Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  63 In September of 1976, Republican Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois introduced legislation that banned the use of federal funds for abortion services to Medicaid recipients. The amendment passed on a 207–167 House vote.

  64 November 10, 2009.

  65 Samantha Power was on the National Security Council from 2009 to 2013 as a senior director for multilateral affairs with a focus on human rights. In 2013, President Obama nominated her for UN Ambassador, a role she served through 2017.

  66 “We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth. We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

  “I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones.’ As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive, nothing naive—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

  “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” —President Obama, inside Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2009.

  67 Chairman of the United Nations panel on climate change.

  68 December 17, 2009.

  69 Agencies for international development.

  70 Danish Prime Minister and COP 15 chair Lars Løkke Rasmussen hosted a “Friends of the Chair” group to preside over a number of issues. Joining UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Rasmussen were representatives from Ethiopia, US, UK, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Russia, Mexico, Lesotho, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, India, Maldives, Grenada, Colombia, Germany, France, China, EU, Brazil, Bangladesh, Australia, Algeria, Norway, and Spain.

  71 The four large newly industrialized countries (NICs) Brazil, South Africa, India, and China made a pact one month prior to the conference with the intent to collectively negotiate their responsibility for climate change.

  72 “Are you ready for me or do you guys need to talk some more? . . . It’s up to you . . . Come on, what do you think? . . . Premier, are you ready for me or do you want to wait?” —President Obama to Premier Wen inside the Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, December 18, 2009.

  73 “Normally, the COP would adopt something by consensus,” explained State Department lawyer Susan Biniaz, who attended COP 15. “Consensus requires the absence of a formal objection. After the Copenhagen Accord was drawn up by a subset of parties, a handful of parties (including, e.g., Venezuela) formally objected to its adoption. So it wasn’t possible to adopt the accord by consensus. But the proponents of the accord (most parties) didn’t want it to have zero recognition at the conference. So the compromise was to have the COP ‘take note’ of it, i.e., recognize its existence while not actually endorsing it.”

  74 December 19, 2009.

  2010

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks on September 11, was still awaiting his day in court. He had been in US custody for almost seven years, ever since the CIA picked up the al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan and applied “enhanced interrogation techniques” at multiple black sites on foreign soil. (Said techniques, ranging from “stress positions” to waterboarding to a medical procedure known as “rectal rehydration,” had yielded no valuable information from the subject, per intelligence reports.) Mohammed had been moved to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba; five years had passed between the time of his capture and the Bush administration’s charging him with war crimes. Evidence of any concerted efforts to successfully try him in a military tribunal was slim.

  Attorney General Eric Holder, on the other hand, made prosecuting the Gitmo detainee part of his agenda. Over the administration’s first year, Obama’s top cop had recruited several lawyers in preparation for trying Mohammed, and four of his accomplices, in a civilian court. It was during the National Mall’s Fourth of July celebration when Holder told the president his intention to try the group in New York for the murders of 2,976 people. “It’s your call,” an expressionless Obama responded, as the two watched the fireworks from the White House terrace.

  “Just because Holder was close to the president personally, it didn’t mean that the president would decide every decision Holder’s way on a policy matter,” the Justice Department’s Matthew Miller explained. “He would often side against him if he felt it was right, and by the same token, Holder was always cognizant that, even though they were friends, he had an obligation on some things—investigative matters, certain legal calls—to make decisions independent of the White House.”

  It certainly felt as if Holder would go this one alone. Members of the White House Counsel’s office valued the AG’s initiative, but “didn’t have the line of sight into where [the Office of] Legislative Affairs and guys like Rahm were making other decisions,” one West Wing aide remarked. Conservative political-advocacy groups launched demonstrations. One New York City protest, held downtown in December, included personal attacks on the attorney general, claiming that he was a “traitor” who “wants to help the terrorists.” Then, Michael Bloomberg’s comments piled on.

  The NYC mayor previously believed it was “fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center,” but come January of 2010, Bloomberg reversed his support on holding the trials locally. Rather, he endorsed “a military base” as a more proper venue to guarantee security and avoid disrupting civilians. Though the federal government had already committed to covering the trial’s expense, Bloomberg also cited the exorbitant costs of such a prospect, claiming the legal proceeding could run up a city’s tab north of $1 billion.

  Bloomberg’s shift opened the door for others to suggest that the state of New York, let alone anywhere within the five boroughs, was an inappropriate location to try the five men. “Chuck Schumer and everybody else came out against it,” Congressman Frank Wolf recalled. “They certainly didn’t want any trial in New York, because they felt that would tie up New York with threats. Many, on both sides, thought it was a danger, and I think they were right. Because after what New York went through? It was pretty difficult. Have you toured the 9/11 Memorial?”

  MATTHEW MILLER

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was such an episode on its own. That was a case that history will absolutely judge Eric Holder to have been right about. I didn’t think, back then, many people thought he was wrong on the substance of it. If that case had gone forward in federal court, KSM would have been on death row. There’s just no doubt about it, versus what happened in Guantanamo, where [the military commission] couldn’t even get the case to trial.

  DR. HAROLD KOH

  What we’re looking for here was credible justice. You could have a perfectly tried case in a military commission against KSM and nobody in the Middle East would think it was fair, right? So what’s the point of doing it? The test of whether it’s a reasonable and legitimate, credible system was whether it stood the test of time. And the United States ought to have confidence in its own justice system to do the right thing in a case that had been made complicated because of the mistreatment of the defendant.

  MARGARET RICHARDSON

  He continued sitting in Guantanamo, and untried for a crime that was an open wound for families and for our country. Attorney General Holder said, if he had been able to have him prosecuted in an Article III [federal] court, this would have been resolved within that year.

  DR. HAROLD KOH
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  Just take a look at the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He was captured, represented, tried, convicted, and sentenced. You know, it’s insane to think that a better way to do it was to do it in a military commission. The problem was KSM was tortured, and nevertheless, even if you excluded all that evidence, a lot of objective evidence connected him to 9/11. Would people seriously contend that the Southern District of New York’s US Attorney’s Office couldn’t get a conviction from a New York jury in a case like that? Even if they admitted error on all of the mistreatment, which they should? So the decision to try him in an Article III court in New York, where many others had been successfully prosecuted and convicted, was correct. And the huge error was to back off of that because of political pressure.

  MATTHEW MILLER

  The administration wasn’t willing to spend all the political capital it needed to on that, because they were in the middle of a health-care fight. I didn’t blame them for that. Trying to get health care? Let’s not spend all our capital on KSM right now. In the meantime, you had the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case, Christmas day of 2009, when he tried to blow up a bomb on a plane descending to land in Detroit.75 That confluence of factors led to the KSM trial being killed, and left him sitting in Gitmo. It’s a real travesty. Health care’s an important thing, but there’s an opportunity cost to that, and it meant KSM was kind of hanging out there. We’re nowhere closer to justice for the 9/11 victims than we were at the beginning of the Obama presidency.

  MARTHA COAKLEY

  [Health-care reform] was one issue that people didn’t have time to absorb—you’re either for it or against it. That was part of what happened in the [special Senate] race. We didn’t realize at the time, and I didn’t think people in Massachusetts understood the distortion. It wasn’t that people were rejecting health care. We didn’t have time to frame it properly, and it got miscast by some of the Republican anonymous PACs who came in with the scary music and the awful gray-black pictures. That frightened people.

  DAVID BOWEN

  I had told one of my colleagues, “I’m getting paranoid that Scott Brown’s going to win.” And he said, “Oh, no, you are completely crazy. That’s not going to happen.”

  MARTHA COAKLEY

  Meanwhile the mantra became that I was “unfriendly.” I “wasn’t campaigning.” One thing that really irritated me was that after the [special-election] primary, somehow I had gone on a weeklong vacation in the Caribbean—absolutely false, never happened, never disputed, and it got traction that I had been taking the race for granted.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  When the president went to stump for Martha Coakley up in Boston, days before Scott Brown defeated her, I remember vividly just kind of feeling that Brown was gonna win. And we were trying to wrap our heads around the implications of Wow, this really may not happen. This health-care bill just may not happen.

  MARTHA COAKLEY

  We had been outcampaigned and outspent. I thought the Obama White House and many of the staffers, including the president, were terrific. They realized that it might be a tougher race than we thought—that the issue of health care was at stake—and I remember somebody who had been at the senior home had come back to headquarters and said she was really worried because many seniors felt they would lose their benefits. Some of that was due to advertising by outside interests, threatening people that their coverage would be damaged if health care succeeded.

  JAMES KVAAL

  We were never under the illusion that the Republicans would decide not to filibuster that bill. We sort of always knew that a simple majority in both houses of Congress was not enough to pass that particular piece of legislation, and so we worked very hard to get sixty votes [in the Senate], and there were times that it appeared to be in sight. But with Ted Kennedy’s passing and being replaced by Scott Brown, that seemed to move out of reach.

  ROB ANDREWS

  There was an intense debate at that point about whether to go small, to try and pass a package of insurance reforms, or stick with the bill. And Nancy Pelosi gave her famous press conference about pole-vaulting over the fence.76 She actually stood in front of the Democratic caucus—this was right after the Scott Brown election—and said, “If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence [is too high], we’ll pole-vault in. If [that doesn’t work], we’ll parachute in, but we’re going to get health-care [reform] passed.”

  DAVID BOWEN

  The Senate no longer had sixty votes for the bill, and the only process to pass it was for the House to pass the Senate bill.

  JAMES KVAAL

  The problem was that [the Senate] bill included substantive provisions that the House didn’t agree with, and the staff that had drafted it had not thought of it as the final draft that would be enacted. So there was some cleaning up that needed to happen to the language of that bill.

  ROB ANDREWS

  I dealt with Rahm a lot. Rahm was my friend. When I first ran for Congress, Rahm was the opposition-research director for our campaign. And I will tell you, clearly there were disagreements in the White House, but that’s kind of cocktail-party chatter. I mean, any group of smart people would get together and ask, What are our strategic options and what can we do? But the consensus, developed with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, was, Okay, let’s go for the end zone. The first president to try to get a law that would make health care available to all Americans was Theodore Roosevelt. And so it was a hundred years that people had been trying to do this, and there was a sense that this was a window that was going to close and wouldn’t reopen again for a long time.

  SCOTT BROWN

  Harry Reid had a plan in place. They were gonna merge the bills, and they couldn’t. So you had two basically screwed-up plans, and they had to pass them through reconciliation—parliamentary maneuvers and the like.

  JIM DOUGLAS

  [We] had a lot of meetings up there with Speaker Pelosi, who I actually liked better than I was supposed to. She was very accessible and quite engaged, but eventually it just devolved into partisanship. Harry Reid sent the word down that We’re just gonna ram it through, and that’s not the way to do things. That’s why half the country didn’t like the act.

  JAMES KVAAL

  There was quite a bit of uncertainty for weeks as the president and Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid tried to chart a path forward, and ultimately what happened was the House passed that Senate bill. So that became the foundation of health reform, and then the House enacted a second [reconciliation] bill that required only majority support in the Senate. It was a budget bill, and it was filibuster-proof. So they were able to make some amendments, and together those two bills became the Affordable Care Act. I know that’s kind of a tricky procedural move.

  ROB ANDREWS

  In a reconciliation bill, the provisions must principally affect revenue and expenditures, not policy. They had to be primarily budget in nature.77 So the [House] reconciliation bill that was done had some modifications to the underlying Senate bills. It passed both the House and the Senate, and therefore the package became the law. And that was the bill that was passed in March of 2010.

  SCOTT BROWN

  Here’s what I find ironic. They had two years to do whatever they wanted, and they did hardly anything. They didn’t do minimum wage. They didn’t do climate change. They didn’t do immigration. They didn’t do health care. They just assumed that they would always have this supermajority, and when I got there, because I won, they could have fixed up [the health-care bill]—they could have if they wanted to—but we brought up two or three hundred amendments to fix it, and they didn’t want to vote on any one of them. As a result, you got a seriously flawed plan, and that’s why it failed. I’ll take credit for that all day.

  JOHN TANNER

  I didn’t vote for it for two reasons. It was too much in one bill. I likened it to trying to digest a fifty-ounce steak when really it should be cut up into six-ounce fillets to be digestible by the system. The second thing
was, it really didn’t save any money until about ten years out, when the majority of the savings, at that time, were predicted. It’s been my experience, through the years, that any major legislation—and that certainly qualified as major—had to have some semblance of bipartisanship to be lasting or permanent or accepted by the majority of Americans. And that didn’t have any of that.

  CHRIS DODD

  The last time there was a perfect piece of legislation was the Ten Commandments, and four hundred thousand years later we’re still arguing about it. In the summer of ’09 in the Health Committee, there were 890 amendments filed. We debated 200 of them, and I accepted 160 Republican amendments. To the point where, one Monday morning, after having worked all weekend, I made the motion that we accept the amendments, and there was a moment of hesitancy about Republicans voting for their own amendments! And they did, but also began to realize, The guy’s taking our amendments, and we’re making part of this bill. We’re going to have an awful time explaining why we’re not for it in the end.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Zero Republican senators—other than Specter, who became a Democrat—voted for health-care reform.

  BEN NELSON

  I had voted for cloture to continue to move it, but I didn’t vote for it at the end. If you’re trying to get provisions put in and put out, you have to continue to legislate . . . You don’t take sides in terms of whether you work for the left or the right. You take sides on issues. Let the chips fall where they may.

  GENE SPERLING

  In many ways it was far easier to talk straight and explain to the American people the pros and cons of the auto industry. Trying to have that level of communication on the degrees of complexity in the financial or health-care systems was never close, even with the brilliance of a communications team that had just won a historic presidency. When people would say, “Oh, you should have just communicated this or that way better,” I’d keep thinking of the little plaque the president had on his desk: Hard things are hard. I once said, “It’s not like Obama, Plouffe, Favreau, and Axelrod went from being geniuses to idiots in two months.” Of which Jon Favreau replied to me, “How many months was it, then, before we became idiots?”