Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  27 National Institutes of Health.

  28 In February 2009, Secretary Geithner announced a plan purported to instill confidence in the nation’s largest banking firms: Regulators from the Federal Reserve and Treasury would review the assets of nineteen financial institutions and determine if they could potentially withstand the recession. If, during the process, regulators discovered assets deemed too risky, organizations would then be required to raise capital to back them—either by selling shares to private investors or, if unable to do so, borrowing from the US government. (Congress approved Obama’s ability to use the second tranche of TARP funds days before his inauguration.)

  29 The Blue Dog Coalition was formed in the House of Representatives in 1994 and made up of fiscally conservative Democrats, largely hailing from Southern districts. The caucus had been named after founding member Congressman John Tanner of Tennessee said he was “choked blue” from his liberal colleagues’ desire for more government spending.

  30 In 1998, Daimler-Benz AG purchased the majority stake of a profitable Chrysler Corporation for $36 billion. The acquisition was framed as a “merger of equals,” but several factors had proven otherwise, from a deterioration of manufacturing quality control to forcing out American executives. The automaker posted billions of dollars in losses in the coming years, and in 2007, Cerberus Capital Management took the American property off Daimler’s hands for $7.4 billion.

  31 In February of 2009, the Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate dipped to 9.6 million, a sharp decline from 15.4 million in 2008. This was the first time in more than twenty-six years that the SAAR hit below the ten-million mark.

  32 “The government is promoting bad behavior, because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping eight or ten dollars in their check and think that they ought to save it. And in terms of modifications, I’ll tell you what: I have an idea. You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology? How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet, as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? Or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper, down the road, and reward people that could carry the water, instead of drink the water? . . . How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand. President Obama, are you listening?” —CNBC’s Rick Santelli, broadcasting from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor, February 19, 2009.

  33 In 2008: investment bank Bear Stearns (March), mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (September), insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) (September), preferred stock from eight commercial banks (October), and the auto industry (December).

  34 In November of 1993, Republican John Chafee of Rhode Island introduced the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act (S. 1770, a.k.a. HEART) on the Senate floor. The Republican majority did not take up the bill for a vote, despite having twenty GOP sponsors. Many provisions in the bill were based on economist Stuart Butler’s work at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

  35 March 5, 2009.

  36 In 2006, Governor Mitt Romney signed healthcare reform legislation crafted by a Democratic-majority state legislature, which aimed to provide coverage to nearly all of Massachusetts’s residents without the use of a public option, and later became colloquially known as “Romneycare.” Senator Edward Kennedy worked closely with Romney on the effort, and was present when the Republican governor signed the bill into law. The legislation would inspire several provisions of what would become the Affordable Care Act, including essential health benefits, coverage for preexisting conditions, and out-of-pocket limits.

  37 March 26, 2009.

  38 After the government approved $17.4 billion in loans to Chrysler and General Motors in 2008, the Obama administration demanded that, in order to continue receiving federal aid, the manufacturers submit rigorous viability plans to his auto task force. In addition, President Obama pressured General Motors’ CEO Rick Wagoner to resign and insisted that Chrysler agree to a deal in thirty days wherein Fiat would own no more than a 50 percent stake of the company. (Fiat could purchase more of Chrysler once Chrysler’s loans were repaid to the government.) The administration would provide operating funds for Chrysler as they ironed out the details of the partnership.

  39 March 29, 2009.

  40 “My Auto Task Force has been reviewing requests by General Motors and Chrysler for additional government assistance, as well as plans developed by each of these companies to restructure, to modernize, and to make themselves more competitive. Our evaluation is now complete . . . My administration will offer GM and Chrysler a limited additional period of time to work with creditors, unions, and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional taxpayer dollars . . . That may mean using our bankruptcy code as a mechanism to help them restructure quickly and emerge stronger.” —President Obama, in the White House Grand Foyer, March 30, 2009.

  41 With Chrysler LLC facing bankruptcy, the Treasury arranged for an asset sale that would allow the auto company to emerge as a new Chrysler Group LLC, jointly owned by the United Auto Workers union, Fiat, and the US and Canadian governments. The Indiana State Police Pension Trust—a group of some 100,000 retired police officers and teachers that had obtained Chrysler bonds in July 2008 at forty-three cents per dollar—filed a lawsuit to block said sale. The lawsuit argued that the sale redistributed value to unsecured creditors (the UAW) in a manner contrary to US bankruptcy law. (The US Treasury set the debt-exchange offer to twenty-nine cents on the dollar.) The plaintiffs appealed a Second Circuit ruling that had approved the sale, but on June 9 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, stating that the trust had “not carried the burden” of proving that the court needed to intervene, while clarifying they were not ruling on the merits of the pensioners’ challenge. The decision pulled Chrysler out of bankruptcy and allowed the sale to go through.

  42 May 20, 2009.

  43 US Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, US Department of Justice (2009–2013).

  44 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure.

  45 May 22, 2009.

  46 In May of 2009, Representatives Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Henry Waxman (D-California) introduced the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454). The “transformational legislation which takes us into the future,” as Speaker Pelosi asserted in 2009, would set higher standards for emission-reduction targets by enacting a national cap-and-trade program. The system would incentivize private companies to reduce pollutants with the purchasing and trading of permits that regulate quotas (caps) on carbon and greenhouse-gas emissions.

  47 The American Clean Energy and Security Act passed on a 219–212 vote June 26, 2009. Forty-four House Democrats voted nay.

  48 A maneuver that empowers the Senate minority, or individual senators, to prevent a motion to vote on a bill by giving floor speeches for an indefinite period of time. To end a filibuster, the legislative body must invoke cloture, a procedure that requires a three-fifths majority (sixty votes).

  49 The Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, located in Falls Church, Virginia, was founded in 1983 and affiliated with the North American Islamic Trust, a foundation that provided places of worship for Muslim American students. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen whom the US government alleged was a recruiter for al-Qaeda and helped plan or inspire a number of terrorist attacks, including the 9/11 plane hijackings, served as imam at the center prior to April 2002. Two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, attended services at the mosque during this period. Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan also was present at the mosque for his mother’s funeral in May of 2001.

  50 In 2004, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 in Rasul v. Bush that detainees in Guantanamo had a right to
petition the American judiciary for legal review. The plaintiff, Shafiq Rasul, spent two years in the Cuba detention camp after being captured during the US invasion of Afghanistan. He denied any allegiance to terrorist organizations but did not deny fighting with the Taliban. “They are not nationals of countries at war with the United States,” read the SCOTUS decision, “and they deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against this country; they have never been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged with and convicted of wrongdoing; and for more than two years they have been imprisoned in territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control.”

  51 Number of detainees from 2001 to 2009 released or transferred under Bush: 500. Number of detainees from 2009 to 2017 released or transferred under Obama: 197.

  52 July 16, 2009.

  53 “The guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house, there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place . . . But so far, so good. They’re reporting. The police are doing what they should. There’s a call, they go investigate what happens. My understanding is at that point Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in. I’m sure there’s some exchange of words, but my understanding is, is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct—charges which are later dropped.

  “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” —President Obama, news conference in the East Room, July 22, 2009.

  2009

  The Senate debate on health-care reform remained in committee, but during the summer recess, the lower house’s latest iteration of the bill, H.R. 3200 (a.k.a. America’s Affordable Health Choices Act), had been disseminated among an anxious electorate. The biggest takeaway? Misinformed hearsay on supposed “death panels.”

  Viral email chains cautioned of a Democratic Party that would “require EVERYONE who is on Social Security to undergo a counseling session every 5 years” and “push SUICIDE” on senior citizens to offset the costs of Congress’s Medicaid expansion. Republicans such as Chuck Grassley fanned the flames. “I don’t have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family,” the senator told a morning crowd in an Iowa town. “We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on Grandma.” Grassley failed to mention how the bill’s language had been twisted—that “advance-care planning” was designed to assist families with legal consultations for drafting wills and powers of attorney, not with killing loved ones.

  Overrun by panicked constituencies, Democrats lost their grasp on the narrative. “I was at a town hall in a very safe part of my district with mostly seniors,” recalled Allyson Schwartz of Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth Congressional District. “They were holding up pieces of paper and saying, ‘I read that you’re going to take away my Medicare.’ It was really hard to address all of these things that were not true, and the scare tactics that people were misled on.” Voters trailed Congressman Lloyd Doggett out of a scheduled event at an Austin grocery store while chanting, “Just say no!” After a forum in Long Island, police escorted Congressman Tim Bishop to his car. David Bowen, staff director for the Senate’s health committee, attended one of Senator Bob Casey’s get-togethers in Pennsylvania. “My view was that the opposition was to the president himself,” Bowen said. “I think it would have manifested had it been climate change or anything else.”

  As for the commander in chief, he headed out west to combat the euthanasia fear—and to address the less conspiracy-theory-based concerns. At a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado, attendees asked about the bill’s public option, which would provide affordable, government-backed health care to individuals who couldn’t access a private insurer’s plan. The program would “keep the insurance companies honest,” the president explained to an industry veteran who worried about diluting competition. Other critiques circled around individual mandates, the cost of premiums, and whether the scale of this legislative undertaking was too much—or not enough. One wondered if all these questions had only magnified the anxieties that continued to linger from the last year. After witnessing the United States Treasury bail out the banking and auto industries, and Congress approve $787 billion to nurse an economy back to life, America’s heartland had difficulty stomaching another major reform. It seemed like too much, too fast—if not immediately to voters, then to their Republican representatives, because the GOP never lost sight of the fact that Obama could use the Democratic majorities and pass the bill through both houses without them.

  “The Republicans were worried that the president would use the [Senate] reconciliation procedure and move ahead with only Democrats,” said James Kvaal. “His preference was to try and do something that would include the Republicans.”

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Obama and, really, Biden got Arlen Specter, Republican stalwart senator from Pennsylvania, to flip and become a Democrat—and not just a Democrat but a strong proponent of health-care reform. I remember, early on, Biden met with Specter and lobbied him to flip parties, and that was no easy thing to do. That was savvy. It doesn’t necessarily fit into the narrative, that those guys did backroom deals the way Lyndon Johnson did, but they successfully had been able to flip a Republican and could ensure that the bill got passed after Senator Kennedy died.

  DAVID BOWEN

  He died after his committee had voted, but I essentially did my same job. I stayed on through the whole process. And during that time, you know, I was sort of working for the memory of Senator Kennedy. Then Senator Dodd took over [the Health Committee] in a kind of shepherding role. Then [Iowa] Senator Harkin took over as chair. Really, I was just kind of working for the bill.

  MARTHA COAKLEY

  Attorney General of Massachusetts (D) (2007–2015)

  Certainly everybody dreaded his death. Ted Kennedy was synonymous in many ways with the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. His death was a shock. It was also an open Senate seat that people realized needed filled, and I made a decision with some close advisors to run for the office.54

  JON FAVREAU

  I was sitting in Axelrod’s office . . . They decided they wanted to give that [joint session of Congress] health-care speech in less than a week. It was a very last-minute decision to do a speech like that. I think they told me that Tuesday or Wednesday, and as we’re sitting there trying to figure out this speech, Axelrod’s assistant came in. “Vicki Kennedy called. She has something she needs to send over.” It’s a letter Kennedy wrote before he died that he asked to be delivered to Obama, and it’s all about health care. And Axelrod said, “Well, she’s going to mail it, because she wants to give him the original,” and I was like, “Could we get her to fax it over or something? We’ve got this big speech.”

  ERIC LESSER

  David’s office was adjacent to the Oval Office . . . and the president’s a pretty scrupulous writer. So we knew if a written product was going to be put in front of him, it had to be good.

  JON FAVREAU

  Vicki faxed the letter over, and Axe and I sat there reading it in his office. We’re both tearing up. At the end, Kennedy talked about [how] this was more than about health care—this was about “the character of our country.”55 I sort of seized on that phrase.

  CODY KEENAN

  We were all at Ben Rhodes’s wedding the weekend right before the speech. It was Labor Day weekend ’09, and I had been working on Walter Cronkite’s eulo
gy. Both speeches were on September 9.

  JON FAVREAU

  I finished a draft, went to Rhodes’s wedding, woke up on Monday in Los Angeles. At six a.m. I got a call from Reggie Love, and he’s back in DC. “Hey, Boss wants to see you about the speech. Can you come upstairs?” I was like, “Reggie, I’m in Los Angeles.” He’s like, “Oh, he’s got a bunch of edits. Can you get here soon?” And I was like, “I don’t know. How fast can a plane go from Los Angeles to DC?”

  REGGIE LOVE

  I was calling people all the time. It never really occurred to me that they wouldn’t be available.

  JON FAVREAU

  I immediately got on a plane—[was] running through Reagan Airport sweating in ripped jeans and a T-shirt. I looked like a mess. I got to the West Wing of the White House and didn’t have my badge. “I got an appointment.” [Security] was like, “With who?” I was like, “With the president.” They looked at me like I was fucking nuts. And so I finally got in to see the president, and he looked at me and was like, “Well, you look well. Have you showered today?”

  Obama and Favreau (left), reviewing the final page of a speech draft on health care days before the September 9, 2009, address to Congress. Pete Souza, White House

  PETE SOUZA

  I made that picture. It’s interesting because, even though you don’t see the president, and you don’t see Jon Favreau, it tells you about not just how he edits but how he thinks. It also tells you about his relationship with his then chief speechwriter, in that he could easily have done his edits, made notations, and then just handed it to Jon Favreau: “Here are my changes.” Instead, he called Jon into the office—nobody calls him “Jon,” everybody calls him “Favs”—and he called Favs into the office and sat down with him for like an hour.