On June 7, 2008, Hillary Rodham Clinton, member of the most powerful family in Democratic politics since the heyday of Camelot, conceded that a freshman senator named Barack Hussein Obama had beaten her for the party’s presidential nomination. A woman—a former First Lady and senator—who had been in the national eye for nearly two decades had lost to someone that the late Senator Ted Kennedy had introduced just three years before as “Obama Baraka,” someone whose very skin color promised a freshness, a rejuvenation, a different kind of politics.
The Clinton team was flummoxed. Their insinuation that Obama wasn’t up to the job—that he wouldn’t be able to handle an international crisis, a portentous “3 a.m. phone call”—hadn’t convinced voters to cast a ballot for someone more experienced. The Republican nominee, John McCain, would try and fail to make a similar point stick in the general election. Neither the Clinton team nor the McCain team understood it was Obama’s freshness, newness, even strangeness, the fact that he hadn’t been tainted by years building his Washington résumé, that appealed to voters. The inexperience was the asset. This was an America desperate for change, not just wanting to hear the words but to see the change with its own eyes.
So it surprised John Podesta that he was one of the first people the new Democratic presidential nominee called after Clinton conceded.
The speed with which Barack Obama rose to national prominence meant he had to build a network faster than most other presidents. His predecessors had had time to amass allies across the country. George W. Bush had been a prominent figure in the Republican Party for two decades, going back to his father’s tenure as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, before he ran for national office. Bill Clinton had been a governor for more than a decade and a leader in reestablishing the Democratic Party’s centrist ranks through prominent think tanks like the Democratic Leadership Council, well before he took the oath in 1993. George H. W. Bush, Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson—each had run in national political circles for decades before ascending to the highest office in the land.
But Obama’s background was more like Jimmy Carter’s. Carter had gone from peanut farmer to two terms in the state senate, then in a surprising upset became governor of Georgia. He had some experience with national politics, having chaired the Democratic National Committee’s campaign wing during the 1974 elections, but his emergence on the national scene during the 1976 Democratic primaries—at the expense of more seasoned politicians like Morris Udall, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Lloyd Bentsen, and Frank Church—was swift, and not the least bit expected when the campaign kicked off.
Similarly, Obama ascended from the depths of the Illinois state senate to a U.S. Senate seat he wasn’t supposed to win. Even before he won election to the Senate, some Democrats believed he would be president of the United States one day. And when “one day” turned out to be just four years down the line, Obama found himself with some catching up to do if he had any chance to build a team competent enough to run the country.
Podesta, as much as anyone who claimed to share party affiliation with the newly crowned nominee, was part of what Obama had been railing against, one of the “Professional Democrats” who’d figured out how to accumulate a healthy living whether his party was in or out of power. He’d started on Capitol Hill in 1979 as a young lawyer, assisting the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Ted Kennedy. Over the next two decades, he held just about every important job in Washington, working as the top lawyer to the Senate Agriculture Committee; as a top advisor to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle; as the founder, with his brother Tony, of the Podesta Group, still one of the most influential Democratic lobbying firms in the city. He was Bill Clinton’s first staff secretary, a job that gave him intimate access to the president. In 1998, as Clinton faced impeachment, he hired the wiry and physically unimposing Podesta, by then well known to Democrats and Republicans alike, to be his chief of staff. Podesta lasted until the end of Clinton’s second term and then invented his own kind of permanent Washington perch in 2003, founding the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank that today is one of the party’s power centers—ironically, at the time of its founding, because of Podesta, CAP was viewed as Hillary Clinton’s campaign and government-in-waiting, whenever she decided to run, be it 2004 or 2008.
At exactly the moment when Podesta’s influence appeared to be on the wane, the junior senator from Illinois was on the phone. Barack Obama wanted John Podesta to begin planning his administration. So Podesta—certainly not of the new generation Obama had been promising to bring with him to the White House—was surprised. After all, he believed the Obama team saw him as a Clinton insider, which made him an enemy in the eyes of some Obama loyalists. Indeed, two of Obama’s most trusted lieutenants in particular—David Axelrod, his chief political strategist, and Robert Gibbs, his longtime press secretary—earned a reputation for blocking Clintonites from the Obama inner circle, both in the general election campaign in 2008 and eventually in the White House itself. But here was Obama, reaching out.
They met the following month, in July 2008. And despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the two men—one a longtime insider, one an outsider who had promised to shake up the insiders—had little in the way of a preexisting relationship, there wasn’t much chitchat in their first encounter. It was, Podesta later recalled, all business. “We were way into the nuts and bolts right from the get-go,” he said. Of all the former Clinton insiders, Obama was told, Podesta was the least Kool-Aid drinking. During the Clinton years, there was a group of Democrats who didn’t comfortably call themselves FOBs (Friends of Bill). Most of them ended up very close to the congressional wing of the Democratic Party, confidants of folks like Dick Gephardt, onetime leader of the House Democrats, and Tom Daschle, Senate Democratic leader from 1994 to 2004. And Podesta straddled that world well. Daschle, who had become close to Team Obama throughout 2008, essentially signed off on Podesta as a Clintonista who could be trusted.
But part of Obama’s outreach to the Clinton old guard was out of necessity. Unlike most folks who run for president, Obama didn’t have a network of people to reach out to, whether the subject was foreign policy or health care. He was that new to the scene. And the prospect of filling a government meant Obama had to have an open mind about Clinton veterans. Who else was there, really? There were only so many Democrats in 2008 who had zero ties to the Clintons, and just about every one of them was already involved with the campaign. And of course the incoming president had been in Washington only a few years, far too short a time to develop his own network of qualified candidates. Eventually he would fill numerous positions with Washington outsiders, but at the beginning, if Obama had limited himself to those who had no ties to the Clinton White House, he might not have been able to fill every job in the West Wing, let alone an entire executive branch.
As the months went on, Obama began taking the transition planning more seriously—the job is actually so big post-9/11 that it is now expected that major presidential nominees start the process, even knowing that there’s a good chance they might not be elected. Podesta, with Obama’s consent, pulled together a roster of Professional Democrats who’d served with him in the Clinton administration, to begin collecting résumés and putting together names of friends, former colleagues, and rising stars to fill out the next Democratic administration.
Through the Democratic and Republican conventions, the presidential debates, and especially after the early September 2008 tailspin that started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the first Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout of big banks later that month, the economy increasingly became the big issue. Here Obama got an assist from rival John McCain, who stubbornly continued to claim that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy were sound—even saying it again on the Monday after the Lehman collapse. That flew in the face of what many voters were witnessing, and with each McCain declaration of confidence, it began to look more probable that the first Obama administration would be taking office the following January. And as this change in focus for the campaign came to be, so did Podesta’s focus on the transition. Suddenly, putting together a top-notch economic team that seemed ready to deal with a huge challenge was a necessity. And this is where Podesta’s ties to the Clintons gave him more cachet with candidate Obama, since the Clinton era was viewed by the public as an economic success. And whether Obama believed the Clinton ’90s economic team was the right way to go, it didn’t matter at this point; Podesta’s experience meant the list of folks he would present Obama to choose from would be veterans of the Clinton years.
Obama came to the U.S. Senate in January 2005, after winning a difficult Democratic primary election through more than a little bit of luck—his wealthy primary opponent’s embarrassing divorce records happened to leak to the press (a leak that some in Illinois Democratic politics still believe Obama aides engineered). His general election matchup followed the same pattern: Republican Jack Ryan, a potentially strong opponent, imploded, thanks to embarrassing divorce records. (Ryan reportedly asked his wife, a famous actress, to have sex with him in swinger clubs; he may be the only politician in history whose sex scandal boiled down to his wanting to have sex with his own wife, not another woman.) When Ryan dropped out of the race, Illinois Republicans cast their lot with former radio host and frequent presidential candidate Alan Keyes. Obama rolled up more than seven in ten voters to win a seat previously held by a Republican.
Senator Tom Daschle recognized a political talent when he saw one—as did those who had been watching the Democratic National Convention three months earlier. There, Obama had been chosen by John Kerry’s campaign to make the keynote address, and, writing the speech himself, Obama knocked it way out of the park and essentially became the rising star of the Democratic Party.
As Obama was cruising toward that Senate win, Daschle was in the fight of his life as he sought to keep his seat in South Dakota, a state George W. Bush was going to win by twenty points or more in that year’s presidential election. When Republican John Thune beat him by just a handful of votes that fall, Daschle’s Capitol Hill days were over. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s were just beginning.
Daschle’s defeat was a loss for the party, but he would leave a legacy within Democratic circles. In party politics over the past two decades there have been a few camps to which the best party activists remain loyal. The Clintons own a cadre of top strategists. So did House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. Nancy Pelosi, who would become the first female Speaker of the House in American history after the 2006 Democratic landslide, owned the friendship and devotion of most of the party’s major fund-raisers and donors on the two coasts. And though there were a few other clans—the Ted Kennedy clique, the Paul Wellstone veterans, the Bill Bradley acolytes—only one group could legitimately take on the Clinton machine in a political street fight: the Tom Daschle gang.
In Washington, Daschle had come to power by putting in his time. He patiently worked his way up the seniority ladder, courted the votes of his colleagues, and eventually took over when Maine senator George Mitchell quit as Democratic leader in 1994. On his way to the top, Daschle collected a staff that reads like a who’s who of Democratic insider politics of the twenty-first century—names unknown outside of the Washington metro area but backroom and cloakroom celebrities within it. They were the muscle.
No one better embodied the Daschle staffer, the powerful but soft-spoken insider, than his longtime chief of staff, Pete Rouse. Rumpled, a tad overweight and understated, Rouse never seemed to revel in the amount of power he wielded. When Daschle led the Senate Democratic Caucus, observers called Rouse the 101st senator, for his ability to deal directly with the principals necessary to get a bill passed, an amendment adopted, or a procedural hurdle overcome. It is rare for a staffer to be able to deal directly with a member of Congress, much less an egomaniacal senator; the unassuming Rouse had no trouble doing so.
After Daschle’s loss, Rouse was determined to get out of government and go through Washington’s revolving door to make some money. Daschle himself thought his old friend was burned-out, ready to take a break from Capitol Hill. But as Daschle spoke with Senator-elect Barack Obama, he became convinced that the new guy had a future and that he needed an experienced chief of staff to navigate the pitfalls that threatened a freshman senator, especially one who might have his eye on national office down the line. He needed Pete Rouse. So Daschle persuaded Obama to give his chief of staff a call. Obama did; Rouse wasn’t interested.
That changed with a little help from the outgoing Senate Democratic leader. Daschle and Rouse talked; if only they could get Obama off on the right foot, they thought, the sky might be the limit for the Illinois freshman. Encouraged by Daschle’s efforts, Obama came at Rouse again. “Barack worked on Pete for a long time,” Daschle later recalled. “[Pete] and I both had such an affection for Barack and thought he had so much potential.” Rouse agreed to take the job for six weeks, until Obama had a staff and his feet had hit the ground. Then Rouse agreed to stay a few more months. Rouse would finally leave Obama’s employ toward the end of 2013, nearly nine years after agreeing to be Obama’s chief of staff for six weeks. It actually became a running West Wing joke for those four-plus years Rouse was around: he was always leaving in about six months.
Rouse’s hiring is particularly revealing in light of the presidency to come. One of Obama’s first acts in Washington, kicking off a career that would ostensibly be dedicated to changing the way the Capitol works, was to hire—and then keep—one of the most plugged-in Democratic insiders the city had to offer. Rouse, and the insiders who would later join him, were Obama’s acknowledgment that he lacked the expertise to navigate the Washington thicket. But there was more to it than just that. Obama saw himself as a Washington change agent—as he does now—and yet there was a devil to deal with. One could win an election running as an outsider, someone uncorrupted by the Washington swamp, but once there, the outsider finds there is no way into the rooms where decisions are made. Before you can teach the town to speak a foreign language you have to be fluent in its native tongue. This dilemma dogs Obama today: how to be out while in, how to be in while out. Obama knows this intellectually but in practice struggles with it. And he’s terrible at faking it. He expects folks to rationally view a problem the way he views it. And when they don’t, he assumes they’re simply playing politics and loses patience quickly. For instance, at the start of his second term, the president hosted a series of dinners with Republican senators. It was an idea his new chief of staff at the time, Denis McDonough, came up with. Obama agreed in principle, but the practice was not nearly as rewarding for these senators as it could have been. While all who attended acknowledged the president was serious about reaching out and about figuring out how to do something big, the follow-through wasn’t there. A few senators even softened their anger toward the president, but because these Republicans got the distinct impression he was there under pressure from McDonough and not because he wanted to be, the occasions didn’t do what they should have done—make new potential frenemies. It really served as an opportunity for Denis, as chief of staff, to make key connections in the Senate, which just doesn’t produce the results a presidential relationship could.
From the moment he hired Rouse, back in 2005, Obama had designs on the leadership of the Daschle gang. As it turned out, most of that gang, from the senior operatives to the most junior members, would follow Rouse’s lead. Just a year into Obama’s term in the Senate, Anita Dunn, like Podesta a veteran of Daschle’s Senate office and a permanent member of the Professional Democrats, came on board Team Obama to help advise his political action committee. Rouse, whose job was to keep Obama’s options open, asked her to get involved. “We don’t know what we’re going to do with this thing,” Rouse told Dunn; the idea that Obama might run for the governorship of Illinois in 2010, or even president in 2008 or 2012, went unspoken.
Now, almost four years later, 1600 Pennsylvania in sight, Obama was sending Podesta, his transition chief, mixed signals. On one hand, he wanted to make it clear that his election signaled a new and different way of doing business in Washington; a part of that was bringing in a new and different cadre of government officials. Longtime Obama friends such as Valerie Jarrett, Michael Froman, and Julius Genachowski would be occupying the top ranks of his administration. But at the same time, Obama’s ideas for other, more prominent positions—positions that might find themselves defending Obama administration policy on Sunday morning talk shows—seemed decidedly establishmentarian. And whenever an acolyte would bring up this contradiction to Obama himself, his answer would be the same: I’m enough change.
For many who served under him, that claim would prove both insubstantial and detrimental. “Obama thinks he is the agent of change,” concluded one disappointed insider. “So he gives a lot of leeway to having establishment people around him sometimes. He thinks that as long as he’s president, he’ll drive that change.” But “he hasn’t always used personnel to do it.”
Of course “always” doesn’t mean “never,” and hardly anyone in the Obama administration proved that point better than the vice president—a loyalist first.
New York congressman Anthony Weiner was not well liked among his fellow House Democrats, even before the salacious scandal that erupted when a self-portrait of Weiner’s nether regions, mistakenly posted to Twitter, cost him his career in Congress. Weiner was loud and confrontational, less a legislator than a bomb-thrower; a made-for-twenty-first-century-cable-TV officeholder, not an old-school legislator. He was known among colleagues for angry, accusatory speeches on the House floor; he was known among his legions of fans for his take-no-prisoners rants on the cable news channels. (Weiner was one of the few Democrats who would willingly, almost gleefully, take on any Fox News host who came his way, angling for a YouTube moment.)
There had been a time early on in Obama’s first term when a group of angry congressional Democrats were up in arms over what they saw as the president’s spineless capitulation to Republican talking points and position papers in an attempt to gain support from a GOP out to destroy him. With his colleagues watching, Weiner decided to confront Joe Biden and treat him like Sean Hannity, bellowing that the president needed to change his whole approach. Obama was acting like a “negotiator in chief,” Weiner snapped, instead of acting like a leader.
His comments found the end of Biden’s rope. “There’s no goddamned way,” Biden roared, losing his temper. In front of the assembled Democrats, his face flashing red before he detonated, he told Weiner (and by extension all gathered), “I’m not going to stand here and talk about the president like that!”1
On the surface, such an outburst from the man first in line for the presidency could have seemed reckless, possibly undermining his own reputation and relations between the White House and fellow Democrats. But to those who knew and worked with Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., it was a moment that clarified the way he saw himself in an administration in which his position had not always been clear: Biden was choosing sides, and the side he chose was Barack Obama’s. It was steel reinforcement for what had become an already good, loyal relationship with the man in the Oval Office.
The moment a presidential candidate chooses a running mate, his campaign begins peddling an awkward, tortured, and almost entirely false narrative. The two ticket-mates, as the campaign will tell it, are thick as thieves. They get along famously, there are no policy differences between the two of them, and if elected, they’ll govern in complete harmony.
In reality, that’s almost never the case. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were barely on speaking terms after a bitter 1980 primary season that pitted two of the Republican Party’s best-known faces against each other. Bush wasn’t even Reagan’s first choice for the job; he was the compromise after former president Gerald Ford refused to join the ticket. Bush picked Dan Quayle, a little-known senator whose verbal gaffes delighted the media and embarrassed the White House. Bill Clinton made a counterintuitive choice in Al Gore, tapping someone from a neighboring state; but their constant side-by-side campaigning forged a personal bond, and the image the two baby boomers projected was one of generational change that resonated with voters. Gore never felt fully like an insider once the presidency began. But only after Clinton was impeached by Congress and Gore’s thoughts turned to his own presidential chances, which he believed were hurt by Clinton’s personal shortcomings, did the relationship truly turn sour.
Where Clinton and Gore had demonstrated a generational harmony and some ideological common ground (remember that Al Gore, circa 1992, was considered a moderate-to-conservative classic Southern Democrat), the difference in age between the younger Obama and the older Biden couldn’t have been more stark; the New York Times once noted that they were farther apart in age (nineteen years) than their West Wing offices were in steps (seventeen).
During the 2008 primaries, when Biden ran an underfunded shoestring bid, he had been critical of Obama’s lack of experience. And at one point, he inadvertently insulted not just Obama but African Americans in general, calling him “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” It had been the prototypical Biden gaffe, a well-intentioned effort at a compliment that had come across as boneheaded, belittling, even racially tinged. Biden, who counts himself a champion of civil rights, called to personally apologize; Obama accepted, and promised there were no hard feelings. And as the primary campaign wore on and the candidates spent more time together at a slew of debates, Obama found himself impressed with Biden’s nimbleness when the spotlight was on. Arguably, Biden won (at least on points from actual debate coaches) just about every debate he participated in during the 2007 portion of the 2008 campaign. And Biden did it without belittling Obama on the most public of stages. Of course, those debate victories did nothing for Biden with the voters, but they left an impression with the one person who would ultimately matter.
When Obama began narrowing his choice of a vice president, Biden’s was the name on the short list that at first looked most out of place. No way a guy campaigning as the change candidate picks the guy with the most congressional experience. But Team Obama had a “do no harm” strategy when narrowing their VP choices. The biggest reach on the short list was Virginia governor Tim Kaine, the first major Democrat to endorse Obama in the primary campaign and the closest in age; picking Kaine would have been akin to Clinton’s 1992 choice of Gore—a generational, change ticket. And Kaine was seen as someone who would also help lock in a state in a year when some Democrats actually doubted Virginia’s place in the swing state category. But Kaine would have reinforced the inexperience talking point, something the campaign was still a tad nervous about.
The poster boy of the “do no harm” short list was the lone centrist on the list, Indiana’s Evan Bayh—also young, but after four terms in state-level office, including two as governor, and two terms in the U.S. Senate, someone with much more governing experience than Obama had. Bayh, however, was just a tad too conservative and, well, underwhelming for Obama’s taste. Indeed, his legislative footprint was about as nonexistent as Obama’s, and yet Bayh had been there twice as long.
Biden certainly had negatives. If Obama was running against Washington, how did it make sense to choose a man who had spent his entire adult life in public office and more than three decades in the United States Senate? Biden’s undisciplined side was legendary; even before he became vice president, the term “Bidenism”—a dopey, quotable gem that tumbled from Biden’s never-still mouth—was routinely used by the Capitol Hill press corps.
But Biden brought to the table what Obama couldn’t: unassailable foreign policy credentials, deep relationships with some of the United States’ most important allies across the globe, and long-standing relationships with members of Congress—Republicans and Democrats—whose votes would be necessary to advance the president’s agenda. In short, Biden was a player, and if picking a running mate is about filling a void the nominee has, Biden filled the “Washington insider” void.
“The day that Clinton picks Gore, he’s in third place in a three-way race for the presidency. Not first, not second, third,” said Ron Klain, the longtime Democratic operative who served as chief of staff to both Biden and Gore. “Within a week of the time he picks Gore, he’s gone from third place to first place. As a result, from the start, the concept of the Clinton-Gore ticket was, partners.” Gore got a similar boost from his running mate pick in 2000, when Joe Lieberman’s selection coincided with a surge of enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket that brought the race back to even for the duration.
Obama, on the other hand, was firmly in the lead by August 2008, when he needed to pick a vice president. His advisors didn’t want to do anything to change the fundamental structure of the race. “They didn’t want a game-changing choice. They liked their game,” Klain said. “I honestly believe, if they could have found a thing in the Constitution that said, ‘You don’t have to have a vice president,’ they didn’t need one.”
Biden himself harbored doubts. After all, he had made the decision to run for president because he believed he would make the best president. That feeling was hard to let go; he believed even after accepting the invitation to join the ticket that he would have made a better president than Obama. Biden’s closest aides told him to knock it off, but in his mind that feeling persisted.
His sense of being unfairly diminished wasn’t helped by the Obama team’s practice, almost from the beginning, of keeping Biden at a distance. Aside from a brief bus tour, a joint appearance at the Democratic convention, and the odd moment when they happened to be in the same state at the same time, the two men didn’t spend much time getting to know each other. And Obama’s advisors were certainly wary of another Bidenism that would reflect badly on the ticket. Nobody was more leery of the Biden pick from the get-go than the chief architect of the Obama campaign apparatus, David Plouffe. It was a skepticism that would never truly go away.
As the economy cratered in the late summer and early fall of 2008, and as it became clearer that Obama would be the next president, he spent hours every day on the phone with Hank Paulson, Bush’s treasury secretary, receiving briefings on an economic disaster he would inherit. When John McCain suspended his campaign in September, ostensibly to return to Washington to deal with the crisis, and the two candidates joined a briefing at the White House, Biden saw a sullen, withdrawn McCain contrasted with the engaged, animated Obama. At the height of a crisis, one neither of his making nor his responsibility, Obama was acting like a leader, Biden thought. Then after the pair had won, when economic advisors made clear to Obama just how bad the economic recession they faced would be, a thought crossed Biden’s mind, according to those close to him: they got the order of this ticket just right. At that point, Biden abandoned any misgivings he harbored about Obama during the campaign.
Biden had developed on the stump his own peculiar mannerisms during his four-decade career in politics. Anyone who had seen him speak to an audience more than once almost certainly heard some old saying that his mother, father, grandfather, or grandmother had used. He took to heart the lessons learned in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, building a kind of guiding morality based on old-fashioned American Rust Belt values. And while politicians earned a reputation for making promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep, that morality required Biden to pledge—repeatedly—that whatever he said, he would do. He routinely gave his “word as a Biden,” a phrase that assumed an intimacy with his audiences.
Those quirks, that intimacy, were key elements of Biden’s natural skill as a politician. What Obama brought to the ticket in soaring rhetoric and the sheer ability to give a speech, Biden brought in retail political skills. The man who hated the backslapping nature of politics in Washington had picked the consummate backslapper to be his vice president. Walk into the Oval Office with your family and the president will be very courteous, give you a warm handshake, perhaps say something fun to your kids. Walk into the vice president’s residence and get ready for a lot of touching. If you have young kids, Biden immediately picks them up and treats them like his own grandkids; for the adults, man hugs, and kisses for the women. It’s just in his DNA—just as much as being less huggy and kissy is in Obama’s.
Biden had watched eight vice presidents of the United States from his perch as a Delaware senator, beginning with Spiro Agnew, who resigned nine months into Biden’s first term. Unlike for the office of president, there is little guidance for what a vice president ought to do, save casting the occasional tie-breaking vote in the Senate. And Biden’s predecessors had traveled dramatically different paths. Dan Quayle had been relegated to the sidelines in George H. W. Bush’s White House. Bush himself had routinely been the last advisor in the room with Ronald Reagan before Reagan made a critical decision, hiding his own views from others so that the staff never quite knew where he stood (a trait that Obama’s first defense secretary admitted he wished Biden would adopt). Al Gore had worked more hand in glove with Clinton than had any VP of the modern era, and Cheney, of course, one-upped Gore and was put in charge of large swaths of George W. Bush’s White House, from an energy task force to an aggressive foreign policy—at least in the first term, until that relationship soured late in the second.
Biden wanted to learn from his predecessors, to adopt their best practices. Before he’d agreed to serve on the ticket, he’d thought of the office in about the same terms as had John Nance Garner, the Texan who served two terms as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president. Garner quit because the office wasn’t worth “a bucket of warm piss.” In fact, Biden actually turned down the job when Obama first offered it.
Obama aides on the White House staff, most of them veterans of the campaign, had worried about the prospect of Hillary Clinton serving as secretary of state. Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod had even argued against choosing her. And some felt a similar distrust toward Biden, albeit nowhere near the level of their distrust of Clinton. But as Biden proved again and again, that distrust was misplaced. In Secret Service terms, Biden was the type of guy who in politics, once you earned his loyalty, would take a bullet for you. There would be no greater defender of the Obama brand, no one who would so readily subsume his own reputation in an effort to protect the team, than Biden.
Biden made clear that he didn’t want a portfolio—primary responsibility for a specific area of policy—like Dick Cheney had carved out for himself. But he told Obama he wanted his opinion considered; he wanted to be the last person in the room. In hindsight, Biden couldn’t believe he’d almost resisted Obama’s offer and was relieved he was asked a second time. He regularly told anyone willing to listen that even he was astonished at how little a part he played, as a sitting senator, in running the government’s operations. He now believed there was no job other than vice president that prepares anyone to be president—not forty years in the Senate, not ten years as a governor, nothing. And, typically for Biden, he said this wholeheartedly and with the best of intent, without realizing what it might say about his boss’s qualifications for the job.
During the first two weeks of their term, Biden committed two trademark Bidenisms that made Obama aides nervous about their vice president. During the inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts had flubbed his lines while he administered the oath of office to President Obama. What hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time made some in the White House nervous; if Obama hadn’t said exactly the right words in exactly the right order, did that mean he wasn’t president? Some extreme Obama-haters had already begun to spread rumors that Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate was fake, that he had been born in Kenya and was thus ineligible to serve as president. And while Team Obama would pretend publicly the whole birtherism stuff was crazy noise and not a serious concern, they did show some sensitivity. So to assuage any possible doubts, the White House invited Roberts to administer the oath again, in a private ceremony.
And just as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was reaching out to the Supreme Court to extend the invitation to Roberts, Obama and Biden were administering the oaths of office that White House senior staffers would take in front of the public. In a meeting room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the ornate, many-columned warren of offices that stands between the White House and Seventeenth Street, Obama asked Biden to read the oath.
“For the senior staff, all right,” Biden said, asking for a card with the oath’s text. “My memory is not as good as Justice Roberts’, Chief Justice Roberts’.” The thirty or so staffers in the room understood Biden’s dig, and they laughed at the joke. A smile broke out on Biden’s face. But Obama flashed irritation he hadn’t shown before; he blanched, as one person in the room described it, scowled, and shook his head. He reached out to Biden to cut him off. Later, he admonished Biden, who called Roberts to apologize.2
The second Bidenism happened a few weeks later, when Biden addressed House Democrats at an annual retreat. He confessed that crafting a stimulus measure that would spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a bid to revive the stagnant economy carried with it political risks, and that even a perfect bill wouldn’t insulate them completely. “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong,” he said.3 This was a classic “Washington gaffe,” as defined by longtime liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, when a politician accidentally speaks the truth but ends up causing a political headache. At a press conference the following day, Biden’s boss, who saw the question coming, took a verbal poke at his own vice president.
“I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly,” Obama said. “But let me try this out. I think what Joe may have been suggesting, although I wouldn’t put numerical—I wouldn’t ascribe any numerical percentage to any of this—is that given the magnitude of the challenges that we have, any single thing that we do is going to be part of the solution, not all of the solution.”4
Biden was incensed. It was the first time Obama had made a joke at his expense, and in a nationally televised press conference, at that. The two men then sat down in the Oval Office, where each made clear to the other that he wasn’t happy with the situation.
While this was the first time Obama had dialed back Biden publicly, it was the second time he’d done so since selecting him as his running mate. In the fall of 2008, Biden had defended Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to a group of reporters. He had answered a question by saying that what the Democratic candidate lacked in experience, he made up for in vision. As far as Obama was concerned, in saying this, Biden had agreed with the premise too much. Obama promptly called up his running mate and privately let him know that it was not Biden’s job to defend his inexperience. Biden was used to dealing with self-assured politicians—after all, he was one himself—so he took the rebuke in stride. But his takeaway from the incident was that one thing Obama didn’t do well was accept even the mildest of friendly critiques.
At around the same time, Obama brought up the subject of Hillary Clinton to Podesta one day early in the fall of 2008, two months before he offered her the job, suggesting that his old rival might be the perfect person to take over as secretary of state. Podesta actually saw Clinton as a potential secretary of defense, but Obama had another idea. He had already told Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and Clinton administration veteran who had barely concealed designs on Pelosi’s speakership—and who was the personification of partisan warfare in Washington—that he wanted him to serve as his chief of staff. Biden was in place, and, based on a few conversations he had had with one of his few real friends in Washington, Obama began trying to find a way to keep another insider—this one a bona fide Republican—on board. Just a few weeks after he became the Democratic nominee, Obama decided he was going to attempt to convince Robert Gates to stay on as secretary of defense.
The idea to keep George W. Bush’s Pentagon chief on the job began to germinate in July 2008, when the candidate traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, and a few other Middle Eastern countries. The stated mission of the trip was to give Obama, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his companions a view of the situation on the ground. The real reason, one formulated more by his campaign in Chicago than by his Senate office in Washington, was to give the Democratic presidential nominee a chance to bolster his foreign policy credentials at a moment when voters were just beginning to tune in to the fall’s presidential contest.
Obama, clearly cognizant of his own perceived inexperience in foreign policy matters, had asked Rhode Island senator Jack Reed to organize the trip. The two men could hardly have come from more different backgrounds. One was a community organizer who spent his formative years engaged in social justice campaigns in hardscrabble areas of Chicago. The other was a northeastern Catholic who graduated from West Point and served as a U.S. Army Ranger. But the two got along; in fact, while few people in Washington count themselves as true friends of Barack Obama, he and Reed hit it off so well from the beginning of Obama’s time in the Senate that today many see Reed as one of the few conduits to the White House. (Although Reed, like many folks identified as “close Obama confidants,” admits that the two, while friendly, aren’t particularly close.)
So when Obama asked Reed to organize the trip, he was turning to the closest thing he had to a friend in the U.S. Senate. Such congressional delegation expeditions—CODELs in Washington-speak—are paid for with taxpayer money, and are thus required to include members of both political parties. To fulfill this requirement, Reed turned to a friend of his own, a fellow army veteran named Chuck Hagel. Obama, who knew Hagel from the Foreign Relations Committee and was aware of his relationship with Reed, could have easily guessed the choice—in fact, he was counting on it; Reed and Hagel were thick as thieves. A tour of Reed’s Senate office shows nearly as many photographs of Hagel as it does of Reed. The two traveled overseas together a lot when they were serving in the Senate.
The company wasn’t bad politics, either. Obama had yet to pick a running mate, and some news outlets speculated that Hagel—a close friend of McCain’s and, eventually, of Obama’s—was on the Democrat’s vice presidential short list. For the obvious political gain, the Obama campaign did nothing to dissuade people from thinking this. Hagel’s wife was a prominent late endorser of Obama, attended a debate as a guest of Michelle Obama in 2008, and was a donor. It was toward the end of his Senate career in 2008 as a Republican that Hagel started to publicly break from his party, particularly on Iraq.
The trip itself was a study in generational—or perhaps cultural—differences. Reed and Hagel, both veterans of military service and of the U.S. Senate, spent their time on the military aircraft swapping stories, trading jokes, playing cards, and gossiping about fellow senators. Obama, the youngest of the three and the newest to the senatorial club, spent his time studying notebooks on policy and doing good old-fashioned debate prep. “He was very disciplined about doing some work,” Reed recalled years later. “We were less so, more like old guys hanging out together.”
The possibility—perhaps the likelihood—that he would assume the presidency was clearly on Obama’s mind at the time, which also explains why he was less than good company during this trip. A meeting with General David Petraeus, then the commander of allied forces in Iraq, turned unusually formal and slightly tense. “You’ve got to understand, as I think I understand, my role versus your role” in crafting war policy, Obama told the general.
For his part, Petraeus was just as formal, and decided to use his time with his potential new boss to persuade him about the surge and try to convince the country’s most famous Iraq skeptic that progress was being made. Using PowerPoint, Petraeus didn’t quite seem to get the hint that his presentation was coming across more as a lecture than as an explanation. Later claims that the two really got off on the wrong foot were probably overstated, but it was clear during this first meeting between Obama and Petraeus that each was sizing up the other, the way two alpha dogs might. And that lecture/debate that the two had in front of Reed and Hagel drove the perception for years that these men never saw either major war the same way.
It was on this trip that Obama began discussing his administration with Reed, the colleague he trusted most on issues of war, peace, and the Pentagon. No soldier himself, Obama knew he would face trouble relating to generals who had spent a lifetime in the military, fighting wars and building the bureaucracy of a Washington establishment that had been growing at a rapid pace for more than half a century. When Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in 1961, Barack Obama hadn’t even been conceived.
So, during the trip overseas, Obama asked Reed what he thought should happen at the Pentagon. This was actually Obama’s way of sizing up Reed himself for the job. Whether or not he realized that the president-to-be was sorta, kinda interviewing him, Reed shifted the discussion immediately in another direction. Reed said he believed that the two ongoing wars, plus the deepening economic crisis at home, meant there had to be some continuity within the ranks of the military. That moment of instability abroad and at home was no time to go about inflicting new instability where there need be none. Reed made it known he wouldn’t just support the idea of keeping Robert Gates on the job—he wanted it to happen.
But that was no simple task, and only recently have presidents asked members of the opposition party to serve in their cabinets. Yes, George W. Bush asked Norm Mineta, a former Democratic congressman from California and Bill Clinton’s last commerce secretary, to stay on as head of Bush’s Transportation Department, hardly a high-profile assignment. To ask Gates, the head of Bush’s war-planning department, to stick around in the same position for a new president who’d won the Democratic primary by being farther to the left, more opposed than any of his opponents to the war in Iraq, was another leap altogether, one even Obama’s most dedicated supporters would have trouble understanding.
And yet the request was very much in line with Obama’s sense of self—political and personal. He had always straddled lines—part black, part white; a childhood overseas and at the very edge of America; Barry to Barack—and knew that labels could be a barrier, not a blessing. He also had a sense of historical grandeur. As part of its sales pitch to some key political elites, his campaign leaked (in such a way that it would become widely known) that in preparation for taking office he read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, an account of how Lincoln gathered into his cabinet several of his fiercest antagonists. Bringing Hillary into the administration would follow such a formula, and the idea of retaining Gates might have been even more appealing in terms of the “Obama as transcendent” narrative. And yet it was about more than the precedent set by an earlier Illinois politician: Obama was following a presidential term that had gotten the rap, fairly or not, of being not-ready-for-prime-time in certain areas, from FEMA to the Pentagon to a sometimes rogue office of the vice presidency. Given that issue, and Obama’s own perceived inexperience, there was a focus on trying to bring in big personalities in the cabinet or, in the case of Gates, keep one. In keeping with the spirit of the postpartisanship brand Obama had been creating for himself since 2004, it would have been odd if he couldn’t find places for political rivals and even Republicans in his cabinet. He had to show he could walk the walk on building a real bipartisan team. Gates’s agreeing to stay on would send that message loudly.
It fell to Reed to make the sale. A few months after their trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama’s transition team asked Reed to reach out to Gates to gauge his interest. Initially skeptical that such a relationship could work, Gates used Reed in the same manner, asking questions about the arrangement through the Rhode Islander to see how serious Obama was. And cognizant of how the politics of Washington are played, Gates never let the discussions leak. It was quite an impressive feat and is proof that when someone does want to keep a secret in Washington, it can be done.
Over several weeks of back-and-forth, Reed made it clear that the Democratic nominee was very serious about keeping Gates on board. But there was another factor at play: Gates wanted to retire. Before being brought back into government service as Bush’s SecDef, he had had a comfortable, even joyful, position as president of Texas A&M University. He attended Aggie football games, he showed up at the school’s weekly Yell (the rally held on campus before game day), and he even posted anonymously to Aggie football message boards. He would have liked nothing better than to return to the academic sector, according to his closest aides.
But thanks to Reed, Obama knew something about Gates that would serve as his trump card, and more than once: Robert Gates was a patriot, someone with a deep sense of service and duty to country, someone who couldn’t say no when a president asked him to serve a little longer. What’s more, Gates felt an almost paternalistic obligation to those in the field, the troops he commanded, particularly post-surge and during a time of deep unpopularity of the wars.
Still, Gates was truly conflicted. Recalled chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, “Gates and I talked about this a lot, and he had very mixed feelings. One of Gates’s greatest strengths and a weakness is he’s such a public servant. There’s nobody that represents better the cliché in town which is, you know, if you don’t want the president to ask you, you’d better intercept it before the phone rings. You’d better get the message over there, please don’t make the call.” Gates never asked Obama not to ask, setting the silent signal that he was open to persuasion.*
Shortly after Obama won the election, the two met face-to-face for the first time. The clandestine encounter took place at a firehouse on the grounds of Washington’s Reagan National Airport—perhaps unintentionally symbolic, given that Gates’s first job in the White House with any real seniority had been in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Gates had given Obama’s team a list of questions before the meeting, a bold move for a prospective employee meeting a prospective employer, even in a relationship as sensitive as that between a defense secretary and a president. The questions were both stylistic and policy based, according to those familiar with the meeting. Obama pulled the list from his inside coat pocket, which impressed Gates; they went over it point by point, and by the end of the brief encounter, they both believed they would make a good fit. One Gates confidant admitted that the minute Obama pulled out his questions was the moment Gates knew he was staying on board—Gates saw it as a sign of respect.
In fact, even before they got to Gates’s questions, the secretary of defense was preparing to stay on for the new commander in chief. But he wanted to keep his senior staff, too, at least until new officials could be appointed and confirmed by the Senate. The Obama people disagreed on a few names, including Gates’s chief of staff, a longtime committed Republican, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon’s spokesman, but the soon-to-be president overruled his own staff, and Gates kept his aides.*
Only a few media outlets got wind that Gates might be sticking around for another tour, but what reporters were really concerned with was whether Barack Obama would offer Hillary Clinton a job, whether she would take it, and what that said about the rift between Clinton and Obama, a schism that once appeared to threaten the very fabric of the Democratic coalition.
In fact, Obama had been intent on hiring Clinton for a long time. His staff likes to say he had decided she would make a strong secretary of state during the primaries, presumably as she was ripping into one of his policies on a debate stage or in yet another negative advertisement. But for Obama, bringing Clinton into the fold meant avoiding a pitfall several of his predecessors hadn’t: he could co-opt an intraparty rival.
Such an olive branch was something other presidents hadn’t been able to stomach (and perhaps other presidents succumbed to staff pressure a tad more easily). After winning the Republican nomination, and then the presidency, in 2000, George W. Bush made no effort to bring John McCain into his administration. (In fact, the bad blood between the two men was so substantial that some Democrats, including John Kerry, believed they might be able to recruit McCain for the VP slot on the 2004 Democratic ticket.)
Jimmy Carter made the same mistake in 1976, when he never paid the Kennedy family its due, never even asked Ted Kennedy to come on board the ticket. Carter, like Obama, was riding a wave of change that had swept a public sickened by the most dramatic inside-Washington scandal, Watergate. Carter, a bit of a true believer in himself, was moralistic to a fault and thought reaching out to someone like Kennedy would undermine his credibility as a change agent. No name screamed “Washington insider” in the mid-1970s like Kennedy. Carter’s snub helped create the first crack in the Democratic Party that would become a full-fledged fracture by 1980, as Kennedy ended up challenging Carter for the Democratic nomination (to this day, Carter believes it cost him the general election against Ronald Reagan).
In turn, the bitterly fought primary campaign of 1980 made Reagan and George H. W. Bush rivals for the same job. But after Reagan picked Bush to become his running mate, in no small part to unite the divided Republican Party, their relationship evolved into something more, into a form of mutual dependency. Reagan, the outsider who defined conservatism for a generation of Americans, needed Bush, the consummate insider, to help him navigate the convoluted contours of governing in Washington. And Bush needed Reagan in order to be successful, and to hand over the legacy that would usher him from the vice presidency to the Oval Office.
Still, that sort of accommodation seemed to be the exception, not the rule. Even Lyndon Johnson pushed Robert F. Kennedy aside as early as was politically feasible, sending the attorney general to New York to win a Senate seat rather than keeping him in the tent—in hindsight, a mistake. And Bobby’s shadow in 1968 helped convince LBJ not to run. Hillary’s husband had a sense of what might happen if you let an opponent walk away. Bill Clinton’s toughest rival by the end of the 1992 campaign was, arguably, Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey. Kerrey didn’t get a job in the Clinton administration; instead he stayed on in the Senate, where he turned into the go-to guy for members of the press looking for a Democrat who would criticize the young president.
Obama learned the lessons Bush, Carter, Johnson, and even Clinton suffered for; he wanted Hillary Clinton on his side. Yet it was more than history that had inspired him to pursue the woman he’d defeated only months earlier. Obama saw something else in Hillary Clinton: raw grit and determination. Despite their campaign trail rivalry, Obama came to deeply appreciate Clinton’s tenacity. Even when the numbers looked daunting, even when she would need to win an almost impossible percentage of the vote to catch Obama in the delegate count, Clinton hadn’t given up. If the roles had been reversed, Obama sometimes wondered, would he have done the same? Or would he have thrown in the towel? Short answer: he probably would have folded a lot sooner than she did.
Since she was interested in the vice presidency only if she was guaranteed the job, that left secretary of state, a position that gave her the potential to bolster her credentials abroad and that gave Obama two huge advantages: On one hand, Clinton was a global superstar in her own right, someone who would command attention and respect from friends and enemies alike, someone who could give a rookie president instant credibility on the international stage. On the other, secretary of state is a traditionally apolitical position; Clinton would be precluded from offering her take on domestic politics, robbing the media of a juicy Obama-versus-Clinton story line. Picking Clinton to be his secretary of state would put her in “a box,” explained one veteran of both the Obama and Clinton administrations, albeit “a very impressive, dignified, special box.”
What’s more, while the administration may not have seen the true calamity the Great Recession was about to bring on, Obama knew his first term would be dominated by trying to fix a broken economy. His focus would need to be on the home front, though in his campaign he had promised a more humble America, willing and able to work with the rest of the world. Only someone with an international stature as great as his own could speak for the United States as Obama dealt with domestic issues; that someone was Hillary Clinton.
Her international status allowed Obama to delegate; if a world leader was upset that Obama couldn’t personally visit, or wasn’t giving the respect that leader felt he deserved, Hillary would be dispatched. While she hadn’t spent her life training to be an international diplomat, her two decades in the highest echelons of American politics—as First Lady and as a senator serving on the Armed Services Committee—gave her a broad range of connections with foreign leaders. Clinton would enter office with more international relationships than most of Obama’s predecessors could have claimed, with the possible exceptions of George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower.
Initially, Clinton was skeptical of taking the job in Foggy Bottom. She would be working for someone else, executing his policies, and leaving behind a Senate career that still had promise. There were moments when Clinton saw herself as the logical successor to Ted Kennedy, the next liberal lion of the Senate. But Obama’s appeal to her sense of patriotism was a strong pitch. And behind the scenes, Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, was making another thing clear: the Senate still worked on a hierarchical system, and a junior senator with little more than a single term under her belt shouldn’t be comparing herself to Ted Kennedy just yet. Reid had no interest in seeing Hillary become the biggest star in his Senate. Such were the ironies of Washington: it was easier for Barack Obama to become president than to become leader of the Senate, and easier for Hillary Clinton to enter the cabinet than somehow take over running the Senate, or even step into leadership.
So Clinton would have returned to the Senate much as she’d left it—as a senator who made headlines but who had little real power in the committee system, not exactly a backbencher but somewhere in the middle, and certainly not someone who had any real chance of climbing the leadership ladder, especially not when Reid and Clinton’s senior colleague, New York’s Chuck Schumer, were still around. Without a piece of actual Senate real estate to run, she would be relegated to become either a White House Senate ally or one of its chief critics in order to fulfill her own ambitions. Leaving the Senate started to have a lot more appeal.
And then there was the mounting public pressure to take the job, especially from some of her biggest supporters. Private appeals from Podesta, from Obama, and, perhaps most important, from Bill Clinton, were pushing her in the same direction. Reid’s coldness only made Clinton’s decision easier. The night before accepting the job, she went to bed convinced she would stay in the Senate; by the next day, she had changed her mind. Obama’s chief rival would join his cause.
The role of national security advisor is as important and as close to a president as that of chief of staff; it also explains why the national security advisor’s office is the only other one in the West Wing, besides the chief of staff’s, that has a conference table and a fireplace. It’s a plum job and is almost always reserved for someone very close to the president. But Obama didn’t have a wise old hand on his foreign policy campaign team who fit the part; Biden was the closest thing, and his position was settled. The folks he would most come to rely on for foreign policy during the campaign were all extremely young. The freshman’s top Senate advisor, Mark Lippert, was a Hill staffer who had worked on the Senate Appropriations Committee and served in the Navy Reserve, and he was all of thirty-two years old when he went to work for Obama, in 2005.5 When Lippert was called up to active duty in 2007, he recruited a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, another longtime Hill staffer named Denis McDonough, to replace him. McDonough was also a former member of the Tom Daschle mafia, and he was a rising star in Democratic foreign relations circles, but he had been a professional advisor for half as long as some of Clinton’s allies.
The third member of Obama’s inner circle on foreign affairs had even less experience. Ben Rhodes had been a speechwriter for Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who cochaired both the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group during George W. Bush’s administration. Rhodes had wanted to get involved in campaigns, and he’d even traveled to New Hampshire with Virginia governor Mark Warner, who was thinking about running in 2008. After Warner decided not to run, in October 2006, Rhodes tried to get on board Obama’s campaign, months before a campaign even existed. He pitched in where he could, writing floor statements on foreign policy to help Jon Favreau, Obama’s top speechwriter. His big break came in April 2007, when Favreau had to write the candidate’s first foreign policy speech. Another speechwriter wasn’t getting the job done, so Favreau helped the campaign kill two birds with one stone—they hired a better writer and found someone who understood foreign policy better than the policy staff did. Rhodes spent 2007 backfilling for both teams.
A small number of better-known foreign policy and national security types with Clinton ties chose Obama over Clinton during the campaign, and some even served as prominent surrogates on TV: Susan Rice, who had been a rising star in the State Department back during the Clinton administration; Samantha Power, another veteran of Obama’s Senate office and a growing voice advocating a more robust U.S. role in stopping genocide from her perch at Harvard and as author of a prizewinning book on the subject; and Greg Craig, a classmate of both Hillary’s and Bill’s when they attended Yale Law School in the early 1970s (he even sublet his apartment in New Haven, for seventy-five dollars a month, to the not-yet-married couple).6 Craig, who had defended Bill Clinton at his impeachment hearing (and who desperately wanted a job in Obama’s State Department), sided with Obama over Clinton. So, too, did Tony Lake, Bill’s former national security advisor; Lake was the single biggest Democratic foreign policy grand pooh-bah to pick Obama over Clinton, though he played only a small role in actually forming the candidate’s foreign policy.
If you thought the general public was putting way too much stock into what an Obama presidency was going to look like, folks in the liberal foreign policy world were taking it to another level. After the Bush era, many of these people thought serving overseas for Obama would be the closest thing they would ever experience to working in an international Utopia (though it sounds naïve in retrospect, the Bush era was viewed that negatively in foreign service circles).
By the time he won the Democratic nomination, the number of folks claiming to be Obama foreign policy advisors had swelled to three hundred, including some of the same Clintonites—such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright—who, just weeks earlier in one of those end-of-the-campaign desperation hits, had questioned Obama’s readiness. To deal with the huge number of so-called advisors and make sure all of them felt they were being used in some form, McDonough broke the crowd into about twenty groups and subgroups, divided by region or issue, so their input could be sought at a moment’s notice if the candidate needed to react to some new development on the world stage.7 Many of those on the roster were there merely for show, to demonstrate that Obama had united the Democratic Party; he was only really close to Craig, Rice, and Scott Gration.*
That made for a very short list of actual close aides to serve as national security advisor, made shorter when Power quit during the primaries after she was quoted calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Craig had so angered the Clintons with his defection, and the language he used as an Obama surrogate attacking his former friends, that he would never be allowed to serve in Foggy Bottom while Clinton was secretary of state. The only campaign surrogate who got a look for national security advisor was Susan Rice, but Obama ultimately felt she fit best as ambassador to the United Nations. “We had huge decisions on Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism,” Rhodes recalled. “That was going to dominate, even though we had a whole agenda that we were going to push out on a range of other issues like nonproliferation and resetting our relations in the world. We had a lot of military decisions to make, so I think the president’s thinking was, let’s put Susan in a prominent diplomatic role. That’s where her experience is rooted in. And I want someone who has military experience in the national security advisor’s role because I’m going to have these big decisions to make on defense and I’m going to have less time to focus on this myself because I’ve got so many domestic agenda items to take care of.” Left unsaid but widely known in Obama circles, Rice and Clinton might not work well together. And one thing that never works well in any administration is when the national security advisor and secretary of state are at odds. Both believe they should have the most influence on America’s foreign policy. The reality is that the person who briefs and meets with the president the most is usually the most influential, and that’s what makes the National Security Council (NSC) role so sought after.
Oddly, back when Hillary Clinton and John McCain were claiming that Obama couldn’t handle that 3 a.m. phone call, there must have been at least one person who took that attack—or at least the perception it created—to heart: Barack Obama himself. Even with Gates and Clinton secured, the president wasn’t finished attempting to tap establishment figures to round out his national security team. Sensitive to the fact that neither he nor his vice president wore the uniform, Obama wanted some high-profile generals on the team, even if it was simply for the sake of appearances. Two big military names that he got to know—a little bit—were former marine corps general Jim Jones and former navy admiral Dennis Blair.
Obama had met Jones, who had served as supreme allied commander in Europe, back in 2005, when Lippert arranged a sit-down.8 During the campaign, Jones had offered Obama advice in private while publicly appearing with his old friend John McCain. Meeting secretly with Jones in Richmond, Virginia, during one of Obama’s campaign swings through the battleground state, Obama brought up the possibility of Jones working in his administration; Jones said he would be better suited to serving as secretary of state than as national security advisor, a prospect that at the time wasn’t wholly out of the realm of possibility.9 On those two occasions Obama and Jones had clicked, and Obama liked the way Jones presented information.
It didn’t matter to Obama that he barely had any relationship with Jones, aside from the few conversations they had had over the preceding three years. As one advisor remembered, “Jones presents well.” Added another, “Jones gives good meeting.” Perhaps a stronger advocate for Jones was Biden, and Obama, according to one of the longtime aides who would put together the foreign policy team, liked the fact that Jones was cut from the same cloth as Chuck Hagel and Bob Gates, “kind of this moderate Republican realist, alliance-internationalist tradition” that was the dominant strain of Republican foreign policy through the first President Bush. These were responsible Republican foreign policy elites—they hadn’t rushed to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they understood, in the same way Obama did, America’s delicate position in the world.*
The first time Jones showed up at an Obama campaign rally in the early summer of 2008, one of Jones’s closest friends, none other than John McCain, was taken by surprise. In fact, when first alerted to Jones’s appearance, some of McCain’s friends thought the press reports were mistaken. After all, Jones and McCain were close, having talked almost weekly for years. No way Jones would be playing national security prop for Obama, or so swore one of McCain’s closest confidants. But prop he would play—with a nice reward: when President-elect Obama announced his national security team, on December 1, 2008, Jones stood next to Clinton, Gates, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano (who would head the Department of Homeland Security), and Eric Holder (who would be attorney general) as the incoming national security advisor.
To balance the establishment-pleasing Jones, Obama loaded up the national security team inside the West Wing with his young true believers, folks like Rhodes, McDonough, and the now-back-in-good-graces Samantha Power, all of whom had independent and better relationships with the commander in chief than did Jones—a fact Jones would realize only once it was too late.
The last major piece of the puzzle was perhaps the most delicate: Wall Street and the economy were in free fall. In a single September day, after the House voted down the nine-figure bank bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 778 points, nearly 8 percent of its total value. To calm the markets as much as possible, and to chart a course to recovery, Obama needed a treasury secretary of stature and gravitas, and as with Defense, he needed someone who would immediately create a bipartisan consensus.
But picking a treasury secretary Wall Street would trust was a delicate task at the moment. Average Americans blamed the Street for destroying their 401(k)’s, their job prospects, and perhaps their children’s futures. On top of that, almost every prominent Democrat on Wall Street had at one time or another worked for Robert Rubin, Clinton’s second treasury secretary. Rubin began his career on the Street and had served as a board member, and briefly as chairman, of Citigroup, and picking a Rubin acolyte would mean choosing someone tainted by the Street’s most unsavory business practices. Voters wanted to see someone from Wall Street frog-marched off to jail, not to the ornate office building across Executive Drive from the White House.
Obama’s short list came down to precisely two names: Larry Summers, the former secretary who took over for Rubin, an Obama advisor who desperately wanted to be chairman of the Federal Reserve but would take Treasury if it meant a shot at the Fed, and Timothy Geithner, a low-key former Summers aide who served as governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the Treasury Department’s unofficial embassy on Wall Street. (There actually was a third name on the short list before the Lehman collapse, former Goldman Sachs CEO and governor of New Jersey at the time, Jon Corzine. But his Goldman ties made Corzine a nonstarter politically.)
Both Summers and Geithner were well known on the Street. Both had Obama’s confidence. But Summers struck many Obama aides as too brash for the moment; he was known for bullying subordinates and equals alike, and he had a history of getting himself into trouble. He had been fired from the presidency of Harvard University after making pseudoscientific statements about the differences between men’s and women’s brains. And how this person played in public mattered at the time. While many treasury secretaries in the past could be seen and not heard, that was not going to be the case for the first Obama secretary. Digging out of the Great Recession was going to put this one under the klieg lights, and the person needed to be a good fit temperamentally. That wasn’t Summers. He’d gotten into trouble at the World Bank for signing on to a report that claimed it made economic sense to export pollution to Africa. (He later admitted he’d not read the report through and simply promised to be smarter about reading something thoroughly before he signed on to it. An assistant classified the idea as “an ironic aside.”10) Oh, and Summers was too easily connected with the Clintons—after all, he was being considered for the same job he’d inherited back then. Obama had been fine with drawing from the pool of Democratic veterans, but a direct repeat was too much for someone who wanted to maintain that his was a new generation. Never mind Summers’s rocky time at Harvard, which earned him a reputation, fairly or not, of not being particularly sensitive to women in leadership roles.
Geithner, on the other hand, had an unquantifiable advantage, one that positioned him well for the inside track. His ability to communicate ideas in a clear, concise way had grabbed the attention of his superiors throughout his career; one reason Summers had promoted Geithner through the ranks of his own Treasury Department during the Clinton years was because Summers liked the way Geithner presented briefing materials. Obama and Geithner had met only once, a private get-together after a campaign fund-raiser in New York City, but the two hit it off, and Obama liked the way Geithner cut to the chase—a very personable guy who loves to crack jokes and would later earn a reputation for using the f-word more often than Rahm Emanuel.
Geithner was also close to the Street without being too close. As president of the New York Fed, Geithner knew all the players. He had dealt with the heads of the big banks as an equal, sometimes as a savior. He even looked the part: even though Geithner’s salary was a tiny fraction of even a junior Wall Street partner’s, he dressed well, ate at the right restaurants, and knew the language and nomenclature. In fact, he appeared to be such a creature of Wall Street that, later in his tenure at Treasury, some opponents would accuse him of being a former banker himself, even though he hadn’t worked in the private sector.
Geithner, over the objections of Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, got the job. Emanuel, who was a Summers acolyte, did convince Obama to hire Summers as chairman of the National Economic Council. Summers took the lesser position because he saw it as a way to earn the trust of the new president so he could then get appointed to his real dream job: chairman of the Federal Reserve.
By picking three establishment favorites—Clinton, who was popular among both Democratic and Republican senators; Gates, who had already won bipartisan backing; and Geithner, who had good relations on Capitol Hill and who had been on both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s short lists for treasury secretary—Obama had hired qualified, competent managers of three key departments, all while avoiding a fight that might cost him political capital.
That latter part, avoiding a fight, was another lesson learned from a prior administration. It took Bill Clinton three tries to find an attorney general, thanks to a few missing tax payments that upended both Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood. When the nomination of former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik as the second secretary of the Department of Homeland Security had to be withdrawn, after even a basic vetting by a rookie FBI agent would have turned up plenty of red flags, it foreshadowed the beginning of a long period of weakness for the Bush administration.
Obama’s picks were by no means without controversy. Several other choices for key cabinet roles—Tom Daschle as health and human services secretary; Penny Pritzker, then Bill Richardson, then Judd Gregg as commerce secretary—either withdrew their nominations or withdrew themselves from consideration because of personal or political considerations. But in the three departments that would make the biggest difference to Obama’s presidency, he avoided early self-inflicted wounds. With several important votes coming up before his inauguration or shortly thereafter, Obama was going to use his political capital on issues rather than on personnel. But the cabinet was hardly looking like change; then again, the Obama mantra throughout the transition and even during the VP selection process was that being America’s first black president was change enough.
The transition period is an awkward time for a president-elect and an outgoing commander in chief. For the two and a half months between Election Day and Inauguration Day, there are in effect two leaders of the United States, and at a moment when one party is handing power to another, their policies can differ dramatically. Few presidential transitions in the nation’s history have had the potential to be as fraught as the transition between George W. Bush, the man who orchestrated and authorized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama, the man who campaigned against one and only barely accepted the necessity of the other. But after the September 11 attacks, during which one of the hijacked aircraft was apparently destined for the White House, Bush had made a smooth transition a priority, regardless of which party would take power once he left. Obama’s team, Bush told his staff, was to be given full access, to ease their path to power so there wouldn’t be so much as a hiccup when the old guard handed power to the new.
That didn’t mean the transition period wasn’t a confusing time for the incoming president’s personnel. They had spent two years in a virtual bunker together, working around the country against—and beating—some of the most established names in Democratic politics. They had rallied for hope, for change, for a new way to do business in Washington. But as the unadulterated glee of winning a national campaign wore off, some of the illusion that they would truly be able to change Washington right off the bat went with it.
For one thing, once campaign aides had recuperated for a few days and started considering their positions in the White House, they found the beginnings of a team already in place. And instead of reuniting entirely with those who had helped the candidate win the election, they were meeting senior members of the transition who had long careers in Washington, and even stints of employment in the Clinton administration and the Clinton campaign, behind them. Of course there was John Podesta, who had by now been leading the transition effort for months. Carol Browner, who had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in Clinton’s White House and was a veteran of Washington politics, had been brought in early to help staff several agencies. Federico Peña, Clinton’s HUD secretary, was on the advisory board; so was Bill Daley, Clinton’s old commerce secretary. Old keys opened old doors, while campaign foes became friends. Tom Vilsack, who had run briefly in 2008 and then endorsed Hillary Clinton, was tapped to run the Agriculture Department, an important outreach position the president could use to woo voters in farm-heavy midwestern states. And so it went.
Sometimes the exclusion was quite literal. Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama aide since his old boss, Senator Evan Bayh, had made it clear he wouldn’t run for president, left Chicago in a daze after helping elect the nation’s first African American president. The Monday after Election Day, he walked into the transition office’s headquarters, a run-down government building halfway between downtown Washington and Capitol Hill, with an aging McDonald’s facing the street. But no one had told the Secret Service that Pfeiffer, who would direct communications for the transition office, was allowed in the building. While he waited for the oversight to be fixed, Pfeiffer watched in amazement as Jamie Rubin, a Clinton administration State Department veteran and a vocal surrogate attacking Obama during the primaries on behalf of Hillary’s campaign, breezed right through security, his credentials already taken care of.
This was change they could believe in? To Obama aides and outside observers alike, the evidence was suddenly pointing in the other direction: longtime Washington hands crowded transition team meetings and would eventually hold the more important posts in the White House. And just as mind-boggling to the campaign staff, a Bush Republican, Obama’s chief primary rival, and an emissary from Wall Street occupied the three most important cabinet posts Obama would fill.
But, Obama would argue, he wasn’t selling out his ideals. Sure, the true believers who had been with him from the beginning ended up with lower-level political jobs, or at least positions that didn’t require Senate confirmation. He was merely demonstrating a pragmatic side, one that would reveal itself time and again during his first four years as president, sometimes at moments when pragmatism was seemingly at odds with the idealism that had carried Obama into office.
His favoring of establishment insiders and veterans of presidencies past demonstrated to those who had been up close with Obama something they’d known was there but had hoped might fade come arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania. They saw the supreme self-confidence, at times bordering on arrogance, that defined Obama, the assuredness that allowed him to sit in a room with four-star generals, heads of state, senior senators, or business icons and believe himself their intellectual equal or superior. Obama wasn’t concerned about bringing big names, pillars of old Washington, on board an administration bent on change; as always, he saw himself as the change.
Only months before, Obama had accepted his party’s nomination by proclaiming that “the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.” He’d meant it—but perhaps not, it seemed, in the way his acolytes had imagined, since the only change apparent to them was him.