Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  CODY KEENAN

  What I really loved was, “There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that’s the love we have for our children, for our families, for each other. The warmth of a small child’s embrace—that is true. The memories we have of them, the joy [that] they bring, the wonder we see through their eyes, that fierce and boundless love we feel for them, a love that takes us out of ourselves and binds us to something larger—we know that’s what matters.”

  DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD

  He’s actually phenomenal in those instances, because before anything, he’s a parent. He spent hours with the families.

  CODY KEENAN

  We didn’t have conversations around Tucson about gun legislation, but this was different. You had to. If you didn’t, it would have been a catastrophic failure of leadership, and it happened just as he won reelection and we were coming up on a second term. I think our first thing, out of the gate, was going to be a push on immigration reform, but circumstances intervened. You had to do something about guns instead, even though we knew the odds were going to be really long.

  BILL DAUSTER

  It was a continuing frustration to us. Republicans were the problem. In contrast to the days of the assault-weapons ban decades before, Republican senators came to view, it seemed, the NRA as part of the wing of the Republican Party, an important-enough ally that they’d obtain greater cohesion with them than what was sensible for them.

  CAROLYN MALONEY

  After Sandy Hook, when we had twenty children murdered, I really thought that we would pass gun-safety laws. It’s sort of like, how outrageous could it get before you did something?

  ARNE DUNCAN

  My wife’s from Tasmania, and they had a massacre.134 At that point, Australia changed a bunch of their gun laws, and there has not been a single mass shooting in twenty years. That’s the gift that Australian political leaders gave to that generation of kids. They’ve never known a mass shooting. The prime minister paid a real price, politically, there, but he said it was worth it. Think about kids in Australia, the lack of fear they have, and think about how, for kids in America, it became normalized. We allowed our kids to grow up with that, and other nations didn’t.

  CODY KEENAN

  There were moments where you believed we might have a chance, when polls came out showing that [91] percent of Americans favored background checks, including [87] percent of Republicans and [74] percent of NRA households. He traveled the country for a couple months making a push on that and the fact that we still couldn’t get it done, when it was one of those things where you had fifty-four yes votes in the Senate but you needed sixty. The day that that vote failed and he went out to do the statement in the Rose Garden was one of the two times I’d actually seen him angry, and cynical.135

  ARNE DUNCAN

  In terms of actually getting any basic legislation done to keep kids and keep parents safe? We got an F. We absolutely failed. There’s no other way to put it. The fact that we, as a nation, allowed the sheer quantity of deaths each year, it’s a choice we made. Other nations made other policy choices and they just didn’t have the level of death we had.

  BILL DAUSTER

  The McConnell years were a study in ratcheting up dysfunction and obstruction from Republicans . . . It was remarkable to us that Senator McConnell was able to push his caucus to be even more obstructionist.

  GENE SPERLING

  Everybody always talked about that first debt limit, but what was staggering was how illogical it was that the Republicans walked away from negotiations with the president in the lame duck of 2012. When they did, the president was able to get the top [marginal tax] rate up to 39.6 percent without conceding to any of the entitlement cuts that they were for and that we didn’t support.

  JACK LEW

  Something that I never understood was why, when the fiscal-cliff136 negotiation happened in 2012-2013—I was chief of staff at the time, it was obviously after the 2012 election—there was a pretty strong mandate for the extension of the tax reduction in the high end to be rolled back. It was a moment where Republicans could have gone back to the kind of bargain that the president was open to in 2011, but they didn’t. They instead, I think, made the choice to just lose and to let the tax increase go through and not have their fingerprints on it in a meaningful way. And that would have been a moment where, if they wanted to put together some of the other pieces, they could have.

  AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

  It was because in 2012, Obama had just won the election and he had a mandate. So they were on the defensive.

  GENE SPERLING

  To me, it showed their degree of dysfunction. For progressives, it meant winning by getting the top rate back to 39.6 percent without having to make any concessions we opposed on Medicare or Medicaid, but with the significant downside of allowing the sequester to stay in place.

  AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

  To me, the Bush administration, plus the Fed, plus Obama really did several things right. They avoided what should have been another Great Depression. It’s a great achievement, but it still drives me nuts that we did not have more conditions on the money that the banks got in the fall of 2008. The banks acted with impunity precisely because they didn’t have any conditions.

  TED KAUFMAN

  The inspector general at [the Department of] Justice studied that period and came out with a report—this was a few years later—and found out, of the six areas that Justice was working on, the whole fraud around the financial crisis was number six. It’s in the report.137 In addition to that, I’d interviewed one of the top people in the Eastern District of New York. He was going to be a Circuit Court of Appeals judge, and while he was talking about that, I asked, “By the way, what’s your number-one priority?” And he said, “My number-one priority is cybercrime.” Cybercrime. Not fraud enforcement.

  BARNEY FRANK

  You wouldn’t go criminally against the institutions. You’d go against individuals. I still thought they could have and should have done more. I didn’t think they would have gotten the CEOs or people at the top who were insulated, but I think it was a mistake.

  TED KAUFMAN

  If you read the prior testimonies, they all said, We’re gonna do it, don’t worry. Clearly they didn’t. Then Lanny [Breuer], at his [New York City Bar Association] speech, said [if they indicted], “Innocent employees could lose their jobs.”138 Lanny never said that to me as a rationale for not prosecuting. Then Eric Holder gave the same kind of speech139 . . . No one had mentioned to me that maybe we shouldn’t prosecute people because it may cause an economic dislocation of the employees. So you mean to say if a guy could help the economy and he shot somebody, we shouldn’t put him in jail?

  MARGARET RICHARDSON

  You had to have a credible belief that you would have a chance of succeeding at trial. I didn’t think people who were looking at the way the financial cases unfolded, who were critical of the department, gave it a fair shake. It’s not like they could point to some admission made by a CEO or general counsel of a bank. It’s more just how could this have happened without people knowing or without criminal conspiracies happening. “There must have been evidence!”

  TED KAUFMAN

  You could question someone’s judgment, but you couldn’t question someone’s motivation, because you just didn’t know what it was. But let me say this: there’s an incredible conflict of interest in the revolving door. When you looked at the revolving door on not just this issue but many issues, far too often people left the government to work for the very people they were supposed to prosecute or oversee. If I wanted to go back to Wall Street and had put somebody in jail, I’d have a difficult time going back to the firm I was with or starting with a new firm.

  DAVID OGDEN

  That’s really cynical and unfair. Anybody in those jobs was looking to be successful at them. Nobody’s trying to serve the clients that they someday hope to have. To the contrary, you’re serving the United States. There’s an ener
getic effort to make those cases if you can make ’em. I’m 100 percent with Lanny there.

  MARGARET RICHARDSON

  It’s not like a bank would hire you if you were adverse to them and you rolled over. They would say, “I don’t want that guy, because he’s gonna blow it when he’s defending us!” The reason that some of these institutions hire people with good reputations coming out of government was because they have good reputations coming out of government. This idea that someone would have caved in order to solicit favor from a future client just fundamentally misunderstands how those kinds of relationships evolve.

  TED KAUFMAN

  They felt the heat. Trust me. These were really smart guys. They weren’t going to prosecute anybody? Nobody’s going to jail?

  BARNEY FRANK

  As some of my liberal friends forget, we’re the ones who believe in civil liberties and due process, and a key part of due process is, you should not be subjected to criminal sanctions unless you can be reasonably certain that your behavior would lead to that. The phrase “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” meant that, if the law was there and you didn’t know it, that’s your problem. But if the law was so ambiguous that nobody could know with any reasonable degree of assuredness, then you didn’t go to jail. You don’t send people to jail for vague stuff. The other part of it was, some of the stuff wasn’t illegal. Having said all that, I think, yes, they should have prosecuted more. I am frustrated as to why they didn’t.

  MATTHEW MILLER

  A lot of things that are corrupt are not illegal. There were a lot of cases we would have loved to make—I mean, it’s true these were career-making cases. People tried as hard as they could, and they couldn’t bring the cases. We had all these investigations going out of [the Southern District of New York]. It was assumed that those would bear fruit and would lead to criminal cases against various Wall Street entities—just because there were so many investigations going. I had always wondered, if you could rewind the clock to ’09 and go, Look, none of these open cases that we have are gonna bear fruit, we probably would have thrown more resources at them.

  MARGARET RICHARDSON

  People wanted a perp walk—the same things that people were very grateful that the Obama administration had undone in the criminal-justice system with people with more street-type offenses. That’s not how it worked.

  MATTHEW MILLER

  One of the stories about Eric Holder’s time at DOJ was that in the first term, he was quietly doing a lot of things on criminal-justice reform. There was, of course, the crack-powder bill that passed in 2010, the Fair Sentencing Act.140

  BARBARA LEE

  It got rid of [five-year] mandatory minimums [for crack-cocaine possession], brought down the [sentencing ratio] on crack cocaine. It went from 100:1 to 18:1. There were a lot of issues members of the Black Caucus worked on day and night with the White House.

  DAVID OGDEN

  The racial-justice element in the crack-to-powder [ratio] was a pretty compelling storyline. Why were we putting these people in jail? Why were we putting nonviolent offenders in jail for their whole lives when the cost was so enormous and the toll, in terms of our sense of justice and in our communities, was so grave? Why didn’t we have a more principled policy?

  VALERIE JARRETT

  We thought it was important to reduce those mandatory minimum sentences and take some of the savings to help people who were incarcerated have the skills and drug treatment that they needed. Or alcohol treatment, counseling. Whatever they needed so that when they were ultimately released from prison, they will be able to return to society as productive citizens.

  MATTHEW MILLER

  [Holder] was doing a lot of work that set the stage for 2013 and 2014, when he pushed through major reforms in the way DOJ treated people accused of crimes and people who’ve been convicted of crimes after they have been released from prison.

  VALERIE JARRETT

  [We worked on] reforming our bail systems so that people who were incarcerated were not there simply because they were poor. Because on average, our data showed that of the eleven million people who cycled through jails on an annual basis, they stayed on an average of twenty-three days. Yet only 5 [percent] were ultimately sentenced to prison. So ask yourself, was it worth keeping someone incarcerated for twenty-three days if ultimately we were going to release them? And were they there because they were dangerous, or were they there because they couldn’t afford bail?

  RON DAVIS

  Police Chief, City of East Palo Alto (2005–2013)

  Director, Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), US Department of Justice (2013–2017)

  Executive Director, President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2014–2017)

  She’s right. Something like 65 percent of jail spaces was pretrial detainment, and we have a system that says, If you have money, you get out. If you don’t, you don’t. For a lot of these low-level crimes, people sit in jail because they don’t have the bail. And that time in jail does more damage to the person who would be more likely to not recidivate again. In that time, they lose their job. They’re disconnected from their family. There are tools now to assess somebody—whether they’re likely to recidivate while they’re on bail—and if you can reduce that population, get people alternatives to get out, they don’t keep going to prison.

  VALERIE JARRETT

  The question was, what was society going to do to give them a second chance? Did they have the requisite skills to hit the ground running? Did they have the support system for housing, clothing, allowance, and job opportunities? We encouraged the private sector to hire people who had been incarcerated and not ask, on their applications, whether they had been incarcerated. The president signed an executive order for federal contractors to abide by “the ban on the box.”141

  HEATHER FOSTER

  Two things happened that, to me, in 2013, really got President Obama thinking. A young woman named Hadiya Pendleton was killed a week after performing at the inauguration. She lived in Hyde Park, the same neighborhood the president [had] lived in, and was gunned down coming home from school . . . And in July, when you saw that George Zimmerman had been acquitted, people kind of lost their minds. I was here in DC. It was the same week as Delta Sigma Theta Incorporated, the largest African American female sorority out here, [was] having this centennial. And so I remember having dinner with friends in a restaurant, and the minute the verdict came across the television, people were screaming.

  CODY KEENAN

  He did have to acknowledge the very real anger out there about this. I didn’t think it was anger that was limited to the black community, but we always had to be careful to do it in a way, and I’m not saying he knew he always had to be careful. I’m saying, just because the way the media environment worked, we would always have to be careful when talking about that. So you didn’t alienate people along racial lines.

  HEATHER FOSTER

  That was when he first started talking about [how] we gotta do more things for boys and men of color, because they’re faced with these ridiculous challenges that we still hadn’t addressed in our society.

  ROY AUSTIN JR.

  In the Civil Rights Division we wrote a statement of interest in the Floyd case.142 This was the New York City stop-and-frisk class-action lawsuit. We weighed in because the evidence was so stark that the vast majority of these searches had resulted in nothing—no contraband, no arrest. And then we sat there and watched when the New York City Police Department reduced the number of people [they were] stopping and frisking, violent crime in New York went down. So you didn’t have to do this “broken windows” nonsense—there was another way that did not harm individuals and families primarily from minority and low-income communities.

  RON DAVIS

  Here’s where the confusion set in. The broken-windows theory simply said that you fix things that were small before they led to bigger issues; that the small things led to bigger things, and if you didn’t fix the broke
n windows, it would basically mean the community was apathetic. That many more broken windows would follow. Now, the problem had been that individual agencies started attaching zero tolerance to that theory. In other words, “broken windows” could work if you’re saying, Fix the small things, which meant you fixed the window. You identified what the conditions were that caused a break-in and provided alternatives so that kids didn’t break windows—education and mentoring programs, opportunities that the president always was fighting for. If it turned out that if you instead fought them or took them to jail for jaywalking and spitting on the sidewalk, then the collateral damage of that policy was devastating to communities, especially communities of color.

  ROY AUSTIN JR.

  This was, in many ways, the administration leaning in and saying, This is a problem. People who have never been stopped by the police don’t get it. They think, Oh, the police stop you. You didn’t have anything on you. Your life is fine. But in certain communities, people could hardly walk down the street without being accused of being a criminal or being stopped and searched. The psychological impact of that, even when you have nothing on you, is a significant burden to carry with you under this cloud of constant suspicion. People just didn’t get that, and they didn’t get it that a lot of these communities felt that it was because they were black or because they were Latino that this was happening to them.

  RON DAVIS

  As an enforcement strategy, it’s terrible. It caused significant damage. It basically resulted in mass arrests, disparate treatment, and this was why you heard all the concern.

  ROY AUSTIN JR.

  Well, you attack the immigrant community, you attack poor people, and you attack black and brown individuals, they’re not going to go to the local police department and say, “I know who did that.” They don’t trust the system, and without a community to trust the system, you couldn’t fight the violent crime. You needed those people to talk to law enforcement, and if they didn’t trust law enforcement, they’re not going to answer their doors.