Obama- An Oral History
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121 “These are young people who study in our schools. They play in our neighborhoods. They’re friends with our kids. They pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one—on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants, and often have no idea that they’re undocumented until they apply for a job or a driver’s license, or a college scholarship.
“Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine you’ve done everything right your entire life—studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class—only to suddenly face the threat of deportation to a country that you know nothing about, with a language that you may not even speak. That’s what gave rise to the DREAM Act. It says that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here for five years, and you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, you can one day earn your citizenship. And I have said time and time and time again to Congress that, send me the DREAM Act, put it on my desk, and I will sign it right away.” —President Obama, White House Rose Garden, June 15, 2012.
122 Director of Communications, White House (2009–2013); Senior Advisor to the President, White House (2013–2015).
123 “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet.” —President Obama at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13, 2012.
2012–2013
The Romney campaign unveiled its running mate on a Saturday afternoon in Norfolk, Virginia. Paul Ryan, the baby-faced representative from Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, had served since 1999, and to many conservatives, he was already mythologized as some mathlete who roamed the halls of the Longworth Building with copies of The Path to Prosperity under his arm. Ryan’s Prosperity proposal, notorious for its aggressive measures to transform Medicare into a voucher system and abolish income tax for capital gains, mobilized voices within a growing Libertarian-bent wing of the Republican caucus and became the basis for the GOP’s fiscal budget proposals. To Republicans with eyes on November 6, his cultivated, wonky persona smacked of a determination and intellect needed after Sarah Palin’s provincial hokeyness.
Tens of thousands of operatives and state delegates descended upon south Florida in late August to witness Ryan take the stage at the Republican National Convention, not to mention booked performances around town by Journey, Kid Rock, and a pole-dancing Palin lookalike at Thee DollHouse. Also in store was a surprise celebrity appearance by Clint Eastwood, who, moments prior to his address on the final night of the RNC, made the spontaneous decision to improvise with an empty chair, where an imaginary President Obama sat for nearly eleven minutes as Eastwood criticized him on subjects ranging from unemployment numbers to his failure to close Gitmo. The invisible POTUS even talked back. “What do you mean, ‘shut up’?” the eighty-two-year-old asked.
A few years later, Eastwood admitted he regretted his “silly” performance, but that night, while watching from backstage, the party’s nominee did not appear to be in a state of panic. “Romney didn’t really care,” Stuart Stevens said of Eastwood’s performance. “It was weird, it was freaky, but it’s not where his head was. He was thinking about what he was gonna do.”
JIM MESSINA
The entire world had been focused on his primary. We couldn’t ever get our message out. We got through the debt-ceiling stuff, and the economic news was starting to turn around but [it still wasn’t] great. It was just hard. But by the time he finally ground his way to the nomination, we were ready. I made these pins for the Chicago staff, and they said “DFA” on them. And I handed ’em out to like four hundred of our staff in our weekly meeting. Everyone was like, What’s DFA? And I said, “We finally have an opponent. His name is Mitt Romney, and DFA stands for ‘Done Fucking Around.’ It is time to define this guy.”
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
David Axelrod and Senator Durbin both got me on a conference call and were really nice. “The president wants bygones to be bygones. He wants to set everything aside.” Something like that. “We’d like to invite you to speak at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte.” And you know what they did? They put me at five fuckin’ o’clock! There were about fifteen people around, but to their credit, at prime time, they brought in undocumented Dreamers to speak who would have qualified for his executive action. So they did the old okeydoke with me again, but I went home feeling pretty good.
GENE SPERLING
When President Clinton gave his speech, you were dealing with a person who was 100 percent on board. Not just giving a great speech to be a statesman, but somebody at an emotional level that really wanted to defend him. He knew what it was like to make a good, fine economic decision for your country and have everybody against you. He knew what it was like to do two major fiscal deals that involved incredible amounts of negotiation and compromise, and he had to live with criticism about not accomplishing things he would have loved to do but just couldn’t because of the political realities.
JOE LOCKHART
White House Press Secretary (1998–2000)
I was working for Facebook at the time. We did an event, I wanna say on the first day, and I had nothing else to do for the next three days. So I was there more for social purposes. I knew the president was giving a speech, but I wasn’t really involved. I show up when asked and not without an invite.
GENE SPERLING
[Clinton] started writing almost two weeks in advance, calling [policy advisor] Bruce Reed and me for facts, for numbers, and so we’re kind of helping to feed stuff, and so I was told when to meet President Clinton as he arrived at Charlotte. So, literally, I was there when his car came. We went up to the room and he pulled out just a ton of handwritten yellow pages. For the next two days, people typed his pages while you were sitting with him in that room.
JOE LOCKHART
I got a call from one of [President Clinton’s] guys at like seven o’clock in the morning: “Would you mind coming by the suite? We’re doing some speech prep, but he wants some fresh eyes and ears.” I said, “When?” He said, “Now.” I was fifteen minutes away, so I went over. So I probably got there seven thirty, eight o’clock in the morning, and we didn’t leave the room till he gave the speech at nine or nine thirty [p.m.].
GENE SPERLING
Axelrod and Plouffe would keep texting us, [asking] could we feed the text. “It’s kind of hard to fax over a hundred yellow pages of handwriting. You have to trust us. This is going well.”
JOE LOCKHART
It was both a typical and atypical Clinton speech prep in this respect. One was, it was the morning of the speech and it wasn’t done. That was typical. It was typical that he had in his mind what he wanted to say, but it wasn’t put down. It was atypical that it got done before it had to get done. I mean, he clearly had a mental clock in his head, because he wanted it completed to make sure he could share it with Obama with enough time that Obama could have input. Which was interesting. That, I hadn’t seen before. He was always open to ideas, but . . . I think he read it to David Axelrod and then sent it to Obama and they were okay with it.
GENE SPERLING
Little things came back. I didn’t know how much was from [Obama] himself, but we were getting it from Favreau, Plouffe, and Axelrod—mostly small things, but [Clinton] really wanted to take everything, all the suggestions—so there was no tension. He wanted to make sure they were okay with things.
JON FAVREAU
Not me, I wasn’t part of it. I remember getting the speech from whomever in Charlotte at the hotel a couple hours before, and then Axe and Plouffe and I all looked at it
and made a few edits, and it was fine. It was great. We just made some cuts because it seemed unbelievably long.
GENE SPERLING
Again, you’re around a table and discussing it, and President Clinton is x-ing out paragraphs and agreeing he’s gotta keep it down. But you gotta remember, he’s actually written this whole speech, and he’s got an amazing memory. So even though you’re cutting it out, he remembered every line.
JOE LOCKHART
The speech was probably an hour and a half. There was an obvious half hour that you could take out of it, which, that wasn’t hard. He was willing. Taking the next half hour out of the speech took about eight hours. Gene and Bruce were there for a couple long blocks of time, but they had a meeting they had to go to. [Former Clinton advisor] Paul [Begala] was definitely there and he had to go do TV. So because I had no other commitment, because I’m a loser, I kind of was along with the president’s staff and continually tried to push everybody. Because, you know, you get a group that’s more than four or five people and you’re trying to cut it down, but some people in the group were trying to put other stuff in.
GENE SPERLING
We had a little back room right where his hotel room was, with a podium. We did a practice or two, and we’re all kind of crowded in there. I remember one time, me coming up to change something and somebody shouted, “Don’t interrupt him!” And I was like, “No, that’s from President Obama himself,” and they’re like, “Oh, okay, okay.”
JOE LOCKHART
All through the day, we kept bringing up, “You could give the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, and if it goes too long, people will only focus on the atmospherics of it.” So he stayed at it and stayed at it and cut it down.
GENE SPERLING
So we cut it down and he practiced it twice. We had it timed, and then he got out there and you know what happened.
JOE LOCKHART
He had a twenty-eight-minute speech on the teleprompter and proceeded to add in whatever it was, another fifteen or twenty minutes from memory, as if it was on the teleprompter. Whole sections had come out, which, by the way, if you watched the speech, it was a great speech. We had taken really good stuff out, and only he could answer this question about whether he knew all along he was gonna do it.
GENE SPERLING
He knew he was crushing it. He went back to things he had cut out and literally said them word for word. His memory was still so good. He had some ad-libs. When he said, “Ryan had to have brass balls” or something,124 that was an ad-lib. But what people thought were ad-libs were really his just remembering things he had liked in his original speech.
JOE LOCKHART
I thought up until that, the campaign . . . they were doing okay. The country was in good shape. He had all the advantages of the incumbency, but it just hadn’t crystallized into something yet.
DAVID PLOUFFE
The last sixty days, we had Benghazi. We had Hurricane Sandy. It’s indescribably hard to run for reelection, much less win, when you’ve also got these serious events that intervene. You also had three presidential debates. I was probably working twenty-one, twenty-two hours a day, and you’re trying to campaign with skill, energize people, and then you’ve got the governing piece.
NATE LUBIN
I was working fifteen, sixteen hours a day for a year straight. Gained a lot of weight. I was very pale. I went to the doctor at some point, and that wasn’t super great. He was like, “You’re healthy, you’re okay right now, but you’re not gonna be.”
JAMES KVAAL
Voters were open to hearing Governor Romney’s argument, and they knew him as a successful moderate governor of Massachusetts, as someone who had been successful in business before that, and they had an open mind [as] to whether he had the answers to the challenges in the economy.
TEDDY GOFF
It’s worth noting that the country was heavily divided, and there were just not that many things that could change people’s votes, but as these things go, the “47 percent” video was a big deal.125 It played into a thing that people really believed, and at that point you had like fifty days left.
DAVID PLOUFFE
We were in Columbus, Ohio, at an event, and I was backstage when the Mother Jones story broke.126 So I looked at the video and got on the phone with Axelrod, Messina, and the campaign for a quick conference call. If I recall, our initial reaction was, Don’t do anything. This’ll do its own damage, then showed the president the video in the presidential limousine, and he couldn’t believe it. He understood its significance, though his instinct was even stronger than ours. Which was, Don’t do anything with this right away.
TEDDY GOFF
Unlike “You didn’t build that,” that was something people thought about Romney, whereas nobody really thought of Obama as having some sick vision for a government-run society. People did think that Romney was the kind of person who was a little bit disdainful of poor or working-class people and just not understanding of their lives. It was a lousy thing that was a perfect storm of kind of insulting the people he’s talking about and also believable as a thing he might actually say.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
At this point, you’re mid-September. You’re into the fall. You’re post–Labor Day, and you’re off and running. This is the point where campaigns would normally go to seven days a week.
TEDDY GOFF
If you think about the election in terms of news cycles, which is a little outdated, but there is such a thing as days, and there was only so much news a person could consume in a day. If three or four or five of those days were consumed in fighting over why you said something and what it meant, and then the second- or third-day stories of where the video came from and what’s the deal, that’s like 10 percent of the time you have left to prosecute your case.
JAMES KVAAL
He seemed to suggest that almost half the country was not important to him. It said something about him personally, but it was also true that his platform was not persuasive to those voters, that they weren’t hearing the kinds of ideas from him that they felt would have had a changeable impact on their lives.
TEDDY GOFF
I remember the morning David Plouffe emailed Ben LaBolt, Larry Grisolano, Jim Messina, [Deputy Campaign Manager] Stephanie Cutter, myself—I forget who else—and basically instructed us to pounce. And I didn’t hear from Plouffe often at all. So, you know, it’s David Plouffe. It certainly was not an original email. He replied to an email somebody else wrote, but when Plouffe’s instructing us to pounce, it’s a big deal.
DAVID PLOUFFE
My email was like, When the cloud lifts, let’s figure out how to keep this in front of people. One of the best ads we ran in that cycle was just the thirty seconds of him with the glasses clinking [and] talking. We didn’t put any words around it. We didn’t try and play it cute. We just wanted to keep that in front of people.
TEDDY GOFF
It knocked him off course. I remember talking to some Romney guys later who just seemed devastated by the whole thing and described crestfallen staff meetings where the campaign manager had to try and buck everybody up.
DAVID PLOUFFE
When you’re given an opening, you have to relentlessly pursue it. You cannot let your opponent up off the mat, and that was obviously one of my most enjoyable two weeks in my American political history—between the “47 percent” tape and the first presidential debate. Romney just couldn’t get out of his own way, and it began to open up. Everything we did during that period was smart, and, of course, you’re reminded that those periods don’t last long. Because basically everything we did in the first debate was not smart. The president didn’t speak at all about that moment.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
That first debate was scary.127 I remember going home and my stomach was completely flipped. It was less any one moment than it was me realizing it was being received and spun. There was not like an “Oh my God” moment. I don’t recall, “The an
swer on Portuguese imports was what turned the whole thing against him.”
MICHAEL STEEL
My recollection was, we were prepping [for the vice-presidential debate] and watching Governor Romney’s first debate, and man, he was good. He called Ryan afterward, and Ryan said something like, “Wow, you really raised the bar for me” or “increased the pressure on me.”
JIM MESSINA
No one had ever lost a debate as badly as we lost that first debate. It just had been a slaughter. I remember right before we went into the spin room, we huddled on the phone with our pollster and heard the dire news on the focus groups. We discussed what we were going to say, and David Axelrod looked at me and said, “Jim, do you know the bad part about being the president’s campaign manager?” And David opened the door to the spin room, pushed me through it, and said, “You first.”
TEDDY GOFF
I thought it was probably worse for us than the “47 percent” was for Romney.
JIM MESSINA
I slid out there and all this press came over to me and I said, “We won this debate tonight!” That’s all I could get out of my mouth before everyone started laughing.
TEDDY GOFF
It really almost reset the whole campaign. Because Obama was the incumbent, you’re seeing him execute his duties as president, but you’re not seeing him out on the campaign trail. As president, he’s often subdued in press conferences or interviews. It’s not the sort of screaming-fans rally environment you remembered from ’08. So that was really the first glimpse that people got of him in that election as a candidate. It was a bummer, and we took a fairly significant hit in the polls.