Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS

  It’s gonna sound cliché, but one of the things that I always admired about Barack was he believed in the fundamental wisdom and goodness of people. There’re people who’re very cynical about politics. There’re people who have been really hurt and damaged, whether it be through race relations, or economic policies, or through foreign policy, who maybe see that as naive, but he believed in it. I think he decided he was going to bet on himself.

  JON FAVREAU

  All day Monday I worked on his edits, and by that I mean not so much with the content, but shaping it, cutting it—making sure that it was a tight speech. And then I gave it back to him Monday night, and then, again, I got a draft from him at four in the morning that Tuesday—the morning he was giving the speech—and that draft was emailed to me, Plouffe, Axe, and Valerie. “No one’s allowed to touch the content. Favs is allowed to edit it for style, tone, grammar. Maybe do some cuts, but other than that, this is what I want to say.”

  LUIS GUTIÉRREZ

  He threw his grandma under the bus! Remember he said something like [how his] grandma would walk across the street and if she saw a black person, would use derogatory language to describe them.5 Basically use the N-word, right? That’s what he said about his grandmother. So, listen. I know all about racism, and I gotta tell you, man, as a grandfather, raising my grandson, you wanna stab me in the heart? Have my grandson tell you some mean, nasty things about Grandma. How’re you gonna throw Grandma under the bus? But that’s what Obama did, because that’s the place Obama felt he was in. That he had to describe the situation as such—that he had white grandparents and he had a white mother.

  VALERIE JARRETT

  That speech was a good example of where he just opened himself up and said, Here I am. Here’s what I stand for. Here’s my life experience. This was why I chose that church. This was what brought Reverend Wright into my life and this was why I’m now moving in a different direction. There was no spin on the ball. It was all heart.

  JON FAVREAU

  I remember he delivered the speech and he called me right after: “Um, I don’t know if I can be elected president saying the things I did about race today, but I also know that I don’t deserve to be elected if I was too afraid to say them in the first place.”

  DAVID AXELROD

  I think of presidential races as essentially very long auditions for the hardest job on the planet, and part of what you measure is how people do under pressure, and under enormous pressure he wrote and delivered one of the most meaningful speeches that has ever been delivered in any campaign, and he did it with grace, and he did it with wisdom. Those moments give people an insight into what kind of president someone will be, and so what looked to be a moment of peril for him turned into a moment of triumph.

  Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech. The National Constitution Center, Philadelphia. March 18, 2008. William Thomas Cain, Getty

  TOM DASCHLE

  He always had a self-confidence about himself, which I think is so critical to be a good president. You have to really believe in yourself, but you also have to be empathetic.

  CHRIS DODD

  D-Connecticut, Second District, US House of Representatives (1975–1981)

  D-Connecticut, US Senate (1981–2011)

  Chair, US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (2007–2011)

  I got a call from Vicki Kennedy in late May, a tearful call. I knew something was immediately wrong. She could hardly speak. My best friend in the Senate had brain cancer, and the question of how long was a matter of days. He managed to survive for over a year.

  MELODY BARNES

  Counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, US Senate Judiciary Committee (1995–2003)

  Director, Domestic Policy Council, White House (2009–2012)

  For Senator Kennedy, one of the great causes of his life was trying to achieve universal health-care coverage. He described that in very personal terms, based on his familial experience and then as the experiences he had as a policymaker and the people that he met over the course of his forty-plus-year career.

  DAVID BOWEN

  Staff Director, US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) (1999–2010)

  I was chief health-policy director for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which Senator Kennedy chaired at the time of the consideration of the Affordable Care Act. My involvement in it began approximately the week before May 21 of 2008. The reason I know that date with precision was that it happened to be a few days before my birthday, but it was [also] a few days before Senator Kennedy got sick. We were in his hideaway, which was his office in the Capitol, and on a rare occasion that there was actually some downtime, we started talking about comprehensive health reform, which was very obviously on the docket for early 2009, regardless of who won in 2008.

  MELODY BARNES

  He saw Senator Obama as the one who could carry the torch, as someone who very specifically had the ability and desire to pass a comprehensive health-care bill.

  CHRIS DODD

  I never asked him this, but I often thought that a major factor in Teddy’s endorsement of candidate Obama was the commitment to [Kennedy] that health care would be a major legislative item. I didn’t know that to be the case, but knowing Teddy well enough, I suspect it was.

  JEREMY BIRD

  We were within one hundred delegates for a long time. So it was actually very close, and particularly around [losing] Pennsylvania, after the Jeremiah Wright stuff came out, there was a real chance, pretty late in the game, that we were going to lose, after we had strung together all those victories.

  CODY KEENAN

  Presidential Speechwriter, White House (2009–2011)

  Deputy Director of Speechwriting, White House (2011–2013)

  Director of Speechwriting, White House (2013–2017)

  He made it a mathematical impossibility on June 3. Even then, it was Be gracious. Don’t demand any concession here. The most we’ll do in the Saint Paul speech is not even claim the Democratic nomination but let her come around to endorsing on her own time. Losing is hard, and the worst thing you could do was to tell someone “Get over it.”

  JEREMY BIRD

  We couldn’t have beaten Hillary, much less any other candidate, had we run a traditional campaign. We were not going to let that political pressure determine our strategy. We were going to do it in a way that’s unique to a candidate and based on his bio and background.

  ALLYSON SCHWARTZ

  D-Pennsylvania, Thirteenth District, US House of Representatives (2005–2015)

  I was a strong Hillary supporter and stayed with her until the very end, and it was difficult. Members of Congress and others asked, “Why aren’t you coming over? Why aren’t you for Obama yet?” I said, “When she’s no longer a candidate, I will be for President Obama.” I didn’t pause for a moment to make that transition, but I supported Hillary all the way through.

  JEREMY BIRD

  We had some Clinton loyalists that we still needed to bring into the fold. I hired Jackie Bray, who had worked on the Clinton campaign. We hired Greg Schultz. We hired Aaron Pickrell, who was on the Clinton campaign, to start that healing process. It didn’t take a long time, because we were in general [election] mode pretty quickly. It was much more about speaking to our base to get them to become the army that we could mobilize, and talk to people who were persuadable.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  The general campaign created the vice-presidential nominee’s team before there was a nominee, and I became the traveling staff assistant to whoever they would pick.

  JIM MESSINA

  I was in the room when they picked Biden, and he really was about adding foreign-policy credentials to the ticket. People forget: Barack Obama had been in the Senate for three years before he started running for president. And so, when I went to work for him, my [former] boss Max Baucus6 said, “You don’t really know him very w
ell.” They all knew Biden, and President Obama did really want to be “change.” He brought in all the outside people, and Biden was much more comfortable with the inside game. And I thought together they were a powerful duo.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Biden had been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  LUIS GUTIÉRREZ

  David Axelrod was blowing me off during the campaign. I called up and asked, “Where the fuck is immigration on your website?” Then, when we went to the convention, they didn’t want to talk about it. Now, some of this could be personal, but here I was, the first Hispanic congressman to endorse him, and they put me at four o’clock! Speaking into some camera. That was supposed to be my speech at the Denver convention. You could tell they just didn’t want to . . . there was never a connection in the campaign.

  JOE LIEBERMAN

  I spent a fair amount of time on the trail for the McCain campaign. There was a decision—in full disclosure, that was not an easy one—but it created more anger toward me. I think there would have been anger anyway among Democrats, but McCain asked if I would speak at the [Republican] convention on his behalf. And there again, I thought, I’m supporting him, so why am I suddenly going to say no?

  JOEL BENENSON

  The Friday right after our convention, we were all still bleary-eyed in Denver because we were partying pretty late that night. And we woke up ridiculously early, like at about four a.m. Colorado time—six a.m. Eastern time—with the news that he’s picking Sarah Palin for vice president.

  JENNIFER GRANHOLM

  Governor of Michigan (D) (2003–2011)

  She revved up their base with her convention speech. It was the first view the nation had of her. But shortly after that, it started to wilt. I think, in part, people generally know this is a big job. You are literally one step away from the presidency.

  BRANDON HURLBUT

  Remember, when she first came out she was the “mama bear.” She was on a roll in the beginning, but when she started taking questions from the press, she revealed her true self.

  JOEL BENENSON

  Most of the folks thought this was a play for the base. He picked someone who seemed void of the qualifications to be vice president, let alone president. It was the kind of pick that, rather than strengthen the ticket, could actually stymie it long term. It undercut a core theme of his. Here was a guy, Senator McCain, a war hero, a veteran, [with] a well-known story about his time as a POW, who was running on “Country First.”

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  There was a moment when this election was about foreign policy—Georgia was invaded by Russia in the summer of ’08—and that certainly was relevant when Obama was thinking about his pick for vice president, but the day that Lehman collapsed and the financial crisis was under way, it became about the economy. Really from September on, we knew that we were dealing with an emergency that required a response.

  NATE LUBIN

  Writer/Producer, Obama for America (2008)

  Director of Digital Marketing, Obama for America (2011–2012)

  Director of the Office of Digital Strategy, White House (2013–2015)

  I was in the office the day the Dow dropped, and sitting there, watching the world implode, we were all like, Well, I guess we gotta keep doing our jobs.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  The senator was supposed to do Saturday Night Live. We had walked through the studio to figure out what was gonna happen, and then plans changed. Both candidates got called to Washington, and then Senator McCain suspended his campaign. That whole week felt completely surreal. I remember being in the student union at Ole Miss to advance the debate, and I just thought, Oh my God, what is happening? Were they even going to debate? There was so much anxiety and confusion over what was going to happen next, not just for the election but for the country.

  NATE LUBIN

  Watching McCain shut down his campaign—it backfired. Whether it was a bad move going in, I don’t even know. Clearly it was, but he was losing.

  JAKE LEVINE

  National Advance Staff, Obama for America (2007–2008)

  Policy Analyst, Office of Energy and Climate Change, White House (2009–2010)

  The release that the campaign put out was that it was because of the recession, but the scuttlebutt—and who knows how much of this was true—was that it was because of Palin’s Katie Couric interview. Word from the reporters was that Palin didn’t know anything. She didn’t know how to answer questions like “What newspapers do you read?” and basics about foreign policy and US history. So there was some rumor that the recession was a pretense and that canceling the debates was really about changing the story from the Couric interview, which was a nightmare for the McCain campaign.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  I remember, within a few hours of that, we got the word from Axe and the rest of leadership like, This debate’s happening. Like, We’re showing up. Obama’s showing up. What McCain does is up to him. So we just kept planning.

  ERIC LESSER

  There was all this mishegas about John McCain suspending his campaign. Then they were trying to get the TARP bill passed in Congress.7 Bush called a meeting—actually, all of this has been recounted numerous times, about how Obama, Pelosi, and Reid went in synced up about what they were going to do. Pelosi and Reid, to their credit, deferred to Obama to speak for them as their party’s nominee, as a united front of the Democratic mission, and McCain, McConnell, and Boehner were not on the same page.

  CHRIS DODD

  People had been talking about reorganizing the architecture of the financial-services sector for decades, but Congress typically doesn’t react to things unless there’s a crisis. We never would have gotten to this, and you had the one window, in the wake of the crisis of the fall of 2008, [when it] came to a head with the AIG issue, Lehman Brothers, mortgages, and that mess. That created an opportunity for us to do something we’d been talking about doing for a long time, to try to set up an architecture not to stop all crises, but to make it possible to manage them in such a way that [we wouldn’t] have the kind of metastasizing that could occur [due to] the lack of sharing information. That’s really all the bill tried to do: set up mechanisms to make it possible for regulators to look over institutions.

  AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

  Member, Council of Economic Advisers, White House (2009–2010)

  Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, White House (2010–2011)

  The Bush administration, particularly Paulson, kept both presidential candidates completely apprised of what he was doing.8 Paulson was doing that not out of kindness, but as a matter of survival. He was basically begging all the political figures not to publicly attack the TARP, specifically the rescue effort in general. He was nervous. Everyone was nervous. The system was about to collapse, and if we condemned the TARP and didn’t rescue the financial system, we’re looking at a depression. So he was basically calling all along to Obama and to McCain . . . they came to a loose agreement, which was to make the TARP spending in two halves. To oversimplify it, the Bush people could spend the first half however they saw fit, and then there would be a second half that the next president—whoever that would be—could use.

  JAKE LEVINE

  The Katie Couric interview blew over. There was no unbelievable bombshell that came out of it other than what people already knew, which was Palin was sort of a lightweight . . . Part of what was interesting for me about the first debate—and this was not really substantive in terms of whether Obama beat McCain or McCain beat Obama—was that it was in Mississippi and that it was at Ole Miss,9 which were places that had a real palpable feeling around issues of race and some of the broader social and historical themes that I thought Obama had been able to tease out along the campaign trail.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  The debate is honestly a bit of a blur to me. In the spin room, I tried to watch the reporters as they reacted to what was going on. I thought that was kinda how I was going to process it. And so I woul
d see people perk up or what they would type, or listen when they would shout a question to someone. I could tell it was going well. You just got the feeling in that huge filing center. You just felt comfortable and confident as it was going on, because the senator felt confident. You could just see it in his demeanor.

  JENNIFER GRANHOLM

  On September 28, Barack, Michelle, and Joe and Jill Biden came to downtown Detroit. This was right in the middle of the crash, and the auto industry was about to go under. All of this was happening at once, and when they visited, there were tens of thousands of scared and angry people. Obama was speaking in these rolled-up shirtsleeves. He targeted his speech to the people who had been laid off—people who really needed to believe that a new administration could actually give them hope, because we were just in the middle of this vortex. And, you know, he said, “We don’t just need a plan for bankers and investors. We need a plan for auto workers.” The crowd went crazy.

  JOEL BENENSON

  I remember in prep sessions Jennifer Granholm was playing Sarah Palin for the debate against Biden, and she was just magnificent, and I think [Biden] was ready for what she threw at him.

  JENNIFER GRANHOLM

  We wanted to make sure that he did this right, and Ron Klain, who was the key preparer of this debate, said to me that if Joe makes mistakes or gaffes, we lose, because . . . Joe’s a seasoned guy and she’s an outsider. So he couldn’t goof this. If he’s seen as condescending to a woman, we lost. If he took the bait if she tried to go to him, we lost. We thought the best scenario would have been a draw. If it were a draw, we figured we’d win. So our goal was to throw everything at Joe and make sure he could stay on an even keel no matter what would happen.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  The third debate in Long Island . . . was more intense.10 There was an argument with the McCain staff. It’s fuzzy to me. I needed something from their press advance team—something about a kind of logistical arrangement—and I went over to their room and knocked on the door. I think it was Nicolle Wallace, or one of them, like “What are you doing here?” I said, “Oh I need to talk to the advance staff,” and they kind of shut me out.