Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  The instructions to which Speaker Boehner referred were all enumerated in the Republicans’ Pledge to America, a 2010 campaign-season manifesto. It included “permanently stopping job-killing tax hikes”; the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to prevent “more financial pain for seniors, families, and the federal government”; heavy spending cuts to set the budget back to “pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone” with a laser focus to “balance the budget and pay down the debt”; and the reduction of overwhelming regulations and government oversight that “prevents investors and entrepreneurs from putting capital at risk.”

  It was a celebration. The chamber’s interior, one reporter noted, felt “sort of like the first day of high school.” Chummy arm-grabs and handshakes ate up the afternoon. Eager to reverse the president’s agenda, conservatives set about implementing the initiatives they had been fantasizing about for at least two years, but by the end of the week the mood had soured. Saturday, in northwest Tucson, a gunman opened fire at a Safeway where Representative Gabrielle Giffords held her annual “Congress on Your Corner” event for Arizona’s Eighth District. An American flag was planted outside the grocery store’s entrance where six were killed, including congressional staffer Gabe Zimmerman; US District Judge John Roll; and nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green. Thirteen others were wounded; the congresswoman herself had suffered a head shot. Speaker Boehner ordered House flags flown at half-staff as funeral arrangements were made and surgeries were under way.

  MICHAEL STEEL

  She was talking with constituents. She was doing her job. She was meeting with the people she represented. The Speaker always believed—and I when I say “the Speaker,” I mean Boehner; it’s just always easier to refer to him that way—that our highest responsibility in some ways was protecting the institution of the House. So an attack on a member of the House was an attack on the institution, and it made absolutely no difference to him whether it was a Democratic or Republican member. The first responsibility was to make sure that the members and the staff were able to do their jobs safely.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  I was in Schenectady, New York, for an advance trip. We heard about the Gabby Giffords shooting. Everyone was emailing, very concerned. POTUS was supposed to go to GE up in Schenectady. So we heard that was going to be postponed, given the shooting, and were just on standby for what would happen next. We all rushed back to DC. I was out to dinner that night with my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, and her parents. I got the call from the director of advance. “Can you get out to [Joint Base] Andrews first thing in the morning?” Of course, no one knew Gabby Giffords’s status. It was up in the air whether she was going to make it or not.

  CODY KEENAN

  I was in the Situation Room already kind of freaking out. There were always those moments early in the presidency, whenever you got a first step up into something you felt like you’re not supposed to be in. You had to constantly remind yourself to pay attention. There is something happening here. Stop yourself from looking around. You’re not on a tour. You’re not watching history from the outside. You’re an active participant.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  This was going to be a twenty-four-hour advance. We usually had five or six days, but that was just the nature of this situation. You had these tragedies where you had to do your job—logistical arrangements, press arrangements, press releases—and in the meantime, you’re wondering whether people were going to live or die. You’re just trying to balance these two things and be respectful and get your job done.

  CODY KEENAN

  [Homeland Security advisor John] Brennan briefed everyone on what had happened—how many people were shot, how the congresswoman was doing, who the shooter was. There were questions at that point about, since a congresswoman was involved, whether there was a plot. Obviously it turned out that that wasn’t true, but we didn’t know that at the time . . . We did a quick statement for the president, and I think maybe it was Monday when we were asked to go speak at the memorial service, which was Wednesday.94 So you had to start writing and researching really fast.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  [When] POTUS came . . . the plan was he was going to stop at the hospital first, before the speech and before the service. I waited with the press outside in the cars. It was the only time that I can remember that the [press] pool was quiet. Usually you’re standing somewhere with them, and they’re like, Hey what’s going on? How long is he gonna be in there? Do you know who he’s with? Everyone knew exactly what was going on. There was nothing to say. Everyone was just quiet and reflecting on what this meant.

  CODY KEENAN

  When I met with the president to talk about what he wanted to say, with eulogies, obviously, the first thing you wanted to do was memorialize the departed and pay tribute to the heroes, and impart a couple lessons on what we’re responsible for now that people were gone. What’s incumbent upon us to do in their absence?

  TERRY SZUPLAT

  One of the things that we noticed was how divisive that event was, the vitriol and the nastiness that followed, politically. Rather than bringing people together, here was another instance, it seemed, where tragedy pushed us further apart.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  I don’t remember how long he was at the hospital, but when we went to the event just across the street, and he met with the families backstage, I’m just not gonna talk about that. I just feel those are completely personal moments and it’s not my place.

  CODY KEENAN

  The president leaned on that notion of civility, but not as a crutch. A lot of people used civility, especially on the Right when this happened, as an argument against doing anything about it. Well, we just need to be more civil and this won’t happen anymore. Well, you know, it happened every single day. Shootings were not fueled by civility or incivility, but it’s still something he wanted to talk about. It was his riff that he came up [with] that, “Did we tell [a spouse just how desperately] we loved them, not just once in a while, but every single day?”

  TERRY SZUPLAT

  So often [it] was the case he would go directly to the central issue or tension point, and I think it’s one of the reasons why his speeches resonated so much. In that speech, of course, wanting, trying to fulfill that little girl’s dreams, making “our democracy [to be] as good as Christina imagined it” became one of the most important lines.95

  ARUN CHAUDHARY

  With Rahm gone, one of the reasons he had Daley come in that was probably so attractive was that he fulfilled that same role: someone who was from outside the organization but still was a familiar face, especially one from Chicago.

  BILL DALEY

  The perception [was] that they had a big problem with the business community—that they weren’t reaching out. Rahm got out just in time, and there was a sense that you had divided government back again [for the] first time since under Clinton. It was also, Maybe we ought to get somebody who can hopefully reach out beyond the way we’ve reached out or not reached out.

  ARUN CHAUDHARY

  Rahm felt as much an outsider to our crew as did Daley. It wasn’t until Denis [McDonough was appointed in 2013] that the Obama inner circle had been represented by a chief of staff, and I think that was a decision that was made by the president. To have his main point person not part of his traditional inner circle coming out of the campaign gave him perspective.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  I obviously spent time in ’09 and ’10 thinking through the reelect and the things we needed to do and who would manage it. And so, yeah, when I came to the White House [in 2011] I basically had two jobs. My day job was just helping govern, and I then had a campaign to oversee. My recommendation to the president was that Messina would run it, and that I would oversee it from Washington. You know, somewhat what Karl Rove did in 2004 for Bush.

  JIM MESSINA

  When I left the White House in January to move to Chicago and start the campaign, our approval rati
ng was under 40 percent . . . Every Friday, starting in February, we would have a discussion and rank the Republicans in terms of one to fifteen on who could be our opponent. We spent resources there, put staff based on those ratings, [and] every single week, Mitt Romney was number one on our list. We always assumed he was the only credible nominee for the Republicans, and we treated him like that for the entire two-year cycle.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  That was all a very well organized, well thought out plan . . . Then Axe would go back to Chicago, rest up a bit, and put himself into the campaign.

  DAVID AXELROD

  It was an adjustment to leave the White House. When you’re there, and you leave, it’s like you’re on a carousel that’s going two hundred miles an hour and suddenly you’re dumped on the side. And the carousel kept on going. It’s an adjustment to return to the real world. But as a campaign consultant, I’m not sure I would have offered him as good advice if I had still been there, because I was back out and really sensing what was going on in the country.

  BILL DALEY

  I had known David for thirty years. He did just about every one of my brother Richard’s elections. Anyway, then all of a sudden David was gone, and even though I knew Valerie and a few others, I wasn’t that close with any of the people. Plouffe I didn’t know at all. I mean, I met him but didn’t pretend to know him.

  DAVID AXELROD

  I had a lot of other personal reasons for [leaving], but I always had a two-year commitment and I could not have worked beyond that. But, you know, like a lot of people who had worked in the White House, I would say it’s the greatest experience of my life and I’d never do it again.

  BILL DALEY

  So the entire team was people who had been together from the very beginning, no doubt about it. That made it difficult, and all the slots were all filled. There was no full-scale sort of change beyond We’ll change the guy at the top—chief of staff role—and see if that makes a big difference.

  MATTHEW MILLER

  That was the worst year of the Obama presidency, and that’s after losing Congress in 2010. There was the debt-ceiling crisis in August, really the low point of his presidency, and there were a lot of low points.

  JACK LEW

  Director, Office of Management and Budget, White House (2010–2012)

  White House Chief of Staff (2012–2013)

  US Secretary of the Treasury (2013–2017)

  The sequence of our engagements on budget issues actually started before the debt limit. It was on the continuing-resolution [bill for fiscal year 2011]—the funding of the government—where, in the spring, a potential shutdown was looming, and the question was, How do you engage? How would you deal with a new Republican majority with a vocal and often-dominant Freedom Caucus?96 We made the judgment to try and work with Speaker Boehner and the majority to avoid a shutdown, to see if there was a way to navigate.

  BRIAN DEESE

  Consistent with how the president went about things, we were very focused on saying, We got a real problem, we should try to do what we can to fix it, and we should assume the best of our opponents who are sitting across the table negotiating.

  GENE SPERLING

  We were, from the start, trying to figure out how to negotiate, and we learned two things simultaneously. The positive thing was that John Boehner did believe in the type of Reagan–Tip O’Neill relationship where you were strong adversaries but in the end figured how to move forward. The negative was realizing that he had so much division within his party that he could not deliver in the same way maybe Newt Gingrich had been able to—not because perhaps it was his fault, but simply because he just didn’t quite have the authority. You saw that begin to play out in the fact that we couldn’t even get past the appropriations negotiations, and this was a great frustration for the president.

  BILL DALEY

  It was obvious that the Tea Party people who had won and given the Speaker his majority had no loyalty to Boehner, Cantor, or any of the leadership. They had nothing to do with getting those people elected. They were outside the norm, and they didn’t give a hoot. So the expectation that a Speaker could deliver his caucus, it didn’t take long into the spring of ’11 to see that that wasn’t the case. You had a situation where Boehner and Cantor were having more problems with their own members than anything.

  MICHAEL STEEL

  At that point, filling that pledge for fiscal year 2011 would have meant a spending reduction of about $100 billion. And so when we got to that first spending fight, a substantial portion of the fiscal year was already over, and because a large part of the fiscal year was already over and for various other reasons, the spending cut, in dollar terms, wound up being much lower than $100 billion.

  JACK LEW

  We agreed, if I recall, to [$61 billion], and it was about half real reductions and half spending that was offset by other measures . . . [Boehner] may not have been able to sell the lower number [to his caucus].

  GENE SPERLING

  When you’re on one side you never have total transparency into the deliberations [on] the other side, but we tended to expect a normal negotiation where sides moved closer together, where there were a few last-minute adjustments, where you each tried to be creative in finding ways to get the necessary votes, and I think what happened, from their point of view, was that Boehner didn’t have a long rope to negotiate.

  MICHAEL STEEL

  That was the first time that a lot of—particularly the newly elected—members had to grapple with the complexities of the budget process, kind of how Washington spent money, which was a complicated and often seemingly irrational—and often actually irrational—process.

  JACK LEW

  He was criticized as not having a tough negotiator in the first round. I think that kind of came back to haunt him, that he was constantly being questioned.

  MICHAEL STEEL

  In that one, I didn’t really recall the White House being terribly influential or important. Obviously in the debt-limit talks over the summer, the White House was very much involved, but this one—to the extent that they were exercising influence, it was with Senate Democrats, shaping what could get through the Senate after we passed it in the House.97 I didn’t remember dealing much with the White House. They had their priorities.

  JONATHAN FINER

  Special Advisor for Middle East Affairs, Office of the Vice President (2011–2012)

  Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Office of the Secretary of State (2013–2014)

  Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning, Office of the Secretary of State (2015–2017)

  The president’s been very clear that his biggest regret, or one of them, was not doing more to follow up on Libya. There was a pretty rigorous debate about whether the administration should [have gone] ahead with that military intervention, and for those who were against it, it was not because they didn’t believe in the validity of the mission—very much a human/civilian-protection goal of preventing a slaughter in Benghazi when [Muammar] Gaddafi’s army was moving in. The reason people were concerned was because they were worried exactly about what would happen in the aftermath, how much of an investment would be required by the United States and our partners to put the country back on track.

  DAN SHAPIRO

  The decision there was connected to a much more limited and discrete event than what Syria would turn into. It was a civil war—sort of rebels against the Gaddafi regime—but the moment of truth was when Gaddafi’s forces were advancing toward Benghazi and had declared that once they retook the city, they were gonna slaughter everybody in it. They seemed to be days or hours away from getting there, like an advancing army on an open desert road, so there was a different kind of initial imperative and decision to be made.

  LEON PANETTA

  Director, Central Intelligence Agency (2009–2011)

  US Secretary of Defense (2011–2013)

  I have used that as an example of NATO coming together in an effective way. I we
nt to Naples, where we had an Allied Joint Force Command center located during the conflict. What they were doing was essentially identifying targets and assigning those targets to various members of NATO, who then conducted the operations pursuant to that.

  DAN SHAPIRO

  We made a decision that this was going to be an air campaign. It wouldn’t involve a ground invasion, and beyond those early weeks I stepped out of it. That’s about the time I came to Israel.

  LEON PANETTA

  I viewed it as something that was successful, in terms of the operation that we were involved with and what we were trying to achieve. The bigger problem became whether we had developed the kind of diplomatic follow-up that was necessary to keep Libya on the right track towards stability—helping them build institutions of governing, providing a support system.

  DAN SHAPIRO

  The mission was so well defined that you had the ability to prevent a humanitarian tragedy. We needed to do it. But in doing that, the president also set some lines, because he understood this could take us in deeper. He was not eager to have extended Middle East military engagements, for all the known reasons.

  JONATHAN FINER

  They’d seen what an enormous project that entailed in Iraq and Afghanistan and weren’t sure the American people would be ready to take on another one.

  LEON PANETTA

  Every one of these countries was different. Every one had their own history, their own tribal divisions—it’s not like you could do a cookie-cutter approach. Every one was unique. But at the same time, there were ways to work with these countries and the various factions within those countries to move them towards stability. Not every one was, obviously, going to turn into Jeffersonian democracy—we understood that—but at the very least, if we could have provided the support system to provide stability, we could have put them on the right track towards the future.