Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  156 November 24, 2013.

  157 At his weekly Sunday cabinet meeting, Netanyahu expressed opposition to the Joint Plan of Action. “What was achieved last night [in Geneva] is not a historic agreement, but a historic mistake,” he said. “For years the international community has demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment. Now, for the first time, the international community has formally consented that Iran continue its enrichment of uranium . . . Israel is not bound by this agreement. We cannot and will not allow a regime that calls for the destruction of Israel to obtain the means to achieve this goal.”

  158 Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government after a Republican faction, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, demanded that the spending bill defund the Affordable Care Act. Democrats wouldn’t budge for the freshman senator, whose gimmick lasted for sixteen days (October 1–17, 2013).

  159 The deadline to apply for Obamacare coverage was March 31, 2014—a six-week extension from the initial date. On March 25, 2014, officials announced a second extension to mid-April.

  160 February 24, 2014.

  161 March 11, 2014.

  162 On the weekend of August 9, 2014, protesters in Saint Louis County assembled outside the apartment complex of Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old black man who had been shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer on duty. According to eyewitness accounts that were later corroborated by video footage, Brown’s hands were raised during the encounter and he did not seem to pose a threat to Wilson. As hundreds more demonstrators took to the streets, the Saint Louis Police Department responded with militarized SWAT units in camouflage gear driving armored vehicles and carrying 5.56-mm rifles.

  2015–2016

  For decades, China refused to engage in efforts to combat climate change. The US had already experienced its era of massive industrialization and growth, so China felt it had the license to pollute in order to grow, too. This was their time to develop, the government reasoned, but by the end of 2014, the country’s domestic politics had changed.

  The “airpocalypse” prompted schools in more than a dozen Chinese cities to keep windows shut. Field trips and sporting activities were often postponed or canceled. Participants in the 2014 Beijing Marathon dropped out toward the beginning of the race, after their face masks acquired an ash-like hue. “The most downloaded app was not some WhatsApp variety,” Brian Deese said. “It’s the AQI, the Air Quality Index. If you’ve ever been to any major Chinese city, you’ve probably used it yourself. You wake up in the morning, and the AQI answers the question whether or not you’re going to go outside that day.” The Xi administration acknowledged that, apart from economic incentives to invest in renewable energy, the government needed to commit to environmental concerns to maintain stability.

  And so on November 12, 2014, the final day of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, President Xi Jinping and President Obama stood beside one another in the Great Hall of the People and announced a commitment to cut carbon emissions by 2030. Their joint decision was the culmination of a year and a half of quiet negotiations, a feat given the multiple conflicting issues between the two nations (e.g., China had long been irked by Obama’s developing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, direct trade competition for the Central People’s Government). “Over the past two days, I had a constructive and productive discussion with President Obama,” Xi announced to the press. “We issued a joint statement on climate change, and we jointly announced our respective post-2020 targets. We agreed to make sure that international climate-change negotiations will reach an agreement as scheduled at the Paris conference in 2015, and we agreed to deepen practical cooperation on clean energy, environment protection, and other areas.”

  “As the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers, and emitters of greenhouse gases,” Obama added, “we have a special responsibility to lead the global effort against climate change . . . I commend President Xi, his team, and the Chinese government for the commitment they are making to slow, peak, and then reverse the course of China’s carbon emissions.”

  The US-China climate deal was only the first step. After hashing out what was technically realistic for China to execute, the two nations then used their leverage to persuade the rest of the world to do the same.

  TODD STERN

  Kerry had in his mind, from the moment he got in [at State], that he wanted to ramp up the US-China cooperation. He wanted to do a joint statement with China expressing a joint US-China commitment on climate change. We drafted that. I negotiated that with my counterpart, Xie Zhenhua,163 and then Kerry went off to China. The statement both made an expression of commitment and also established a new US-China climate-change working group, which became the new umbrella under which all of our China cooperation happened. So that was in April of 2013.

  BRIAN DEESE

  Kerry’s engagement was important. I would point more fundamentally to the president’s first meeting with President Xi, which was actually in Sunnylands in the United States. That was more than a year before we actually reached the public agreement with them, and in that meeting, the two of them had the first extended conversation about climate change.

  TODD STERN

  The first Xi-Obama meeting [was] at Sunnylands in June of 2013, where the most important deliverable, as it turned out, was a short but consequential agreement to start working together on the subject of an industrial gas called HFCs,164 the rapidly growing greenhouse gas used in refrigerants and air conditioners. That was a first important positive interaction between Obama and Xi.

  JONATHAN PERSHING

  For the Obama and Xi administrations, climate change turned out to be one of those areas where we thought we had enough that we could talk to each other about that it was worth elevating. It was a discussion that was had at the presidential level, and it counterbalanced the other areas where we had much less common ground. You have to find things that let you continue to talk to even countries you have hard times with, and you find whatever you can find to try and create some continued avenue of an opportunity. Human rights was one of the conflicts we had with them. They didn’t like our interference, but we found climate change to be a place where we could play with them, and so it got moved way up the chain of command on both sides because it was a real opportunity to make progress. Obama cared about it, and Xi cared about it.

  BRIAN DEESE

  They weren’t doing it for some diplomatic reason. They’re doing it because, economically, they wanted to establish themselves as the global superpower on renewables. The cost of alternative sources of energy and more efficient ways of developing had been plummeting. In India, they’re holding auctions for new electricity generation, where the solar bids were cheaper than the new coal bids. So we actually got toward a tipping point. Reducing emissions and increasing your growth were no longer at odds with each other. That’s a market-driven thing, and . . . without that market transformation, it would have been extremely difficult to create a diplomatic construct that would have worked.

  JONATHAN FINER

  It was impossible for most of us to imagine how to successfully achieve an agreement in Paris without the groundwork that we laid with the Chinese years in advance. A meeting took place in the State Department soon after I got there in 2013, with Secretary Kerry. He was about to go to China165 and said he really wanted to propose US and China work together on what might be possible in terms of setting an ambitious emissions target in advance of Paris. These so-called INDCs, every country had a target for how much they would reduce emissions.166

  TODD STERN

  I met with my team and came up with the idea of trying to do a joint statement between President Obama and President Xi announcing our targets for the Paris Agreement. We knew that they were going to be together in November [2014], because it was already on the calendar in Beijing, and so I talked to the White House about that. [Counselor to the President John] Podesta was there at that point, and I went with Kerry to China to
lay this idea out, to try to work out this together . . . There was a sort of public-statement upshot of the Kerry trip that indicated we were going to collaborate in some way as we worked on our targets, but it didn’t say anything about any presidential joint announcement, because of course we didn’t actually know if we were going to succeed.

  BRIAN DEESE

  That set off a year of back-and-forth diplomacy, which culminated in the fall of 2014 when the president was at the UN General Assembly.167 He had a set of private meetings with the Chinese delegation—basically that he wanted to negotiate an agreement. At the time, John Podesta was in the role that I ended up taking over, and the president designated John to say, Okay, it’s September. You’ve got a couple months to see if you can get an agreement with the Chinese. Over the subsequent six weeks or so there was a lot of back and forth, but that culminated in the announcement when the president went to Beijing in November of 2014 for the US-China joint statement.

  JONATHAN PERSHING

  We [lobbied] other countries to themselves become a party, and while some had executive-order structures, others had parliamentary-ratification provisions. So I give Obama credit as well, because he just made calls. We all, at the State Department, set up call-sheet stuff. We made our own calls. Kerry met with foreign ministers. Obama met with heads of state. It would never have happened without those calls.

  BRIAN DEESE

  We had about a year before the Paris conference, and that set off a frenetic year of activity, including the president making decision after decision to prioritize this issue, including, in early January of 2015, only eight weeks after he announced the joint deal with China, getting on a plane to Delhi to be Prime Minister Modi’s guest at Republic Day. A big part of his decision to go on that trip was to have an opportunity to talk in a very direct and personal way about what it would take to get India to come on board.

  JAKE LEVINE

  When comparing the Paris Agreement to the Copenhagen Accord, the structure of the two was radically different. The Paris Agreement was a voluntary nonbinding agreement that asked every country to individually commit to domestic policies, and it relied on some degree of competition and behavioral nudging—the idea being if the US and China agreed to something aggressive, then Mexico’s gonna feel the pressure. And once Mexico announced, then Brazil’s gonna feel the pressure. That’s exactly what happened and where Deese was so critical in paving that path forward.

  BRIAN DEESE

  It was an all-out effort on all fronts to try to set the conditions so that we could have success in Paris at the end of 2015.

  March 7, 2015: President Obama marches across Edmund Pettus Bridge while holding hands with Congressman John Lewis and 103-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson—activists who were assaulted by state troopers and Klansmen in the “Bloody Sunday” demonstrations fifty years prior. Lawrence Jackson, White House

  HEATHER FOSTER

  Selma, you’ve seen the photo. That was my project, to figure out how to get President Obama to commemorate one of the most important marches in civil-rights history. For me, personally? Top five events. The day that motorcade came over that same bridge, that had all these people who were battered and beaten, was priceless.

  CODY KEENAN

  Valerie told us she agreed on the president’s behalf to have him do Selma. I found out the day of the State of the Union address and was already exhausted by that. So we’re sitting at the table going, Oh, what the fuck! It had just come up so fast. Obviously I was excited for the speech. I just couldn’t handle it at the time.

  HEATHER FOSTER

  I had to introduce like eighty people to the president, and I was trying to get their names, and he was like, “I know who this is.” I would be like, “Dr. Lowry.” He would just look at me like, “I know who these people are. These are my peeps.”

  BARBARA LEE

  There were moments during his presidency that [made me] realize he was a great president who had a very difficult time. In spite of the challenges from Mitch McConnell and the obstructionism by the Republican Congress, that he was going to do his job and he made me feel proud as an African American, the way he conducted himself.

  YOHANNES ABRAHAM

  I wasn’t on the ground there, but speaking as an African American, it’s funny. When you’re a staffer you would have your head down, focused on execution and making sure that your piece of the thing happened well. In the run-up to Selma, you could get lost. Okay, who’s speaking? Who’s gonna be in the greet beforehand? Okay, they’re shutting down this road, so how can we . . . It’s a lot of work. I’m sort of specifically speaking about my experience as an African American with these moments that were heavy with history, but that’s true across the board with the job. Just to take two minutes and reflect, every day—obviously, invariably something happened on any given day that was, for better or worse, worth internalizing and reflecting and putting in the context of history and life. Sorry to go down a philosophical rabbit hole.

  CODY KEENAN

  That was one of those speeches where you couldn’t really screw it up. John Lewis said it best in his introduction: “If [someone] had told me . . . that one day I would be back here introducing the first African American president, I would have said . . . you’re out of your mind.” Symbolism would have been enough on its own, but we tried to think of something interesting to say beyond commemorating what happened. Of all people, Rudy Giuliani gave us that impetus. He was on Fox the week before, trotting out the same old racist dog-whistle bullshit that the president wasn’t raised like us, doesn’t love this country like “we” do.168 He even began [a speech the night before] by saying, “I know this is a terrible thing to say,” which we always laughed at, because it’s like, “You could just stop yourself right there.”

  VANITA GUPTA

  The president’s speech came at a moment when there were heightened community-police tensions and a systematic assault on voting rights. He spoke to the moment with a sense of patriotism and kind of put it into a long arc of historical perspective—about the role people play in ensuring progress and change, that none of our institutions or our progress has been inevitable.

  CODY KEENAN

  Again, we were pissed off about it—by “we” I mean speechwriters and staff—but the president, everybody always talks about how he was calm or detached or whatever. He just didn’t care about shit like that. He thought it was stupid. So I suggested it to him in the Oval. “It doesn’t deserve a response,” he said, “but it’s an interesting idea. Who gets to decide what patriotism is? Who gets to define who is more American than somebody else?” It was one of those rare speech sessions where ideas flowed fast. When you think about the people who crossed that bridge, they weren’t protected by law or custom. They were poor. They were powerless and willing to make incredible sacrifices, maybe even face death, to just win not special rights but equal rights that were promised in our Constitution. So we thought, What could be more American than that? Not blaming others or saying, “No, we’re the real Americans here,” but saying, “We’re all Americans and we’re going to put our lives on the line to prove it.”

  VANITA GUPTA

  It was a call to action in a very hopeful way and reminded us of where we’d come from but also the work ahead we needed to do. I think, for a lot of us, it renewed our spirits in the fight for equality and justice.

  CODY KEENAN

  The speech itself was patriotism for grown-ups, and it’s Barack Obama’s core view of America, which was that our founding documents say, We are imperfect. The very language to form a more perfect union suggested that we were not perfect, that we’d been given the keys to this remarkable system of self-government that lets us make ourselves more perfect. He’d always said, before I’d ever worked for him, that the trajectory of American history is jagged. Sometimes you take two steps forward. Then you take a step back, even two steps back. But the trajectory is undeniably upwards, and that should give people hope.


  RICHARD NEPHEW

  You know, I was convinced from moment one that we would get a comprehensive deal with the Iranians. Obama was very public that he thought an agreement was fifty-fifty. He didn’t shy away from that conclusion. Kerry may have been as optimistic as me. It’s hard to judge, because he’s just an upbeat kind of guy. I spent a lot of time with the guy and never saw him as anything but focused on getting it done.

  CHRIS VAN HOLLEN

  The president and his team were very engaged in the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, direct day-to-day involvement, negotiation and communication with members of Congress regarding the merits of the nuclear agreement. I believed strongly that it was the best way of preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

  RICHARD NEPHEW

  The number discussion—where we’re all giving each other our confidence numbers—that was always at a staff level, where Wendy was the highest-ranking person. And she always refused to give us her number. We never got hers. It was only guys at the staff and expert level.

  WENDY SHERMAN

  It’s binary. You either get there or you don’t. Even if you get 99 percent of the way there, if you don’t get the last 1 percent, you don’t have a deal. That’s why I would never give a percentage, because it doesn’t matter if you get far. If it’s not all the way, you don’t have a deal. The symbol I used all the time was a Rubik’s Cube. There were multiple moving pieces, and every time you moved a piece—the number of centrifuges, the level of enrichment, the level of the stockpile—it moved the other elements. And so you constantly had to recalibrate until all of the pieces fit snugly together and the last cube of the Rubik’s Cube locked into place. That was what made this so staggeringly complex.

  RICHARD NEPHEW

  It’d been a year that we’d negotiated with the Iranians before Lausanne. And you know, during that process we were kind of working through what a comprehensive agreement could look like. So, you know, for Lausanne, it wasn’t special for the date on the calendar.169 We had simply agreed, in November [2013], that we needed to say by the end of March [2015] whether or not we could actually hammer out an agreement in broad strokes, with the final coming by July. That was all laid out in the November agreement to extend the initial agreement, so that’s why Lausanne got this special attention. It was less because of where we were in the process, which was kind of the same as what we had been doing, but more because we had established a deadline for ourselves that, if we weren’t getting closer by the end of March, then maybe it’s time to pack it in.