Obama- An Oral History
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JONATHAN PERSHING
Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, US Department of State (2009–2012)
Senior Climate Advisor and Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, US Department of Energy (2013–2016)
Special Envoy for Climate Change, US Department of State (2016–2017)
We had gone into that [conference] where developing countries were insisting on separate levels of treatment, that they should do less because they were developing.
MICHAEL FROMAN
In my view, it really was the critical moment of breaking down this artificial barrier between developed countries and [developing countries] to establish that all countries would have to contribute to solving the climate-change problem. It would take several years and subsequent conferences in Durban, Cancún, and ultimately in Paris for that to be refined in what became the Paris accord. But the Paris accord wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t been for that breakthrough.
BRIAN DEESE
It was a total disaster as a conference, but . . . Copenhagen was the beginning of Paris. That gave a clear sense of what was going to be necessary in terms of changing the diplomatic tectonic plates.
MICHAEL FROMAN
I didn’t think of it as a disaster. It was highly chaotic, but we got an important outcome that laid the groundwork for Paris several years later. When people arrived in Copenhagen . . . It was unclear what the respective roles of the Danes, the UN Secretary General, [or] Yvo de Boer were.67 Who was running the show? Who had responsibility to forge an agreement? . . . By the time Secretary Clinton arrived,68 the question was, what could she do to change the dynamic and increase the focus?
JONATHAN PERSHING
Clinton’s role, she came as the bearer of money . . . I don’t mean to make it in crass form, but people were worried about what the costs were gonna be . . . Put this in the context of the entire global development budget—all of the AIDs of the world.69 Ours, Germany’s, the Brits, Japan—everybody’s combined was about $130 billion. She came with a commitment for another $100 billion [in financial aid] that we were gonna try and mobilize, and that was insufficient. It gave you some sense about the worries that people had then, about how hard this was gonna be to do, and the lack of real political commitment.
MICHAEL FROMAN
We were still far from any agreement.
JONATHAN PERSHING
The White House got into this internal debate where we on the ground were saying, “We think we could perhaps unlock it if Obama comes [to COP 15]. If he doesn’t come, we know that it fails,” and all the people back at home were saying if it failed, it [would be] a disaster for a new presidency. “He’s committed himself to working on health care. This is not gonna go anywhere. We don’t want him to go.” That was a really interesting debate, and, from what I had heard, he decided he was gonna come anyway, even though there wasn’t a deal.
TODD STERN
Special Envoy for Climate Change, US Department of State (2009–2016)
Obama arrived on Friday morning, the eighteenth, and went into the Arne Jacobsen room, where the group of [twenty-eight parties] had been meeting and had first convened around eleven on Thursday night70 . . . The Chinese were not represented at the top level. They had a bureaucrat there, and he at least once said that he had to leave the room to consult with his superiors, which was thoroughly annoying to most every other country because the other countries had their leaders there. President Hu was not in Copenhagen. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, was in Copenhagen but still didn’t attend that meeting of leaders. The Indian prime minister, Singh, did not attend either.
JONATHAN PERSHING
[German chancellor Angela] Merkel was more or less throwing up her hands and saying, “If you can go in and get the BASIC countries to buy in, good.71 But we’ve given up.”
TODD STERN
The biggest issue that was open at that point was the issue of transparency, the language on that issue. And Obama wanted to talk to the Chinese again, and we weren’t able to locate them for a considerable period of time.
BRIAN DEESE
That summit’s become a little famous because Obama and Clinton ended up literally chasing the heads of states around the conference center.
JAKE LEVINE
We had learned that the Chinese were leaving the conference and that they were on their way to the airport, and then, of course, we stumbled onto a room full of Chinese negotiators.
MICHAEL FROMAN
Ultimately we found the room where we thought Premier Wen of China was. We spotted the Chinese bodyguards outside, and the president said, “Well, let’s just go there.” He, Secretary Clinton, and a group of us presented ourselves at the door, pushed our way in, and found not just Wen but all of the leaders we had been looking for.
TODD STERN
We get to the room and there were like a zillion reporters and news-camera guys. I don’t know if they had been there before or they had just started to collect when they had seen Obama—probably some combination of the two.
JAKE LEVINE
[Press secretary Robert] Gibbs ended up getting pushed around by some of the Chinese. Either they were security guards or maybe [part of the] negotiating team, but they were clearly not welcoming others into the room. Meanwhile, there was the impression that they had purposefully misled our team as to their whereabouts.
TODD STERN
Everybody had to kind of muscle their way into the room and, you know, Obama just asked if they were ready to see him or if they wanted to wait.72 And everybody all started scrambling around to make room for Obama and Hillary Clinton at the table.
MICHAEL FROMAN
Sort of hidden away in this room, you had President Zuma of South Africa, President Lula of Brazil, and Prime Minister Singh of India. The president and Secretary Clinton pulled up chairs at the table and the rest of us hovered around them. And over the course of the next hour or so they worked out the final agreement, including the fact that those countries—particularly China—would have to indicate how they specifically would address climate change just like the developed countries. That was a key breakthrough.
BEN LABOLT
The president played a big role in making sure that China, South Africa, India, and Brazil didn’t crush the deal and go off to do their own thing. That was kind of the first time where he really brought China into the process of acknowledging that they had to reduce their emissions. They were the world’s largest polluter and had an obligation as well.
TODD STERN
That famous meeting was mostly focused on getting language on the transparency point . . . that they would be subject to international consultation and analysis. There was lots of back-and-forthing before those words got landed on, because the Chinese were seeking language that kind of avoided that in various ways. We were pushing for language that was strong enough.
JONATHAN PERSHING
I have a sense that it was a very personal appeal. It’s funny that the analogy that’s often brought up was that he treated [the meeting] like a community-organizing structure. You went in and you talked to people, and you engaged them. And he was incredibly effective, because when he went in there was no outcome, and when he came out, there was a deal . . . The structure was essentially that all countries would individually have to take an action. It would be self-determined, but it would have to be an action.
TODD STERN
The meeting went on for about an hour or so. The main part of that discussion was what everybody was going to put forward in terms of what amounted to a target . . . That might not sound like a big deal. That was a really big deal for China.
JAKE LEVINE
I think the fact that the president decided to come was what, in turn, got all the other heads of state to sit down at a table, even though it was a table that was literally hard to find.
TODD STERN
When that meeting’s over, Obama went back and sat with deve
loped-country leaders and walked them through what happened in the meeting with China, India, Brazil, and South African leaders. That was probably in the range of sixish, six thirty [p.m.].
JONATHAN PERSHING
They’re in a room that’s about thirty feet long, around an open rectangular table. The place was hot and sweaty. There’s no airflow, and there’s a space for the senior person from each country at the table, either the head of state, sometimes it’s the secretary of state or foreign minister. You had like [twenty-eight] countries around this table arguing for hours over the nuance of the deal, which at this point was only a couple of pages. And Obama’s doing this himself. He’s sitting at the table, and Todd’s advising him. Mike Froman’s advising him. Clinton’s sitting next to him advising him, and there’s this team of people coming in and out, the US delegation providing input to this small room upstairs.
TODD STERN
When Obama left, he left Copenhagen altogether, because there was this gimungo snowstorm which was predicted to come to Washington, and they were keen to get the president out of there.
JAKE LEVINE
A snowmageddon was coming to DC and we had to depart, and the negotiations were still ongoing at that point. We had announced the accord and felt really good about that, actually, but there was still a huge amount of work in order to get the emissions-productions commitments from each individual country.
TODD STERN
The leaders around that table at that point had agreed on all the elements of this two-and-a-half-page Copenhagen Accord, [but] that’s just done among a group of [twenty-eight] countries. It still had to go to the plenary meeting of everybody—all 190-plus countries—and so at some point, not immediately thereafter, the plenary reconvened. There was a period of time when those of us who were still there knew that there was a very live issue . . . In theory, any one country could break consensus.
JONATHAN PERSHING
The Danes were having this enormous problem making things work. The world was focused with its attention on this as it’s never focused before on any international environmental agenda. A stunning level of global attention, and it’s not going very well. What partly seemed to have happened was that all the heads of state that Obama met with in that small room, they went back to the delegations: Here’s the deal we want. Even though you had the deal with China, the Chinese in particular felt that it was not good enough. Their technical guys were not happy with Wen’s commitment.
TODD STERN
There were all sorts of objections, and you could hear from the applause there were more countries semipassively supporting the objectors. It seemed there was potential for the entire Copenhagen Accord to be rejected outright . . . I was sitting with the UK and proposed that we needed to seek a pause, just a timeout from the proceedings to avoid Prime Minister Rasmussen literally slamming down the gavel and declaring the meeting over. So the pause happened, and there was a lot of consulting and agitating in the corridors of the plenary room to try and produce a result, and the proposal was that the accord not be adopted, but taken note of. There are all sorts of UN-ese, several different buzzwords that get used. “Taken note of” was one of those,73 and Rasmussen had to go somewhere for a short period. So in his absence, a lead negotiator from the Bahamas acted as the de facto president and slammed the gavel down fast on that proposition. There was some discussion, but he moved pretty quickly, so there wasn’t time to start rebelling. That’s how the Copenhagen Accord had been kept alive.
JAKE LEVINE
That’s ultimately what would lead to this novel approach of seeking the individually determined national contributions . . . To the extent that health care dominated the agenda, it was more a sense that it had dominated the domestic-policy agenda rather than the international stuff.
BARNEY FRANK
One frustration people forget: We were close to getting the votes to extend Medicare down to [age] fifty-five, which would have been a great thing and made it much more popular. Joe Lieberman, who’d been for it, for some reason backed away from it.
CHRIS DODD
There were other issues. A great job that Barbara Boxer did [dealing with] Ben Nelson on the abortion issues.
BARBARA BOXER
D-California, US Senate (1993–2017)
I played a big role at the end. Harry [Reid], Chuck [Schumer], and Dick [Durbin] were stuck on the abortion provision in the Senate version of the bill. We couldn’t get our sixty votes unless I was able, as it turned out—because this was the role Harry gave me—to ensure that federal funds would never be used for abortion. So we had to figure out a way for people to be billed separately for their abortion coverage, but we really came close to losing the Affordable Care Act over this, because Ben Nelson was pro-life . . . So I came up with a way to fix it at midnight. It was a snow night, and I remember driving to Harry’s office. Chuck was the go-between, and we resolved it.
BEN NELSON
I decided to be the sixtieth vote for cloture,74 to continue to move the bill forward so that the Senate could legislate. They could have stopped at any time and used the reconciliation process, but I didn’t want the process to stop too early because, among other things, I wanted to get a medical loss ratio in—80 to 85 percent—to deal with the question of whether or not the rates would be adequate or excessive. Consequently, that’s why I continued to push forward and legislate in addition to getting the public option out. These things all progressed along the way as long as they had cloture to continue to deal with it.
DAVID BOWEN
The Senate bill passed with no Republicans on Christmas Eve. If Hollywood wrote the script, you wouldn’t believe it, with members getting snowed in and having to be dug out so they could make the vote. It was completely Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And then there was a process. We had a Senate bill and a House bill, and the sort of Civics 101 plan would be that the House and Senate would get together and enact a compromise bill.
ROB ANDREWS
The plan was to go conference, and, you know, everyone would admit that there were imperfections in the Senate bill that were meant to be corrected.
JOE LIEBERMAN
I thought Rahm was pretty happy. We didn’t exchange high-fives or anything after I committed to him, but, of course, that’s the way it went.
CHRIS DODD
After we did the health-care bill at seven o’clock in the morning on the floor of the Senate, I had gone up to Connecticut, and I stopped on the way to see Teddy Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Cemetery. An incredibly beautiful, crystal-clear morning, December 24, 2009, and this was eight o’clock. And looking out over the city with the sun coming up, and I just, I didn’t know why at that particular moment, I said, Do you want to do this again for six or seven years? And the answer was quicker than the question was. I said, I’ve had enough.
* * *
54 Coakley announced her run for the Senate special election on Tuesday, September 1, 2009.
55 “What we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” —Letter from Senator Edward Kennedy to President Obama, May 12, 2009.
56 “Ted Kennedy’s passion was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick; and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance; what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent, ‘There is something that could make you better, but I just can’t afford it.’
“That large-heartedness, that concern and regard for the plight of others, is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together . . . A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should
be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise . . .
“Our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem . . . But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, that at that point we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.” —Obama to the 111th Congress, September 9, 2009.
57 Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor, White House (2009–2013).
58 October 4, 2009: George Papandreou and his social-democratic PASOK party won by nearly ten points in the Greek snap election against the conservative New Democracy party.
59 October 9, 2009.
60 October 13, 2009.
61 November 1, 2009.
62 A medical loss ratio (MLR) determines the percentage of premium dollars that health providers would put toward medical claims, with the remaining revenue applied toward operation costs. A medical loss ratio of 90 percent, for example, would mean the provider appropriates 90 cents on the dollar toward customer costs, as opposed to payroll or advertising. The provision was included as an attempt to sort of Band-Aid progressive lawmakers who were aching over the removal of the public option.