The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Obama embodied the late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban’s description of the Palestinians: They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The president muffed chances to bring up the 47 percent, the auto rescue (mentioned only in passing), and the jobs bill that could have created a million jobs had Romney’s party approved it. And he confirmed liberal suspicions about his fundamental aversion to conflict when he tried to find common ground with Romney even on Social Security, thereby tossing away one of the party’s trustiest weapons and sending up a cheer in Boston.

  Chicago wasn’t surprised that Romney ditched his past positions, but he “did it more shamelessly than we expected,” Benenson said. “We should have called bullshit on him right from the start.” Romney seemed flexible on his plans to shrink government (“Regulation is essential”); he vowed not to cut education and, in a move he had earlier rejected when Paul Ryan proposed it, accused the president of “kissing up to banks” in the Dodd-Frank financial reform. When in reference to Obamacare he said that “preexisting conditions are covered under my plan”—as if the high-risk pools that had been failing for years were an answer—Obama seemed at a loss for words.

  Jake Tapper, who covered Obama on a daily basis for ABC News, thought that what happened in Denver was predictable. The president, he said, had no one around every day to tell him to straighten up. And because he hadn’t held a press conference since June, he had had no sparring partners. Obama advisers rejected that argument, insisting that even the most contentious press conferences weren’t preparation for a challenger given ninety minutes to insult you to your face.

  A transcript of the debate shows a closer contest than many recalled. Obama worked in most of his major points and was more accurate than Romney.III On camera, Obama looked “logy,” as Sheehan put it, listless, lacking in mental energy. It was, he said, like seeing someone run in a swimming pool. Romney is “about a minute away from holding Obama down and cutting his hair,” the comedian Bill Maher tweeted, a reference to Romney’s bullying a gay student when he was in prep school. The dominant impression was of a passive president receding from view. Afterward the New Yorker ran a cover that depicted Romney debat partner, Russ Schriefer, because earlying an empty chair.

  It wasn’t the first time Obama had shrunk from a fight or failed to finish someone off. After beating Hillary Clinton in a string of 2008 primaries and caucuses that took him to the threshold of the nomination, he let her back into the race until the end. Once in office, he failed to nail down his signature health care plan until it was almost too late and never sharply called out the Republicans for taking the country to the brink of default. Could it be that he wanted the game to be a little more challenging, like Michael Jordan sitting on the bench in the early fourth quarter? Obama’s basketball buddies knew that he always wanted the ball for the final shot in a close game. It was left to those with less confidence to worry that, more times than not, the buzzer shot goes off the rim.

  More to the point, Obama didn’t trust himself to tangle with Romney. He thought Romney was a liar and an empty suit and would reverse everything worthy he had done as president. Even if the Democrats hung on to the Senate 52–48, he figured, Romney would be able to win over a couple of Democrats and push through some version of the Ryan Plan. That would be a disaster for the country. Obama had long worried that his attitude would spill out. Suppressing that was part of what threw him off his game.

  The prospect of a Romney administration was what propelled him. According to one senior staffer, Obama would have been ready to move on if he had lost to Hillary Clinton, or someone else he respected. For his whole life, he had been restless and impatient in whatever he was doing, always looking to the next chapter. Being president was no different. He still liked the policy challenges and the chance to bend history, but he could do without the political part. This was his last campaign, and he was damn glad to be almost done with it. For those ninety minutes in Denver, it showed.

  AS THEY HAD in 2008, the Obama high command held a conference call with ten minutes remaining in the debate to decide on spin. This one was full of lame rationalizations—the president kept Romney on the defensive; Romney was bullying Jim Lehrer—but everyone knew that convincing anyone he had won was out of the question. Plouffe, Axelrod, Messina, Cutter, and Psaki plunged into the crowd, determined to say it wasn’t as bad as the initial reaction indicated. The spin room ritual has long ago descended into self-parody, with both sides always claiming a victory. But on this night it was more like the locker room after a lopsided playoff game.

  In 2012 Twitter put the spin room on steroids. Chicago’s entire social media plan depended on getting out the message that Obama was winning (fifteen minutes into the debate) to hundreds of “validators,” prominent Democrats who could retweet positive coverage. As the first debate ended, the plan collapsed. “We had nothing,” Adam Fetcher of the Comm staff recalled. For an hour Chicago couldn’t credibly tweet anything. The instant CNN poll showed more than 70 percent of viewers thought Romney won. The coverage on MSNBC was brutal, with Obama supporters like Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton mincing no words, and blogger Andrew Sullivan’s attack on a president “too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously” not far behind. The old metric for measuring debates was how they affected undecided voters. But this was a base election, with ideological cable news and ubiquitous social media. That meant that the new measure of success was whether a debate performance energized support partner, Russ Schriefer, n the ,Paers.

  Klain told the president that he had lost 60–40, but the press would make it 80–20. Obama told Klain, Axelrod, and Plouffe, “I didn’t think it was so bad.” Back at the hotel, he told Messina the same thing. A few hours later, after he saw the scorching reviews on his iPad, he told Axelrod, “I guess I lost.” “That’s the consensus,” Axelrod replied.

  The good news was that there was no killer exchange that could be played on an endless loop and burned into the mind of the public. The only thing anyone remembered was that Obama lost and Big Bird got a shout-out when Romney called for cutting federal funding for PBS.

  A couple days later the president called Messina to apologize: “I didn’t bring my A game. I was a little rusty.” To others he admitted, “Message received.” He was frustrated that he had to wait thirteen days before getting a chance to redeem himself. The staff found him gracious and humble in blaming his performance, not the preparation.

  Obama told Patrick Gaspard of the DNC that he had seen an amusing viral video of the actor Samuel L. Jackson appearing in a family’s home and telling them to “wake the fuck up” and recognize the stakes in the election. “I didn’t realize he was talking to me,” the president chuckled.

  IN CHICAGO THE debate, like other big TV events, was projected onto the white walls. Dan Wagner stuck his head out of the Cave and said that the silence was so overwhelming he thought he heard a pin drop on the Floor. Young staffers were angry and disoriented. The president had let them down. They had thought if Obama lost it would be because of something they did wrong, some poorly executed decision or organizational lapse. It never occurred to them that the man they worshipped could be so, well, disrespectful of all of their work and personal sacrifice. “Why am I here until two in the morning night after night and the president can’t even show up for the debate?” one senior staffer complained before his fury turned to sadness. “The idea that we could be looking back and saying this was all his fault—it’s heartbreaking.”

  The first forty-eight hours were brutal. Chicago worried that the spin would feed on itself and turn the debacle into a nosedive. The only question was “Where’s the floor?,” and it was all hands on deck to figure it out. Dan Wagner shut the door of the Cave and told his people that nobody could leave until they found out exactly what was going on. He was exaggerating, but only slightly. After increasing the Cave’s sample size from nine thousand to twelve thousand a night—eight to ten times the sample size of everyone
else’s weekly polls—Elan Kriegel, the thirty-one-year-old director of battleground state analytics, finally got to go home. His last email was logged at 4:02 a.m.

  The next night, before all the numbers were crunched, Kriegel listened in remotely on call center interviews and heard voters answering the short survey with “Yes, I thought the president was crushed in the debate. No, it doesn’t change my decision to vote for him.” It settled his stomach.

  Joel Benenson’s fresh polls showed the race going from 51–44 to 50–47, but with Romney’s momentum stopping. The president hadn’t lost much National Youth Administration, ,Paground. Romney had simply picked up Republican-leaning independents he had lost since the Democratic Convention and the 47 percent remark. Had the famous videotape not provided Obama with a cushion, he would be in much bigger trouble now, maybe even behind.

  The next day Kriegel delivered a twenty-page PowerPoint to the high command that echoed Benenson’s numbers and argued that the campaign should do the hardest thing in a tough situation: nothing. There was no movement in Ohio and no need to drop out of Florida or drop into Pennsylvania, though both options would be discussed at length. Even better, early voting had started in Iowa on September 27, a week before Denver, and the debate had no impact on Obama’s turnout, which was almost precisely what the Cave’s models predicted.

  When public polls and Nate Silver’s model showed Obama in trouble, Chicago continued to fret. Then, less than a week after Denver, David Shor, the former child prodigy in the Cave, dove into the latest numbers and told Kriegel, “Tomorrow, Nate Silver goes up.” Sure enough, the New York Times polling analyst, a security blanket for millions of Obama supporters, reported the next day what Chicago had already heard from the Cave and from Benenson: No big change.

  The Golden Reports from Analytics found the race stable, with one exception: Numbers coming out of the Green Bay area showed Romney expanding his lead there from 2 points to between 6 and 9. This didn’t sound right, but the Cave’s models couldn’t be dismissed. The campaign bought more ad time and eventually sent both Obama and Bill Clinton into the region, even though it may not have been necessary.IV

  The numbers from battleground states relaxed the president. After he had apologized to his staff and told major supporters, “This one’s on me,” Obama himself was cool about the whole thing. Talking with Marty Nesbitt, he took on the tone of a basketball star in the NBA finals: “Look, we were up 2 to 0 and Game 3 was the first debate. They beat us on our home court. We win Game 4, people will say it’s over.”

  Chicago didn’t want people saying that. As long as the media narrative of a close race didn’t spin too far out of control, it helped immensely with fundraising and volunteer recruitment. On the day after the debate, Bill Burton’s pro-Obama super PAC had his biggest day, $7 million, as Plouffe’s Democratic bedwetters drenched the sheets. Small fry went on donating binges on their mobile phones. And the big donors turned out. On October 7 the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg hosted a late lunch at his home on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills that may have been the priciest political fundraiser ever held, though the public learned only that it was a thank-you event. The meeting featured two presidents, Obama and Clinton, and the dozen or so guests (including Eric Schmidt and David Geffen) each paid $1 million apiece for the privilege, with the money going to the super PAC. Clinton was deferential to Obama, but the donors were not. They peppered him with questions about the first debate and other topics. The lunch made him late for a splashy public fundraiser with George Clooney, Jennifer Hudson, and Stevie Wonder. “They just perform flawlessly night after night,” he said of the stars. “I can’t always say the same.”

  THE EIGHT DAYS between Denver partner, Russ Schriefer, n the ,Pa and the vice presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky, felt like an eternity to hard-core Democrats. Had they been inside Joe Biden’s prep sessions, they would have rested easier. The format for the debate was Biden and Ryan sitting around a table with Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Once the vice president was reminded that he shouldn’t confuse the setting with a Sunday show, debate prep went well, with Congressman Chris Van Hollen channeling Ryan perfectly. Because the aim was to revive and rally the base, Biden was told it was “literally” (his favorite word) impossible for him to go too far. He needed to raise the flag high and rip Ryan, buying Obama time for a comeback in Round 2.

  After the vice president landed in Kentucky, he took a call from Obama on the tarmac. “I know we’re in trouble now,” he told aides moments later. “The president just said, ‘Joe, be yourself.’ In four years, he has never said that before.”

  Biden took grief for smiling too much in the debate, but he was only trying to show his fangs. From the start, he hammered Ryan’s budget and called his numbers “malarkey.” Ryan hit hard on Benghazi, but it didn’t stick. While instant polls rated the contest a draw and some voters thought Biden had shown bad manners, Obama World was ecstatic. Biden had done just what he needed to do to stop the bleeding and rally the Democrats. When Boston attacked him for appearing “unhinged,” Chicago knew he had won. Style points are the last refuge of debate losers.

  THE OCTOBER 16 debate at Hofstra University on Long Island was a nerve-racking experience for Obama supporters. A second consecutive lopsided loss would have put Obama in a deep hole. He told his debate prep team, gathered in the Roosevelt Room, “I think this whole thing is fake, a TV show performance. I’m not good at it. But I will do whatever it takes to win the next ones, and I will win them.” This time the prep team would feed him no lines. The advice was to avoid getting caught up in Romney’s distortions, just say “That’s not true,” and pivot to message.

  Ron Klain thought the key statistic from Denver was that Obama spoke for a full four minutes more than Romney, but Romney got out seven hundred more words. As a theater major in college, Benenson had learned to recite Hamlet at top speed. En route to Delaware for a meeting with the president, he entertained other senior advisers in the car with his rapid-fire Hamlet monologues. During prep, Michael Sheehan would hold up a sign saying “FASTER.” This time, Obama listened.

  At the Hilton Hotel in Suffolk County, where the president and his team gathered for a final run-through before heading to the debate venue nearby, Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council put the president through one last rehearsal on Benghazi. Romney had made it part of his stump speech that Obama had never called the attacks terrorism. But the transcript of Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden on September 12, the day after the Benghazi attacks, clearly showed that Obama’s words “acts of terror” applied to Benghazi as well rity, and it b

  25

  The Homestretch

  Two days after the Denver debate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its much-awaited September jobs numbers. The survey of thousands of employers and households showed 114,000 new jobs and, much more significantly, that the unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, which was where it was when Obama became president. This was serendipitous news for the Obama campaign. The margin of error in the BLS numbers was 100,000 jobs and half a point. Had unemployment spiked to 8.6 percent and job growth fallen below zero—both possible within the margin of error—Obama would most likely have lost the 2012 election right there.

  Within an hour of the happier numbers, Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers . . . These Chicago guys will do anything. . . . Can’t debate so change numbers.” When confronted by Chris Matthews on MSNBC that evening, Welch, apparently suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, admitted he had no evidence that nonpartisan civil servants at the BLS had cooked the books in cahoots with Chicago to bring unemployment below 8 percent. But he refused to back off his charge, which was echoed by the onetime presidential candidate Steve Forbes. The arrival of “BLS truthers” marked a milestone in the radicalization of the right. This wasn’t Donald Trump or Michelle Bachmann or Jerome Corsi. Upstanding members of the American financial elite were n
ow peddling outlandish conspiracy theories and sliming innocent federal employees in order to drive an American president from power.

  Of course, Trump himself was still onstage, but his transition from role model of crass success to national joke was almost complete. For weeks he had hyped an upcoming “October Surprise” that Fox took seriously as a potentially pivotal event. Finally, on October 24, Trump announced with great fanfare that he was offering $5 million to the charity of the president’s choice if he would agree to release his college transcripts, college applications, and passport applications to Trump’s satisfaction by October 31. Trump apparently believed that young Obama had been too stupid to be admitted to college except as an affirmative action case and was simultaneously covering up that he was born abroad or, in another racist conspiracy fantasy, had traveled to Pakistan to hang with terrorists.

  That evening Stephen Colbert said on his show that he was so moved by Trump’s offer that he would give the $1 million collected by his Colbert super PAC (“Making a better tomorrow, tomorrow”) to a charity of Trump’s choice if he met certain conditions by October 31. “One million actual dollars, if you will let me dip my balls in your mouth. One million,” Colbert said, in a comedy bit that went viral and was eventually seen at the highest levels of the government. “Nothing would make me happier than to write this check. And nothing would make partner, Russ Schriefer, heor with 12 America happier than to have something going into your mouth instead of coming out of it.”

  John Sununu, who had been forced to resign in 1991 as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff after he used a government limo to pursue his stamp-collecting hobby, proved to be almost as divisive a surrogate as Trump.I In July he said he wished “this president would learn to be an American.” Now, not long before the election, he called Obama “lazy” and said that Colin Powell only supported him because they both were black, a remark Powell found so offensive that he vowed to call Sununu out on it every chance he got. The “lazy” line, long a racist stereotype, circulated widely on the right. “How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time,” Roger Ailes told a biographer. “He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.”II The media didn’t report that because it wasn’t true; despite the golf outings, Obama was, by the accounts of officials who had served in prior administrations of both parties, better prepared in meetings and more attentive to his job than most of his recent predecessors.