Chapter Fourteen
The Battle Ahead

PRESIDENT OBAMA ENTERED 2011 HOPING TO MOVE QUICKLY to a values debate with the Republicans. But external circum-stances—and Republican obstructionism—intervened.

After taking that shellacking in the midterm elections, the president and his aides freely admitted that they had failed to define their own achievements during their first two years and that they had not shaped the nation’s political story. For much of the third year, they had not done better.

“We felt like we were so immersed in crisis in the first two years and were so much a triage unit, we didn’t spend enough time presenting an overarching narrative about where he’s going,” David Axelrod recalled at the end of 2011.

“And we were muted in our communications for the first eight months of this year,” he continued. “It’s been much better since the jobs speech. In the first two years, we tried to communicate too many things. In the first eight months of this year, we tried to communicate too little. There was a lot of hunkering down with fiscal issues and there was a desire not to get into gratuitous back-and-forth [with the Republicans].”

With the American Jobs Act and Obama’s subsequent barnstorming, the president was fully in the fray, not above it. He had finally reached the political spot he had anticipated a year earlier—though it had taken longer to get there and the pathway had been even bumpier than foreseen.

There had not been many policy successes, but the president had emerged with a clear strategy that included championing a progressive set of values and pressing a distinct vision of how to guide the nation and its economy into the twenty-first century.

Obama’s Gallup presidential approval rating had remained stuck in the low 40s since the debt-ceiling fight, but he scored better in other polls than the Republicans when respondents were asked whom they trusted to handle the economy and protect the middle class. (A Washington Post–ABC News poll in mid-December 2011 found Obama’s approval rating to be 49 percent, a nine-month high, excluding the post–bin Laden raid bump.)

And David Plouffe could barely believe that at the end of the year Obama’s approach to deficit reduction was better received by the public than the Republicans’. He told people it was as if the Republicans had gained ground on the Democrats on the issue of children’s health care. A core Republican strength had been neutralized.

OBAMA AND HIS AIDES CONSIDERED A STEADY AND SHARP DEPICTION of his vision and values the key to reelection. Though the unemployment rate in early December had dropped half a point to 8.6 percent (partly because droves of workers dropped out of the labor force), the economy was not likely to improve tremendously in 2012, and not since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt won his second term, had a president been reelected with unemployment above 7.2 percent.

But his team had a plan.

A top campaign strategist for Obama described its three parts. First, the reelection effort would establish a proper context in which voters could review and understand Obama’s first term.

“We have to remind people what Obama faced when he took office,” this strategist said. “The economy was losing eight hundred thousand jobs a month. Where we are now is not exciting. But it’s much better. We’ll never convince people the world would be so much worse without him, but we can point to health care, Wall Street reform, and other accomplishments, and make sure our activists and volunteers have all these talking points so they can answer those people who say they are disappointed.”

In a speech at the Economic Club of Washington, Gene Sperling made a similar point: “It may be that, quote, ‘Prevented a Second Great Depression’ does not read well on a bumper sticker. But it is an appropriate description of policy choices that dramatically improved and helped the lives of tens of millions of our fellow working families and the global economy.”

Or as Axelrod quipped in one interview, “You know, his slogan should be, GM Is Alive and Bin Laden Is Dead.”

The second step was to hammer that values and vision contrast with the Republican candidate. Perhaps Obama’s most crucial reelection goal was to prevent the contest from becoming a referendum on him. The Republicans could easily argue that the economy was awful, and Obama should be booted. If unemployment remained high and economic growth continued to lag, this case for change would be compelling.

Obama had to shift the question to which candidate offered a better vision for the future and a more compelling declaration of the nation’s values.

Throughout the fall of 2011, Obama had been comparing his vision and values with those of the Republicans. He was for the prudent use of government resources to produce jobs, enhance middle-class security, and make investments necessary for future economic progress (while tending to fiscal matters in a balanced manner). The Republicans favored strangling government, allowing Wall Street to again run free, and protecting tax breaks for the wealthy.

The debt-ceiling fight demonstrated that Obama could best the Republicans on these fronts. And in early December 2011, Plouffe was delighted when Mitt Romney enthusiastically renewed his endorsement of Paul Ryan’s budget. This embodied the values contrast Obama was looking to establish.

The third step was fighting. For much of 2011, Obama was bogged down in negotiations he and his aides believed were crucial to avoiding economic disaster. To win reelection, he’d have to persuade voters he had the mettle and determination to battle for them.

Independent voters, as Obama’s aides saw it, desired compromise and an end to partisan sniping—but only if decent results were realized.

“They do not want capitulation to the Tea Party in the name of compromise,” the Obama strategist remarked. “These people prefer a postpartisan world, but in the face of just-say-no Republicans, they want someone who will be very direct.”

In his first three years in office, Obama had taken a lot of guff for not being a fighter, for being too quick to conciliate and seek an accommodation.

“A big part of the game is keeping our people engaged and enthused, and you can’t do that if they don’t think you’re fighting for them,” a senior House Democratic aide complained about Obama during the debt-ceiling brawl. “They don’t respond to the pragmatic management of government. You don’t always get rewarded in politics for being rational.”

But Obama could be a steely battler—though in a cool and quiet manner. During the Egyptian and Libyan crises, after careful deliberation, he took decisive steps. He did the same when he launched the bin Laden mission that could have ended his presidency had it failed. Yet following these episodes, he displayed little swagger, and the full extent of his behind-the-scenes fortitude did not completely register with the public. But after Romney accused Obama of “appeasement,” the president did snap back, “Ask Osama bin Laden and the twenty-two out of thirty top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.”

Obama spent much of his presidency seeking consensus perforce. But he was a competitor. The 2008 campaign had not been merely an upbeat and touchy-feely parade of hope-iness, yes-we-can-ism. Obama fiercely took on establishment favorite Hillary Clinton and then war hero John McCain, and his campaign machine was always aggressive.

Obama’s advisers knew he could be a fighter. The Republican presidential nominee would definitely try to make the election a referendum on Obama; the president and his allies would have to promote his contrasting vision and tear into the Republican nominee. Obama could do that.

IN CHICAGO, JIM MESSINA, WHO LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE shortly after the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, was in charge of the reelection campaign. In preparation, he had read nearly every book he could on presidential campaigns of the past hundred years. He had found great lessons in the reelections of Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—but he would not share these with reporters who asked. He had, however, reached a traditional conclusion: winning campaigns are always about the future.

Messina believed—and polls backed this up—that a majority of voters shared Obama’s vision and values, as evidenced in the debt-ceiling showdown and the ongoing push for the jobs package. The election in 2012, he thought, need not be an up-or-down vote on the incumbent, as long as the Obama campaign robustly conveyed its core messages. Messina even thought Obama could be the hope and change candidate in the race—though, of course, with a modification in expectations.

The hope and change sales pitch in 2008 had allowed Obama to define himself in assorted ways—and, more important, permitted voters to embrace him for different reasons. Now, the president had a concrete record that could be judged. If Messina and his crew were serious about reprising the change theme, they had to convince voters the president’s actions had truly resulted in positive change.

Saving the economy from depression, overhauling health care, reforming Wall Street, enacting a stimulus that created or saved millions of jobs—none of that had helped the Democrats in 2010. But Messina was planning an aggressive strategy to trumpet Obama’s accomplishments. Even on health care: Do you want Republicans to take away your mammograms and colonoscopies or your insurance for preexisting conditions?

Obama could still hold on to the mantle of change, Messina insisted, by persuading voters that the government needs to do big things to create jobs, develop clean energy technology, confront immigration reform, invest in education. With such an approach, Obama’s aides contended, the president could both court independents and rev up the Democratic and progressive base.

There were obvious obstacles. Though White House aides routinely cited polls showing that the president’s Democratic base supported him at high levels, these surveys also revealed a so-called enthusiasm gap, with Democratic voters expressing less passion about the 2012 contest than Republican voters. And a number of Democratic and progressive activists and influentials were disappointed with the president and the outcomes of the first three years. “We’d be out of our mind to say this is not real,” Messina said.

By the end of 2011, the campaign had already developed mechanisms and metrics to respond to the disillusionment. As part of its grassroots operation, the reelection effort was conducting one-on-one conversations between Obama volunteers and prospective voters—with the results of the conversations sent back to the Chicago headquarters and stored in a database that logged the concerns, pet issues, and past voting histories of each voter. By mid-November, the campaign had amassed one million of these contacts, and many of these conversations had addressed voters’ discouragement concerning the president.

The leading causes of the disenchantment tended to be Obama’s abandonment of the public option and the lack of progress on climate change, immigration reform, and Guantánamo. (Obviously, these voters were liberal Democrats.) With all this data in hand, the campaign was developing strategies for its volunteers to address these concerns. Surely, once the Republican nominee emerged and the alternative was clear—a Republican in the White House with possibly the Tea Partied GOP controlling both sides of Capitol Hill—Democratic enthusiasm would increase. But Messina and the campaign were not willing to wait.

There were positive signs for the campaign. In the first ten months of 2011, a million people donated to the campaign, with 46 percent having never before contributed to Obama. By the end of the year, the campaign had established on-the-ground operations in all fifty states and deployed more than a thousand neighborhood team leaders, attracting more volunteers than it had initially anticipated. And in November, Obama for America volunteers in North Carolina quietly mounted an organizing effort across the state and helped Democrats trounce Republicans in local elections. It was a test of the reelection campaign’s theory that targeted grassroots activity in key areas could help win the day. There was little doubt that Obama’s team could pull together a monster of a campaign organization.

STILL, OBAMA AND THE CAMPAIGN WOULD BE IN UNCHARTED waters, striving to reelect a president at a time of economic misery and profound popular doubt. (At the start of 2012, about 70 percent of Americans worried that the country was on the wrong track.) The combination of clever and sophisticated electoral strategies, cutting-edge tactics, a highly organized on-the-ground army, a bountiful campaign treasury, and an appealing message of vision and values would be up against a powerful impulse within the electorate to make a change . . . at the top.

In Obama’s third year as the forty-fourth president of the United States, he did not triumph over the Republicans. Though he often outmaneuvered them—including during the payroll tax cut dustup at the end of the year—the GOPers, driven by unrelenting Tea Party extremism, had defined the debate for much of this period.

Yet as 2012 began, control of that debate was up for grabs—and Obama had reached the point where he had the chance to bolster his recently acquired advantage over the Republicans. Most of the public believed he had behaved more reasonably and responsibly during the absurd debt-ceiling trauma. (In mid-December, Pfeiffer tweeted, “Just a thought: if the House GOP had prevailed in August, right now we wld be debating the debt ceiling and possible default. Happy Holidays.”) And Obama finally had managed to launch that war of ideas.

Looking at the 2012 election, Plouffe saw it evolving as a contest of greater clarity and contrast than the 2008 campaign. That heartened him. The more contrast, the better for Obama—and the millions of Americans who were with him.

The president’s challenge in the final year of his first term was not merely to draw this fundamental comparison, but to persuade Americans that the survival of the middle class and the future of the nation was indeed at stake and that this face-off between him and the Republicans was not merely the same-old same-old partisan showdown or an interesting rivalry of progressive and conservative perspectives. And in his feisty, populist-tinged, and policy-drenched State of the Union address in January 2012, Obama aimed to establish this thread: “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot.” He noted there was a choice. Government could help the top 2 percent by preserving tax breaks for the wealthy, or it could bolster the middle class by financing programs that boost manufacturing, education, job-training, innovation, and research and that preserve the social safety net. “We can’t do both,” he said. What’s at stake, he contended, is “American values.”

At a time of profound trial for the United States, there were two distinct pathways forward. That’s the story Obama would have to tell and sell—and the voters would get to choose.

“OBAMA RAN FOR PRESIDENT BECAUSE HE BELIEVED THERE WAS a confluence of problems that were a long time in the making, a consequence of rapid changes in communications, technology, and the economy,” Axelrod said. “And the real question was, Are we mature enough as a country to deal with that in a way that works for most Americans?”

In his first three years in office, Axelrod insisted, Obama had been “exactly what he said he would be.” He put results ahead of politics, outcomes above theatrics. He resisted the temptation to score cheap political points. He cut deals to solve problems—and to prevent harm to millions of Americans.

Axelrod summed up the case for Obama: “This may not be entirely satisfying, but he believes his highest responsibility is to get things done.” And he noted that his own job, as Obama’s message guru in 2012, was to “find a way to convey this, to politically monetize character.” He added, “It’s not entirely apparent you can do that.”

Though the year 2011, full of political and policy complications and disappointments, had not always proceeded as anticipated, Obama had eventually succeeded in laying the foundation for the decisive campaign to come. In the face of unremitting opposition—and perhaps because of it—Obama had realized much of his strategic plan.

He could only hope the same would happen in 2012.