Obama- An Oral History
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BRAD JENKINS
We had already been thinking of big ideas where we’d need break-emergency-glass moments for enrollment. We had flown Valerie out to LA, and she met with Zach [Galifianakis]. She met with screenwriters and producers. She met with will.i.am. Will was thinking about doing a health-care-type song similar to “Yes We Can,” but apparently that never materialized. And, yeah, consumer experts were telling us, “This is going to be impossible. It’s really hard to make health care sexy and cool.”
NATE LUBIN
Between Two Ferns was a Valerie Jarrett–engineered thing. It wouldn’t have happened without her. It had been an idea we’d talked about in the campaign at some point and had come back around.
KORI SCHULMAN
The digital team would have pie-in-the-sky brainstorms about tons of ideas that would never see the light of day. Two Ferns had been on this list for years, a dream project we would have loved to see happen.
BRAD JENKINS
Because the website was an epic disaster, it was hard for the president to come back and say, “Hey, go back to the website. It works now.” So to come back with some humility and self-awareness, to completely make fun of himself, that was obviously the thing about that video. So when we first started talking to [Funny or Die], they made clear that it had to be like every other Between Two Ferns. It couldn’t be watered down. It couldn’t be some big Obamacare commercial.
NATE LUBIN
Partnerships like that were high risk, obviously. When you’re the president of the United States, the upside and downside risks were not the same. The upside was, you’d get your message out a little bit, and it’s hard to measure the value of some of those things. You know, you make a great case on health care, then some foreign-policy crisis happens and you gotta pivot to that. So the story would end up being that you screwed up.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
We had to be as scrappy and creative as we could be, because we had a job we had to get done, and ended up getting done.
BRAD JENKINS
Valerie had told the president that this would be our breakthrough; tens of millions of people were going to watch it. That was the expectation, and so when we shot it160 and it got thirty million views after we released it161 in its first few days, Healthcare.gov saw a 40 percent uptick in traffic. Ninety percent of the people clicking Healthcare.gov from Funny or Die had never been to Healthcare.gov before. It was the exact healthy demographic who would never think to go to Healthcare.gov or who had never heard of it, and I got to brief the president about the success of the video.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
You know, it’s probably true that the urgency around enrollment did lead us to be creative in a way we might not have been otherwise.
BRAD JENKINS
Someone literally helped me clean baby-vomit stains off of my suit jacket before I went into the Oval, and I had maybe five minutes, way more time than we needed. But I walked him through it all. And not to sound hyperbolic, but no president ever went on a program like this—an internet-only, weird satirical show. It was the biggest video of the year, and I was thinking, Wow, maybe he’ll give me a fist bump. It’d be this moment where Barack and I would become friends, and that did not happen. He smiled and congratulated me. Valerie was in the office as well, and he looked at her. “Val, I thought this was your idea?” And she was like, “No, no. This was Brad’s.” The biggest takeaway from all this was, he expected it. That decision was probably the least-important decision he had made in those twenty-four hours, whether to go on that stupid show. He’s dealing with life-and-death matters on national security.
TERRY SZUPLAT
I wasn’t in a policy position, so I wasn’t running around meeting-to-meeting trying to figure out how to respond to any given situation, but just in the broadest general terms, it was an extremely challenging time, especially on the foreign-policy side. Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine was one of the most consequential moments in Europe since the end of the Cold War. You actually had one nation essentially invading another nation and trying to rewrite the borders of post–World War II Europe. I mean, everyone in the White House and people around the world understood . . . how reckless this was on the part of Putin.
HEATHER FOSTER
We went through a year where there were a variety of crises. People don’t talk about it anymore, but remember when Ebola was on the television screen twenty-four hours a day? People were massively concerned about catching Ebola, and, you know, here we are and people are almost laughing about it. Do you remember how they literally got rid of an entire airplane because one person had Ebola on the plane?
TERRY SZUPLAT
Ebola was certainly out of control in West Africa. Spring was sort of the rise of ISIS and its sweep across western Iraq. There may have been other issues here, but you had, as part of the rise of ISIS, a number of the kidnappings and beheadings in the spring/summer of ’14. You had Ferguson. I mean, these were all happening at the same time. It was an incredibly challenging time.
TED CHIODO
2014 was tough. We were still basically making sure that the first two years after the reelect, that we were implementing that part of the president’s agenda. There hadn’t been a lot of easy decisions. We were still a ways away from the finish line, but I had always thought, aside from my shingles, it was a good time to get some new blood into the White House. I could only have done six poison-prevention proclamations. “The first thing about poison is, don’t call 911. Try not to eat it. If you do, call the prevention hotline.” There were only so many National Boating Week proclamations you could do without getting jaded.
ARUN CHAUDHARY
There was so much grind and so much hustle. You’re doing the same things all the time, and it could be maddening. For me, doing the third Saint Patrick’s Day celebration was one of the reasons why I was like, You know what? I will have no problem leaving my job at the White House. It was so much the same thing over and over again, but that’s not to say it’s not an honor to work there.
PETE SOUZA
The thing that I always admired about President Obama, as well as Michelle, was that, you know, maybe after the fifth or sixth time, you didn’t really wanna do the Easter Egg Roll. And yet they always got up for the occasion. There was enthusiasm on their part for every Easter Egg Roll, and you could imagine having to do this every year. It’s kinda like, at least, if it were me, I’d be like, God, why do I have to do this again? And those two, they rose to the occasion every single time. I thought they both realized that, Did this define the presidency? No. But it meant so much to the people that were involved, and as a result, they felt they were role models for all those kids to get people enthusiastic about reading, listening, participating in the whole Easter Egg Roll. Does that make any sense?
HEATHER FOSTER
You gotta remember: post-2009 was “postracial.” It was all good. Everybody was holding hands. There’s no more racism in our country. We had a black president, but there were a lot of disparity issues because of that 2008-2009 crash. You had unemployment in the double digits for African Americans. Things drastically impacted the African American community and other communities of color that weren’t addressed at all. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Banks didn’t loan to African Americans the way that they loaned to white Americans. To be honest, African Americans were holding on to a lot of issues, issues that had been issues since I’d been born.
RON DAVIS
Some people say that race relations got worse under President Obama, and I thought, as an African American, that’s just completely false. It’s like the old thing on “Men don’t like to go to doctors.” You go to the doctor, and the doctor says, “Hey, you got stage IV,” and you come out saying, “I was okay until I saw the doctor.” You were not even close to being okay. You just didn’t know. So the president didn’t create the tension. Circumstances and his leadership pulled the Band-Aid off of the wound that was not healing.
HEATHER
FOSTER
These were issues that we continued to carry and were upset about, but people saw a window where this was actually going to get press attention.
MARGARET RICHARDSON
That early August there were a lot of conference calls trying to figure out what was happening on the ground in Ferguson.162 There had also been a discussion about what to say, when to say it, when to go, and whether to go. We had obviously talked about what the goals were: trying to make sure that we were connecting with the relevant stakeholders, making sure [AG Holder] had time to talk to law enforcement as well as to the community activists—to young people, to people who were feeling like the protests weren’t sparked by Michael Brown’s death but the result of a simmering distrust and failure of community-police relations over a long period of time.
RON DAVIS
Law enforcement was forced to look in the mirror and acknowledge our own past, to recognize it’d take strong leadership to move forward. And some people resisted. But it was not a longstanding resistance, because the rank-and-file officers understood.
ROY AUSTIN JR.
I was a longtime prosecutor before I joined the administration. I was a civil-rights prosecutor and a street-crimes prosecutor in Washington, DC. And as a civil-rights prosecutor, part of our job was looking at excessive-force cases and prosecuting law enforcement, but in order to do that you would work closely with other law enforcement who’d help you. Whether it’s the internal affairs of the local department, or the FBI civil-rights investigators, you’re trying to make clear that you absolutely respect the profession, that we all needed law enforcement, while at the same time prosecuting those who were damaging the brand of good officers. So you were constantly in this kind of dichotomy of great officers helping you prosecute bad officers.
HEATHER FOSTER
Trayvon wasn’t Michael Brown. Michael Brown was that guy that hung out in the neighborhood. Trayvon should have been more relatable to people in general, but the same kind of outcomes kept happening with these boys and men of color who kind of seemed to be on this track of, like, How are you going to be successful in this society if all you’re faced with is prejudice?
VANITA GUPTA
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, US Department of Justice (2014–2017)
The cases were pretty different. [Michael Brown’s] involved a shooting by a police officer, meaning a representative of government, in a certain sense, and Trayvon was killed by a private actor. So they were situated very differently that way. In Trayvon’s case, the Justice Department announced an investigation but watched the state process unfold. In Michael Brown’s case, the Justice Department opened a tandem federal investigation along with the state investigation. One very directly went to the broader systemic issues on race and policing, whereas Trayvon, I think, really forced people to ask themselves a lot of questions about race in America—about our own stereotypes, our own actions—and then ask a different set of questions about stand-your-ground laws.
HEATHER FOSTER
If you remember, the [Brown] shooting took place over the summer, when [Obama] had actually gone on vacation. Then, when he returned, Attorney General Holder went down to Ferguson. DOJ was doing this whole pattern-or-practice [investigation] with the police department, but everyone had been waiting on the district attorney to make the decision whether they were going to press charges [against Officer Darren Wilson]. And everyone who was in Ferguson or was an activist in that area clearly told us if charges were not brought that they were going to protest, and that’s what happened in November in multiple cities.
VANITA GUPTA
It certainly caught the attention of the Justice Department in important ways, and also caught the attention of the country to focus again on race and the criminal-justice system. You know, one of the things that Black Lives Matter did was really validate the experiences of Ferguson residents. And not just Ferguson residents, but also people of color in the region, around the ways in which the police and the courts interacted to harass and degrade people of color through fines and fees and policing practices. That discourse has continued, but those issues have not been resolved.
BRAD JENKINS
Black Lives Matter, as opposed to Occupy, had clear policy priorities as it related to use of force, community-police engagement, and all of these things.
JON CARSON
I mean, it’s lasted longer right? BLM seemed to create local chapters with local goals. I think part of the problem for Occupy Wall Street was that the original idea was to just literally occupy Wall Street in New York. Then all these other cities sprung up and it wasn’t exactly clear what they were going after, whether Oakland or Washington, DC, or Madison, Wisconsin, that had to do with that locality. Black Lives Matter had issues that could actually be concrete in the local area for most places.
HEATHER FOSTER
I found all of [the local leaders of BLM]. I called half of them while they were in the middle of protesting and introduced myself. “We’d like to have you come to the White House to talk more about what you’ve been doing and what makes you feel angry about these issues.” The president had been clear with me in basically saying, I want these young people to also understand what the government can and can’t do. Most people just didn’t know what the power of the presidency was. There wasn’t a magic wand he could have waved and everything would have been okay in Ferguson. It just didn’t work like that. These were still local issues.
BRAD JENKINS
Simultaneously, while all of the BLM stuff was happening, the president had launched his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. This was an initiative, interagency-wide, to study what we could do to provide more career pathways for young black boys.
VALERIE JARRETT
My Brother’s Keeper was designed to help the lives of boys and young men of color and try to put their lives on a better trajectory, but at the same time, the broader community had to embrace them and realize that we’re all Americans together.
BRAD JENKINS
Take a look at incarceration rates and dropout rates—there were clearly gaps in the system that they were falling through. And so while we were simultaneously releasing this, all of these atrocities were happening and being shot on iPhones. It was even more important for that team and for Heather to engage with BLM, and for the Department of Justice to be in touch with them.
HEATHER FOSTER
It was a difficult meeting to put together. Oval Office meetings usually had CEOs or members of Congress—people who were not kids that had been arrested forty-eight hours prior. These were people willing to push past laws to get what they wanted to get done, and so we didn’t want people who were going to be upset and start flipping stuff over.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
I’ve always thought folks were able to be more effective when they have a seat at the table, but yeah, it was probably not an uncomplicated decision for the folks who were invited.
HEATHER FOSTER
They were skeptical. Part of them was like, “This better not be a photo op. I could lose my credibility when I go back to my community.” And, you know, I did my best. I met with all of them the night before. “Look, I’m the realest when it comes to being real. I’m not overly political. I’m not trying to run for office.” And I told them, “This is a really important time in history. Everybody’s looking at you. The best thing you can do for your communities is to communicate to the leader of the free world why you are protesting and why you are in the streets.”
Obama meets with community leaders and law-enforcement officials in the wake of the events in Ferguson. From left to right: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Ferguson activist and community organizer Rasheen Aldridge, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Philadelphia Police Department Commissioner Charles Ramsey. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. December 1, 2014. Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
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149 “I have, at this point, not ordered military engagemen
t in the situation, but the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.
. . “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” —President Obama in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, August 20, 2012.
150 Lethal at low concentrations, the nerve agent sarin gas typically causes death one to ten minutes after initial exposure, due to the inability to control the muscles related to breathing. Those that do not die typically have permanent neurological damage. Sarin was developed in Germany in 1938 by a group of scientists looking to create stronger pesticides. Its production and stockpiling were banned by the United Nations in 1993.
151 The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia), plus Germany.
152 Sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 24–October 1, 2013.
153 Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, October 2007 to September 2013.
154 Enriched uranium is uranium in which the percentage of the isotope uranium-235 has been increased beyond that found in nature, wherein uranium 235 represents 0.7204 percent of the total element’s mass. Enriched uranium, capable of sustaining a nuclear-fission chain reaction, is a necessary component of both nuclear-power generation and nuclear weaponry.
155 November 7-10, 2013.