Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  Despite a few exasperating incidents like that, there was no denying that our status as the First Family conferred plenty of benefits. Museums around town let us visit after hours, allowing us to avoid the crowds (Marvin and I still laugh over the time he decided to strategically plant himself in front of a large and very detailed portrait of a naked man at the Corcoran Gallery for fear that the girls might see it). Because the Motion Picture Association of America sent us DVDs of new releases, the White House movie theater got plenty of use, although Michelle’s tastes and mine often diverged: She preferred rom-coms, while according to her, my favorite movies usually involved “terrible things happening to people, and then they die.”

  The incredible White House staff also made it easy for us to entertain guests. No longer did we have to worry, as most working parents with young kids do, about mustering the energy after a long week at the office to shop, cook, or straighten up a house that looks like it’s been hit by a tornado. Along with weekend get-togethers with our regular circle of friends, we began hosting small dinner parties in the residence every few months, inviting artists, writers, scholars, business leaders, and others whose paths we’d crossed and wanted to know better. Usually the dinners would last until well past midnight, full of wine-fueled conversations that inspired us (Toni Morrison, at once regal and mischievous, describing her friendship with James Baldwin); instructed us (the co-chair of my Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Dr. Eric Lander, describing the latest breakthroughs in genetic medicine); enchanted us (Meryl Streep leaning over to softly recite in Mandarin the lyrics to a song about clouds that she’d learned for a part years ago); and generally made me feel better about humanity’s prospects.

  But maybe the best White House perk involved music. One of Michelle’s goals as First Lady was to make the White House more welcoming—a “People’s House” in which all visitors would feel represented, rather than a remote, exclusive fortress of power. Working with the White House Social Office, she organized more tours for local school groups and started a mentorship program that paired disadvantaged kids with White House staffers. She opened up the South Lawn for trick-or-treating on Halloween, and held movie nights for military families.

  As part of that effort, her office arranged for us to host a regular American music series in tandem with public television, in which some of the country’s leading artists—household names like Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Lopez, and Justin Timberlake but also up-and-comers like Leon Bridges and living legends like B. B. King—spent part of a day conducting music workshops with area youths before performing in front of a couple hundred guests on an East Room stage, or sometimes on the South Lawn. Along with the Gershwin Prize concert, which the White House traditionally put on each year to honor a leading composer or performer, the series gave my family front-row seats three or four times a year at a live, star-studded musical extravaganza.

  Every genre was represented: Motown and Broadway show tunes; classic blues and a Fiesta Latina; gospel and hip-hop; country, jazz, and classical. The musicians typically rehearsed the day before they were scheduled to appear, and if I happened to be upstairs in the residence as they were running through their set, I could hear the sounds of drums and bass and electric guitar reverberating through the Treaty Room floor. Sometimes I’d sneak down the back stairs of the residence and slip into the East Room, standing in the rear so as not to attract attention, and just watch the artists at work: a duet figuring out their harmonies, a headliner tweaking an arrangement with the house band. I’d marvel at everyone’s mastery of their instruments, the generosity they showed toward one another as they blended mind, body, and spirit, and I’d feel a pang of envy at the pure, unambiguous joy of their endeavors, such a contrast to the political path I had chosen.

  As for the actual concerts, they were absolutely electric. I can still picture Bob Dylan, with just a bassist, a piano player, and his guitar, tenderly reworking “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” When finished, he stepped off the stage, shook my hand, gave a little grin and bow in front of me and Michelle, and vanished without a word. I remember a young playwright of Puerto Rican descent named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who told us in the photo line before an evening of poetry, music, and the spoken word that he planned to debut the first song of what he hoped would be a hip-hop musical on the life of America’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts.

  And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with “Michelle.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle’s parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

  Michelle loved those concerts as much as I did. But I suspect she would have preferred to have attended them as a guest rather than a host. On the surface, she had every reason to feel good about her own adjustment to our new life: Our daughters seemed happy; she’d quickly made a new circle of friends, many of them the mothers of Malia’s and Sasha’s classmates; and she had a little more flexibility than I did to leave the White House complex unnoticed. Her initiative to reduce childhood obesity—called Let’s Move!—had been well received and was already showing meaningful results, and in collaboration with Jill Biden she would soon launch a new initiative, called Joining Forces, that would provide support to military families. Whenever she appeared in public, whether it was visiting a public school classroom or trading good-natured barbs with late-night television hosts, people seemed irresistibly drawn to her genuineness and warmth, her smile and quick wit. In fact, it was fair to say that, unlike me, she had not missed a step or hit a false note from the moment we’d arrived in Washington.

  And yet, despite Michelle’s success and popularity, I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine. It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all of her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round-the-clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to constant scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance.

  More than anything, the White House reminded her daily that fundamental aspects of her life were no longer entirely within her control. Who we spent time with, where we went on vacation, where we’d be living after the 2012 election, even the safety of her family—all of it was at some level subject to how well I performed at my job, or what the West Wing staff did or didn’t do, or the whims of voters, or the press corps, or Mitch McConnell, or the jobs numbers, or some completely unanticipated event occurring on the other side of the planet. Nothing was fixed anymore. Not even close. And so, consciously or not, a part of her stayed on alert, no matter what small triumphs and joys a day or week or month might bring, waiting and watching for the next turn of the wheel, bracing herself for calamity.

  Michelle rarely shared such feelings directly with me. She knew the load I was carrying and saw no point in adding to it; for the foreseeable future, at least, there wasn’t much I could do to change our circumstances. And maybe she stopped talking because she knew I’d try to reason away her fears, or try to placate her in some inconsequential way, or imply that all she needed was a change in attitude.

  If I was fine, she should be too.

  There remained stretches when it really did feel fine, evenings when the two of us snuggled under a blanket to watch a show on TV, Sunday afternoons when we got down on the carpet with the girls and Bo and the entire second floor of the residence filled up with laughter. More often, though, Michelle retired to her study once dinner was done, while I headed down the long hall to th
e Treaty Room. By the time I was finished with work, she’d already be asleep. I’d undress, brush my teeth, and slip under the covers, careful not to wake her. And although I rarely had trouble falling asleep during my time in the White House—I’d be so tired that within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow I’d usually be out cold—there were nights when, lying next to Michelle in the dark, I’d think about those days when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered, and my heart would suddenly tighten at the thought that those days might not return.

  It makes me wonder now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Michelle’s was the more honest response to all the changes we were going through; whether in my seeming calm as crises piled up, my insistence that everything would work out in the end, I was really just protecting myself—and contributing to her loneliness.

  I know that it was around this time that I started having a recurring dream. In it, I find myself on the streets of some unnamed city, a neighborhood with trees, storefronts, light traffic. The day is pleasant and warm, with a soft breeze, and people are out shopping or walking their dogs or coming home from work. In one version I’m riding a bike, but most often I’m on foot, and I’m strolling along, without any thoughts in particular, when suddenly I realize that no one recognizes me. My security detail is gone. There’s nowhere I have to be. My choices have no consequence. I wander into a corner store and buy a bottle of water or iced tea, making small talk with the person behind the counter. I settle down on a nearby bench, pop open the cap on my drink, take a sip, and just watch the world passing by.

  I feel like I’ve won the lottery.

  * * *

  —

  RAHM THOUGHT HE had the answer for regaining political momentum. The Wall Street crisis had exposed a breakdown in the system for regulating financial markets, and during the transition, I’d asked our economic team to develop legislative reforms that would make a future crisis less likely. As far as Rahm was concerned, the sooner we got such a “Wall Street reform” bill drafted and up for a vote, the better.

  “It puts us back on the side of the angels,” he said. “And if the Republicans try to block it, we’ll shove it up their ass.”

  There was every reason to expect that Mitch McConnell would fight us on new financial regulations. After all, he’d made a career of opposing any and all forms of government regulation (environmental laws, labor laws, workplace safety laws, campaign finance laws, consumer protection laws) that might constrain corporate America’s ability to do whatever it damn well pleased. But McConnell also understood the political hazards of the moment—voters still associated the Republican Party with big business and yacht-owning billionaires—and he didn’t plan on letting his party’s standard anti-regulation position get in the way of his quest for the Senate majority. And so, while he made no secret of his intention to filibuster my agenda at every turn, a task made easier after Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race deprived Democrats of their sixtieth vote, he let Tim know in a meeting in his office on Capitol Hill that he’d make an exception for Wall Street reform. “He’s going to vote against whatever we propose,” Tim told us after returning from the meeting, “and so will most of his caucus. But he said we should be able to find five or so Republicans who’ll work with us and he won’t do anything to stop them.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Only that obstruction is working for them,” Tim said. “He seemed pretty pleased with himself.”

  McConnell’s concession to the public mood was significant, but it didn’t mean we’d have an easy time getting Wall Street reform through Congress. Banking industry executives continued to show no remorse for the economic havoc they’d caused. Nor did bankers show gratitude for all we’d done to yank them out of the fire (accusations that I was “anti-business” had become a regular feature in the financial press). On the contrary, they viewed our efforts to tighten regulations on their operations as unacceptably burdensome, if not downright offensive. They also retained one of the most powerful lobbying operations in Washington, with influential constituencies in every state and the deep pockets to spread campaign donations across both parties.

  Beyond all-out opposition from the banks, we had to confront the sheer complexity of trying to regulate the modern financial system. Gone were the days when most of America’s money ran in a simple, circular loop, with banks taking in customers’ deposits and using that money to make plain vanilla loans to families and businesses. Trillions of dollars now moved across multiple borders in the blink of an eye. The holdings of nontraditional financial operations like hedge funds and private equity firms rivaled those of many banks, while computer-driven trading and exotic products like derivatives had the power to make or break markets. Within the United States, oversight of this diffuse system was split among an assortment of federal agencies (the Fed, Treasury, FDIC, SEC, CFTC, OCC), most of which operated independently and fiercely protected their turf. Effective reform meant corralling these different players under a common regulatory framework; it also meant syncing up U.S. efforts with those made by regulators in other countries so that firms couldn’t simply run their transactions through overseas accounts to avoid more stringent rules.

  Finally we had to contend with sharp differences within the Democratic Party about both the shape and scope of reform. For those who leaned closer to the political center (and that included Tim and Larry as well as the majority of Democrats in Congress), the recent crisis had revealed serious but fixable flaws in an otherwise solid financial system. Wall Street’s status as the world’s preeminent financial center depended on growth and innovation, the argument went, and cycles of boom and bust—with corresponding swings between irrational exuberance and irrational panic—were built-in features not only of modern capitalism but of the human psyche. Since it was neither possible nor even desirable to eliminate all risk to investors and firms, the goals of reform were defined narrowly: Put guardrails around the system to reduce the most excessive forms of risk-taking, ensure transparency in the operations of major institutions, and “make the system safe for failure,” as Larry put it, so that those individuals or financial institutions that made bad bets didn’t drag everyone else down with them.

  To many on the left, this sort of targeted approach to reform fell woefully short of what was needed and would merely put off a long-overdue reckoning with a system that failed to serve the interests of ordinary Americans. They blamed some of the economy’s most troubling trends on a bloated, morally suspect financial sector—whether it was the corporate world’s preference for cost cutting and layoffs over long-term investments as a way of boosting short-term earnings, or the use of debt-financed acquisitions by certain private equity firms to strip down existing businesses and resell their spare parts for undeserved profit, or the steady rise in income inequality and the shrinking share of taxes paid by the über-rich. To reduce these distorting effects and stop the speculative frenzies that so often triggered financial crises, they urged, we should consider a more radical overhaul of Wall Street. The reforms they favored included capping the size of U.S. banks and reinstating Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that had prohibited FDIC-insured banks from engaging in investment banking, which had been mostly repealed during the Clinton administration.

  In a lot of ways, these intraparty divisions on financial regulation reminded me of the healthcare debate, when advocates of a single-payer system had dismissed any accommodations to the existing private insurance system as selling out. And just as had been true in the healthcare debate, I had some sympathy for the Left’s indictment of the status quo. Rather than efficiently allocate capital to productive uses, Wall Street really did increasingly function like a trillion-dollar casino, its outsized profits and compensation packages overly dependent on ever-greater leverage and speculation. Its obsession with quarterly earnings had warped corporate decision-m
aking and encouraged short-term thinking. Untethered to place, indifferent to the impact of globalization on particular workers and communities, the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors, leaving huge swaths of the country drained of money, talent, and hope.

  Big, bold policies could make a dent in these problems, most of which had to do with rewriting the tax code, strengthening labor laws, and changing the rules of corporate governance. All three items were high on my to-do list.

  But when it came to regulating the nation’s financial markets to make the system more stable, the Left’s prescription missed its mark. The evidence didn’t show that limiting the size of U.S. banks would have prevented the recent crisis or the need for federal intervention once the system began to unravel. JPMorgan’s assets dwarfed those of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but it was those smaller firms’ highly leveraged bets on securitized subprime mortgages that had set off a panic. The last major U.S. financial crisis, back in the 1980s, hadn’t involved big banks at all; instead, the system had been rocked by a deluge of high-risk loans by thousands of small, poorly capitalized regional savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in cities and small towns across the country. Given the scope of their operations, we thought it made sense for regulators to give mega-banks like Citi or Bank of America extra scrutiny—but cutting their assets in half wouldn’t change that. And since the banking sectors of most European and Asian countries were actually more concentrated than they were here, limiting the size of U.S. banks would put them at a big disadvantage in the international marketplace, all without eliminating the overall risk to the system.