Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  It was a big hurdle to clear, a case of politics as the art of the possible. But for some of the more liberal Democrats in the House, where no one had to worry about a filibuster, and among progressive advocacy groups that were still hoping to lay the groundwork for a single-payer healthcare system, our compromises smacked of capitulation, a deal with the devil. It didn’t help that, as Rahm had predicted, none of the negotiations with the industry had been broadcast on C-SPAN. The press started reporting on details of what they called “backroom deals.” More than a few constituents wrote in to ask whether I’d gone over to the dark side. And Chairman Waxman made a point of saying he didn’t consider his work bound by whatever concessions Baucus or the White House had made to industry lobbyists.

  Quick as they were to mount their high horse, House Dems were also more than willing to protect the status quo when it threatened their prerogatives or benefited politically influential constituencies. For example, more or less every healthcare economist agreed that it wasn’t enough just to pry money out of insurance and drug company profits and use it to cover more people—in order for reform to work, we also had to do something about the skyrocketing costs charged by doctors and hospitals. Otherwise, any new money put into the system would yield less and less care for fewer and fewer people over time. One of the best ways to “bend the cost curve” was to establish an independent board, shielded from politics and special-interest lobbying, that would set reimbursement rates for Medicare based on the comparative effectiveness of particular treatments.

  House Democrats hated the idea. It would mean giving away their power to determine what Medicare did and didn’t cover (along with the potential campaign fundraising opportunities that came with that power). They also worried that they’d get blamed by cranky seniors who found themselves unable to get the latest drug or diagnostic test advertised on TV, even if an expert could prove that it was actually a waste of money.

  They were similarly skeptical of the other big proposal to control costs: a cap on the tax deductibility of so-called Cadillac insurance plans—high-cost, employer-provided policies that paid for all sorts of premium services but didn’t improve health outcomes. Other than corporate managers and well-paid professionals, the main group covered by such plans were union members, and the unions were adamantly opposed to what would come to be known as “the Cadillac tax.” It didn’t matter to labor leaders that their members might be willing to trade a deluxe hospital suite or a second, unnecessary MRI for a chance at higher take-home pay. They didn’t trust that any savings from reform would accrue to their members, and they were absolutely certain they’d catch flak for any changes to their existing healthcare plans. Unfortunately, so long as the unions were opposed to the Cadillac tax, most House Democrats were going to be too.

  The squabbles quickly found their way into the press, making the whole process appear messy and convoluted. By late July, polls showed that more Americans disapproved than approved of the way I was handling healthcare reform, prompting me to complain to Axe about our communications strategy. “We’re on the right side of this stuff,” I insisted. “We just have to explain it better to voters.”

  Axe was irritated that his shop was seemingly getting blamed for the very problem he’d warned me about from the start. “You can explain it till you’re blue in the face,” he told me. “But people who already have healthcare are skeptical that reform will benefit them, and a whole bunch of facts and figures won’t change that.”

  Unconvinced, I decided I needed to be more public in selling our agenda. Which is how I found myself in a prime-time press conference devoted to healthcare, facing an East Room full of White House reporters, many of whom were already writing the obituary on my number one legislative initiative.

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  IN GENERAL, I enjoyed the unscripted nature of live press conferences. And unlike the first healthcare forum during the campaign, in which I’d laid an egg as Hillary and John Edwards shined, I now knew my subject cold. In fact, I probably knew it too well. During the press conference, I succumbed to an old pattern, giving exhaustive explanations of each facet of the issue under debate. It was as if, having failed to get the various negotiations involving the bill on C-SPAN, I was going to make up for it by offering the public a one-hour, highly detailed crash course on U.S. healthcare policy.

  The press corps didn’t much appreciate the thoroughness. One news story made a point of noting that at times I adopted a “professorial” tone. Perhaps that was why, when the time came for the last question, Lynn Sweet, a veteran Chicago Sun-Times reporter I’d known for years, decided to ask me something entirely off the topic.

  “Recently,” Lynn said, “Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you, and what does it say about race relations in America?”

  Where to start? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was a professor of English and Afro-American studies at Harvard and one of the country’s most prominent Black scholars. He was also a casual friend, someone I’d occasionally run into at social gatherings. Earlier that week, Gates had returned to his home in Cambridge after a trip to China and found his front door jammed shut. A neighbor—having witnessed Gates trying to force the door open—called the police to report a possible break-in. When the responding officer, Sergeant James Crowley, arrived, he asked Gates for identification. Gates refused at first and—according to Crowley—called him racist. Eventually Gates produced his identification but allegedly continued to berate the departing officer from his porch. When a warning failed to quiet Gates down, Crowley and two other officers that he’d called for backup handcuffed him, took him to the police station, and booked him for disorderly conduct. (The charges were quickly dropped.)

  Predictably the incident had become a national story. For a big swath of white America, Gates’s arrest was entirely deserved, a simple case of someone not showing the proper respect for a routine law enforcement procedure. For Blacks, it was just one more example of the humiliations and inequities, large and small, suffered at the hands of the police specifically and white authority in general.

  My own guess as to what had happened was more particular, more human, than the simple black-and-white morality tale being portrayed. Having lived in Cambridge, I knew that its police department didn’t have a reputation for harboring a whole bunch of Bull Connor types. Meanwhile, Skip—as Gates was known to his friends—was brilliant and loud, one part W.E.B. Du Bois, one part Mars Blackmon, and cocky enough that I could easily picture him cussing out a cop to the point where even a relatively restrained officer might feel his testosterone kick in.

  Still, while no one had been hurt, I found the episode depressing—a vivid reminder that not even the highest level of Black achievement and the most accommodating of white settings could escape the cloud of our racial history. Hearing about what had happened to Gates, I had found myself almost involuntarily conducting a quick inventory of my own experiences. The multiple occasions when I’d been asked for my student ID while walking to the library on Columbia’s campus, something that never seemed to happen to my white classmates. The unmerited traffic stops while visiting certain “nice” Chicago neighborhoods. Being followed around by department store security guards while doing my Christmas shopping. The sound of car locks clicking as I walked across a street, dressed in a suit and tie, in the middle of the day.

  Moments like these were routine among Black friends, acquaintances, guys in the barbershop. If you were poor, or working-class, or lived in a rough neighborhood, or didn’t properly signify being a respectable Negro, the stories were usually worse. For just about every Black man in the country, and every woman who loved a Black man, and every parent of a Black boy, it was not a matter of paranoia or “playing the race card” or disrespecting law enforcement to conclude that whatever else had happened that day in Cambridge, this much was almost certainly true: A wealthy,
famous, five-foot-six, 140-pound, fifty-eight-year-old white Harvard professor who walked with a cane because of a childhood leg injury would not have been handcuffed and taken down to the station merely for being rude to a cop who’d forced him to produce some form of identification while standing on his own damn property.

  Of course, I didn’t say all that. Maybe I should have. Instead, I made what I thought were some pretty unremarkable observations, beginning with the acknowledgment that the police had responded appropriately to the 911 call and also that Gates was a friend, which meant I might be biased. “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” I said. “But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

  That was it. I left the evening press conference assuming that my four minutes on the Gates affair would be a brief sidebar to the hour I’d spent on healthcare.

  Boy, was I wrong. The next morning, my suggestion that the police had acted “stupidly” led every news broadcast. Police union representatives suggested that I had vilified Officer Crowley and law enforcement in general and were demanding an apology. Anonymous sources claimed that strings had been pulled to get Gates’s charges dropped without a court appearance. Conservative media outlets barely hid their glee, portraying my comments as a case of an elitist (professorial, uppity) Black president siding with his well-connected (mouthy, race-card-wielding) Harvard friend over a white, working-class cop who was just doing his job. In the daily White House press briefing, Gibbs fielded questions on little else. Afterward, he asked whether I’d consider issuing a clarification.

  “What am I clarifying?” I asked. “I thought I was pretty clear the first time.”

  “The way it’s being consumed, people think you called the police stupid.”

  “I didn’t say they were stupid. I said they acted stupidly. There’s a difference.”

  “I get it. But…”

  “We’re not doing a clarification,” I said. “It’ll blow over.”

  The next day, though, it hadn’t blown over. Instead, the story had completely swamped everything else, including our healthcare message. Fielding nervous calls from Democrats on the Hill, Rahm looked like he was ready to jump off a bridge. You would have thought that in the press conference I had donned a dashiki and cussed out the police myself.

  Eventually I agreed to a damage-control plan. I began by calling Sergeant Crowley to let him know I was sorry for having used the word “stupidly.” He was gracious and good-humored, and at some point I suggested that he and Gates come visit the White House. The three of us could have a beer, I said, and show the country that good people could get past misunderstandings. Both Crowley and Gates, whom I called immediately afterward, were enthusiastic about the idea. In a press briefing later that day, I told reporters that I continued to believe that the police had overreacted in arresting Gates, just as the professor had overreacted to their arrival at his home. I acknowledged that I could have calibrated my original comments more carefully. Much later I’d learn through David Simas, our in-house polling guru and Axe’s deputy, that the Gates affair caused a huge drop in my support among white voters, bigger than would come from any single event during the eight years of my presidency. It was support that I’d never completely get back.

  Six days later, Joe Biden and I sat down with Sergeant Crowley and Skip Gates at the White House for what came to be known as the “Beer Summit.” It was a low-key, friendly, and slightly stilted affair. As I’d expected based on our phone conversation, Crowley came across as a thoughtful, decent man, while Skip was on his best behavior. For an hour or so, the four of us talked about our upbringings, our work, and ways to improve trust and communication between police officers and the African American community. When our time was up, both Crowley and Gates expressed appreciation for the tours my staff had given their families, though I joked that next time they could probably find easier ways to score an invitation.

  After they were gone, I sat alone in the Oval Office, reflecting on it all. Michelle, friends like Valerie and Marty, Black senior officials like Attorney General Eric Holder, ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, and U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk—we were all accustomed to running the obstacle course necessary to be effective inside of predominantly white institutions. We’d grown skilled at suppressing our reactions to minor slights, ever ready to give white colleagues the benefit of the doubt, remaining mindful that all but the most careful discussions of race risked triggering in them a mild panic. Still, the reaction to my comments on Gates surprised us all. It was my first indicator of how the issue of Black folks and the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life. It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents of our nation’s psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves, perhaps because it reminded all of us, Black and white alike, that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

  My thoughts were interrupted by Valerie, who poked her head in to check on me. She said that the coverage of the “Beer Summit” had been generally positive, although she admitted to having received a bunch of calls from Black supporters who weren’t happy. “They don’t understand why we’d bend over backward to make Crowley feel welcome,” she said.

  “What’d you tell them?” I asked.

  “I said the whole thing has become a distraction, and you’re focused on governing and getting healthcare passed.”

  I nodded. “And our Black folks on staff…how are they doing?”

  Valerie shrugged. “The younger ones are a little discouraged. But they get it. With all you’ve got on your plate, they just don’t like seeing you being put in this position.”

  “Which position?” I said. “Being Black, or being president?”

  We both got a good laugh out of that.

  CHAPTER 17

  BY THE END OF JULY 2009, some version of the healthcare bill had passed out of all the relevant House committees. The Senate Health and Education Committee had completed its work as well. All that remained was getting a bill through Max Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee. Once that was done, we could consolidate the different versions into one House and one Senate bill, ideally passing each before the August recess, with the goal of having a final version of the legislation on my desk for signature before the end of the year.

  No matter how hard we pressed, though, we couldn’t get Baucus to complete his work. I was sympathetic to his reasons for delay: Unlike the other Democratic committee chairs, who’d passed their bills on straight party-line votes without regard for the Republicans, Baucus continued to hope that he could produce a bipartisan bill. But as summer wore on, that optimism began to look delusional. McConnell and Boehner had already announced their vigorous opposition to our legislative efforts, arguing that it represented an attempted “government takeover” of the healthcare system. Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican strategist, had circulated a memo stating that after market-testing no fewer than forty anti-reform messages, he’d concluded that invoking a “government takeover” was the best way to discredit the healthcare legislation. From that point on, conservatives followed the script, repeating the phrase like an incantation.

  Senator Jim DeMint, the conservative firebrand from South Carolina, was more transparent about his party’s intentions. “If we’re able to stop O
bama on this,” he announced on a nationwide conference call with conservative activists, “it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

  Unsurprisingly, given the atmosphere, the group of three GOP senators who’d been invited to participate in bipartisan talks with Baucus was now down to two: Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe, the moderate from Maine. My team and I did everything we could to help Baucus win their support. I had Grassley and Snowe over to the White House repeatedly and called them every few weeks to take their temperature. We signed off on scores of changes they wanted made to Baucus’s draft bill. Nancy-Ann became a permanent fixture in their Senate offices and took Snowe out to dinner so often that we joked that her husband was getting jealous.

  “Tell Olympia she can write the whole damn bill!” I said to Nancy-Ann as she was leaving for one such meeting. “We’ll call it the Snowe plan. Tell her if she votes for the bill, she can have the White House…Michelle and I will move to an apartment!”

  And still we were getting nowhere. Snowe took pride in her centrist reputation, and she cared deeply about healthcare (she had been orphaned at the age of nine, losing her parents, in rapid succession, to cancer and heart disease). But the Republican Party’s sharp rightward tilt had left her increasingly isolated within her own caucus, making her even more cautious than usual, prone to wrapping her indecision in the guise of digging into policy minutiae.

  Grassley was a different story. He talked a good game about wanting to help the family farmers back in Iowa who had trouble getting insurance they could count on, and when Hillary Clinton had pushed healthcare reform in the 1990s, he’d actually cosponsored an alternative that in many ways resembled the Massachusetts-style plan we were proposing, complete with an individual mandate. But unlike Snowe, Grassley rarely bucked his party leadership on tough issues. With his long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl, he’d hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes. Phil’s conclusion was that Grassley was just stringing Baucus along at McConnell’s behest, trying to stall the process and prevent us from moving on to the rest of our agenda. Even I, the resident White House optimist, finally got fed up and asked Baucus to come by for a visit.