Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  My strong suspicion on election night was he probably had mixed reactions to winning. I’m sure he was seething that night.

  JENNIFER PALMIERI

  It felt like a reckoning to me. Tensions had been simmering under the radar, and we’d gone through twenty years of incredible disruption. People don’t express frustration when you’re in the middle of a crisis. They wait until it’s passed. The Great Recession, when you’re going through that, everybody was still just getting by, and then things started getting better but not for everyone, and that’s when this all came crashing down. Even if Hillary had won, that reckoning would still have been there.

  JENNIFER GRANHOLM

  Obama would have been elected in a heartbeat. Voters responded to Trump because he was angry and was talking about NAFTA and jobs. You know, Bernie Sanders would have been elected in Michigan, too. He was so clear about that message.

  JEFF WEAVER

  Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  I got no sleep. I remember the morning being a Wednesday, so typically we’d have our senior-communication-team huddle. And I was like, Do we still have that? What’s the protocol now that Donald Trump has been elected president?

  JEN PSAKI

  I didn’t know what the president anticipated in terms of people’s reactions to the fact that the country just elected this misogynist, and how we all felt about that as humans. Because we all worked for somebody who was entirely different, and what did that say about the country?

  ROB O’DONNELL

  I got in at maybe eight fifteen and grabbed a water from the mess in the West Wing. I ran into Denis McDonough. “Good morning, Rob.” He looked like he had spent most of the night up following the elections and, obviously, being chief of staff to the president, had to think through all the different mechanisms of governing and regulations that maybe would come undone. He had the weight of the entire government to think about.

  CODY KEENAN

  I went in early and the first thing that struck me was that my assistant couldn’t stop crying. “I know you’re upset and everybody’s upset, but you gotta stop crying. We’re at work.” And it struck me that there were so many young people who got their start not just in politics, but postcollege—like Rob O’Donnell, who dropped out of college to join the campaign. Barack Obama was all they knew. Winning elections was all they knew. We lost in the midterms, but they didn’t know defeat at this scale.

  KORI SCHULMAN

  It was like a funeral. My eyes were full of tears.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  Everyone just wanted to get through their mornings before having any real conversations with anyone. Then, sometime later, they held a meeting with the entire comms team in Josh Earnest’s office. Josh and Psaki led it off, and then they opened the floor for people to talk.

  FERIAL GOVASHIRI

  The president walked in the Oval. We looked at each other, didn’t need to say anything. He knew he was going to have to make a statement that day. So he’s like, “Can you go get Cody?”

  CODY KEENAN

  Josh talked about the campaigns he’d lost. Psaki talked about the campaigns she’d lost. She’d been on Kerry. I hadn’t been on a losing campaign, only because I had started working for Ted Kennedy out of college—Obama was my first actual campaign—but Kennedy was a big Kerry surrogate in 2004. We lost that pretty hard, and on Inauguration Day in 2005 most people got the day off just because they wanted the Mall cleared. But in the Senate we had to confirm a bunch of President Bush’s nominees. So I had to go to work, and I took the Metro surrounded by people in cowboy boots and fur coats all headed to the ball. That was my hell.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  Cody had begun speaking about what the president was going to say. “It’s going to be the type of remarks that no one will be excited about.” It wasn’t a call to arms for Democrats. It was very gracious, and exactly the message the president wanted to send.

  FERIAL GOVASHIRI

  I peeked my head in Josh Earnest’s office. Pretty much all of the communications team was in there, along with some other staffers. Normally I would never barge in on a meeting, but anytime the president was looking for someone, I would walk into anything and demand answers. So I cut through, and Cody was in the center. Our staff at that time was younger than when we had started, and Cody was a senior staffer and was trying to talk everyone down. I needed to grab him, but everyone was listening and crying—not just one tear or two tears, like crying—and I decided I wasn’t going to interrupt. I knew the president had a couple extra minutes.

  CODY KEENAN

  I was sharing how, if you wanted to stay in politics and keep making a difference, you were going to lose all the time. “What defines you is how you get back up and move forward. We’re still in this office for another two and a half months, and there’re still a lot of things to get done. The country’s watching us today to see how we carry ourselves.”

  ROB O’DONNELL

  Some people were just stone silent.

  FERIAL GOVASHIRI

  The president was like, “Where is he?” Then I said, “I think it’s gonna be a couple minutes. He’s in the middle of something.” I would never say that. I would always say something like, “He’s coming” or “He’s on his way.” And the president knew something was up, so I told him the story. “I don’t want to interrupt him. He’s helping all these other staffers feel better.” And he’s like, “What?” I told him how, like, they’re very upset and crying. He’s like, “I’m going to go in there,” and I was like, “No, no. You’re not going to fit in there. It’s gonna be mayhem. More people are gonna come if they know you’re in there.” And he was like, “You know what? Send them all in here.”

  ROB O’DONNELL

  Two minutes later, Ferial came back. “The president would like to see all of you in the Oval.” I didn’t think the president had any clue how many people actually worked in the communications office. There were like thirty of us. He’d worked with most of them but had never seen all of them at once.

  FERIAL GOVASHIRI

  No one ever really heard that before. They kind of looked at each other. “No, I’m serious. Please. This is not a joke. Everyone just go to the Oval right now.” I ran out of another door through the Roosevelt Room to get in front of everybody, and I got to the president first. “Sir, they’re all coming in. There’s a lot of them.” And he said, “Okay, bring them in.”

  ROB O’DONNELL

  At first, fifteen people streamed in. He was like, “How many more people are there?” And if you look at the Pete Souza photo, it’s a lot. Half of them are crying. And then he made a joke: “Well, I would have let you guys continue on your communications meeting, but that didn’t look like it was going particularly well.”

  Pete Souza: “They filed in and essentially formed a semicircle almost around the whole Oval Office. I think the president had to change what he had planned to say, because he was just going to have this conversation with [Cody].” Pete Souza, White House.

  CODY KEENAN

  He gave a pep talk and went around the room shaking everybody’s hands. Most of those staffers barely ever interacted with the president. Some had never even met him. That turned things around for a lot of people.

  PETE SOUZA

  These were young kids in their twenties, and here’s the president of the United States trying to take the high road and say, “The people have spoken,” and as much as we’re disappointed in what happened, we had to go forward with the transition of power.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  The president’s press statement was initially planned to be delivered from the Cabinet Room, but it ended up being a nice day. It wasn’t raining, and the president felt that, having it in the Cabinet Room, which wasn’t particularly well lit and wasn’t a huge space, sent the wrong message. The Rose Garden would send a more uplifting message. We went out there an hour later.
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br />   CODY KEENAN

  That one photo of everyone looking despondent on the colonnade has always bothered me. I wished we had set a better example out there.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  I didn’t think anyone on the colonnade knew that they were going to be on TV or part of the pictures. You had your whole bank of photographers, and 95 percent of them were facing the president. Every once in a while you’d see a photographer turn around and snap a shot. My assumption was they wanted to see Valerie or Jen. Had I known I was going to be on camera, I would have shaved. I probably would have worn a different shirt. Then people started creating memes of my face and talked about how much I looked like Macaulay Culkin.

  Ferial Govashiri: “I think everyone was in shock and scared of the unknown, and scared of the things that Donald Trump had talked about.” Susan Walsh, Associated Press

  CODY KEENAN

  I mean, I’m glad we weren’t all smiling or anything, but we should have looked more resolute.

  KORI SCHULMAN

  I was at my desk in the EEOB and was torn about where I wanted to see it. I didn’t end up going out in the Rose Garden, and I watched it on TV in the digital office with my team. It was helpful to have that distance.

  DAVID CUSACK

  Everyone had a shared grief and did not want to be alone in their own offices, so we just moved in chairs and tables and stuff like that. I moved ten people into my office, and that’s where everyone worked for two days. Granted, we probably started drinking around one or two o’clock each day.

  JEN PSAKI

  There were points where you felt dishonest, because publicly it’s like, We’re carrying out a graceful transition, but privately you’re thinking, Are you serious?

  ROB O’DONNELL

  People felt a certain way and wanted to know that he felt the same. You’d been elected to two terms. Your approval rating’s at 60 percent. The American people were clearly happy with what you’ve done. There were no scandals. Then, having Hillary Clinton, who ran on a platform that’s much similar to ours and lost, must have been extremely difficult.

  PETE SOUZA

  He’s got thicker skin than I’ll ever have.

  JEN PSAKI

  Basically we’d given ourselves until about Thanksgiving to mourn and get it out of our systems, but Donald Trump came two days after the election to the White House for the meeting. So we all had to pull ourselves together for that.

  KORI SCHULMAN

  I broke down. There was the live stream of the president next to Trump in the Oval, and you saw the MLK bust in the background. That made it more real to me, seeing that contrast in that office.

  DAVID CUSACK

  For most people, the reset of going back home for Thanksgiving helped. I needed them to refocus, and they did. Again, we were doing operations and logistics. For us, it was all about the whole peaceful transition of power. No one ever said anything inappropriate about the incoming administration. We were gonna hand over to them the best-possible-working buildings, and do all that we could so that they could hopefully find the right path.

  BRIAN DEESE

  We made ourselves available and tried to be supportive, and the thing that was challenging was that it was hard to figure out who we were interfacing with. It took their transition a long time to have folks in place. In a lot of areas that just never happened because there wasn’t anybody on the other side.

  KORI SCHULMAN

  I interacted with our incoming counterparts. We met Dan Scavino, Gerrit Lansing, and Ory Rinat with the Heritage Foundation, but the meetings and the conversations that we had were very much oriented around the handoff of assets like WhiteHouse.gov and social-media channels. Those meetings were obviously challenging.

  ROB O’DONNELL

  The Clinton administration would have carried on our stuff on the economy, on how we regulated Wall Street, on how we did climate change, and all of a sudden, the president had to think about how the absolute inverse was going to happen. How do we ensure what we’ve done stays done? To make sure we race to the finish on some key priorities that we hope will then not become undone?

  BRIAN DEESE

  Postelection, it operated at two levels. We were—and this came directly from the president—very committed, even in the wake of the election, after we all absorbed what had happened and the implications, that we were going to run the transition in the same by-the-book way that the Bush administration ran it with us. And we had an operating strategy where we had to focus on the set of things that we thought were important before the election and the things that we intended to drive through.

  YOHANNES ABRAHAM

  On both a personal and a professional level, I think Brian’s right. You’re immediately going down the list of things that were potentially at risk come January. In some ways that manifested itself personally, meaning that you thought about how you spent a lot of 2013 trying to get policy x done. Then you thought about the birthdays or weddings you missed in the course of that. And, you know, just on a personal level you couldn’t help but kind of do that math. It was sad.

  BRIAN DEESE

  Whether it was around health care or the environment, we knew the things we needed to get done—rule makings or decisions—and tried to get them done in a workmanlike way and not draw tons of unneeded attention.

  VAN JONES

  Merrick Garland should [have gone] on the Supreme Court. He should have recess-appointed a bunch of judges. He should [have] also let Leonard Peltier out of prison. I mean, screw it.

  BRIAN DEESE

  We were clear eyed from the get-go that the Garland nomination was an uphill fight and that it could well be the case that we wouldn’t end up even with a hearing . . . There was an ongoing debate that played out across issue areas. On one hand, people argued that if we took aggressive executive action, it would draw even more attention to the issue and make it more likely that the incoming administration would seek to unravel the good that we’d done. Therefore, that line of argument led you to say, Keep your head down. As important as it may seem, to do this big thing could actually backfire. The other argument was obvious. This is the last chance to lock in gains. You might as well make this as difficult as possible. It’s not like you can poke the bear any more than the bear has already been poked.

  VAN JONES

  You have an authoritarian, kleptocratic regime, and we had a lot at stake. Who cared at this point? You should just [have done] what’s right. Let them figure it out.

  BRIAN DEESE

  Frankly, the way that we approached it—this sounds corny but it’s actually true—was largely What are we prepared to do? What did we actually work to actually be able to get done in a responsible way? All those things we should do, and things that we aren’t prepared to do and would be scattershot and thrown together at the last minute, we shouldn’t do.

  JOSH LIPSKY

  There was a lot of work to be done between then and January 20 no matter who was coming in next. There were priorities for us, and that didn’t change. The election just put a very finite time in front of us.

  BRIAN DEESE

  A good example’s the announcement we made jointly with Canada to indefinitely withdraw the Arctic from offshore oil and gas drilling.190 That was something that we had been working on for over a year with the Trudeau administration, and the agency had done a huge amount of technical work to understand the legal and factual reasons for doing a withdrawal. So the view was that they would do what they’re gonna do with respect to oil and gas, and in December, we did what we thought was the right thing. But at the same time, there were arguments that said, like, You should take the entire Pacific Ocean off the table for oil and gas drilling. Go ahead and do that, because who knows where the future’s gonna lie?

  JASON FURMAN

  We certainly implemented executive orders that we had, in effect, been working on for a couple of years. We tried to get most of our executive orders done early, and done in a way that wouldn�
�t be subject to a Congressional Review Act [resolution].191 There’s always the idea that—and we crossed our t’s and dotted our i’s—when you do a better notice-and-comment process for regulation,192 not only do you get a better-quality regulation that’s better designed, but you also get something more likely to withstand attempts to change it.

  BRIAN DEESE

  If we hadn’t done the work, then we weren’t going to do it well. We wanted to do things the way we had been doing them and be able to seriously justify them if they were going to be associated with our administration. That’s not just quaint. It’s practically important, too. As all of these legal defenses get geared up, being able to justify that these regulatory actions were actually based in a record of strong fact, that’s what would carry the day in court.

  DAN SHAPIRO

  Something else happened during that period. The Israeli right wing got very excited about Trump’s victory and started to say and do things that they felt demonstrated there were no more restrictions on settlement building. Eventually the UN resolution was presented,193 and ultimately, the president decided—but really very late, only after the resolution was coming up on a vote—that there wasn’t a good hook to hang a veto on. It included language about violence incitements and terror, which made it more balanced. It was consistent with many previous resolutions that the United States had allowed to pass in previous administrations and in that sense reflected the longstanding and known disagreement between the United States and Israel.

  JONATHAN FINER

  Secretary Kerry’s concern about the future viability of the two-state solution’s very much rooted in his love for and concern about the future of Israel.194 He had personally known Prime Minister Netanyahu since both of them lived in Boston as young men. He made an early series of visits to Israel as part of his work on the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, and this was something that he felt was of fundamental importance to the world and the United States. It was that core of beliefs, both intellectual and emotional, that led to his deep concern about steps that both the Israelis and the Palestinians were taking that made the prospects of a two-state solution even more remote than they’d ever been. Some concluded that it may well be too late.