by Brian Abrams
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
That’s why you had the Israeli intelligence services insisting that Netanyahu stick with the deal.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
That time period generally felt good. It felt like we had turned the corner, and 2014 had been a tough year for a lot of reasons, but by that point, we had been executing well. Things felt good. That summer, as a general matter, felt like things were moving in our direction writ large in terms of our priorities.
JEN PSAKI
I would say 2014 was not his favorite year of his presidency. It was probably not the best year of his presidency, and not on the communications front either. He was ready to do things differently and was open to different approaches, and so in 2015, we really had this clean slate. I mean, I’d been there before, but it’d been a while. I think a big part of it was, we focused on What is the president good at and how can we utilize that to use his time? Let’s focus those conversations on things he cares deeply about. Let’s do some different platforms like podcasts and more digital options, because, honestly, they’d reach a lot more people. It was a waste of time for him to go fly to a factory, get a tour, and give ten minutes of remarks. No one covers it. No one cares. It’s not getting his message out. Obviously, a lot of this he was up for and game for, and so part of our process was presenting things to him, seeing what he liked and what worked.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
The First Lady was having an event for these young women, a pop-up concert,181 and the president wanted to support her and do a surprise drop-in. “Get the logistics real quick so we know what we’re walking into.” Quickly, I was trying to get anyone on her staff to get me the details. “Who is performing? Where is it? And where is the First Lady going to be speaking?” No one could hear their phones in there, but this one person finally wrote back. All I got in response was, East Room. W-A-L-E. So the president was like, “Okay, where am I going?” I was like, “You’re going to the East Room.” He just bolted. I had to quickly tell Secret Service, and so I caught up to him down the colonnade and he yelled out, “Who’s performing again?” And I was like, “WHALE!” He stopped, half turned, and looked me in the eye. “You mean Wale.”
BRAD JENKINS
Look. We all make mistakes.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
My jaw was down. He just shook his head and took off. All the things ran through my brain—him meeting the singer and announcing the wrong thing to all these young girls, who probably knew exactly who he was, and losing cool points. Or being in front of the media and saying, “Whale,” and that would have been my fault. I was seriously on the verge of Should I resign? Thank God he was the coolest person, because otherwise I would have made him look like such a nerd because I’m such a nerd. He hugged me and was like, “It’s okay, but you really need to get up on your music.”
Govashiri and President Obama in the Green Room. July 23, 2015. Pete Souza, White House
PETE SOUZA
I remember the occasion, but not the photo. Not to diminish how meaningful this was to Ferial; to me it was one of a million things that happened in eight years.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
I went back and did a deep dive about the singer, and I saw that he has a song about how people call him “whale” even though his name is Wale, and I just thought, Dude, put an accent on your name!
ROB O’DONNELL
All of the talk that if only President Obama had spent more time schmoozing with lobbyists and members on Capitol Hill and doing the DC parlor games, then he would have gotten stuff done? Boehner basically being forced out as leader of his own caucus justified the fact that some of that talk wasn’t based in reality or merit.
MICHAEL STEEL
Remember, when it came to Boehner leaving, and when he did, he never wanted to do the job that long. He probably would have left at least maybe after the 2014 midterms or something like that. I mean, he was clearly aiming to leave and turn over the House majority to Mr. Cantor, and then, when Mr. Cantor lost his primary, it meant Boehner had to stick around a little longer than he planned.
ROB O’DONNELL
Boehner was the consummate person who had his glass of red wine, he had his cigarette, he was well liked by the entire Republican caucus. He couldn’t even get the intransigent Republicans on board. And, like, that’s how I think some people felt about Boehner leaving. It was like a vindication.
MICHAEL STEEL
I was actually gone by then. I left in May of 2015 to go work for Governor Bush’s presidential campaign . . . I think the Speaker was an underappreciated figure in terms of changes he often forced by sheer personal will—whether that’s on school choice, ending earmarks in Congress, or staring down the president to force trillions of dollars in spending cuts . . . There were obviously substantial areas of difference, but they both believed that free trade made America more prosperous. When it came to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, candidate Obama was more naive than President Obama. And so once he got into office and grappled with the reality of what we were facing, he came around to policies that were similar to the Bush administration in a lot of ways.
BRIAN DEESE
When people talked about Obama’s foreign policy, people wouldn’t usually go to climate. But it’s a good example of the sort of slow, persistent, patient diplomacy, recognizing that to engineer that kind of change actually did take multiple years and a chessboard approach. It took six-plus years to push that kind of change.
JONATHAN FINER
There was just an incredible momentum in Paris. Once people got in the room and started negotiating, things really did, for the most part, proceed in a pretty linear and direct way.
BRIAN DEESE
The thing that’s interesting about the actual Paris Agreement was that these were two weeklong negotiating sessions. And because of how much of a disaster Copenhagen was, in 2009, France—who hosted the Paris conference, obviously—was dead set against having heads of state come at the end of the conference. They were worried about Copenhagen. Everyone had PTSD.
JAKE LEVINE
It’s interesting, because in the second term, Copenhagen was panned as this awful disaster, and a meaningless result. But that’s not really true. Ultimately, we did bring all of these countries to the table to sit down, negotiate, and focus, at least to sort of get to a commitment. You had to be an incrementalist here to appreciate it, but it was a bit of a sea change from where the negotiations had been, in terms of these so-called developing nations versus the so-called developed nations.
BRIAN DEESE
So they said, “Look, we shouldn’t have the heads of state come at the end. It will be a disaster. Instead, the heads of state should come at the beginning.” But that created its own problem because you had Obama, Xi, Modi, and all of these folks come right at the beginning of the conference and then leave. Once they left, they’d leave their negotiators to pull things together.
JONATHAN FINER
Brian, Secretary Kerry, and I were all there for that.
BRIAN DEESE
We knew that the United States and China being willing to exert pressure on their respective counterparts was key. So what the president decided was, rather than get into all of the particulars, he had a direct conversation with President Xi. At the beginning of the conference they sat across the table from each other, looked at each other eye to eye, and basically said, We’ve developed trust, but this is still going to be difficult. There’s going to be a moment over the next two weeks where the United States and China are going to have to respectively make good on the commitment, and we need to be prepared to direct our teams at that moment to get things done, to bring this to a close. President Xi agreed to that.
JONATHAN PERSHING
You’re always trying to assess, to triage. You are thinking about where you need that highest, most senior input, where you need them to come in and make calls with their counterparts. This may often be to people in a different place, and in a different time zo
ne—but still needs to be timely enough to affect the outcome.
BRIAN DEESE
As these conferences would go, there was a huge amount of bickering and fighting. Things looked like they could go either way. With seventy-two hours left, when Kerry, Todd Stern, and I were in the trenches on a day-to-day basis, every night President Obama called heads of state from back in the United States just to touch base.
TODD STERN
We were on the opposite sides of some tough issues for a long time, all the way up until maybe two days before the end, and there was a point then, late in the day, when I got together with [Chinese negotiator] Xie and we were still looking at a number of sticking points. Xie said to me, “Now we have to get together and figure out how to resolve this.” He’s not talking about just big-picture issues in general, but . . . issues that we needed to resolve and use our influence to do that.
BRIAN DEESE
On [Thursday] night, very late US time, superlate—like four in the morning—French time, the president called President Xi just before the conference was intended to end.182 Things are stuck. Now is the moment to bring things to a close. I’m going to direct my team that we can no longer allow each side to bicker. President Xi agreed to do the same. That produced a meaningful change in the posture of the Chinese negotiating team, and created an environment where it was still quite frenetic over the last forty-eight hours . . . Then there was the hiccup with the “should/shall” at the very end.
TODD STERN
There was a meeting of the whole plenary on Saturday. Fabius, the French foreign minister, made a speech to everybody,183 and here we are just about at the final moment, on the brink of achieving this big thing and the final draft was going to be circulating within an hour or two. We went back to our various delegation rooms to wait for the thing to come over the wire, and when it did we started to print copies. I grabbed the first one and sat down to read it and, “4.4—wait a minute, what was that?”
JONATHAN FINER
Our position was to not have it be a legally binding agreement—that every country’s political commitment to do its part should be enough. So everybody knew that inserting the word “shall” would have been a deal breaker. The word “shall” hadn’t been in a draft of the agreement for many months, and so when we saw this in the final version that had been printed, Secretary Kerry called Foreign Minister Fabius, who had control of the document. “I hope that this is a mistake. This is a huge problem for us.”
TODD STERN
We sat down with our lawyers and immediately realized this was not a word we could accept. It was actually a highly threatening moment for the entire negotiation. That language was not in the penultimate draft, and it wasn’t what had been agreed to. I’d actually discussed that with Xie, and I had discussed it with Fabius—this is Article 4, Paragraph 4—“shall” is a word that connoted a legally binding undertaking and “should” is a word that does not connote a legally binding undertaking.184 It’s just black and white.
JONATHAN FINER
Fabius seemed surprised that this word had appeared, and within forty-five minutes had called us back and said yes, this was a mistake.
TODD STERN
Fabius didn’t know that had happened, but they had already sent what was supposed to be the final for everybody. So we had to actually go in the plenary room, and the danger was that if a few countries would say, We’re not going to allow it. If Fabius wants this changed, we want to make five other changes. And you might say, “Well, no, just tell them it was an accident.” Why would they believe that?
JONATHAN FINER
We had to go around to other delegations and explain that this was not a change. We were seeing to something that had already been negotiated but had been mistakenly transcribed.
TODD STERN
It’s perfectly plausible to think this was a last-minute special favor to the United States. Not that it was a mistake, but that “shall” was what it was supposed to be. In any event, that was a huge risk, a huge danger. If five countries felt abused by the agreement in one way or another because some pet thing of their own hadn’t gotten in and thought we were getting special treatment, the whole thing could have fallen apart.
JONATHAN FINER
In the end, everybody backed off.
TODD STERN
In the actual public meeting, once it resumed, Fabius was masterful. He never announced to the whole group what had happened. He just read through a number of errata-type changes—“There’s a comma here, there’s a word there”—and right before part four, he just read what it was supposed to say. He didn’t say, “It says ‘shall’ and now it’s gonna say ‘should.’” He just read, “For part four, we need to blah-dah-bump.” And he slammed the gavel down and it was done.185
JONATHAN FINER
Everybody had this sense of seizing the moment and, to some extent, the uncertainty of the subsequent election infused our side with the greater sense of urgency. But the rest of the world was not conforming itself to our political calendar. That, in and of itself, would not have been enough to move anybody other than the United States.
JOEL BENENSON
In a campaign, you know when you have it clinched. Clinched in the sense of, if you have two viable candidates, the ability of one to catch the other in delegates. The math is the math. You can’t change the math unless you dramatically change the trajectory, and if you pile up enough wins, at some point it is very hard to catch up. March 15, 2016, was the night at which [the Clinton campaign] basically had a delegate lead that we were never going to relinquish again.
JEFF WEAVER
We won four states on Super Tuesday, and we came within an inch of winning Massachusetts. And certainly after New Hampshire, the second contest, when Bernie Sanders won by [twenty-two] points, you know, there was a tremendous amount of concern among certain establishment forces.
CODY KEENAN
People forget how contentious 2008 was. There was the whole [pro–Hillary Clinton] PUMA movement that said they would never vote for Barack Obama no matter what,186 and, obviously, that never materialized. It might have been even more contentious this time around.
JEREMY BIRD
Sanders was done after she won Missouri. That day when she won all five of those states?187 There’s no way he was winning.
JEFF WEAVER
He came within 1,500 votes of winning Missouri. He won Michigan. He came within half a percentage point of winning Illinois. Many of Secretary Clinton’s weaknesses had been exposed in the primary, and that’s not a criticism of her. I mean, clearly she had a problem with young people. She had a problem with people of color who were under forty-five, which, you know, Bernie Sanders consistently won African Americans under forty-five. He was winning young Latinos even before that. So she clearly had problems with young people, with working-class people, with rural people, and independents. Those were all laid on the table during the primary process, and I didn’t think that there was an effort to deal with it.
JOEL BENENSON
That’s nonsense. He lost Ohio. He lost North Carolina to us. He lost Illinois to us. In reality, what the long campaign did was both suck up resources, and Senator Sanders’s message became the foundational message of the attack on Hillary Clinton from the Republicans. So basically, from March through June, they didn’t have to attack her. He did, and he made the argument that they were going to make across the country.
BARBARA BOXER
I thought Bernie had a very good populist message, but it was narrow. He didn’t really talk about women’s health, equality, diversity, and immigration. Her campaign was more focused on broader issues than that. I certainly always got along with Bernie, but I was very strong for Hillary.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
Sanders literally sat next to me for years on the Financial Services Committee,188 but he never once talked to me, even though I was, you know, very much a leader on immigration. He never addressed those issues to me, and with Hilla
ry, it was different. I knew her from when her husband was president, and I met with her like September of ’91 for the first time. We campaigned together. So we were good, and I endorsed her in New York with thousands of people cheering on. It was a much more open, easier relationship with her.
JEFF WEAVER
I would describe Bernie Sanders as a movement politician, right? He believed in governing with a strong grassroots movement. I thought in many ways Barack Obama ran as a movement politician. It’s an admittedly difficult thing to maintain once you get into office, but Bernie Sanders wanted to transform the country. That’s not just passing a few laws. He wanted to fundamentally change the way the government and economic actors related to regular people.
STUART STEVENS
One of the truisms of the conservative Republican world had been that the country was actually more center-right than Barack Obama, but because of Bush fatigue, his incredible charisma as a candidate, and the economic crash, the country accepted and embraced Barack Obama even though he was more left than the country. There’s a lot of data to suggest that’s true. However, you looked at Bernie Sanders, and the idea that an obscure democratic socialist from this tiny state could become the most popular politician in America? You had to ask the question, “Is the country more center-left than it used to be?”
JOEL BENENSON
I got criticized roundly by all the Bernie bros and the trolls on Twitter when going into the New York primary in late April. I thought he was running a negative campaign and should tone it down. They all went crazy: Tone it down?! I said, “Go read his speeches.” He was attacking her every day, but you’re going to have to overcome difficult things to win the general election.
TAD DEVINE
Chief Strategist, Bernie Sanders for President, 2016
