by Obama Barack
Although I spoke about my plans to end the war in Iraq, fortify U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, and prosecute the fight against terrorist organizations, the bulk of my address was devoted to the economic crisis. I went over the Recovery Act, our housing plan, the rationale behind the stress test. But there was also a bigger point I wanted to make: that we needed to keep reaching for more. I didn’t just want to solve the emergencies of the day; I felt we needed to make a bid for lasting change. Once we’d restored growth to the economy, we couldn’t be satisfied with simply returning to business as usual. I made clear that night that I intended to move forward with structural reforms—in education, energy, and climate policy, in healthcare and financial regulation—that would lay the foundation for long-term and broad-based prosperity in America.
The days had long passed since I got nervous on a big stage, and considering how much ground we had to cover, the speech went about as well as I could have hoped. According to Axe and Gibbs, the reviews were fine, the talking heads deeming me suitably “presidential.” But apparently they’d been surprised by the boldness of my agenda, my willingness to forge ahead with reforms beyond those that addressed the central business of saving the economy.
It was as if nobody had been listening to the campaign promises I’d made—or as if they assumed that I hadn’t actually meant what I’d said. The response to my speech gave me an early preview of what would become a running criticism during my first two years in office: that I was trying to do too much, that to aspire to anything more than a return to the pre-crisis status quo, to treat change as more than a slogan, was naïve and irresponsible at best, and at worst a threat to America.
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AS ALL-CONSUMING AS the economic crisis was, my fledgling administration didn’t have the luxury of putting everything else on hold, for the machinery of the federal government stretched across the globe, churning every minute of every day, indifferent to overstuffed in-boxes and human sleep cycles. Many of its functions (generating Social Security checks, keeping weather satellites aloft, processing agricultural loans, issuing passports) required no specific instructions from the White House, operating much like a human body breathes or sweats, outside the brain’s conscious control. But this still left countless agencies and buildings full of people in need of our daily attention: looking for policy guidance or help with staffing, seeking advice because some internal breakdown or external event had thrown the system for a loop. After our first weekly Oval Office meeting, I asked Bob Gates, who’d served under seven previous presidents, for any advice he might have in managing the executive branch. He gave me one of his wry, crinkly smiles.
“There’s only one thing you can count on, Mr. President,” he said. “On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.”
We went to work trying to minimize screw-ups.
In addition to my regular meetings with the Treasury, state, and defense secretaries and the daily briefings I got from my national security and economic teams, I made a point of sitting down with each member of my cabinet to go over strategic plans for their departments, pushing them to identify roadblocks and set priorities. I visited their respective agencies, often using the occasion to announce a new policy or government practice, and spoke to large gatherings of career government staffers, thanking them for their service and reminding them of the importance of their missions.
There was an endless flow of meetings with various constituency groups—the Business Roundtable, the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, veterans’ services organizations—to address their concerns and solicit their support. There were big set pieces that absorbed enormous amounts of time (like the presentation of our first federal budget proposal) and innovative public events designed to increase government transparency (like our first-ever live-streamed town hall). Each week I delivered a video address. I sat down for interviews with various print reporters and TV anchors, both national and local. I gave remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast and threw a Super Bowl party for members of Congress. By the first week of March, I’d also held two summits with foreign leaders—one in D.C. with British prime minister Gordon Brown, the other in Ottawa with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper—each involving its own policy objectives and diplomatic protocols.
For every event, meeting, and policy rollout, a hundred people or more might be frantically working behind the scenes. Every document issued was fact-checked, every person who showed up for a meeting was vetted, every event was planned to the minute, and every policy announcement was carefully scrubbed to make sure it was achievable, affordable, and didn’t carry the risk of unforeseen consequences.
This kind of focused industriousness extended to the East Wing, where the First Lady had a small suite of offices and a busy schedule of her own. From the moment we’d arrived at the White House, Michelle had thrown herself into her new job while also making a home for our family. Thanks to her, Malia and Sasha seemed to be taking the transition to our strange new life completely in stride. They tossed balls in the long hallway that ran the length of the residence and made cookies with the White House chefs. Their weekends were filled with playdates and birthday parties with new friends, rec basketball, soccer leagues, tennis lessons for Malia, dance classes and tae kwon do for Sasha. (Much like her mother, Sasha was not to be messed with.) Out in public, Michelle sparkled with charm, her fashion choices attracting favorable notice. Tasked with hosting the annual Governors Ball, Michelle had shaken up tradition by arranging to have Earth, Wind & Fire provide the entertainment, their horn-blasting R&B funk generating moves on the dance floor that I’d never thought I’d see out of a bipartisan gathering of middle-aged public officials.
Look beautiful. Care for your family. Be gracious. Support your man. For most of American history, the First Lady’s job had been defined by these tenets, and Michelle was hitting all the marks. What she hid from the outside world, though, was the way her new role initially chafed, how fraught with uncertainty it felt.
Not all her frustrations were new. For as long as we’d been together, I’d watched my wife struggle the way many women did, trying to reconcile her identity as an independent, ambitious professional with a desire to mother our girls with the same level of care and attentiveness that Marian had given her. I had always tried to encourage Michelle in her career, never presuming that household duties were her province alone; and we’d been lucky that our joint income and a strong network of close-by relatives and friends had given us advantages that many families didn’t have. Still, this wasn’t enough to insulate Michelle from the wildly unrealistic and often contradictory social pressures that women with children absorbed from the media, their peers, their employers, and, of course, the men in their lives.
My career in politics, with its prolonged absences, had made it even tougher. More than once Michelle had decided not to pursue an opportunity that excited her but would have demanded too much time away from the girls. Even in her last job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, with a supportive boss and the ability to make her own schedule, she’d never fully shaken the sense that she was shortchanging the girls, her work, or both. In Chicago, she had at least been able to avoid being in the public eye and manage the everyday push and pull on her own terms. Now all that had changed. With my election, she’d been forced to give up a job with real impact for a role that—in its original design, at least—was far too small for her gifts. Meanwhile, mothering our kids involved a whole new set of complications—like having to call a parent to explain why Secret Service agents needed to survey their house before Sasha came for a playdate or working with staffers to press a tabloid not to print a picture of Malia hanging out with her friends at the mall.
On top of these things, Michelle suddenly found herself drafted as a symbol in America’s ongoing gender wars. Each choice she made, each word she uttered, was feverishly interpreted and judged. Whe
n she lightheartedly referred to herself as a “mom in chief,” some commentators expressed disappointment that she wasn’t using her platform to break down stereotypes about a woman’s proper place. At the same time, efforts to stretch the boundaries of what a First Lady should or should not do carried their own peril: Michelle still smarted from the viciousness of some of the attacks leveled at her during the campaign, and one had only to look at Hillary Clinton’s experience to know how quickly people could turn on a First Lady who engaged in anything resembling policy making.
Which is why, in those early months, Michelle took her time deciding how she’d use her new office, figuring out how and where she might exert an influence while carefully and strategically setting the tone for her work as First Lady. She consulted with Hillary and with Laura Bush. She recruited a strong team, filling her staff with seasoned professionals whose judgment she trusted. Eventually she decided to take on two causes that were personally meaningful: the alarming jump in America’s childhood obesity rates and the embarrassing lack of support for America’s military families.
It wasn’t lost on me that both issues tapped into frustrations and anxieties that Michelle herself sometimes felt. The obesity epidemic had come to her attention a few years earlier when our pediatrician, noticing that Malia’s body mass index had increased somewhat, identified too many highly processed “kid-friendly” foods as the culprit. The news had confirmed Michelle’s worries that our harried, overscheduled lives might be adversely impacting the girls. Similarly, her interest in military families had been sparked by emotional roundtable discussions she’d had during the campaign with the spouses of deployed service members. As they’d described feeling a mixture of loneliness and pride, as they’d admitted to occasional resentment at being treated as an afterthought in the larger cause of defending the nation, as they expressed reluctance to ask for help for fear of seeming selfish, Michelle had heard echoes of her own circumstances.
Precisely because of these personal connections, I was sure her impact on both issues would be substantial. Michelle was someone who started from the heart and not the head, from experience rather than abstractions. I also knew this: My wife didn’t like to fail. Whatever ambivalence she felt about her new role, she was nonetheless determined to carry it out well.
As a family, we were adapting week by week, each of us finding means to adjust to, cope with, and enjoy our circumstances. Michelle turned to her unflappable mother for counsel anytime she felt anxious, the two of them huddling together on the couch in the solarium on the third floor of the White House. Malia threw herself into her fifth-grade homework and was lobbying us to deliver on our personal campaign promise to get a family dog. Sasha, just seven, still fell asleep at night clutching the frayed chenille blankie she’d had since she was a baby, her body growing so fast you could almost see the difference each day.
Our new housing arrangement brought one especially happy surprise: Now that I lived above the store, so to speak, I was home basically all the time. On most days, the work came to me, not the other way around. Unless I was traveling, I made a point of being at the dinner table by six-thirty each night, even if it meant that later I needed to go back downstairs to the Oval Office.
What a joy that was, listening to Malia and Sasha talk about their days, narrating a world of friend drama, quirky teachers, jerky boys, silly jokes, dawning insights, and endless questions. After the meal was over and they bounded off to do homework and get ready for bed, Michelle and I would sit and catch up for a time, less often about politics and more about news of old friends, movies we wanted to see, and most of all the wondrous process of watching our daughters grow up. Then we’d read the girls bedtime stories, hug them tightly, and tuck them in—Malia and Sasha in their cotton pajamas smelling of warmth and life. In that hour and a half or so each evening, I found myself replenished—my mind cleansed and my heart cured of whatever damage a day spent pondering the world and its intractable problems may have done.
If the girls and my mother-in-law were our anchors in the White House, there were others who helped me and Michelle manage the stress of those early months. Sam Kass, the young man we’d hired to cook for us part-time back in Chicago as the campaign got busy and our worries about the kids’ eating habits peaked, had come with us to Washington, joining the White House not just as a chef but also as Michelle’s point person on the childhood obesity issue. The son of a math teacher at the girls’ old school and a former college baseball player, Sam had an easygoing charm and compact good looks that were enhanced by a shiny, clean-shaven head. He was also a genuine food policy expert, conversant in everything from the effects of monoculture farming on climate change to the links between eating habits and chronic disease. Sam’s work with Michelle would prove invaluable; it was brainstorming with him, for example, that gave Michelle the idea to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn. But what we got in the bargain was a fun-loving uncle to the girls, a favorite younger brother to Michelle and me, and—along with Reggie Love—someone I could shoot hoops or play a game of pool with anytime I needed to blow off a little steam.
We found similar support from our longtime athletic trainer, Cornell McClellan, a former social worker and martial arts expert who owned his own gym in Chicago. Despite his imposing frame, Cornell was kind and good-humored when he wasn’t torturing us with squats, deadlifts, burpees, and lunge walks, and he’d decided that it was his duty to start splitting his time between D.C. and Chicago to make sure the First Family stayed in shape.
Each morning, Monday through Thursday, Michelle and I began our days with both Cornell and Sam, the four of us gathering in the small gym on the third floor of the residence, its wall-mounted television reliably set to ESPN’s SportsCenter. There was no disputing that Michelle was Cornell’s star pupil, powering through her workouts with unerring focus, while Sam and I were decidedly slower and given to taking longer breaks between sets, distracting Cornell with heated debates—Jordan versus Kobe, Tom Hanks versus Denzel Washington—anytime the regimen got too intense for our liking. For both Michelle and me, that daily hour in the gym became one more zone of normalcy, shared with friends who still called us by our first names and loved us like family, who reminded us of the world we’d once known—and the version of ourselves that we hoped always to inhabit.
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THERE WAS A final stress reliever that I didn’t like to talk about, one that had been a chronic source of tension throughout my marriage: I was still smoking five (or six, or seven) cigarettes a day.
It was the lone vice that had carried over from the rebel days of my youth. At Michelle’s insistence, I had quit several times over the years, and I never smoked in the house or in front of the kids. Once elected to the U.S. Senate, I had stopped smoking in public. But a stubborn piece of me resisted the tyranny of reason, and the strains of campaign life—the interminable car rides through cornfields, the solitude of motel rooms—had conspired to keep me reaching for the pack I kept handy in a suitcase or drawer. After the election, I’d told myself it was as good a time as any to stop—by definition, I was in public just about anytime I was outside the White House residence. But then things got so busy that I found myself delaying my day of reckoning, wandering out to the pool house behind the Oval Office after lunch or up to the third-floor terrace after Michelle and the girls had gone to sleep, taking a deep drag and watching the smoke curl toward the stars, telling myself I’d stop for good as soon as things settled down.
Except things didn’t settle down. So much so that by March my daily cigarette intake had crept up to eight (or nine, or ten).
That month, another estimated 663,000 Americans would lose their jobs, with the unemployment rate shooting up to 8.5 percent. Foreclosures showed no signs of abating, and credit remained frozen. The stock market hit what would be its lowest point of the recession, down 57 percent from its peak, with shares of Citigroup and Bank of
America approaching penny-stock status. AIG, meanwhile, was like a bottomless maw, its only apparent function being to gobble up as much TARP money as possible.
All this would have been more than enough to keep my blood pressure rising. What made it worse was the clueless attitude of the Wall Street executives whose collective asses we were pulling out of the fire. Just before I took office, for example, the leaders of most of the major banks had gone ahead and authorized more than a billion dollars in year-end bonuses for themselves and their lieutenants, despite having already received TARP funds to prop up their stock prices. Not long after, Citigroup execs somehow decided it was a good idea to order a new corporate jet. (Because this happened on our watch, someone on Tim’s team was able to call the company’s CEO and browbeat him into canceling the order.)
Meanwhile, bank executives bristled—sometimes privately, but often in the press—at any suggestion that they had in any way screwed up, or should be subject to any constraints when it came to running their business. This last bit of chutzpah was most pronounced in the two savviest operators on Wall Street, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, both of whom insisted that their institutions had avoided the poor management decisions that plagued other banks and neither needed nor wanted government assistance. These claims were true only if you ignored the fact that the solvency of both outfits depended entirely on the ability of the Treasury and the Fed to keep the rest of the financial system afloat, as well as the fact that Goldman in particular had been one of the biggest peddlers of subprime-based derivatives—and had dumped them onto less sophisticated customers right before the bottom fell out.
Their obliviousness drove me nuts. It wasn’t just that Wall Street’s attitude toward the crisis confirmed every stereotype of the über-wealthy being completely out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. Each tone-deaf statement or self-serving action also made our job of saving the economy that much harder.
