Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  YOHANNES ABRAHAM

  The communicators, I’m sure, spent a lot of time arguing about the [“Forward”] slogan and the design and all that. If you were an organizer and you were on the battleground-state team, getting those rallies off the ground was what you were tasked with, and that was your concern. I might be remembering this wrong, but the number-one thing you’re afraid of in moments like that at a rally was a bad camera shot.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  The president had an interview [scheduled] with Robin Roberts from ABC News and was going to discuss gay marriage, talk about his full evolution. If I recall, that was a Wednesday,117 and Biden made his remarks the Friday before.

  STUART STEVENS

  The first time in history that anyone ever listened to Joe Biden—he came out for it, and clearly the reason Biden did it was because he was worried that [the campaign was] gonna back away from it. It wasn’t a gaffe. He’s not an idiot.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  I was really angry about this. Actually, I feel bad about this in retrospect.

  BEN LABOLT

  The president had said for a long time he wanted to make his position on it clear, and he previewed that answer over the years by saying he had evolved in his thinking. We knew the venue it was likely to come up in, so, you know, the VP jumping that by a few days was not part of the plan.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  We were completely shocked—the president, myself, Jack Lew, others in the White House—when we got the transcript of the Biden interview. So it was not a trial balloon. We already had this laid out. We had strong words about it, because it made it look like the president was responding to the VP. And that was going to be an important moment for us. I wanted it to be the president’s moment.

  BEN LABOLT

  At the same time it’s like, when the history books note it, they both came out for same-sex marriage a week apart. To me, what’s important was that they came out for it.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  President Obama actually didn’t really care. He said, “Well, listen, I’d been talking to Joe about this, so he probably thought he had the permission structure to do this.” Which kind of infuriated me, because I wanted the president also to realize how this affected our best-laid plans.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Obama and Biden were extremely close colleagues. They genuinely loved each other. That’s a real thing, whereas that’s not always the case with previous presidents and vice presidents.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  I was just maniacal about order and planning, and this was disrupted. Secondly, I thought it was historic, and I wanted the president to have that stage. It’s a moment that would go through the decades and generations. Not surprisingly, a lot of the press commentary was, “Biden got ahead of Obama.” None of that was true, and so at the end of the day the history books won’t talk about that. It’s a good lesson, but sometimes when you’re in the middle of something it’s hard to have that perspective.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Things like that happen when you’re working at the White House. Early on in the administration there was a swine flu in the country. Biden made a comment about how he wouldn’t advise families to use [“any system of public transportation where you’re confined”].118 It created a bit of a firestorm. It’s hard to always be on message, but part of why people loved Biden was because he’s a genuine, straightforward person and said what’s on his mind, which was a virtue. But there were days when you’d be presented with challenging moments.

  TYLER MORAN

  There had been a real pivot to the White House from the advocacy community to pressure the administration to grant legal status to Dreamers119—which, at that time, [the White House] was really pushing back and saying the president’s office didn’t have the authority to do it, [that] it was Congress’s deal. There was a really ramped-up, intense pressure leading through ’11 and then finally in ’12.

  LUIS GUTIÉRREZ

  By this point, there’s a broad movement. It’s April of 2012, and he sent Cecilia Muñoz to speak to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, because I had already met with Senator Rubio on a DREAM Act bill, which would give them status but wouldn’t give them citizenship. And I had gone around telling everybody, “If Obama won’t stop the deportations”—because his deportation numbers were going up—“we should all work with Rubio and get a bipartisan bill and at least set aside the Dreamers.”

  CECILIA MUÑOZ

  I remember the meeting. While the press got really excited about a Rubio puts Obama in a tough spot narrative, the impetus for DACA . . . evolved from a bunch of policy shifts . . . Essentially, there’re eleven million people who are deportable, and before the Obama administration, the [Homeland Security] strategy was to find as many of them as possible. So [DHS] Secretary Napolitano [began] modest steps toward establishing a system of priorities so that they went from Let’s find as many people as we can to Let’s be strategic and go after people who are priorities because they pose some kind of harm or threat. Everybody agreed the Dreamers should be low priority for enforcement, and lo and behold, Dreamers kept ending up in the deportation pipeline because the policy was not airtight enough and the behavior at the agency was not changing enough. And Secretary Napolitano’s barometer was Are we still picking up Dreamers? Are we wasting enforcement resources on these folks? Because that kept happening, she brought DACA to us.120

  TYLER MORAN

  On my first day at the White House I was told we were going to move on what became DACA and was in the Rose Garden on Friday for the announcement121 . . . The president had basically approved giving deferred action to Dreamers. Then we had sixty days to stand up the program. So it was a pretty crazy summer, because on August 15, the first applications could be accepted.

  PETE SOUZA

  There’s an interesting transition that took place in his presidency, and you could sort of see it best on the rope line. When the president finished making a speech and walked off the stage, he’d shake hands with people in the audience. And the first few years, there was a lot of excitement. People would shake his hand, and you’d see every fifth or sixth person with a little point-and-shoot camera. Then, somewhere along the way, I would guess probably around 2011—we certainly saw it in the campaign of 2012—everybody had a smartphone. Everybody was trying to get a selfie with him, and they were missing the moment of looking the president of the United States in the eye and shaking his hand.

  KORI SCHULMAN

  Deputy Chief Digital Officer, Office of Digital Strategy, White House (2009–2017)

  You look at photos of East Room events early in the presidency in 2009. People were seated or standing, but they’re looking at the president. A couple people had small handheld cameras, but then it’s a total transition in the later years where it’s just, like, a sea of iPhones.

  PETE SOUZA

  He did not like doing selfies. It got to the point where he would actually say to people on the rope line, “Put your camera down and shake my hand and look me in the eye.” Now, he’d usually say that to the little kids, right? Kids that are twelve to fourteen, I mean—it’s hard to say that to an adult. In terms of news cameras and stuff like that, it never bothered him. He didn’t like to pose. He never liked to do a magazine cover shoot. He was very impatient. He wouldn’t give people that much time. Even me.

  Pete Souza: “I’d say 99 percent of what I did was documentary/candid photography . . . This was in the 1 percent category.” Pete Souza, White House.

  DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD

  Any president gets to a point where they’re exhausted. We’d run very hard, and he’d get to the point, I need a break. At the same time, if we gave him that break, he’d be like, I’m supposed to be out. There’s something I could be doing. Shouldn’t I be traveling? Shouldn’t I be out? Then, you gotta put him back out.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  The number of people in the White House who interacted with the campaign in Chicago was minimal. We s
tudied what the Bush people did pretty carefully, and Jack Lew and I had a great division of responsibility. So usually Dan Pfeiffer122 and I were the only ones on the weekly call to Chicago. It’s not like we had twenty-five different people in the White House offering opinions about what ads we should run in Ohio.

  JOEL BENENSON

  We ran a campaign in 2012 based on the idea that you build an economy from the middle out, not the top down. People had been feeling for more than a decade that corporate profits were staggeringly high and their wages were stagnant. There’s disconnect there. I thought the Republicans totally misread that, and we were happy to engage that debate. We called for raising taxes on the very wealthy. President Obama ran in 2012 saying he was going to repeal the Bush tax cuts.

  STUART STEVENS

  There’s no question that Barack Obama brought a different governing philosophy than the majority of the country. He’d always been seen as more ideologically left. Barack Obama was someone who had grown as well, because he’s a smart and sane adult and, certainly in areas of foreign policy, he changed greatly, but he saw the world through a social-justice framework . . . When he said something like “You didn’t build that,” he’s speaking from that worldview.123 It’s not just a gaffe. It was speak through a debate over the role of government in our society.

  JOEL BENENSON

  The American people at that point understood what President Obama was saying. Government does have a role to play in strengthening our economy. You could go back to Abraham Lincoln building the Transcontinental Railroad, starting land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century. The private sector didn’t do those things. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, building the Interstate Highway System—what did it do? Opened markets across America to businesses big and small that could ship their products around the country. The notion that somehow, even in our capitalist society, that business alone created economic progress was just horseshit. Public universities educating Americans—business didn’t do that. We had the most educated workforce in the world. Why?

  TEDDY GOFF

  Nobody really thought that he had this crypto-communist vision of America where anything you had was thanks to the government and there’s no such thing as businesspeople having achievements. Obviously there were people who freakin’ hated the guy and thought he wasn’t even born in the United States or whatever, but the median voter in the United States basically liked the guy, trusted him, and believed he was doing his best. Instead, Romney overreached and made it out like Obama was a huge failure. Now, people didn’t necessarily know the details of economic policy, they probably weren’t satisfied with the pace of improvement, but nobody thought he made the economy worse.

  STUART STEVENS

  In that same press conference, he said the private sector’s doing fine. One of the things I thought that’s really important about the Obama years was, in our culture, the Center-Left had been much better about talking about those left behind and disadvantaged than the Center-Right. It’s just not part of the Center-Right vocabulary. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the truth. During the Obama years, a lot of the voices that would speak to those who had been left behind, which were millions and millions of Americans, had been somewhat muted. They wanted to support the president, and they didn’t want to help Republicans. So you had this phenomenon, and it’s one of the contributing factors to Trump and Bernie Sanders, this sort of conspiracy of silence that things were better than they were.

  * * *

  107 Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US creditworthiness to AA+ from AAA, a rating the nation had previously maintained for more than 70 years until S&P frowned upon 2011’s “political brinkmanship” and a deficit agreement that “falls short” of the ability “to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” The downgrade immediately resulted in a dip in financial markets across the globe, including a staggering 634-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

  108 The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone is a remotely piloted aircraft that was originally developed in the 1990s for reconnaissance and observation purposes, but has since been outfitted with Hellfire missiles and other ammunitions to serve in combat settings. Their offensive use by the US Armed Forces and Central Intelligence Agency is classified.

  109 On September 30, 2011, a missile strike carried out by Predator drones killed al-Awlaki, US citizen and alleged operative of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), in Yemen’s al-Jawf province. One year prior, Obama had authorized his killing by the CIA, citing the vast number of terrorist activities he was believed to be involved in or have inspired—including the attacks on September 11, the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, and the 2009 attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253. Human-rights advocates have argued that the decision to kill al-Awlaki represented a violation of his due-process rights as an American citizen and amounted to an extrajudicial execution.

  110 The justification for conducting a preemptive drone strike against an American national as an act of war—despite the target’s not being recognized on any battlefield—centered around the argument that the US had the right to defend itself if facing a “continued and imminent threat,” per a 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memo from the Department of Justice. The memo identified such a target as a “leader of an organization” (versus, say, an expendable foot soldier) who demonstrated efforts to attack the American people. Intelligence indicated al-Awlaki’s connection to AQAP and multiple future plots, e.g., the poisoning of Western water supplies and explosives surgically implanted in humans, which would go undetected by airport security.

  111 “I rise today for the principle. That Americans could be killed in a café in San Francisco, or in a restaurant in Houston, or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination.” —Rand Paul, participating in a March 7, 2013, Republican filibuster on the Senate floor to halt the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director.

  112 “With Iraq and Afghanistan still in transition and serious economic challenges in our own country, there are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition, but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward—we cannot afford not to.

  “Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of American firms to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia. Strategically, maintaining peace and security across the Asia-Pacific is increasingly crucial to global progress, whether through defending freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, countering the proliferation efforts of North Korea, or ensuring transparency in the military activities of the region’s key players.” —Secretary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011.

  113 November 16, 2011.

  114 “At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: Would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were being controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because there were people who thought massive inequality and exploitation of people was just the price you pay for progress.

  “Theodore Roosevelt disagreed . . . And in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here to Osawatomie, and he laid out his vision for what he called a ‘new nationalism.’ ‘Our country,’ he said, ‘means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy . . . of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.’” —President Oba
ma at Osawatomie High School, Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6, 2011.

  115 Charles Blow, “The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” New York Times, March 16, 2012.

  116 “Obviously this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together—federal, state, and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened. So I’m glad that not only is the Justice Department looking into it, I understand now that the governor of the state of Florida has formed a task force to investigate what’s taking place.

  “I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen. That means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened as well as the specifics of the incident. But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And, you know, I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re gonna get to the bottom of exactly what happened.” —President Obama, press conference in the White House Rose Garden, March 23, 2012.

  117 May 9, 2012.

  118 April 30, 2009.

  119 In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute estimated some 114,000 undocumented immigrants, who would be protected under the 2010 DREAM Act, would instantly qualify to apply for permanent residence. (An estimated 96,000 were within the ages of 18–34.) Another 612,000 who qualified for conditional legal status would need to obtain a higher education or serve two years in the military to then apply for permanent residence.

  120 On June 15, 2012, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano instructed US Customs and Border Protection to defer enforcement on “certain young people who were brought to this country as children and know only this country as home”—specifically, those ages sixteen to thirty who have lived in the US for five years and with no criminal record, who are either enrolled in school or have served honorably in the Coast Guard or US military. Two months later, the administration initiated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application program, which issued renewable two-year permits to qualifying individuals for work eligibility without fear of deportation.