Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  “Time’s up, Max,” I told him in the Oval during a meeting in late July. “You’ve given it your best shot. Grassley’s gone. He just hasn’t broken the news to you yet.”

  Baucus shook his head. “I respectfully disagree, Mr. President,” he said. “I know Chuck. I think we’re this close to getting him.” He held his thumb and index finger an inch apart, smiling at me like someone who’s discovered a cure for cancer and is forced to deal with foolish skeptics. “Let’s just give Chuck a little more time and have the vote when we get back from recess.”

  A part of me wanted to get up, grab Baucus by the shoulders, and shake him till he came to his senses. I decided that this wouldn’t work. Another part of me considered threatening to withhold my political support the next time he ran for reelection, but since he polled higher than I did in his home state of Montana, I figured that wouldn’t work either. Instead, I argued and cajoled for another half hour, finally agreeing to his plan to delay an immediate party-line vote and instead call the bill to a vote within the first two weeks of Congress’s reconvening in September.

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE HOUSE and the Senate adjourned and both votes still looming, we decided I’d spend the first two weeks of August on the road, holding healthcare town halls in places like Montana, Colorado, and Arizona, where public support for reform was shakiest. As a sweetener, my team suggested that Michelle and the girls join me, and that we visit some national parks along the way.

  I was thrilled by the suggestion. It’s not as if Malia and Sasha were deprived of fatherly attention or in need of extra summer fun—they’d had plenty of both, with playdates and movies and a whole lot of loafing. Often, I’d come home in the evening and go up to the third floor to find the solarium overtaken by pajama-clad eight- or eleven-year-old girls settling in for a sleepover, bouncing on inflatable mattresses, scattering popcorn and toys everywhere, giggling nonstop at whatever was on Nickelodeon.

  But as much as Michelle and I (with the help of infinitely patient Secret Service agents) tried to approximate a normal childhood for my daughters, it was hard if not impossible for me to take them places like an ordinary dad would. We couldn’t go to an amusement park together, making an impromptu stop for burgers along the way. I couldn’t take them, as I once had, on lazy Sunday afternoon bike rides. A trip to get ice cream or a visit to a bookstore was now a major production, involving road closures, tactical teams, and the omnipresent press pool.

  If the girls felt a sense of loss over this, they didn’t show it. But I felt it acutely. I especially mourned the fact that I’d probably never get a chance to take Malia and Sasha on the sort of long summer road trip I’d made when I was eleven, after my mother and Toot decided it was time for Maya and me to see the mainland of the United States. It had lasted a month and burned a lasting impression into my mind—and not just because we went to Disneyland (although that was obviously outstanding). We had dug for clams during low tide in Puget Sound, ridden horses through a creek at the base of Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, watched the endless Kansas prairie unfold from a train window, spotted a herd of bison on a dusky plain in Yellowstone, and ended each day with the simple pleasures of a motel ice machine, the occasional swimming pool, or just air-conditioning and clean sheets. That one trip gave me a glimpse of the dizzying freedom of the open road, how vast America was, and how full of wonder.

  I couldn’t duplicate that experience for my daughters—not when we flew on Air Force One, rode in motorcades, and never bunked down in a place like Howard Johnson’s. Getting from Point A to Point B happened too fast and too comfortably, and the days were too stuffed with prescheduled, staff-monitored activity—absent that familiar mix of surprises, misadventures, and boredom—to fully qualify as a road trip. But over the course of an August week, Michelle, the girls, and I had fun all the same. We watched Old Faithful blow and looked out over the ocher expanse of the Grand Canyon. The girls went inner tubing. At night, we played board games and tried to name the constellations. Tucking the girls into bed, I hoped that despite all the fuss that surrounded us, their minds were storing away a vision of life’s possibilities and the beauty of the American landscape, just as mine once had; and that they might someday think back on our trips together and be reminded that they were so worthy of love, so fascinating and electric with life, that there was nothing their parents would rather do than share those vistas with them.

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE, one of the things Malia and Sasha had to put up with on the trip out west was their dad peeling off every other day to appear before large crowds and TV cameras and talk about healthcare. The town halls themselves weren’t very different from the ones I’d held earlier in the spring. People shared stories about how the existing healthcare system had failed their families, and asked questions about how the emerging bill might affect their own insurance. Even those who opposed our effort listened attentively to what I had to say.

  Outside, though, the atmosphere was very different. We were in the middle of what came to be known as the “Tea Party summer,” an organized effort to marry people’s honest fears about a changing America with a right-wing political agenda. Heading to and from every venue, we were greeted by dozens of angry protesters. Some shouted through bullhorns. Others flashed a single-fingered salute. Many held up signs with messages like OBAMACARE SUCKS or the unintentionally ironic KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE. Some waved doctored pictures of me looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, with blackened eyes and thickly caked makeup, appearing almost demonic. Still others wore colonial-era patriot costumes and hoisted the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag. All of them seemed most interested in expressing their general contempt for me, a sentiment best summed up by a refashioning of the famous Shepard Fairey poster from our campaign: the same red, white, and blue rendering of my face, but with the word HOPE replaced by NOPE.

  This new and suddenly potent force in American politics had started months earlier as a handful of ragtag, small-scale protests against TARP and the Recovery Act. A number of the early participants had apparently migrated from the quixotic, libertarian presidential campaign of Republican congressman Ron Paul, who called for the elimination of the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve, a return to the gold standard, and withdrawal from the U.N. and NATO. Rick Santelli’s notorious television rant against our housing proposal back in February had provided a catchy rallying cry for the loose network of conservative activists, and soon websites and email chains had begun spawning bigger rallies, with Tea Party chapters proliferating across the country. In those early months, they hadn’t had enough traction to stop the stimulus package from passing, and a national protest on Tax Day in April hadn’t amounted to much. But helped by endorsements from conservative media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, the movement was picking up steam, with local and then national Republican politicians embracing the Tea Party label.

  By summer, the group was focused on stopping the abomination they dubbed “Obamacare,” which they insisted would introduce a socialistic, oppressive new order to America. As I was conducting my own relatively sedate healthcare town halls out west, newscasts started broadcasting scenes from parallel congressional events around the country, with House and Senate members suddenly confronted by angry, heckling crowds in their home districts and with Tea Party members deliberately disrupting the proceedings, rattling some of the politicians enough that they were canceling public appearances altogether.

  It was hard for me to decide what to make of all this. The Tea Party’s anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government manifesto was hardly new; its basic story line—that corrupt liberal elites had hijacked the federal government to take money out of the pockets of hardworking Americans in order to finance welfare patronage and reward corporate cronies—was one that Republican politicians and conservative media had been peddling for years. Nor, it turned
out, was the Tea Party the spontaneous, grassroots movement it purported to be. From the outset, Koch brother affiliates like Americans for Prosperity, along with other billionaire conservatives who’d been part of the Indian Wells gathering hosted by the Kochs just after I was inaugurated, had carefully nurtured the movement by registering internet domain names and obtaining rally permits; training organizers and sponsoring conferences; and ultimately providing much of the Tea Party’s financing, infrastructure, and strategic direction.

  Still, there was no denying that the Tea Party represented a genuine populist surge within the Republican Party. It was made up of true believers, possessed with the same grassroots enthusiasm and jagged fury we’d seen in Sarah Palin supporters during the closing days of the campaign. Some of that anger I understood, even if I considered it misdirected. Many of the working- and middle-class whites gravitating to the Tea Party had suffered for decades from sluggish wages, rising costs, and the loss of the steady blue-collar work that provided secure retirements. Bush and establishment Republicans hadn’t done anything for them, and the financial crisis had further hollowed out their communities. And so far, at least, the economy had gotten steadily worse with me in charge, despite more than a trillion dollars channeled into stimulus spending and bailouts. For those already predisposed toward conservative ideas, the notion that my policies were designed to help others at their expense—that the game was rigged and I was part of the rigging—must have seemed entirely plausible.

  I also had a grudging respect for how rapidly Tea Party leaders had mobilized a strong following and managed to dominate the news coverage, using some of the same social media and grassroots-organizing strategies we’d deployed during my own campaign. I’d spent my entire political career promoting civic participation as a cure for much of what ailed our democracy. I could hardly complain, I told myself, just because it was opposition to my agenda that was now spurring such passionate citizen involvement.

  As time went on, though, it became hard to ignore some of the more troubling impulses driving the movement. As had been true at Palin rallies, reporters at Tea Party events caught attendees comparing me to animals or Hitler. Signs turned up showing me dressed like an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose and the caption OBAMACARE COMING SOON TO A CLINIC NEAR YOU. Conspiracy theories abounded: that my healthcare bill would set up “death panels” to evaluate whether people deserved treatment, clearing the way for “government-encouraged euthanasia,” or that it would benefit illegal immigrants, in the service of my larger goal of flooding the country with welfare-dependent, reliably Democratic voters. The Tea Party also resurrected and poured gas on an old rumor from the campaign: that not only was I Muslim, but I’d actually been born in Kenya and was therefore constitutionally barred from serving as president. By September, the question of how much nativism and racism explained the Tea Party’s rise had become a major topic of debate on the cable shows—especially after former president and lifelong southerner Jimmy Carter offered up the opinion that the extreme vitriol directed toward me was at least in part spawned by racist views.

  At the White House, we made a point of not commenting on any of this—and not just because Axe had reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race. As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it’s what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism.

  More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.

  One thing felt certain: A pretty big chunk of the American people, including some of the very folks I was trying to help, didn’t trust a word I said. One night around then I watched a news report on a charitable organization called Remote Area Medical that provided medical services in temporary pop-up clinics around the country, operating out of trailers parked outside arenas and fairgrounds. Almost all the patients in the report were white southerners from places like Tennessee, Georgia, and West Virginia—men and women who had jobs but no employer-based insurance or had insurance with deductibles they couldn’t afford. Many had driven hundreds of miles—some sleeping in their cars overnight, leaving the engines running to stay warm—to join hundreds of other people lined up before dawn to see one of the volunteer doctors who might pull an infected tooth, diagnose debilitating abdominal pain, or examine a lump in their breast. The demand was so great that patients who arrived after sunup sometimes got turned away.

  I found the story both heartbreaking and maddening, an indictment of a wealthy nation that failed too many of its citizens. And yet I knew that almost every one of those people waiting to see a free doctor came from a deep-red Republican district, the sort of place where opposition to our healthcare bill, along with support of the Tea Party, was likely to be strongest. There had been a time—back when I was still a state senator driving around southern Illinois or, later, traveling through rural Iowa during the earliest days of the presidential campaign—when I could reach such voters. I wasn’t yet well known enough to be the target of caricature, which meant that whatever preconceptions people may have had about a Black guy from Chicago with a foreign name could be dispelled by a simple conversation, a small gesture of kindness. After sitting down with folks in a diner or hearing their complaints at a county fair, I might not get their vote or even agreement on most issues. But we would at least make a connection, and we’d come away from such encounters understanding that we had hopes, struggles, and values in common.

  I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived locked behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful. I wanted to believe that the ability to connect was still there. My wife wasn’t so sure. One night toward the end of our road trip, after we’d tucked the girls in, Michelle caught a glimpse of a Tea Party rally on TV—with its enraged flag-waving and inflammatory slogans. She seized the remote and turned off the set, her expression hovering somewhere between rage and resignation.

  “It’s a trip, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What is?”

  “That they’re scared of you. Scared of us.”

  She shook her head and headed for bed.

  * * *

  —

  TED KENNEDY DIED on August 25. The morning of his funeral, the skies over Boston darkened, and by the time our flight landed the streets were shrouded in thick sheets of rain. The scene inside the church befitted the largeness of Teddy’s life: the pews packed with former presidents and heads of state, senators and members of Congress, hundreds of current and former staffers, the honor guard, and the flag-draped casket. But it was the stories told by his family, most of all his children, that mattered most that day. Patrick Kennedy recalled his father tending to him during crippling asthma attacks, pressing a cold towel to his forehead until he fell asleep. He described how his father would take him out to sail, even in stormy seas. Teddy Jr. told the story of how, after he’d lost his leg to cancer, his father had insisted they go sledding, trudging with him up a snowy hill, pick
ing him up when he fell, and wiping away his tears when he wanted to give up, the two of them eventually getting to the top and racing down the snowy banks. It had been proof, Teddy Jr. said, that his world had not stopped. Collectively, it was a portrait of a man driven by great appetites and ambitions but also by great loss and doubt. A man making up for things.

  “My father believed in redemption,” Teddy Jr. said. “And he never surrendered, never stopped trying to right wrongs, be they the results of his own failings or of ours.”

  I carried those words with me back to Washington, where a mood of surrender increasingly prevailed—at least when it came to getting a healthcare bill passed. The Tea Party had accomplished what it had set out to do, generating reams of negative publicity for our efforts, stoking public fear that reform would be too costly, too disruptive, or would help only the poor. A preliminary report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the independent, professionally staffed operation charged with scoring the cost of all federal legislation, priced the initial House version of the healthcare bill at an eye-popping $1 trillion. Although the CBO score would eventually come down as the bill was revised and clarified, the headlines gave opponents a handy stick with which to beat us over the head. Democrats from swing districts were now running scared, convinced that pushing forward with the bill amounted to a suicide mission. Republicans abandoned all pretense of wanting to negotiate, with members of Congress regularly echoing the Tea Party’s claim that I wanted to put Grandma to sleep.