by Brian Abrams
JON FAVREAU
He sat down with me and did two major things to the speech. Number one was, he was like, “Look. There’re all these crazy arguments out there about health care: death panels, free health care for illegal immigrants”—a couple other things—“and I know you’re not supposed to talk about the arguments that your opponents have against you and repeat them, that’s not a good communications practice. But if we don’t knock down every single one of their arguments and their myths about this bill, then we’re never going to pass it.”
PETE SOUZA
He went over his thinking and reasoning for why he’s using this clause instead of that clause. I thought it was bold of the White House to allow me to release this photo not much later. Here, you got a chance to see what the president of the United States crossed out and what he put in its place. You could easily have seen people really nervous about releasing a photograph like this to the public.
CODY KEENAN
I traveled with the president that day up to New York for the Cronkite eulogy and remember flying back with him on Marine One while he was making edits to the joint-session [speech] for that night.
JON FAVREAU
The other thing was, he had also seized on that phrase “the character of our country,” but he basically wrote almost an entire new ending around that. That was one of my favorite endings of any speech. It’s an ending about the role of government in our lives and how certain things shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican or liberal or conservative.56 Ted Kennedy realized that, and Ted Kennedy’s passion wasn’t just a passion for big government. It was a passion for the idea that there are some things that we cannot do on our own.
MELODY BARNES
It’s a combination of the personal as well as the pragmatic. Given all the things that we knew—GDP just being gobbled up by the cost of health care—and the fact that in our country, we’re not providing to the number of people that needed it, Senator Kennedy and President Obama understood the very real effects of that, not only on our economy but on individuals and families. It’s a mixture of those things, the individual as a policy maker—someone who understood more broadly the effect on our economy, but also an individual who, with his family, had seen how our health-care system worked and didn’t work.
SCOTT BROWN
R-Massachusetts, US Senate (2010–2013)
They were taking everybody for granted. I’m not trying to have bravado, but I could feel it. The people were really pissed off at this whole It’s the Kennedys’ seat. It’s the Democrats’ seat, and Martha’s going to be the next one, and really wanted to send a message. So, yeah, I was eating a bowl of Rice Chex and reading the paper, and I said, “You know, honey, I think I’m going to run.” She said, “Heh. That’s the Democrats’ seat.” I said, “No, it’s the frickin’ people’s seat.” And she said, “You know what? You’re right.” That’s how it started.
MARTHA COAKLEY
It’s not the Kennedy seat. It’s the people’s seat. That became a mantra, and he was able to wage a good campaign, particularly around health care and fighting these Democrats . . . That was increasingly becoming a national focus, and I took a strong position that we should have a public option. And we saw increasing outside money coming in to support Scott Brown and that maybe—maybe even in Massachusetts—this could be a place where Republicans could put a halt to that in ways that people hadn’t anticipated.
ROB ANDREWS
The decision was made to go full speed ahead when the House came back in September. [Speaker] Pelosi really took over the process, wanted to have a meeting with the [Tri-Committee] Group once a week but also with the freshman and sophomore members who would be critical to getting health care passed. I sat in on those meetings.
ALLYSON SCHWARTZ
The Progressive Caucus was pushing the public option. Most Americans had coverage through their employers. That was going to be maintained. That, the president was clear about. And whether there would be a public option or not, he was more mixed about . . . I became a supporter, but I was not one of the people who initially fought to make sure that that was included.
BARBARA LEE
We were pushing for a public option, and we did get it into the [House] bill that states had the option if they wanted to do it, but there were many provisions we pushed for that we didn’t get. But I’ll tell you one thing: Medicaid was expanded, we expanded community clinics, and I really believed that this would be the reason for the decline in the uninsured rates.
ALLYSON SCHWARTZ
Not everybody’s in the same place as Democrats, and health care’s done a lot of different ways across the country. How’s it going to affect a district? How do we have choices for Americans? There’s no single model. We were really building on a system of American health care. We were going to build in accountability for the private sector but were going to offer options. That was actually exciting to me.
ROB ANDREWS
We reached a point in late October, after a lot of input from people, where Pelosi closed the bill, meaning this was it—this was what we’re going to put up for a vote. We voted November 7 to pass the House version of the bill.
VALERIE JARRETT
In the nature of any White House, the stakes are high. The opportunities and the risks are plenty, and you need a leader with an even temperament and a clear vision of what true north is to steer the ship. Through all of that, it’s inevitably going to be choppy.
PETE SOUZA
Usually in the Residence, I wouldn’t ever bother him. That was kind of his private time. There were few occasions where, if John Brennan or Tom Donilon57 would need to go upstairs and brief him on something late at night, I would go up with them. I had one or two [photos] close to midnight if he was going to make calls to the Japanese prime minister or a couple other people. I would just work it out with him that I would come upstairs when he would be doing those calls, but for the most part, I figured my day started when he left the Residence and [ended] when he went upstairs to the Residence.
TED CHIODO
I was always around at odd times. He needed to make a congratulatory call to a Greek prime minister who had just won an election.58 It was a Sunday. No one else was there, and I was like, Has anyone delivered him his call sheet? It was hot out. I was wearing ridiculous flip-flops and shorts, and I didn’t think I actually had to see the president. I was just going to deliver stuff to the Residence and go on my way. So you go up. Package it all secured in a sealed envelope. If he was around, you’d give it to him, but if he wasn’t, you’d either place it upstairs on the table or you’d give it to an usher walking around on duty: “Hey, we can’t leave this on the table. You have to hold this until he comes back.” Some stuff you couldn’t even give to the usher. You’d have to chase the president down.
REGGIE LOVE
You carry around whatever he needs.
TED CHIODO
Plenty of times you’d have to wake up the president, or make sure he didn’t go to bed at a certain time, to sign something. He’d have to sign a foreign-surveillance act. There were plenty of examples where he had to do that, but that’s the exception, not the rule. We’d plan this out so we didn’t inconvenience him, but sometimes world events happened and you gotta get call sheets up. Whenever you’re on call, something like that could happen.
REGGIE LOVE
The job was very much a consistent job. Not like a rocket scientist, right? Not like having to solve the most complex problems, but you’re often trying to deal with problems around logistics, or food, or staffing, or setup or lighting. Very human-type challenges, but it’s all day.
TED CHIODO
So that day I couldn’t find him at the Residence, so I went back downstairs. He and the First Lady were playing tennis down on the tennis court / basketball court on the South Lawn. They saw me. “Chiodo, what are you doing?” So that’s great. It went from I have to bother the president on the weekend to Now I’m breaking up family time.
I was just, “Oh, sir, you have to make this congratulatory call.” I was always the person bringing homework, and he was like, “Oh, they scheduled it so fast. We got a phone down here?” You’d have to think about all those logistics. “Yes, sir, we have a secure line right here. The Sit Room will transfer you through.”
MONA SUTPHEN
He’s always that Rorschach-test kind of guy, and I remember that during the campaign. I had friends that were die-hard Obama fans who essentially would not even sit in a room together . . . I mean, politicians always disappoint on some level. You can’t help it. Because you are a vessel for people’s aspirations, but half the time they’re not even articulated. The Nobel thing just added to it. Somehow the whole world’s giving you this prize and you’re like, Great.
JON FAVREAU
There was a big gap, obviously, between the day we found out59 and the day we went to Oslo—a couple months. But right around the time it’d been announced, the president wanted Axe, Ben [Rhodes], and me to come see him. He directed the research for that speech in a way that he hadn’t for any other speech. “I want you to look at Gandhi and King and Eisenhower and just-war theory.” He had all the different theories of war and peace and readings that he wanted us to look up, and so we put this big binder together. We researched. We’d done all this kind of stuff, and then he had all these other crises intervene.
MONA SUTPHEN
Yes, being in two wars, and also the sense of We just got into office.
DAVID BOWEN
Then the Finance Committee marked up [health-care legislation].60 So there were two Senate bills. We merged the two, and of course we needed sixty votes, and there were sixty Democrats plus independents. So we needed to make sure that every single one of them would be okay with it, or find a Republican who would provide one vote if we lost one of the Democrats.
JOE LIEBERMAN
I was on a Sunday-morning TV show.61 I remember it was Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, and at one point he asked me about the public option. I told him I was opposed to it, and he asked if I was opposed to it enough to vote against cloture on the bill, and I said I was, and the show was over. I walked out, got in the car, and my cell phone rang. It was Harry. He said, “Did you just say on Face the Nation that if the public option is in there, that you’re not going to vote for cloture?” I said, “That’s what I’ve been telling you and [New York Senator Chuck] Schumer for the last two weeks.” So he said, “Come into my office at two.”
JON FAVREAU
We didn’t get a public option because of fucking Joe Lieberman.
CHRIS DODD
I thought the public option should have been part of the bill, but when Joe made that decision, I heard him say it [when I was] at home, and before the show was over, Harry Reid was on the phone to me. I was in his office maybe a half hour or an hour later.
JOE LIEBERMAN
I came in and there was the normal cast of characters: Harry, Schumer, Durbin, and some staff. Rahm was there. We went back and forth on it, and Rahm said, “So are you telling me that if we promise you the public option is out, you’re going to commit to us to vote for the bill?” I said, “Well, look, I gotta read it, but from everything I know, from everything else that’s in the bill—a lot of which is controversial—if you take this thing out, you got my word. I’ll vote for the bill.” And he said, “Okay.”
CHRIS DODD
Literally that was the vote that broke the back. We were working on margins, getting this bill done, and decided that [we wouldn’t] give up on the bill, although, going forward, we blew off a major provision. It was a loss.
JOE LIEBERMAN
The public option was clearly an attempt by the leadership to pacify the people who really wanted government health insurance for everybody as kind of a door opener . . . There’s no question that Ben Nelson felt as strongly as I did about it.
BEN NELSON
There was never a deal-making process. I told them what I was interested in, and that I would continue to work with them if we could get the public option out, get the medical loss ratio in,62 and get in appropriate language regarding abortion consistent with the Hyde Amendment.63 Because there was nothing in there until I worked with Senator Boxer and her staff to try and come up with appropriate language so you didn’t have government money funding abortion by subsidy under the act.
JIM MESSINA
At one point we were talking about the health-care bill with the president and I blew up and started screaming about some senator, and Obama said, “Hey. Stop. Rahm’s supposed to be the screamer. You’re supposed to be the calm one. Don’t switch roles.”
VALERIE JARRETT
The president just was determined to push, and there were times when his senior team was pretty beat up and bedraggled. He picked us up and said, Get back to it.
JIM MESSINA
Rahm and I both, very early, became frustrated with long decision-making processes. I think we bonded over that.
JOE LIEBERMAN
Toward the end, they brought the closer, William J. Clinton, into the Senate Democratic caucus.64 Basically his argument was, “You all understand how much our system needs reform, how many people are uninsured. It’s outrageous, and I believe you want something different from the status quo, right?” And everybody said, “Yes, Mr. President.” He said, “It’s too complicated to get it right on the first shot, but if you can get it to a point where you’re absolutely convinced that it will improve the status quo and cover a significant number of people who don’t have insurance, then vote for it. But know that you will have to come back, or Congress will have to come back, to every session probably for the next twenty years, to fix something that experience will show you wasn’t quite working as you thought.”
TED CHIODO
Within the White House there were disagreements all the time, but that was good. That meant a rigorous process was happening. If everybody agreed, then they’re not really serving the president. People had points of view. Sometimes the debates were hearty. That’s why the president wanted them in the first place.
JON FAVREAU
Even the week before we went to Norway [to accept the Nobel], he had to give this West Point speech on Afghanistan. So he and Ben were working on that, and I was working on the Nobel speech.
TERRY SZUPLAT
Presidential Speechwriter, White House (2009–2017)
West Point was the speech where they rolled out the Afghan surge and timetable. Ben was very much the lead on that one. That was the moment where he stood up in front of the country and in front of the military and made the single-largest commitment of troops of his presidency. That’s what helped shape the Oslo speech. Here he was getting the Nobel Peace Prize while at the same time leading a nation at war, and he’d just made the decision to commit more troops to a fight. So he was very much aware of the apparent contradiction in that.
MONA SUTPHEN
I do remember him being quite thoughtful about this challenge. It just added to the expectation burden that we all felt already for the economy, for two wars, for the world, for restoring popularity and credibility of the US government.
JON FAVREAU
We got him a draft. He didn’t start working on that speech until the night we left for Oslo. So the day that we were leaving, Obama came down from the Oval and had like thirty handwritten pages of a speech plus our draft. “I’m not finished at all, and what I wrote is way too long, and I also like a lot of parts in the draft you guys sent me. So now we need to combine them all together in a speech by the time we leave tonight.”
MONA SUTPHEN
Favs will tell you the president had a very strong view of what it was he wanted to say, and he spent a lot of time, back and forth, editing multiple versions.
JON FAVREAU
Ben and I panicked. We spent all day trying to put this thing together. Sam Power was helping us, too,65 and then we all got on the plane. We didn’t have a speech finished, and the whole flight Rahm,
Axe, and everyone else passed out. The only people up were Obama, Rhodes, Sam Power, and me. Ben and Obama worked on the policy, I was off in the corner trying to write the ending, and it’s the worst turbulence ever. And I’m a bad flyer and I was just sweating and trying to finish this thing. Sam’s trying her best to help me. It was the closest we ever came to not finishing a speech. And Obama handed me his last page of edits while he was in the elevator on the way to the venue, and so we were directly typing in the last page of edits in the prompter as he was walking up to the stage. It was crazy.
MONA SUTPHEN
It’s one of his better speeches, by the way, and got no coverage. He wrote a fair amount of it.
JON FAVREAU
I totally agree with Mona. It’s one of my favorite speeches of his whole presidency.
JEFFREY BLEICH
If you reread the speech you’ll find real consistency in what he said he would do, and the policies that he pursued throughout his presidency.66
JON FAVREAU
Whether they were foreign-policy successes or failures, he sort of saw all the limits of American power, of what we could do to stop war, what we could do to achieve peace and the possibilities as well. It was also a speech about human nature at its core, and what it is to live in peace with each other, and what it is to live in a world that will never be perfect but that we have to constantly strive to perfect.
TERRY SZUPLAT
If you made a list of his ten most important speeches of his presidency, that would certainly be one of them. I’ve never really thought about whether it got the coverage or attention it deserved. Within national-security and foreign-policy circles, there’s a widespread recognition that that was a defining moment and laid out some of the core themes of his presidency.
CAROL BROWNER
One of the [themes] the president had run on was a commitment to building a clean-energy future.
BEN LABOLT
The Copenhagen Climate Agreement started the process that allowed the Paris accord to happen.
JAKE LEVINE
There was a lot of prep. You had to remember that the Conference of the Parties happened every year, and Copenhagen was COP 15. So the one before it and the one after it were not that remarkable. Of course, Paris would be remarkable. That was COP 21, six years later. COP 15 had a lot of hype and anticipation because we had Obama, this new president, a Democrat who campaigned on climate. This was his first major foreign-policy venue for which climate was the focus.
