Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  “I love nuns,” I told Phil and Nancy-Ann.

  Despite all this work, our tally still showed us at least ten votes shy of what we needed for passage. Public opinion remained sharply divided. The press had run out of fresh stories to write. There were no more dramatic gestures or policy tweaks that might make the politics easier. Success or failure now depended entirely on the choices of the thirty or so House Democrats who represented swing districts, all of whom were being told that a vote in favor of the ACA could cost them their seat.

  I spent much of each day talking one-on-one to these members, sometimes in the Oval Office, more often by phone. Some cared only about the politics, closely monitoring polls in their district and letters and phone calls from constituents. I tried to give them my honest assessment: that support for the healthcare reform bill would improve once it passed, though maybe not until after the midterms; that a “no” vote was more likely to turn off Democrats than it was to win over Republicans and independents; and that whatever they did, their fates in six months would most likely hinge on the state of the economy and my own political standing.

  A few were looking for White House support on some unrelated project or bill they were working on. I sent them to Rahm or Pete Rouse to see what we could do.

  But most of the conversations weren’t transactional. In a roundabout way, what representatives were looking for was clarity—about who they were and what their consciences demanded. Sometimes I just listened as they ran through the pros and cons. Often, we compared notes about what had inspired us to get into politics, talking about the nervous excitement of that first race and all the things we’d hoped to accomplish, the sacrifices we and our families had made to get where we were and the people who’d helped us along the way.

  This is it, I’d say to them finally. The point of it all. To have that rare chance, reserved for very few, to bend history in a better direction.

  And what was striking was how, more often than not, that was enough. Veteran politicians decided to step up despite active opposition in their conservative districts—folks like Baron Hill of southern Indiana, Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, and Bart Stupak, a devout Catholic from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who worked with me on getting the abortion funding language to a point where he could vote for it. So did political neophytes like Betsy Markey of Colorado, or John Boccieri of Ohio and Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, both young Iraq War vets, all of them seen as rising stars in the party. In fact, it was often those with the most to lose who needed the least convincing. Tom Perriello, a thirty-five-year-old human rights lawyer turned congressman who’d eked out a victory in a majority-Republican district that covered a wide swath of Virginia, spoke for a lot of them when he explained his decision to vote for the bill.

  “There are things more important,” he told me, “than getting reelected.”

  It’s not hard to find people who hate Congress, voters who are convinced that the Capitol is filled with poseurs and cowards, that most of their elected officials are in the pocket of lobbyists and big donors and motivated by a hunger for power. When I hear such criticism, I usually nod and acknowledge that there are some who live up to these stereotypes. I admit that watching the daily scrum that takes place on the House or Senate floor can sap even the hardiest spirit. But I also tell people about Tom Perriello’s words to me before the healthcare vote. I describe what he and many others did so soon after they’d first been elected. How many of us are tested in that way, asked to risk careers we’ve long dreamed of in the service of some greater good?

  Those people can be found in Washington. That, too, is politics.

  * * *

  —

  THE FINAL VOTE on healthcare came on March 21, 2010—more than a year after we held that first White House summit and Ted Kennedy made his surprise appearance. Everyone in the West Wing was on edge. Both Phil and the Speaker had done informal head counts that showed us getting over the hump, but just barely. We knew it was always possible that a House member or two could have a sudden change of heart, and we had few, if any, votes to spare.

  I had another source of worry, one I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on but that had been in the back of my mind from the start. We’d now marshaled, defended, fretted over, and compromised on a 906-page piece of legislation that would affect the lives of tens of millions of Americans. The Affordable Care Act was dense, thorough, popular with only one side politically, impactful, and surely imperfect. And now it would need to be implemented. Late in the afternoon, after Nancy-Ann and I had worked through a round of last-minute calls to members heading off to vote, I stood up and looked out the window, across the South Lawn.

  “This law better work,” I told her. “Because starting tomorrow, we own the American healthcare system.”

  I decided not to watch the preliminary hours of speechmaking that went on in the House chamber, instead waiting to join the vice president and the rest of the team in the Roosevelt Room once the actual voting began, around seven-thirty p.m. One by one, the votes accumulated as House members pressed either “yea” or “nay” buttons on electronic voting panels, the running tally projected on the TV screen. As the “yeas” slowly ticked up, I could hear Messina and a few others muttering under their breath, “Come on…come on.” Finally the vote hit 216, one more than we needed. Our bill would go on to pass by a margin of seven votes.

  The room erupted in cheers, with people hugging and high-fiving as if they’d just witnessed their ball club winning with a walk-off home run. Joe grabbed me by the shoulders, his famous grin even wider than usual. “You did it, man!” he said. Rahm and I embraced. He’d brought his thirteen-year-old son, Zach, to the White House that evening to watch the vote. I leaned down and told Zach that because of his dad, millions of people would finally have healthcare if they got sick. The kid beamed. Back in the Oval, I made congratulatory calls to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and when I was done, I found Axelrod standing by the door. His eyes were a little red. He told me he’d needed some time alone in his office following the vote, as it had brought back a flood of memories of what he and his wife, Susan, had gone through when their daughter Lauren had been first stricken with epileptic seizures.

  “Thanks for sticking with this,” Axe said, his voice choked up. I put my arm around him, feeling my own emotions swell.

  “This is why we do the work,” I said. “This. Right here.”

  I had invited everyone who worked on the bill up to the residence for a private celebration, about a hundred people in all. It was Sasha and Malia’s spring break, and Michelle had taken them to New York for a few days, so I was on my own. The evening was warm enough that we could mingle outside on the Truman Balcony, with the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial lit up in the distance, and I made an exception to my rule of weekday sobriety. Martini in hand, I made the rounds, hugging and thanking Phil, Nancy-Ann, Jeanne, and Kathleen for all the work they’d done. I shook hands with scores of junior staffers, many of whom I’d never met and who no doubt felt a little overwhelmed to be standing where they were. I knew they had toiled in the background, crunching numbers, preparing drafts, sending out press releases, and answering congressional inquiries, and I wanted them to know how critical their work had been.

  For me, this was a celebration that mattered. The night we’d had in Grant Park after winning the election had been extraordinary, but it had been just a promise, not yet realized. This night meant more to me, a promise fulfilled.

  After everyone had left, well past midnight, I walked down the hallway to the Treaty Room. Bo was curled up on the floor. He’d passed much of the evening on the balcony with my guests, threading through the crowd, looking for a pat on the head or maybe a dropped canapé to snack on. Now he looked pleasantly fatigued, ready to sleep. I leaned down to give him a scratch behind the ears. I thought about Ted Kennedy, and I thought about my mom.

  It was a good day.


  PART FIVE

  THE WORLD AS IT IS

  CHAPTER 18

  JUST AS DELIVERING A SALUTE became second nature to me, repeated anytime I boarded Marine One or Air Force One or interacted with our troops, I slowly grew more comfortable—and efficient—in my role as commander in chief. The morning PDB became more concise as my team and I got better acquainted with a recurring cast of foreign policy characters, scenarios, conflicts, and threats. Connections that had once been opaque were now obvious to me. I could tell you off the top of my head which allied troops were where in Afghanistan and how reliable they were in a fight, which Iraqi ministers were ardent nationalists and which carried water for the Iranians. The stakes were too high, the problems too knotty, for any of this to ever feel entirely routine. Instead, I came to experience my responsibilities the way I imagine a bomb-disposal expert feels about clipping a wire or a tightrope walker feels as she steps off the platform, having learned to shed excess fear for the sake of focus—while trying not to get so relaxed that I made sloppy mistakes.

  There was one task that I never allowed myself to get even remotely comfortable with. Every week or so, my assistant Katie Johnson set on my desk a folder containing condolence letters to the families of fallen service members for me to sign. I’d close the door to my office, open the folder, and pause over each letter, reading the name aloud like an incantation, trying to summon an image of the young man (female casualties were rare) and what his life had been like—where he’d grown up and gone to school, the birthday parties and summer swims that had made up his childhood, the sports teams he’d played on, the sweethearts he’d pined for. I’d think about his parents, and his wife and kids if he had them. I signed each letter slowly, careful not to smudge the heavy beige paper with my left-handed, sideways grip of the pen. If the signature didn’t look the way I wanted, I’d have the letter reprinted, knowing full well that nothing I did would ever be enough.

  I wasn’t the only person to send such letters. Bob Gates also corresponded with the families of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, though we rarely if ever talked about it.

  Gates and I had developed a strong working relationship. We met regularly in the Oval Office, and I found him to be practical, even-keeled, and refreshingly blunt, with the quiet confidence to both argue his case and occasionally change his mind. His skillful management of the Pentagon made me willing to overlook those times he tried to manage me as well, and he wasn’t afraid to take on Defense Department sacred cows, including efforts to rein in the defense budget. He could be prickly, especially with my younger White House staffers, and our differences in age, upbringing, experience, and political orientation made us something short of friends. But we recognized in each other a common work ethic and sense of duty—not only to the nation that had trusted us to keep it safe but to the troops whose courage we witnessed every day, and to the families they had left behind.

  It helped that on most national security issues our judgments aligned. Entering the summer of 2009, for example, Gates and I shared a guarded optimism about developments in Iraq. Not that the conditions there were rosy. The Iraqi economy was in shambles—the war had destroyed much of the country’s basic infrastructure, while plunging world oil prices had sapped the national budget—and due to parliamentary gridlock, Iraq’s government had difficulty carrying out even the most basic tasks. During my brief visit there in April, I’d offered Prime Minister Maliki suggestions for how he might embrace needed administrative reforms and more effectively reach out to Iraq’s Sunni and Kurdish factions. He’d been polite but defensive (apparently he wasn’t a student of Madison’s “Federalist No. 10”): As far as he was concerned, Shiites in Iraq were the majority, his party’s coalition had won the most votes, Sunnis and Kurds were hindering progress with their unreasonable demands, and any notions of accommodating the interests or protecting the rights of Iraq’s minority populations were an inconvenience he assumed only as a result of U.S. pressure.

  The conversation had been a useful reminder to me that elections alone don’t produce a functioning democracy; until Iraq found a way to strengthen its civic institutions and its leaders developed habits of compromise, the country would continue to struggle. Still, the fact that Maliki and his rivals were expressing hostility and mistrust through politics rather than through the barrel of a gun counted as progress. Even with U.S. forces withdrawing from Iraqi population centers, AQI-sponsored terrorist attacks had continued to decline, and our commanders reported a steady improvement in the performance of Iraqi security forces. Gates and I agreed that the United States would need to play a critical role in Iraq for years to come—advising key ministries, training its security forces, breaking deadlocks between factions, and helping finance the country’s reconstruction. But barring significant reversals, the end of America’s war in Iraq was finally in sight.

  The same couldn’t be said about Afghanistan.

  The additional troops I’d authorized in February had helped check Taliban gains in some areas and were working to secure the upcoming presidential election. But our forces had not reversed the country’s deepening cycle of violence and instability, and as a result of increased fighting over a wider swath of territory, U.S. casualties had spiked.

  Afghan casualties were also on the rise, with more civilians caught in the cross fire, falling prey to suicide attacks and sophisticated roadside bombs planted by insurgents. Afghans increasingly complained about certain U.S. tactics—nighttime raids on homes suspected of harboring Taliban fighters, for example—that they viewed as dangerous or disruptive but that our commanders deemed necessary to carry out their missions. On the political front, President Karzai’s reelection strategy mainly consisted of buying off local power brokers, intimidating opponents, and shrewdly playing various ethnic factions against one another. Diplomatically, our high-level outreach to Pakistani officials appeared to have had no effect on their continued tolerance of Taliban safe havens inside their country. And all the while, a reconstituted al-Qaeda operating in the border areas with Pakistan still posed a major threat.

  Given the lack of meaningful progress, we were all eager to see what our new ISAF commander, General Stanley McChrystal, had to say about the situation. At the end of August, having spent weeks in Afghanistan with a team of military and civilian advisors, McChrystal turned in the top-to-bottom assessment that Gates had asked for. A few days later, the Pentagon sent it to the White House.

  Rather than provide clear answers, it set off a whole new round of troublesome questions.

  * * *

  —

  MOST OF MCCHRYSTAL’S assessment detailed what we already knew: The situation in Afghanistan was bad and getting worse, with the Taliban emboldened, the Afghan army weak and demoralized, and Karzai, who prevailed in an election tainted by violence and fraud, still in charge of a government that was viewed by the Afghan people as corrupt and inept. What got everyone’s attention, though, was the report’s conclusion. To turn the situation around, McChrystal proposed a full-blown counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign: a military strategy meant to contain and marginalize insurgents not just by fighting them but by simultaneously working to increase stability for the country’s wider population—ideally quelling some of the fury that had driven insurgents to take up arms in the first place.

  Not only was McChrystal proposing a more ambitious approach than what I’d envisioned when I’d adopted the Riedel report recommendations in the spring, he was also requesting at least forty thousand troops on top of those I’d already deployed—which would bring the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan close to one hundred thousand for the foreseeable future.

  “So much for being the antiwar president,” Axe said.

  It was tough not to feel as if I’d been subjected to a bait and switch—that the Pentagon’s acquiescence to my more modest initial increase of seventeen thousand troops and four thousand military trainers had be
en merely a temporary, tactical retreat on the path to getting more. Among members of my team, divisions over Afghanistan that had been evident back in February began to harden. Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs, and David Petraeus all endorsed McChrystal’s COIN strategy in its entirety; anything less, they argued, was likely to fail and would signal a dangerous lack of American resolve to friends and foes alike. Hillary and Panetta quickly followed suit. Gates, who’d previously expressed concern over the wisdom of expanding our military footprint in a country famously resistant to foreign occupation, was more circumspect but told me he’d been persuaded by McChrystal that a smaller U.S. force wouldn’t work, and that if we coordinated closely with the Afghan security forces to protect local populations and better trained our soldiers to respect Afghan culture, we could avoid the problems that had plagued the Soviets in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Joe and a sizable number of NSC staffers viewed McChrystal’s proposal as just the latest attempt by an unrestrained military to drag the country deeper into a futile, wildly expensive nation-building exercise, when we could and should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism (CT) efforts against al-Qaeda.

  After reading McChrystal’s sixty-six-page assessment, I shared Joe’s skepticism. As far as I could tell, there was no clear exit strategy; under McChrystal’s plan, it would take five to six years just to get U.S. troop numbers back down to what they were now. The costs were staggering—at least $1 billion for every thousand additional troops deployed. Our men and women in uniform, some on their fourth or fifth tours after close to a decade of war, would face an even greater toll. And given the resilience of the Taliban and the dysfunction of Karzai’s government, there was no guarantee of success. In their written endorsement of the plan, Gates and the generals acknowledged that no amount of U.S. military power could stabilize Afghanistan “as long as pervasive corruption and preying upon the people continue to characterize governance” inside the country. I saw no possibility of that condition being met anytime soon.