by Brian Abrams
BRIAN DEESE
I was working on the auto stuff in particular, and so we presented a broad sense of Where are the companies? What are they asking for? What’s likely to happen to them and what are the choices they’re going to have to face? [Obama] took it all in, and the only question he had was along the lines of “Why can’t the American car company make a Corolla?” His point being, Why is it that American companies can’t figure out how to produce a car that has safety and reliability and that people want to buy? It’s a good example of him getting right to the core of the issue. We were talking about how much cash GM had left, what they were asking Congress to do, and what might happen in the next couple months.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
Chrysler and GM were not going to be able to make their payments, and the Bush administration ended up giving them [$17 billion] just to burn to keep themselves warm before the Obama administration came in.
ARUN CHAUDHARY
The transition in Chicago was a very small group, the president-elect and the immediate people around him who needed to help him function. In general the team was already in Washington working on policy, so the fewer people who were around you—the “you” being President-Elect Obama—the less you’re going to feel that panic. When you were around him—and in Chicago you just were, because there were so few of us around—you felt absolutely calm. He was going through the things he needed to do methodically and surely. You’re rolling people out. It’s still the land of potential. You’re still talking about what can potentially be done with all of these players you’re putting in place.
JIM MESSINA
The picks we made, it’s important to think about that time, because we were watching the economy fall off the end of the table, and you had this president-elect who was brought in to change Washington. He really viewed the cabinet selections as his first chance to do that. And so he wanted, from the very early conversations in the transition, to do two things: hire the best-qualified people, no matter their politics, and send a message of unity, because the country was freaking out about the economy. And so that’s why he made a couple early Republican picks in Gates and LaHood.12
JOSH LIPSKY
The way [Senator] Clinton took the job at the State Department was just amazingly healing in terms of the Obama and Clinton worlds. It didn’t happen overnight. In the beginning, there was always this Oh, is that a Clinton person? Is that an Obama person? That faded over time, but everyone’s experience was different. I mean, fifteen Obama people would tell you fifteen different things.
GENE SPERLING
Director, National Economic Council, White House (1996–2001)
Counselor to the US Secretary of the Treasury (2009–2010)
Director, National Economic Council, White House (2011–2014)
There’s no question there were some hard feelings right after the election, right after Obama defeated her in 2008, but everyone put on their big-boy and big-girl pants and worked together for the greater good, even if not all of the hard feelings had gone away . . . In the first couple of years, I felt that there were more occasional misunderstandings among the staffers who looked out for them and were protective than there were between the principals themselves.
TOM VILSACK
It certainly made sense for the president-elect to look for an opportunity to use Hillary Clinton’s abilities in his cabinet. That would have been sufficient, I think, to send a clear message to folks who had been loyal to Clinton that this was a president who embraced former opponents. But he went far beyond that. You would think that, traditionally, the Department of Agriculture would be run by someone who had deeper roots in farming than I had had. Obviously I was governor of a state that was predominantly agriculture based, but that, in and of itself, may not have been enough to get you nominated to that cabinet position. So I was surprised on that score.
MELODY BARNES
The president-elect was looking for individuals who had both the intellect for the job ahead but also a passion for these issues—real-life experience related to the issues in the position that they would hold. Arne [Duncan] was a perfect reflection of that. He’s someone unconventional in the sense that he wasn’t a national political figure but someone who understood, because of hands-on experience, what it meant to work in an education system.
ARNE DUNCAN
Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools (2001–2008)
US Secretary of Education (2009–2015)
He and I talked much earlier. Some communication, more socially in the interim, but it wasn’t like the offer was there. You just didn’t know, and I really did not want to go to DC. To become education secretary was not my life’s ambition, but it was really a chance to be part of his team, and to help someone to whom I was a friend, that I just believed in. If he said, “Come to the White House and take out the garbage for me,” I would have said yes. Frankly, had anyone else asked, I would have said no. But for him it was a no-brainer.
DR. STEVEN CHU
US Secretary of Energy (2009–2013)
I didn’t think many people appreciated how he made his cabinet-held appointments. He picked a lot of people not as kickback favors—he picked people he thought would be good at the job. He wanted me to make decisions based on knowledge, science, and all the other things that seemed a little bit more removed . . . unless you called acknowledging that the climate was changing and we should do something about it “political,” but I didn’t regard that as “political.”
JIM MESSINA
You had a couple picks blow up in the process. We had two commerce secretaries we had decided to pick but in the end couldn’t, because of vetting issues. Tom Daschle’s [Health and Human Services nomination] blew up during confirmation. Tim Geithner’s [Treasury Secretary] confirmation hit a snag in committee. All these things were swirling around at the same time when we were trying to deal with the economy. [It] was just unbridled exhaustion in attempting to grasp the changing situations in a nanosecond. I kept saying to John Podesta, the chair of the transition, “Where the fuck is our honeymoon?”
ARNE DUNCAN
Podesta was involved. Axe was involved. I think [Obama] felt it was important that he had a cabinet that reflected the country. When you look at Secretary Clinton, Bob Gates, and others, these were the best people not just in the United States, but arguably in the world. There were early cabinet meetings where I used to pinch myself. What’s a kid from the South Side of Chicago doing here? There was definitely a piece of it that was exhilarating but also surreal.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
I still had his personal phone number, and I called him up. “Look, we should talk.” I met with him over in the [Kluczynski] Federal Building in Chicago—and it’s days after Blagojevich was arrested—and he basically told me that we’re hemorrhaging jobs and couldn’t do immigration reform. I kinda said, “I thought I was important.” He said, “You are important. That’s why you’re here.” In retrospect, I guess you are pretty important if you get to see the president all by yourself in his transition-team office one evening and you get to chat.
ARUN CHAUDHARY
Governor Blagojevich had done some crazy stuff with Barack Obama’s Senate seat. People were going to be subpoenaed, including Valerie Jarrett and possibly the president-elect, and it seemed like not a great situation. And I remember we were all huddled around those TVs and Obama came out of his office. He surveyed the screen and was like, “Huh. That doesn’t seem like it’s any good. We’re gonna figure that out,” and walked back into his office. To make a phone call and figure it out, you know, not to start yelling, “What’s the hell’s that guy doing?” or “Rahm needs to fix this!” or whatever. He didn’t feel the need to start a tweet storm.
BRIAN DEESE
We were thinking as hard as we could and trying to be as docile as we could, but it was a harrowing time. It’s actually hard to take yourself back, because, present circumstances aside, there was just such existential unc
ertainty across the board . . . We all took our places in the transition office in Washington, and then got down to the business of preparing for that December 16 meeting.
JARED BERNSTEIN
Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor, Office of the Vice President (2009–2011)
That meeting was largely about the recession and how deep we thought it was; basically that meeting was diagnosis and prescription vis-à-vis the recession . . . That’s when [Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer and I] started working on that paper. That was published before the president took office.
BRIAN DEESE
That’s the meeting where we wrote that fifty-some-odd-page report which leaked,13 and then that was the meeting where, respectively, Tim [Geithner], Larry [Summers], Peter [Orszag], and Christy [Romer] walked through different aspects of the crisis and where Christy said, “This is your holy shit moment.”
ERIC LESSER
They basically gave a run-through of how serious the economic crisis was and what would happen if the measures that needed to be taken weren’t taken. You would have seen Depression-era unemployment figures in certain parts of the country. There would have been a continuing bleeding of credit. The deficit would have exploded. It was very dour.
DAVID AXELROD
We needed to fill the huge hole that the economic collapse had created in the output of the economy, and so the Recovery Act would be a large and expensive program by design, as big as we could get it.
ERIC LESSER
I was one of the junior people making photocopies for it, and I remember seeing everyone walking out, just the seriousness and the pressure.
RAHM EMANUEL
I mean you were literally shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. You didn’t have to artificially create a crisis or sense of urgency off that crisis. It was there. The harder challenge was getting the policy people and the political people [on the same page], and this was what happened with any big policy. What could the political system absorb?
JARED BERNSTEIN
Even at the time I probably would have had a hard time telling you what was going on. The economics team—at least those of us who recognized this as very much a Keynesian moment—believed that we needed as large a stimulus as the system could bear, politically, and absorb without wasting money.
JASON FURMAN
It was $300 billion before [the economic team] got there. They pushed for a larger number, and the number got larger over the course of December, and almost everyone agreed that the largest number we could get through Congress was what we wanted. And the political people thought—and I think [their] judgment was reasonable—that we couldn’t get anything above $1 trillion through Congress.
BRIAN DEESE
The president [-elect] had a mantra early on that he started in both of those early meetings with his economic team and then continued it in the White House. I want to focus on the policy first. I want to understand the issue, and then we’ll get to the politics. He wanted the team’s best analysis and assessment, and he didn’t want them to put politics on the front of it.
JASON FURMAN
If you remember the context at the time, Congress was talking about numbers like $200 billion. There were a lot of lefty progressives who were pushing for numbers more like $300 billion, $400 billion, $500 billion. So going for $800 billion or $1 trillion was way outside the bounds of what anyone else was talking about.
BRIAN DEESE
It was hard to find windows of time to sit back, reflect, and really freak yourself out. From that minute we got in at ten o’clock after election night, we were sprinting for what turned out to be months. So you were up really early in the morning. Then you were just sprinting all day, then going to bed very late at night, and then doing it over again. The rhythm of the crisis didn’t allow for a lot of time to just freak out. But we were full of extraordinary levels of anxiety, in large part because on all of those fronts—on the financial crisis, and the crisis response on the stimulus, and the fiscal response on the autos—we didn’t know whether either the politics or the policy were going to work.
JON CARSON
So there was that side of it, and then there was the interaction with the outgoing George W. Bush [administration]. I was going in as the chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Marty Hall was the outgoing Bush staffer. He walked me through everything. He walked me through the budget. He literally walked me through the West Wing while the White House Christmas party was going on.
HERBIE ZISKEND
The last time the parties had swapped was eight years ago, so if you’re in your twenties, you didn’t really know anyone who could walk you through a transition. And a couple of weeks before [Inauguration Day], a young staff assistant had taken us around the White House—introduced us to the Secret Service agents. She brought me into Vice President Cheney’s office and showed me where things were. I didn’t see Cheney or Bush. This was late at night, but everyone [was] working really hard because they [were] dealing with a lot of issues, and Keith Hennessey, the advisor who was overseeing the economic operation for Bush, said, “Welcome” and “It’s going to be an amazing experience.” He put his arm around me. “Go to the White House mess on Thursdays. It’s the best food that day.”
ERIC LESSER
I obviously did not agree with their decisions, but the Bush people were very polite to us in the transition process. I had a friend, Elise Stefanik, who became the youngest female Republican ever elected to Congress. She had a job similar to me for Josh Bolten, who was Bush’s chief of staff, and she had invited me to the White House. She introduced me to some of the civil servants and the professional staff, and that was happening at every level. So Axelrod, I knew he met with his counterpart, and obviously Bush and Obama were speaking. I really do have to give them credit, that they were very professional about it.
DAN SHAPIRO
So all through the transition we were watching this very bloody conflict unfold in Gaza, the Cast Lead, and the president-elect was determined on that issue and others . . . to not get involved in diplomacy other than to say he wasn’t president at the time. So we knew we were going to have to deal with this . . . By Inauguration Day, the guns were quiet. There was a cease-fire in place that was shaky, and so we knew that one of his first things that he should be engaged in was to do what he could to stabilize the cease-fire. So it was decided that he would call those four [Middle East] leaders.14
DAVID CUSACK
Director of Advance, White House (2009–2011)
Executive Director, Presidential Inaugural Committee (2012–2014)
Director of Operations, White House (2015–2017)
The morning started off across the street at the church. I was the director of events and ceremonies for the [Presidential Inaugural Committee], and . . . ended up doing the tea that morning. It’s a traditional tea at like nine thirty in the morning in the Blue Room. So both the president-elect and the president would go to church, and they’d come back across the street and do the welcoming tea between the two families. So I was responsible for that, and so my day started at like four thirty in the morning at Secret Service headquarters, because we were preparing the Mall for all the people who were gonna come.
TED CHIODO
Deputy White House Staff Secretary (2009–2014)
On the first day, January 20, 2009, I couldn’t go in until noon, so I watched the inauguration from the downstairs bar at the Hay-Adams across the street. I just had a cheeseburger. This was after working pretty extensively on the campaign. I don’t think I had a day off since, I don’t know, February or March of 2007?
DAVID CUSACK
I got to the White House around probably eight or eight thirty, and they had me sit in the West Wing lobby for like an hour. So I literally sat by myself, and it was weird because the two doors that were usually opened were both closed, and I sat on the north wall looking at the huge bookcase from the late 1700s. There was n
o ROTUS.15 There was one UD officer.16 There were no photos up. There was nothing, and I sat there quietly by myself for about forty-five minutes, and all of a sudden the door to my right opened up and in came Vice President Cheney in his wheelchair. He had hurt his back a day or two before. I know it’s bad, but he totally reminded me of Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. I stood up. “Good morning, Mr. Vice President,” and he just went, “Urff.” Like, he just grunted, and he kept on being rolled through the West Wing lobby. And I sat back down.
DAN SHAPIRO
I went down to the Mall to hear the president take the oath of office, and about one hour after he did, I walked a few blocks north and went through a checkpoint. My name was on the list, and I was one of the very first Obama staffers admitted into the White House.
TED CHIODO
You go in, do the security check, and take a little mini oath of office. They swear you in as a government employee. They’re like, “Are any of you guys working on security stuff?” I raised my hand. “I do the president’s briefing book now.” And the security officer, who was a nice woman, was like, “Okay, let me give you the briefing.” She literally pulled out this old monitor, and it squeaked as she pulled it over. It had, like, bungee cords holding it down. She put in this VHS tape. “Welcome to the government!” It’s ridiculous. She was like, “Watch this tape and retain everything you hear. The penalties for misusing the type of classified documents that you’ll be handling can be up to life in imprisonment, or, in time of war, death. Just so you know, we’re considered at war right now.” I was like, “Thanks, Jan!”
ERIC LESSER
We were all ushered onto a bus and driven down Pennsylvania Avenue with a police escort, and we walked into the White House and they handed me a BlackBerry and a badge, and I walked into my little cubby where my desk was going to be. Everything was empty. The computer was there, and the phone was ringing. I was like, All right, I guess I gotta get started.
