Obama- An Oral History
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DAVID PLOUFFE
Once it was clear that the mission was a success, we started working on his remarks that he would deliver to the nation that night.
ROB O’DONNELL
It was Sunday night. I was at the Justice Department then, and all of a sudden people came across the TV like, The president’s gonna give a prime-time address, and I emailed my boss, Dean Boyd, who was the national-security spokesman. “Is there anything we should be aware of?” He emailed back, “I don’t know. Let me check into it.” Then half an hour or fifteen minutes before the president went on, Dean sent me an email, like, Holy shit, we got bin Laden! I was with my cousin and my sister, and we ended up going down to the White House that night to cheer on with everyone, and then I had to be at the Justice Department at five a.m. to send out the updated guidance for the day for the AG. That was just a wild night.
BILL DALEY
Starting the next day, Denis McDonough said there was a collective barf of information from the US government leaking and everybody telling their stories. Whether it was the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, it was ridiculous how everybody just kind of threw up how important they were in the getting-bin-Laden story. Ridiculous.
LEON PANETTA
I’ve always looked on most of the jobs I had in Washington as not something I sought but I did because, when presidents ask you to do it, you do it. The same thing was true with the CIA. Frankly, when we were successful with the bin Laden raid, I thought, This might be a great time to get the hell out of Washington, because timing is everything. But then the president asked me to consider secretary of defense. I wanted to go home at some point, [and] didn’t want to spend more time in Washington, but he kept coming back at me. And, as always when the president does that, I agreed to serve for the remainder of his first term.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
Deputy National Political Director, Obama-Biden 2012
Chief of Staff, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House (2013–2017)
Having been through the 2008 campaign, I knew what was coming up ahead. I moved out to Chicago—I forget the exact date—but I was one of the first few folks in the Chicago headquarters, before we even announced. I was extremely excited but also realized it was gonna be a long couple of years.
DAVID PLOUFFE
There’s no doubt that anybody that’s been through this will tell you—the Bush people, the Clinton people, the Reagan people—reelects were nowhere near as fun as the first one, because in the first one you’re not an incumbent. You’re an insurgent. And then basically in an incumbent race, the organization has taken on barnacles. So it’s not as fun.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
For a huge chunk of the first campaign, we were completely and totally unburdened by expectation. We were underdogs, and it’s different when you’re running as an incumbent. You’re running on a record, and you’re not running on a platform. Those are really different things.
DAVID PLOUFFE
But the core of ’12 was Axe, Jim, and I, and Larry Grisolano. Depending on the issue, that was the real decision-making group. And we would do calls, and meetings when I could get to Chicago. So Axe was as involved in ’12 as he was in ’08. He wasn’t overseeing the advertising. Larry was doing that, but he had David’s proxy.
DAVID AXELROD
I missed my life in the White House to some degree, but I was happy to be freed of it to do the work that I had to do relative to the reelection. And quite frankly, I was exhausted, and I think I would not be here if I had tried to stay for eight years.
NATE LUBIN
I ended up going to Chicago in May. I was the first marketing person on the ground and was there all the way through. I ended up as the director of digital marketing—built that team from just me to twenty-some-odd people—but it was sort of a weird organizational thing. I was basically an internal consultant to the whole campaign. They gave a twenty-five-year-old $100 million to play with.
TEDDY GOFF
I became a member of the senior staff in the second campaign. The guiding premise of the campaign, from the day that I started—I remember in the first or second senior staff meeting, Jim Messina said, “Look, it’s going to be a topsy-turvy year. These things are always unpredictable and I’m sure some stuff is going to go down, but we are preparing to run a campaign against Mitt Romney and we have to stay focused on that.” That was always the prediction.
JEREMY BIRD
We felt, at the beginning, we were in an underdog situation because of what we inherited. A lot of Americans were feeling the lack of equality on the economic side and hadn’t seen a change. We were in the position of having to convince them that we’re on the right track forward, not back, that we’d seen progress but, at the same time, it’s a really complicated thing to say to folks, because they hadn’t seen it in their lives.
JON FAVREAU
You could tell people that it’s going to take a long time, but that would only go so far. We’re an impatient people, and if you’re out of a job, having a president tell you, Oh, no, no, no, it’s just gonna take time. It’ll eventually get better, that doesn’t help much. You’re still gonna say, No, buddy. I want you to fix this now.
NATE LUBIN
The organization was better in ’12 because we’d already come through once, and there was more prep time. We could get bigger faster, raise more money, and those of us who were there, working those hours, we were obviously super in the tank. It was an If we don’t win it’s the end of the world kind of thing.
JEREMY BIRD
On our [Democratic] base side, the challenge was we didn’t have an opponent in the primary—although Senator Sanders flirted with running against us—and so we had to get people to actually pay attention. We had to get them active early to make sure we’re not put in the position where we’re behind after [Republicans] ran their primary and probably got stronger as an organization from it.
ROB ANDREWS
One thing you gotta remember, and this was true until the Iowa caucuses in 2016: Bernie was always a likable, interesting back-back-back bencher. At that stage of the game, anything he said was probably regarded as Okay, he’s an interesting fellow. He wasn’t nearly the figure in Democratic politics that he would become.
JIM MESSINA
We had to run a perfect campaign, and we surely didn’t. But we had a couple theories of the case. One was, if this were a choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, we would win that choice. If it were a choice between, were you happy with the economy, or did you want to vote for Democrats or Republicans, we would lose. We were still in the toughest economic situation, which we inherited.
STUART STEVENS
This idea that Mitt was going to run and roll right into ’12 was just not accurate. He wanted to write that book, and I used to go down and visit him in La Jolla. He’d be sitting there in his shorts at the kitchen counter, happy as a clam, writing his book. The assumption was the economy would get better—this would have been February of 2009—and would improve at a normal historical rate. As it turned out, we had the slowest recovery in modern history. He probably thought that Obama would, given the rhetoric that he ran on—There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—make more effort to be bipartisan.
GENE SPERLING
Yes, one could have tried to get an even better Recovery Act, but had you missed the opportunity for a strong $800 billion plan signed into law twenty-seven days after inauguration, had you, in the effort to do a little more or a little better, ended up having to wait three or four more months, and the economy had spun down, it would have been a tragic mistake.
STUART STEVENS
My longtime partner, Russ Schriefer, and I had been doing all these [2010] races at my firm, and Mitt talked about getting together. “You’re through on Election Day, right?” And I said yes. And he said, “Great, let’s get together on Election Day.” It was so Mitt. So we flew up to Boston, and he was pretty clear tha
t he was on a track to run. Something changed. Just, personally, I had a bit of an issue about my involvement, because my longtime friend and client Haley Barbour was also talking about running. I didn’t think Haley would run, but by the time around Thanksgiving, I think Mitt had pretty much decided to run.
JIM MESSINA
We would have to define Mitt Romney, but we also had to give our people a reason to believe and to vote. That wasn’t ever going to come from negative campaigning. That’s always going to come from having a vision. We had to build turnout. I spent four years of my life hearing everyone say, “Oh, the first campaign was so special. No one’s excited about 2012.”
JAMES KVAAL
You would at least be able to sleep at night with Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. There’s no question that he’s a highly qualified person and also fundamentally a decent person, a good man. To us, it felt like an important election if for no other reason than if Mitt Romney had been president, he would have unraveled universal health care, which was something that our country had been trying to accomplish for three or four generations. Also, his tax cuts for very wealthy people were wrongheaded, and it was disappointing that he was not willing to take action on climate change and move us off of fossil fuels. So there were big issues at stake. It’s just they seemed more within the realm of conversation, in comparison to what Donald Trump would mean.
TEDDY GOFF
The absolutely most terrifying thing in politics that I’d ever seen until Donald Trump was the debt-ceiling debacle,104 and that happened in the early days of the campaign.
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
Republicans were threatening to default on the debt if they didn’t get their way on [long-term deficit reductions], which was an incredibly reckless position to take. And so this was the height of sort of the budget wars, and the president appointed Biden to put together what became known as the Biden Group. That included House and Senate Republicans and Democrats. I served on that group.
JIM MESSINA
Anytime there was really a problem, the vice president would go up to the Hill and fix it. Thirty years, I mean, he just knew everybody. He was a legislator’s legislator.
JASON FURMAN
We had the vice president lead discussions for about two months. Nothing leaked from them. A lot was done on paper. I had extensive discussions with Republicans where we would swap drafts and share things, and I thought that all worked quite well.
JACK LEW
I played the role in the room of briefing everybody on what the options were. I was actually proud that, at the end of it, [House majority leader] Eric Cantor had absolute faith that I was describing things fairly and looked at the options that he and Joe Biden were able to make political judgments based on understanding it, and it was not an insignificant piece of work. It formed a list of $200-ish billion of potential savings.
JASON FURMAN
Then those talks collapsed.
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
I recall Cantor walking out of the negotiations, partly over disagreements, but also because he discovered that Boehner had opened up his own line of communication with the White House.
BILL DALEY
Cantor found out that Boehner and we had been talking and getting going towards a deal. He blew that up.
MICHAEL STEEL
It was always clear that there was going to be a next stage in the discussions. I think Mr. Cantor’s explanation at the time was that he thought that the Democrats were going to end the talks on some pretext and blame him for being intransigent. He wanted to get out in front of that. I don’t know why he had that indication or what the thinking was there, but Mr. Cantor is a very smart man and very sophisticated. He knew that we still had to increase the debt limit and that discussions with the White House were the only way to reach an agreement that would get that done in a responsible way.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
It’s not really about who called what and whether Cantor was mad at Boehner. Fundamentally, the Republican Party was not willing to trade cuts for tax increases . . . but the fact that Obama would entertain the idea for sure showed he was willing to do things that the [Democratic] leadership in Congress was not keen on, because they were getting mad at him for even talking about it with them in private.
BILL DALEY
[One week later] Boehner and Cantor came back together. We were on a path, I firmly believed, that we could have gotten a deal, and it all unraveled rather quickly, partly because Democrats realized Obama was willing to deal on things that they didn’t want him to deal on, i.e., Medicare and Social Security, and [Obama] was willing to go further than they really wanted him to.
JACK LEW
We would talk to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid about places we might have to go. We didn’t tell them how every meeting went, what every meeting was, and all the minute back and forth. But the president was pretty comfortable that, if we had struck a deal, he could have sold it.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
The administration asked the Republicans, essentially, You wanna cut entitlements. Here’s a list of ten things. What would you wanna do first? Raise the retirement age on Social Security? Cap Medicare? What is your priority? The fact that they even asked that question really irked the Democrats in Congress, who said, You should not be offering anything for a grand bargain. You should be blasting them for proposing cuts to entitlements. Let’s demonize them and we will defeat them based on that.
JACK LEW
We came close a couple of times, and each time the Speaker would go back to the Republican caucus and they’d want more, or they’d say there was too much wiggle room, and there was a deep level of suspicion. It may have just been that what the Speaker might have been willing to agree to and what the majority of the Republican caucus was willing to agree to were not the same thing.
MICHAEL STEEL
Democrats never really accepted the legitimacy of the Bush tax cuts and were always obsessed with the revenue that they had lost. So they were willing to discuss reducing spending, but only in the context of also increasing taxes.
JASON FURMAN
We had a series of meetings in the Roosevelt Room and might as well have broadcast them on C-SPAN, because everyone would walk out of them and put their own spin on everything that had just happened.
GENE SPERLING
This was a frustrating period for the president, because he held back for the sake of getting a more significant fiscal agreement, only to see the Republicans mysteriously walk away from the table twice and then, even more mysteriously, try to blame him for their inability to stay at a table and finish a negotiation.
MICHAEL STEEL
Boehner’s solution was that there [were] a number of increased government revenue [streams] that could be generated by tax reform. Our best calculation from outside sources was about $800 billion every ten years. That was really a hard line, from the moment the discussion started. We can do this and no more on the tax front, and the Speaker and the president had a handshake deal on a package of spending cuts with that level of increased revenue through tax reform, and for a variety of reasons, the president came back after that handshake and asked for an additional $400 billion in increased revenue.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
That’s the Republican version. I’m not sure that’s 100 percent accurate. We had a bit of the old Yasser-Arafat-in-the-negotiations-with-Bill-Clinton, in which he was making promises but couldn’t deliver his own people. My impression of the $400 billion was, that was simply a counteroffer and they had been going back and forth. I’ll give you A. No, I won’t take A. How about B? No, we won’t take B. How about C? They were just looking for some way to walk, because Boehner realized his people wouldn’t accept anything. So they’re like, Oh, you changed the deal!
JACK LEW
I know the story [has been] told from different perspectives with different heroes and different villains. I actually believed that everyone in the negotiation, meaning the Speaker, the preside
nt, the minority leader of the Senate, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, with everyone skeptical for different reasons, was approaching it looking to reach an agreement. I never thought that the negotiation was in bad faith. I think that there was a fundamental inability to go back and sell something fair and balanced in the House Republican caucus.
GENE SPERLING
They couldn’t admit that they were walking away because they were so deeply divided. So they would then spend an enormous amount of energy and time trying to convince the media that somehow it was President Obama’s fault.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
The way you knew that the grand-bargain discussion was doomed was that Republicans were unwilling to say anything that they actually wanted to cut, because they didn’t want to cut. Their response to “Which of these is your priority? What are you demanding? We’re gonna demand high-income tax increases. What are the entitlements that you’re gonna cut?” was, “We want you to name things that you are going to cut.” Because they wanted to condemn Democrats for cutting entitlements! So of course, in a world like that, it’s never gonna work. That’s why the grand bargain fell apart.
MICHAEL STEEL
So the Speaker began talking with Senator McConnell and Senator Reid about whether, if he ended discussions with the president, what they needed to pass a bill that would increase the debt limit. Senator Reid had been supportive for many years of this idea that if you put together a bipartisan group and forced a vote . . . you could pass a large bipartisan deficit-reduction package. So he was supportive of what came to be known as “the supercommittee,” the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.105 And Boehner’s priority was making sure that we hit the spending cuts and reforms equal to or greater than the debt-limit increase. So that was kind of his ask, and originally we put together the stuff that the Biden-Cantor talks had done—a cap on discretionary spending—and that got you about halfway to the debt-limit increase that the White House was seeking.