The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Capitol Hill remained a zoo of exotic species. Representative Paul Broun of Georgia said that “the only constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution,” while Representative James Lankford of Oklahoma blamed gun violence on “welfare moms.” Senate Republicans ignored the pleading of a wheelchair-bound Bob Dole, the former Republican majority leader, and refused to ratify a nonbinding UN treaty that offered people around the world with disabilities some of the same respect they receive in the United States.

  Obama decided he would no longer let his frustrations with Congress prevent him from talking to more people outside his orbit. In January he said he would have more time for schmoozing: “The nice thing is that now that my girls are getting older, they don’t want to spend that much time with me anyway. So I’ll probably be calling around, looking for somebody to play cards with or something, because I’m getting kind of lonely in this big house.” After the Inauguration he launched a charm offensive, wining and dining senators he had neglected in the past. The president and first lady finally hosted Bill and Hillary Clinton for dinner in the family residence and it went well. Obama made sure the world knew how grateful he was for Hillary’s service.

  Valerie Jarrett began what she called a “do-over” with business. The Chamber of Commerce, once a sworn enemy of the president, now joined with the White House to push for immigration reform. Even Stephen Schwarzman, who had compared Obama’s position on carried interest to Hitler invading Poland, went on a conference call with the president, though it would be a while before Obama knew whether schmoozing with his enemies was worth his time.

  Jarrett said that after the election the president was even more confident than he had been in the past, which was saying something considering his level of confidence all along: “Having juggled a thousand balls and made life-and-death decisions, he felt tested.” During the first two years he focused so much on the inside game that “he lost that connection to the American people.” In the second term he would leave Washington regularly and work on his outside game.

  WHEN NEWS REACHED the president on the morning of December 14 of a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it shook him to the core. The killing of twenty children and six adults took the event to a level of devastation unmatched by the other gun violence that occurred on his watch. He wasn’t proud of the fact that after the partner, Russ Schriefer, ">On Sunday, two days after the shootings, the president followed the governor through five rooms in the local high school where the families of the surviving children had gathered. In each room, he stopped to hear survivors’ memories of the children and teachers who died and shared the raw grief of the moment, crying and praying with the parents and other family members. After an hour of personal visits, he spoke at length about the loss. As in Tucson, he was an eloquent mourner in chief, but this time he made it clear that he would be launching a new effort to stem gun violence. “Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children—all of them—safe from harm?” the president asked, before concluding that the answer was no.

  OBAMA’S SECOND INAUGURAL fell on Martin Luther King Day, lending symmetry and resonance to the festivities.II His Inaugural Address was crisp and inspiring, though it characteristically contained no memorable lines that would fit easily onto memorabilia. While the speech would likely be remembered for the first mention of gay rights in an Inaugural Address, it was mostly an idealistic defense of the twentieth-century consensus on the role of government. Widely covered as an ode to liberalism, its celebration of Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, science, education, and the nation’s openness to immigrants was in fact a testament to the postwar bipartisan consensus ratified in the election. Obama wasn’t turning left but driving right down the median strip of U.S. politics, as Newt Gingrich understood when he called it “a great speech about fundamental American values.” The president wrapped those values in progressive rhetoric to be true to himself and his liberal ideas and, more pragmatically, to give himself cover with the left for the painful budget and entitlement compromises to come. On the MLK holiday he was, as usual, playing a longer game, pledging to bend the arc of King’s moral universe toward justice, a little at a time.

  On the morning of the Inauguration no one in Obama’s circle was sure the Mall would be filled with people, as it had been in 2009. It was. As he exited the platform, a wistful president turned around for several seconds to view the throng. “I’m going to look one more time. I’ll never see this again,” he said, in a moment caught on television. Watching the tape, Jarrett said that in twenty-two years she had never seen that expression on his face. The combination of exhilaration and nostalgia, the sense that all of those people had once more come there for him, left her in tears.

  At the staff inaugural ball, the president paid tribute again to his young staffers and volunteers. Referring to himself in the third person as “kind of old and gray-haired,” he credited his team with “carrying him across the finish line” for larger reasons: “Because this is not about him; this is about us. This is about America. This is about what we believe. This is about what our values are. This is what our ideals are all about. We are going to go out partner, Russ Schriefer, OV early there and change America.”

  Scott Prouty, the man who taped Romney’s “47 percent” speech, had come to the Inauguration, thrilled to be there on his first trip to Washington. Leo Gerard, president of the Steelworkers Union, knew his identity by then and found him and his girlfriend tickets to the swearing-in and one of the Inaugural Balls, where they were introduced—without any last names—to Teddy Goff and his family, who almost fell over when they heard who he was. “You changed history,” Goff’s mother gushed. Two months later Gerard arranged for Prouty, who needed a job, to get work investigating international labor abuses. But to do so, he would need to surface publicly, which he did on Ed Schultz’s show on MSNBC. The reaction from the right was less than Prouty feared.

  The squabbling among black leaders continued even at the Inauguration. When the leaders of half a dozen civil rights organizations were granted honored seats on the inaugural platform, Jesse Jackson complained that they had grown too close to Obama and needed to be fighting from the outside. Al Sharpton, who still talked regularly to Jackson despite their differences, reminded him that Jackson’s daughter, Santita, had sung at Bill Clinton’s Second Inaugural. When Jackson spoke at Hugo Chávez’s funeral, Sharpton upbraided him for it: “Do you think Dr. King would have spoken at Ho Chi Minh’s funeral? Of course not.”

  In early March, Sharpton and seven other African American leaders met with the president in the Roosevelt Room. The issue of whether Obama was pursuing a pro-black agenda came up again. Sharpton told the story of a friend who converted to Islam, then ate a ham sandwich and claimed it wasn’t pork. Sharpton told the president, “I said to my friend that day, ‘Just because it’s not called pork doesn’t mean it isn’t.’ And just because your agenda isn’t called pro-black doesn’t mean it isn’t.” Obama was happy to embrace the pork metaphor.

  FOX NEWS CHANNEL’S ratings were down sharply after the election. Conservative media had stormed the liberal barricades over the previous twenty years and become an insular establishment of their own. The belittling of the president continued. One day in November a missive came down from Ailes saying that when Obama was speaking, producers should feel free to use a “big/little,” TV-speak for a smaller window on the bottom of the screen that shows something different from the main image. Under previous presidents, big/littles were barred as disrespectful of the office. According to one producer, “This was Roger saying of Obama, ‘I’m just going to minimize this man as much as I can.’ ”

  Ailes recognized that the predictions of a Romney victory made Fox look bad. The week after the election he decreed that Karl Rove and Dick Morris no longer be booked on Fox without special approval. Rove’s Fox contract was eventually renewed, but Morris’s wasn’t. “I was wrong at the top of
my lungs,” Morris later explained. Rove went on to found a new organization, the Conservative Victory Group, devoted to fighting Obama’s agenda and to helping mainstream Republicans who found themselves “primaried” by Tea Party extremists.

  Grover Norquist was still putting antitax starch in the shirts of Republican House members. But he was also doing all he could partner, Russ Schriefer, OV earlyto get the GOP on the side of comprehensive immigration reform. He was comforted by his certainty that the GOP had a lock on the House at least through 2022, when the next census would bring redistricting.

  Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles seemed to have missed that there was an election. Ceding ground to conservative critics, they issued a new version of their plan in February that eliminated much of the tax revenue in their original proposal in favor of deeper cuts in social welfare programs. “Kicking the can down the road is bad,” said retiring congressman Barney Frank, summarizing the liberal view of the budget and the new Simpson-Bowles proposal. “But kicking the ass of the poor is even worse.”

  To protect programs for the poor, the president would need to cut elsewhere. That meant not just reductions in Pentagon spending but tackling entitlements. In April, Obama finally released a budget. In exchange for tax increases on the wealthy and his other spending priorities, it offered to change the way the Consumer Price Index calculated inflation, which would result in lower cost-of-living increases for wealthier seniors under Social Security. Contrary to the claims of some liberals, Obama was not tampering with the social contract (the original Social Security contained no COLAs at all), merely acknowledging that social insurance programs were unsustainable if they remained un-amended amid the retirement of the baby boomers. On three big issues of 2013—entitlements, guns, and immigration—Obama would have to find the right balance between rallying public support and working the Washington levers of power.

  THE BATTLE OVER voting rights would continue. While fourteen state laws restricting voting were weakened or delayed by court decisions, vetoes, referenda, and Department of Justice probes, dozens more remained on the books, a testament to the Republican Party’s efforts to change the playing field. Many judges hadn’t fully overturned these bills, merely ruled that they didn’t apply in the 2012 election. This set up the potential for significant losses at the polls for Democrats if they didn’t organize better for the 2014 midterm elections than they had in 2010.

  But some of their adversaries were in weaker positions. Governor Rick Scott of Florida, recognizing the power of the backlash against voter suppression, opposed reviving the legislation he once championed. In Colorado, Secretary of State Scott Gessler was on the defensive. The Colorado state ethics commission and the Denver district attorney both launched probes into Gessler’s decision to bill taxpayers for his trips to Republican Party conferences, as well as his depositing the year-end balance from his office’s discretionary account into his own pocket. Gessler’s legal troubles did nothing to dissuade him from joining with Attorney General Kris Kobach of Kansas and Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation to denounce the plan by the Brennan Center for Justice to modernize polling places and computerize voter registration systems so that people don’t lose the right to vote when they move. They falsely claimed the modernization plan constituted “mandatory voter registration.; super PAC, c

  (1) For those Tea Party members suffering from “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” the president was both a communist and a fascist (next).

  (2)

  (3) Obama’s overreliance on the teleprompter often put up a barrier between him and the public, though there was a racial subtext to some of the criticism.

  (4) Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News Channel, was so paranoid that he once came in over the weekend to work in a supply closet because he feared his office in the News Corp. building was bugged. When Steve Jobs heard that Glenn Beck had called Obama a racist, he ordered all Apple ads off Fox immediately.

  (5) Grover Norquist (holding his famous no-tax pledge) borrowed tactics from his Marxist-Leninist enemies. He set the tone for House freshmen with his aim to “make government so small it could be drowned in a bathtub.”

  (6) Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted tried to prevent Obama from partner, Russ Schriefer, Ho seemed winning Ohio by throwing up more barriers to voting as part of the GOP’s voter-suppression project. There was a concerted effort in nineteen states to restrict Democratic turnout, especially among young people and minorities.

  (7) Florida’s new law effectively ended all voter registration drives, an activity the League of Women Voters had undertaken in the state for nearly a century. A federal judge struck down the law as “harsh and impractical” as well as unconstitutional. But early voting days were cut, leading to long lines.

  (8) Steven Spielberg told campaign manager Jim Messina (left), “You’re only the Rolling Stones once.” Backed by less public enthusiasm than in 2008, Obama’s campaign built a new Chicago Machine that combined technology with old-fashioned shoe leather that resembled “governors’ races on steroids.”

  (9) The Chicago campaign included a secret annex called “the Cave” where twentysomething analytics geeks sometimes worked until 4 a.m. using Big Data for state-of-the-art microtargeting of voters. Their breaks included Gangnam-style riffs and instruction on the subtleties of Seinfeld episodes. There was trouble in digital paradise.

  (10) Tensions developed with the Tech section run by hipster Harper Reed, whose code writers from tech companies had a culture clash with staffers from political backgrounds.

  (11) Valerie Jarrett’s overlapping roles as senior official and personal confidante made her feared in the White House, where she failed to rally American business to the president’s cause. Her nicknames included “Keeper of the Essence” and, because of her ability to go into the residence after hours and influence the Obamas, “the Night Stalker.”

  (12) Obama seemed to be missing the schmooze gene present in most politicians, who complained that his lack of personal relationships in Washington was hampering his presidency. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people. He simply preferred people, including children, who satisfied his curiosity and told him things he didn’t know.

  (13) At the White House Correspondents parriefer, ed for early’ Dinner the night before the May 1, 2011, raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Obama puzzled aides in the dark about the raid by deleting a bin Laden joke written for his comic speech as “so yesterday.”

  (14) The iconic photo of the president and his national security team when the SEALs’ helicopter crashed outside the bin Laden compound. Three days earlier, a 9/11 widow asked a startled Obama at a fundraiser, “When are we going to get bin Laden?”

  (15) Obama and House Speaker John Boehner quarreled. The president thought Boehner wanted a “Grand Bargain” in July 2011 but was forced out of it by the GOP caucus. The Republican Party’s decision to hold the U.S. economy hostage to its agenda convinced Obama that this was the low point of his presidency.

  (16) The president believed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a devotee of the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, was bent on eliminating the social compact that had existed since FDR’s New Deal.

  (17) The GOP “clown car” primary candidates all raised their hands to say they wouldn’t accept even a 10:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, which indicated the party was committed to shrinking the government and lowering taxes, not deficit reduction.

  (18) Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, originally for Newt Gingrich, spent more than $100 to beat Obama and the Democrats even though he was a social liberal. Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s campaign manager in 1896, envisioned the 2012 campaign when he said, “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

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  (19) George Romney (with young son Mitt), a CEO and 1968 presidential candidate, spoke out against the GOP moving too far to the right. Mitt Romney revered his father but
refused to emulate his challenge to right-wingers and his policy of releasing all of his tax returns. Trying to avoid his father’s careerjust caused him to make more of them.

  (20) Stuart Stevens (left), Romney’s chief strategist, argued for a relentless focus on jobs and the economy: “Obama thinks this is an National Youth Administration">s small eharmony.com election. We think it’s monster.com.” Others said the campaign should have defended Romney’s record at Bain Capital and humanized him.

  (21) The machine hums with rigorous testing and annoying emails: Teddy Goff (gesturing) and Marie Ewald cracked the code on Internet fundraising, increasing it tenfold to more than $150 million a month. Some supporters “drunk donated” with smart phones when Obama seemed in trouble.

  (22)

  (23) Obama brought up his game on the stump, but his heart was with his campaign staffers, who he said were much better at organizing than he was when he was young. An innovative Facebook app was a big success, and two million volunteers executed flawlessly on the ground.

  (24) Obama’s relationship with blacks and Latinos was strong but not always easy. Here he is on the verge of reaming out Professor Cornel West for saying he wasn’t progressive. While West called him a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” other African American leaders felt his policies were pro-black even if he didn’t call them that.