Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  BRAD JENKINS

  We were just trying to take it to Republicans and be on the offensive. It was a great thing to organize around, and, at the same time, [Jon] Carson went to Occupy. They were talking about the same things. Occupy was talking about more money for schools. The American Jobs Act had a huge funding for schoolteachers and rebuilding of public schools. We talked about raising the minimum wage. Occupy talked about that. We were 100 percent on the same wavelength on all these key things, so Carson wanted to meet these kids. He got on a train to New York and went to Zuccotti Park. In his head, he’s thinking, What are ways we can work with these guys? What are they gonna do next? The world was watching, right? Are they thinking about recruiting candidates? Voter registration? A list of policy initiatives?

  JON CARSON

  Van Jones actually got me in touch with a gentleman there. I’ll never forget. I called him and he called me back, got my voicemail, and the beginning of the voicemail, he said he wanted to make clear that he did not speak for Occupy Wall Street, “because nobody speaks for Occupy Wall Street,” but he would be interested in meeting with me. But then we began to negotiate where. He did not want me anywhere near Zuccotti Park, so we met at this out-of-the-way Irish pub about five or six blocks from the main site.

  BRAD JENKINS

  Carson went to this Irish bar and spent two hours with them. And an hour and a half of it was all about, How do we stay in the park? That’s all they wanted to talk about, because it was getting cold.

  BARNEY FRANK

  I was once in a debate with someone from Occupy on Bill Maher’s show, and I confessed, as I did often, that I agreed more with Occupy than the Tea Party, obviously, but the Tea Party people got involved in politics. They registered. They voted. They lobbied Congress. People at Occupy smoked dope and had drum circles. I was very disappointed that I never saw a voter-registration table at any Occupy site, and this woman said, “Well, we weren’t into that.” Yeah, right, like influencing the way things happen? What help do you need to get people to register to vote? The unions would have been glad to help.

  BRAD JENKINS

  They had Jon Carson, the head of public engagement, who had an office in the West Wing right above the president, with a willing ear, wanting to organize and figure out how you use this huge moment in American history to organize. This was the guy who organized millions of volunteers, and that’s all they wanted to talk about. And, again, he admitted, “That’s important,” but every time he asked a question on What are you guys going to do next? They were like, “No, we’re not about being in the system. All we care about is staying here. We don’t want it to end.”

  JON CARSON

  My view of the whole thing changed over time. I think there’s a new kind of organizing happening, and Occupy Wall Street was one of the first examples of it. There was a lot of criticism from old-time organizers that They never created a list out of this or Never turned it into a permanent organization. You might call it “idea based” versus “list based.” It was this decentralized movement. People criticized them for not being able to clearly state what they wanted, but as far as what they were against, I thought they were pretty singularly focused on income inequality. It was really the beginning of the notion of that “1 percent” idea being used a lot.

  BRAD JENKINS

  They didn’t want anything from us. They didn’t want our help. We were not interesting or compelling at all to the fight.

  Demonstrators gather for an Occupy Wall Street march in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan. September 30, 2011. John Lamparski, Getty

  LEON PANETTA

  The 9/11 attacks were something that hit us hard. The big problem we faced almost from the beginning was that this enemy disappeared into the mountains of Pakistan. We knew they were there because of intelligence, and we knew they were continuing to plan additional attacks on our country. And yet, in any other war, we would be able to use F-16s. We would be able to use B-2 bombers. We would put boots on the ground, and that was not the case, obviously, in Pakistan. So the question was, if we were going to confront an enemy that was continuing to plan to attack our country, how would we do that?

  NICK SHAPIRO

  The counterterrorism structure that President Obama built with the help of John Brennan was, I thought, one of the crowning achievements. I’d say a couple things to support that. Yes, ISIL had grown, but al-Qaeda was the one who could conduct those large-scale attacks—the 9/11s. They were very skilled. They had the ability to move people and cause significant damage. The counterterrorism operations that this president did—instead of invading countries like Afghanistan or Iraq—were dealt with surgically, using drones.108 We dealt with it in a way that had the least civilian casualties and inflicted the most damage against the enemy, which was al-Qaeda in the AfPak region or in Yemen. Those were really the two areas we focused on the most.

  LEON PANETTA

  And when you consider the alternatives, if we had to go to full-scale war against al-Qaeda, I’d think history would say that it was an effective way to decimate our enemy in a way that resulted, really, in much less collateral damage than otherwise would have been the case.

  NICK SHAPIRO

  So you had someone like Anwar al-Awlaki who, yes, was an American citizen.109 At the same time, he had pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and was trying to conduct lethal operations against American citizens. So this was not the same process that [we] went through with other terrorists that were removed from the battlefield. There was a higher [legal] standard that was met to do the operation against Awlaki.110 So when you looked at the structure that the White House put in place, it was going after the most significant senior leaders, the folks who could afflict the most harm against Americans and who were plotting to kill Americans, but it was brought under the rule of law.

  DR. HAROLD KOH

  When you’re fighting a terrorist network, you’re invoking the laws of war. That meant that you’re lawfully entitled to make decisions as long as you’re hitting legitimate targets and doing it in accordance with the rules. I didn’t go into the government to kill people. Nobody did. But the next time someone would say something like, “Let’s get the lawyers off the backs of the generals,” my answer to that would be “Don’t you dare.” Generals need lawyers to help them make distinctions—whether something was a lawful act of war or murder. And so, as a lawyer, that’s my job: to make sure that my client didn’t break the law and commit murder.

  NICK SHAPIRO

  There was always a need to try and capture first, and if you can’t capture, then you have to do something else.

  BARBARA LEE

  The Obama administration was very deliberative in how they approached this. They were always concerned about unintended consequences, collateral damage.

  BILL DALEY

  They thought about those things. They worried about them and tried to figure out whether you agreed or not that they should have done Awlaki, or whether or not you believed that we had the ability to go after people in other countries. But it was something the administration struggled with. I didn’t think Cheney ever struggled with it. It didn’t matter to him. I thought it did to Obama. And we may have ended up at the same place that they did, but I think there was a greater sense of concern around those issues than at least how you could seemingly read how the Bush administration approached these things.

  DR. HAROLD KOH

  Brennan and I had a great alliance. I barely knew him. He’s not a lawyer, but he was extremely courageous on this point, I thought, and understood that the legitimacy of our actions followed from how clearly we specified and differentiated green-light zones from red-light zones. And how we carefully delineated rules in the yellow-light zones. There was a lot of public misunderstanding of the rules we articulated. Somebody like a Rand Paul said we could kill an American citizen sitting in a café in New York with a drone.111 That’s obviously false. He just didn’t understand what the rules were.

  LEON PANETTA />
  Like all weapons, it demanded that we thought about how to use it, when to use it, [and] to make sure that it’s being used in a way that was in concurrence with our laws and our values.

  TERRY SZUPLAT

  Again, the technology was there. It’s not going away. Other nations were increasingly, as we’re seeing, developing these technologies. There’re no international rules or norms governing these technologies yet, and so we, as the leader, had the opportunity—and, [Obama] would say, the responsibility—to, through our actions, set certain norms.

  JONATHAN FINER

  Secretary Clinton laid out what would accurately be described as the biggest strategic shift in foreign policy that the Obama administration made in the first term. That is, rebalancing our resources—militarily, economically, diplomatically—toward a region the president believed was going to play a larger role in all elements of our future: the Asia-Pacific. So Secretary Clinton laid out this theory in a long article in Foreign Policy,112 and the president gave a speech elaborating on this theme in the Australian Parliament in Canberra.

  JEFFREY BLEICH

  There were years of work that led up to the president’s announcement in Canberra113 of the [Asia] rebalance . . . We allocated our resources across the globe to reflect the rising economies and opportunities of the Indo-Pacific.

  MICHAEL FROMAN

  The goal there was to tie these countries more closely together. It started off with four relatively small countries, from Latin America to the Asia-Pacific, and the ultimate countries representing 40 percent of the global economy. A dozen economies [joined] the agreement over time. So that’s what [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] would become. Defining high-standard rules of the road for the region, particularly in light of China moving ahead with its own state capitalist model and making sure that there was an alternative out there [to China] for trading partners and allies that reflected the values of an open rules basis.

  MARK LIPPERT

  Basically he felt that if you had treaty allies behind you, that you’d be in far better shape in the Asia-Pacific region. Then, add a few friends and partners with that to deal with China, with India, and with Indonesia—rising powers.

  JONATHAN FINER

  The other important thing happening at this time—and intimately tied to the president’s thinking, I think, on the rebalance of Asia—was that we were drawing down our troops in Iraq. By the end of 2011, the last American combat forces had departed, which fulfilled a campaign promise the president had made to bring about a responsible end to that war.

  LEON PANETTA

  We had hoped to keep somewhere in between eight thousand to ten thousand of our troops, plus maintain our intelligence bases and diplomatic presence. We pretty much had designed a plan to do that. The biggest problem was the inability to develop the agreement.

  JONATHAN FINER

  What happened was, we decided that in order to keep ground forces in Iraq, we needed a sufficient degree of what were called “privileges and immunities”—protection for American forces from being subjected to the Iraqi legal system, which we, frankly, didn’t have a ton of confidence in at that time while these American forces were deployed.

  LEON PANETTA

  There was an effort to try to work that out with Prime Minister [Nouri] al-Maliki. We always thought that, ultimately, Maliki would agree to provide that protection for our forces, and we just could not get there. We were kind of caught in a pressure point that ultimately resulted in the president saying, “If we want to do this more than the Iraqis want to do it, something’s wrong.”

  JONATHAN FINER

  The prime minister of Iraq decided that he did not want to take this agreement—and it’s understandable, politically—because even though Maliki fundamentally believed that we were helpful to the stability of the country, for an Iraqi to say, Not only do we need these American forces, which were already controversial, but we need to give them all this protection from Iraqi laws, almost no matter what they do, I didn’t think he could get parliamentary approval for that. So then he decided not to try, and so that prompted our decision about whether to keep forces in the country. The president decided to withdraw them.

  KAREEM DALE

  Leaving Iraq and ensuring that we didn’t have more men and women coming home with disabilities was always something that was important to the president. It was a good thing, right? Fewer people fighting, fewer people coming home with fewer physical and mental disabilities. And you know, just in terms of the reelection, I did not work on the campaign in 2012. I was still in the White House, and we were just starting to pull ourselves out of that recession. People still were having difficulties and having a hard time seeing the progress being made, even though the unemployment rate was going down. People were rightfully concerned about getting jobs and feeding their families, but people were pleased that we were out of Iraq . . . I just don’t think it was an either/or proposition.

  JON FAVREAU

  The Kansas speech . . . was the setup for the whole campaign. We talked about how economic inequality was the fundamental challenge of our time.114 He wanted to stake that out early on in that race, and we knew that we wanted, no matter who the nominee was on the other side, to focus on the economy and to focus specifically on equality.

  JAMES KVAAL

  The Osawatomie speech showed how important it was to the president that we got back to this fundamental argument about reducing inequality by lifting people up in the middle and people trying to get into the middle. That speech sort of laid out his vision for the mistakes that had been made that got us to the point where economic growth was flowing almost exclusively to the top 1 percent, leaving ordinary Americans working harder and not seeing their incomes go up.

  BILL DALEY

  I left in ’12, so the ’12 election I was pretty much out of it.

  JACK LEW

  The year I was chief of staff was obviously a uniquely challenging year, because the president was running for reelection. My responsibilities included far more than driving the fiscal-policy agenda. It was the full span of chief-of-staff responsibilities, which included everything foreign and domestic.

  HEATHER FOSTER

  Advisor, Office of Public Engagement, White House (2011–2015)

  The Trayvon Martin case was always something that we were tracking, and it took people a while to understand. You know, everyone automatically jumped to Oh, this kid got gunned down. No. This was a young man who was in a gated community visiting his father over a holiday break. He was coming back from the store and was confronted by George Zimmerman and disappeared. No one contacted his parents. Charles Blow had written this column in the New York Times, and it just spiraled.115

  ROY AUSTIN JR.

  I was still in the Civil Rights Division when the Trayvon Martin incident happened, and when the president gave his remarks.

  HEATHER FOSTER

  When the reporter asked him the question, he said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”116 That was a moment since maybe the Beer Summit that had to have careful messaging. Regardless of what people say, people have a natural reaction when you mention race.

  DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD

  A lot of times, as advisors, we’d come to decisions about the best way to respond as an administration, but one of the things that made the president special was that, with things like this, he had his own ideas about how to respond, about what he wanted to say.

  CODY KEENAN

  He was always more willing to push the boundaries. You know, I once had a different conversation about a different speech, and he told me, “Look, I wrote a book on race and identity. When you’ve been grappling with it for forty years, you have a better idea of what you want to say.”

  VALERIE JARRETT

  Why is it that a child walking down the street with Skittles in their hand is instinctively scary? He said the same thing in his race speech about his grandmother who sometimes was “scared of [black men who passed he
r by on the street].” We should ask ourselves why that is, and we should see if we can do something about it.

  HEATHER FOSTER

  It was still a local issue, but all of the folks that I talked to in the communities desperately wanted him to provide, I don’t know if the word is reassurance, but some validation. That’s all they were looking for. They knew, courtswise, this might not turn out the way that we wanted, but they wanted this issue to be recognized. It’s not right that a young black boy can get gunned down and that his parents had no idea where he was for twenty-four hours. That’s unacceptable.

  YOHANNES ABRAHAM

  The killing of Trayvon Martin affected me deeply, personally. While I was on the campaign I wasn’t involved in the deliberations around how or if the president would speak about him, and I imagine that decision was a tight circle in the White House. I would be surprised if anyone on the campaign had weigh-in on that. That’s my guess, knowing how things would work. A lot of moments like that I experienced more as a private citizen than I did in my day-to-day work.

  JAMES KVAAL

  The president’s goal was not just to get the economy growing again and create jobs but also to have a positive impact on middle-class incomes. Those were not necessarily the same thing. If you looked at the economic expansion we had in the 2000s, even over the course of that economic expansion you saw middle-class incomes fall, if you adjusted for inflation. So how did you have an economy that was growing based upon strong fundamentals—not a housing boom, not a tech boom—and, also, how did you make sure that economic growth was shared up and down the ladder?

  JIM MESSINA

  About every two or three weeks, at two o’clock in the morning, I’d get this call from this amazingly really brilliant political operative named Bill Clinton. “Jim, all presidential elections are always a referendum on the economic future. If you win that argument, you’ll win the campaign.” So it wasn’t just about negative. It had to be about a positive vision. That’s how “Forward” came about. We were able to put Romney in the box of defending the old policies of the past when we were for the future.