A president must maintain a delicate balance between his official duties and his campaign duties. Legally speaking, presidents can use the perks of office—Air Force One to travel, the bully pulpit to command media attention, the trappings of the White House itself to reward donors—to their political benefit. His campaign, or an affiliated party apparatus, must pay for political travel, but at a laughably low rate; if he flies to a fund-raiser in Los Angeles, for example, he pays only the equivalent of first-class airfare to get there, a tiny fraction of the cost of renting the world’s most advanced 747 for a transcontinental flight. He can “cut down” that cost even more if he pairs political fund-raising duties with an ostensibly official event, though in today’s world of perpetual campaigning even official events can be scheduled with an eye to political benefit. Basically, if the president does a meet and greet with some tech industry leaders who are using some government grant, he can call it an official duty and defray the costs even more. This is always how presidents handle their fund-raising excursions to California. It’s a very expensive trip if there are no “official” events, but add a stop in Silicon Valley to talk about the outdated energy grid, say, and voilà!—using Air Force One to raise money for the party is not only extremely economical, it’s a huge advantage to the sitting president in campaign mode.
In recent decades, the way the president operates has become successively more political. Bill Clinton was the first to work on what his team openly dubbed a permanent campaign basis. George W. Bush took it a step further and kept his top political aide, Karl Rove, on the actual West Wing payroll. Few decisions in Barack Obama’s White House were made without considering the politics of re-election, even within weeks of his taking the oath of office. As one former senior staffer remembers, with some disgust, “These guys poll everything.” In fact, a week doesn’t go by without a poll that was in some way paid for by Team Obama being perused by the key members of the West Wing political team. These were never national polls. These were surveys of only the swing states. Whether it was October 2009 or October 2012, someone in the Obama White House would have data reporting where independent voters in Colorado stood.
Senior members of Obama’s staff were never not focusing on re-election and on the states he would need to win in order to stick around for a second term. In the first few months of the president’s first term, his domestic travels took him almost exclusively to the narrowly divided states that would determine the outcome of the 2012 election. He signed the stimulus bill in Denver; he stopped off in North Carolina; he traveled to Virginia and Florida. Reading Obama’s travel schedule in February 2009, when he and his staff were still figuring out how the phones in the White House worked, one could be excused for thinking the 2012 re-election campaign was already off the ground.
The president’s staff had obvious cover for sending Obama to such key battlegrounds—he was trying to win swing voters over to his agenda, and to pressure the members of Congress whose votes he would need on later initiatives (all four of those early states also featured competitive House and Senate races in both 2010 and 2012). But at times, they allowed their political considerations to shine through; it was hard, if not impossible, to have a five-minute conversation with any member of the Obama brain trust without hearing them quote the latest poll numbers for independent voters in Colorado, Hispanic voters in Florida, or suburban mothers in the crucial northern Virginia suburbs. From Axelrod, the architect of Obama’s first victory, to Messina, who would manage his re-election effort, it was clear that Obama’s most senior advisors had one eye on the 2012 campaign from the moment they set foot in the White House in January 2009.
For a staff that steeped itself in history, determined as it was to avoid the mistakes of past presidents, such concern was understandable. History does not look kindly on one-term presidents; though Obama repeatedly told interviewers he would rather be a great one-term president than a mediocre two-term chief executive, his staff had no illusions that one term would be enough. And, by the way, every president proclaims this, because it sounds good to the general public. But it is B.S., pure and simple. The last two sitting presidents to lose their re-election bids—Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush—missed early opportunities during their first two years in office to benefit by playing politics. Further, presidents defeated after one term give opponents a mandate to roll back parts of their agenda. So the only way to cement first-term achievements is to simply win a second term. As much as Obama seemed to disdain the actual work of it, his team was not going to sit on their hands. And the Obama political team rationalized this focus on re-election another way: it was about the only avenue left for Obama to have any juice inside the Washington Beltway and get his agenda through. Winning begets influence, or so Obama hoped.
Axelrod, Messina, and Emanuel were aware from the beginning that the Democratic majority Obama had helped usher into Congress would face a test in the midterm elections. Axelrod recalls thinking the majority was in trouble at the December 18, 2008, meeting in which the administration’s economic advisors laid out just how bad the recession would get. Emanuel knew that any first midterm election, when turnout would be lower than for a general election, and when the president’s most ardent fans wouldn’t necessarily be motivated to vote if the name Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, meant hard times for the party in power, doubly so when an economic recovery was under way.
Obama’s advisors also knew that midterm elections would be an opportunity to test their campaign apparatus, and the results would give them insights into the political mood of the country, especially in key battleground states for 2012. So in 2010, the White House team didn’t hide their 2012 interest. The team was especially interested in three elections. In Nevada, Harry Reid was seeking re-election. In Colorado, newly appointed senator Michael Bennet was running for his first full term in office. And in Ohio, Governor Ted Strickland was asking voters for another four years in office. The conventional wisdom among Obama’s brain trust held that if those three Democrats won their races—or even two of the three—it was a sign that the president’s re-election bid would be stronger than the pundits believed, in spite of Obama’s low poll numbers and the shellacking that was likely coming in many of the redder states.
Reid wasn’t making it easy; he was as unpopular as almost any incumbent senator in the country. The majority leader is by definition a partisan figure, and Reid’s bullheadedness hadn’t helped him with voters. Nevada’s economy, meanwhile, was one of the worst in the nation, given its dependence on tourism and construction, sectors that had dried up during the recession. He began the race trailing almost every potential Republican nominee he might have faced, including the wackadoodles.
Emanuel had a rule of thumb that helped determine which candidates the president would help: if the candidate was a sure loser, there was no point in sending Obama, who would then look weak for backing someone who couldn’t win. No matter how bad Reid’s poll numbers got, though, Obama traveled to Nevada several times, and his top strategists continually checked in. Reid’s campaign, it turned out, was something of a dry run for the president’s re-election bid; the majority leader’s campaign built a political machine that focused on getting voters to the polls during the state’s early-voting period, especially Hispanic and African American voters who traditionally turned out in lower percentages than their white counterparts. Plus, many of Reid’s political problems in Nevada were caused by his devotion to enacting Obama’s agenda. So Obama had no choice but to do whatever it took to help him, no matter how bleak things looked.
Reid had some unwitting assistance from Republicans, who nominated Sharron Angle, a walking disaster of a candidate. A favorite of the farthest extremes of Nevada’s Republican Party, Angle beat out far more able candidates in the primary, then began a slow and torturous process of completely undermining her own campaign, making intemperate statements on rape, religion, and ethnicity within the space of a few weeks. Reid’s campaign took advantage, running an almost completely negative advertising campaign—another tactic Obama advisors would duplicate a few years later against an opponent far superior to Angle—while focusing on turning out the voters most likely to back the Democrat, no matter how unpopular. Reid won by a surprisingly comfortable five-point margin, even though his approval rating never improved.
Reid’s victory taught Obama’s campaign that the Hispanic vote was a potent force to be harnessed. A later study by the William C. Velasquez Institute in San Antonio found that while nearly seven in ten white Americans who are eligible to vote are in fact registered, just over 60 percent of African Americans and just over half of Hispanics who meet the same eligibility requirements are registered.1 And minorities turn out in smaller percentages than their white counterparts. Searching for new voters, and faced with polling data that showed their candidate deeply unpopular with white Americans, the strategists who would guide Obama’s campaign got a clear message: Democrats were leaving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes on the table, and turning out Hispanic voters in droves would be key to winning several western states.*
A few states away, in Colorado, Obama himself had created something of a political mess. After winning election in 2008, Obama wanted Ken Salazar, a freshman senator, to serve as his secretary of the interior, a post traditionally reserved for a western politician. Salazar resigned from the Senate to take the cabinet post; in his place, Democratic governor Bill Ritter could have picked any number of accomplished politicians. Instead, he turned to Michael Bennet, chief of the Denver school system, someone who had never run for office and whose patrician Washington, D.C., private-school upbringing could appear at odds with the state’s frontiersman spirit. But Bennet wowed Ritter in a private interview, and he got the job, ahead of several more experienced candidates.
Bennet was not a natural politician, especially in the Mountain West. He looked more at home in a well-tailored suit discussing finances than he did wearing a hunting jacket and drinking a Coors with the snowcapped Rockies in the background. That made him vulnerable, not only to Republicans determined to take back control of the Senate but also to the very politicians Ritter had bypassed to select Bennet in the first place. Though Washington Democrats did all they could to keep the primary field clear for Bennet, one of those Ritter had scorned, former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, decided to take a shot at the prize he had been denied. Messina, in a last-ditch effort to keep Romanoff out of the race, appeared to offer him a position in the administration. Their exchange earned conservative media claims that Messina had violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits such tit-for-tat offers of help. And while Messina was smart enough to not technically break the law, it seemed painfully obvious what he was up to. Romanoff tried to score political points by going public with his refusal to back down.2 In the end, Bennet outlasted Romanoff in a blistering primary, winning by a little over eight percentage points.
Primaries can rip a party apart or produce a badly damaged nominee. But in Bennet’s case, the reverse happened: he had survived his trial by fire against an experienced politician such as Romanoff. More intriguing, Bennet became one of the few candidates to beat an opponent who had been endorsed by Bill Clinton. (Most of the forays Bubba made during the 2010 cycle were for candidates like Romanoff who had backed his wife two years earlier. During the later part of the cycle, Clinton would eventually travel for candidates who had supported Obama in the 2008 primaries, but only after months of begging. Bill Clinton and his closest confidants were the keepers of the unofficial grudge list for most of 2010. But after that year’s pummeling of Democrats, bygones finally became bygones for the former president, and the blacklist was essentially shelved.)
Obama seemed to click on a personal level with Bennet, another young outsider who came to Washington determined to change the system. And Bennet’s rise to prominence coincided with the mental image Obama had of himself: intellectual—to Obama’s Harvard Law Review, Bennet had edited the Yale Law Review—and disgusted with and disdainful of the process of politics. The two got to know each other in part because Obama seemed to travel to Colorado an inordinate number of times, whether for bill signings or public events, anything to keep his name in the papers in an important battleground state.
Like Reid, Bennet benefitted from the Republican primary. Former lieutenant governor Jane Norton looked like a shoo-in, a prominent centrist who had backing from the Washington establishment. But the populist furor that inspired the Tea Party movement struck again, and Norton lost the primary to a local county attorney named Ken Buck. Like Angle, Buck was proud of his determination not to be politically correct. He made controversial comments on abortion and proposed repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which allowed for direct election of senators.
The key to Reid’s victory in Nevada was the untapped well of Hispanic voters. The key to Bennet’s in Colorado was women, voters Buck seemed to offend at every turn. Overtly, the television advertising campaign Bennet ran contrasted the career politician versus the outsider; but under the radar, Bennet was communicating directly with women, particularly with social moderates in the booming Denver suburbs, about Buck’s stands on abortion and contraception. Bennet won by just under 29,000 votes out of more than 1.7 million cast, or about 1.7 percentage points. It was women voters who edged him to victory—again, something Team Obama took note of. Bennet’s campaign wasn’t just a blueprint for Obama in 2012; it also became a blueprint for Democrats all over the country by 2014.
In Ohio, Ted Strickland was running one of the more promising campaigns in the country, staffed by some of the most talented Democratic operatives in the country. Strickland had won election in 2006, then watched his state’s auto industry slide nearly into oblivion, taking the rest of Ohio’s economy with it. Now he faced John Kasich, a former congressman and Budget Committee chairman and even brief presidential candidate in 2000, who had stepped away from electoral politics a decade earlier, first to host a show on Fox News and then to make his fortune on Wall Street.
Strickland’s poll numbers were dismal. But Kasich’s choice of career after politics gave Democrats an opening: if they could paint him as the heartless, moneygrubbing cause of the financial collapse, the embodiment of a recession caused by greed and unchecked ambition, they had a chance to get Strickland a second term.
But Strickland couldn’t make the case, or perhaps Ohio’s economy hadn’t recovered sufficiently. More than 120,000 Ohioans held jobs with motor vehicle companies or parts suppliers, with about one in eight Ohio jobs supported by the industry,3 and the full effects of the stimulus package and the auto bailout wouldn’t be felt for several more months. Strickland held his own and did much better than he should have in this environment, but with the enthusiasm of the Tea Party behind his rival, Kasich edged out a two-point win on November 2.
Two of the three races the White House staff viewed as most indicative of their own chances had broken their way—but could Messina, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Obama’s other top strategists count on the fact that there were enough Hispanics in Nevada, suburban women in Colorado, or African Americans in key battleground states like Virginia and North Carolina? Or did Reid and Bennet survive because their opponents were laughably out of the mainstream, disasters-in-waiting who hadn’t the slightest chances of winning a general election? Would Obama himself have to get involved in a Republican primary to make sure he faced an unelectable alternative in 2012?
At a national level, the atmospherics seemed to suggest the latter. Obama’s victory in 2008 was total, sweeping, historic: He won states no Democrat had won in two generations, fueled by a growing coalition of minorities, single women, and the well educated. His coattails dragged nearly two dozen new Democrats into the House and another eight Democrats into the Senate. Obama won a majority of the popular vote, something no Democrat—including Bill Clinton—had achieved since Jimmy Carter in 1976. The coalition the Obama campaign stitched together looked virtually unassailable.
It wasn’t. To the White House, the die had been cast against Democrats months, if not years, before voters cast their ballots in November 2010. For one thing, there were a slew of accidental Democrats serving in Congress, candidates who essentially rode the Obama wave in 2008. Early indications in the 2009 elections were that the Obama coalition wasn’t turning out when Obama’s name wasn’t on the ballot. There was also the reality of the American psyche during midterm elections, especially during periods of economic anxiety. Voters almost always punish the party in the White House. It happened to Reagan and the Republicans in the 1982 midterms, and to Carter and the Democrats in 1978, for instance. Then add in the health care law and the fear of big change, and the die wasn’t cast only for Democratic losses in 2010; there was a perfect storm of disaster brewing.
Thus the president’s mission, his advisors decided, was simply to insulate himself from the damage beforehand in order to preserve his chances for a second term—chances that, in the depth of the Democratic doldrums of the spring and summer of 2010, already looked perilously low.
If his survival-of-the-fittest mentality made sense, it made sense to him alone. And that mind-set only added to the increasing frustration of Democrats on Capitol Hill, in the corridors of K Street, and in campaign offices across the country. The president and his White House seemed disconnected, resigned to a fate other Democrats believed was not yet sealed. And—perhaps most enraging—these Washington Democrats hated the White House for believing that the Obama brand and the Democratic Party brand were distinct, and that one was paramount over the other. The White House did little to dispel the notion that Obama came first, over and above the party. After all, for the first time ever, a new president came in and, instead of using the official party headquarters as his political base of operations, he and his team decided to start up a competitor of sorts—they called it Organizing for America, the OFA a play off the campaign initials Obama for America. After his second-term win, this decision to keep the Obama campaign apparatus separate from the party would continue, and “Organizing for America” would morph into “Organizing for Action.” At the time, it was designed to be the political apparatus that would help sell the president’s agenda. But despite modest fund-raising success, this group has had little impact. And the political legacy the president is leaving the Democratic Party is that of a bankrupted Democratic National Committee. For the first time in history, the official national arm of the Democratic Party would maintain a debt for more than two straight years. Political party committees regularly take on debt late in a campaign cycle but almost always pay it back before the end of the next calendar year. That is not the case with the DNC, circa 2014. In many ways, the president’s campaign team has used the DNC the exact same way the Obama campaign accused Romney’s Bain Capital of using distressed companies—load them up with debt and bankrupt them. Late in 2013, the Obama political team finally decided it had to start fixing the DNC, but the damage was done. It’s not clear the DNC will be a meaningful player for the next few years beyond being a vehicle to move money around. Many non-Obama Democrats have openly wondered just how powerful the DNC would be today if the 2008 Obama brain trust had truly taken it over and turned it into a similar campaign juggernaut that Obama’s 2012 re-elect turned out to be.
This mind-set of distancing Obama from the Democratic Party brand began the day he decided to run and thus challenge the person and family that controlled the party—Hillary Clinton. After all, when he entered the presidential contest in 2007, he was decidedly outside the Democratic establishment. Few believed that this interloper, this freshman senator without a gray hair on his head, could defeat the former First Lady of the United States, a two-term senator with such an overwhelming fund-raising advantage that any bid against her was seen as quixotic at best. Obama’s top strategists were outsiders, too; Axelrod maintained an office in Chicago rather than in Washington. Obama’s best moments on the trail and in debates came when he ran against Washington, the poisonous partisan swamp that had become so loathed by the average American. Even after he took over the White House, he continued, to his party’s chagrin, to set up Congress as his straw man opponent rather than singling out Republicans in Congress for criticism. But more than rhetoric was involved. After the president beat the establishment, he and his advisors had in their heads that they should not become the establishment. And so they tried to start their own party apparatus, of sorts. It took them a while to accept the fact that once they were in the White House, they would become the “new” establishment.
But running against Washington, standing against incumbency, can’t work when one’s own party controls Congress—being the outsider works only when one is truly outside. The image Obama crafted ended up working at cross-purposes with the party that needed him. That played out in the worst possible way for Democrats in 2010.
The seeds of their defeat were sown even before Obama won office. Pushed through by the Bush administration, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which made $700 billion available to big banks on the brink of collapse, spurred conservative anger. For years, the grumbling on the right was muted by the Bush-Cheney clan, essentially out of political necessity. Winning and holding the White House trumped all, so the conservative populist wing of the party accepted the largest expansion of government in generations by Bush, on things like national security and even the Medicare prescription drug benefit, because it was deemed good politics at the moment. Bush won re-election in 2004 and Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, so why mess with success?
But with Republicans in the minority across the board by 2009, the conservative natives weren’t just restless, they decided to start flexing their muscles about the size of government again. This is actually an inevitable reaction to losing. A party in regrouping mode usually tries to go back to its core principles. The Democrats did that post-2004, and it proved successful in 2006 and 2008. Republicans were now going through a similar soul-searching, and the more conservative elements were calling the shots. And so just a month after Obama accepted victory in Grant Park, the degree to which the economy was suffering became apparent to his advisors, and they could picture how a party out of power could take advantage of this anxiety.
The political landscape only got worse. In 2008, the economy lost about 2.6 million jobs. In January 2009, as Obama prepared to take the oath of office, another 800,000 jobs disappeared—in a month! Obama’s approval ratings, which started in the mid-60s, followed close behind. By the end of his first year in office, Obama’s rating was below 50 percent. At the same time, nearly 60 percent of Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. “It was mind-boggling how bad things were. And it was also frightening to think about the things we were going to have to do to save the country from a depression. Midterm elections are always tough, but this one we knew was going to be really, really hard because of the things that we were going to have to do,” Axelrod said later.
The signs of an impending Republican wave were everywhere. In 2009, Bob McDonnell trounced his Democratic opponent in the race to become governor of Virginia, running up larger margins than Obama had in the critical Washington, D.C., suburbs. Chris Christie, the bombastic former U.S. attorney, ousted a scandal-plagued Democratic governor in deep-blue New Jersey. The Tea Party movement had scared every Republican, and even some Democrats, away from working with the White House. And of course there was Massachusetts. Was that race a referendum on the president’s health care bill, as Republicans interpreted it? Was it simply a case of a better candidate, Republican nominee Scott Brown, beating an inferior campaigner, as the White House would spin it?
As hard as it might have been for Obama aides to imagine, things were about to get worse.
The life of a White House staffer, several of Obama’s senior advisors had come to realize, is not driven by carefully laid plans and a consistent agenda. Instead, life in the White House is driven by a series of crises, all of which have far-reaching consequences. After all, if it were a small problem, someone else would have handled it before it reached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or so the president would say over and over again when talking publicly about his troubled political situation. And in the spring and summer of 2010, any of the crises that faced Obama and his team—Emanuel referred to the “G-Force,” for Greece, Germany, Gaza, the Gulf, gas prices, and stock market gyrations—could have irreparably derailed a presidency.
The economy remained so stagnant that the word “recovery” hardly applied. Nervousness on Wall Street contributed to wild swings back and forth. Hundreds of billions of dollars in net worth had already been wiped out of 401(k)’s and retirement accounts, and every sign of hope was seemingly offset by a negative that might have signaled the beginning of another downward spiral. If the economy wasn’t irrefutably on the way to recovery by the time Obama was running for re-election two years later, his chances would be grievously imperiled.
And in an interconnected world, the American recovery depended in large part on the European economy. Greece’s government, forced to take severe austerity measures by European creditors as they struggled to curb their own budget crises, inspired a wave of protests from civil servants. On May 5, 100,000 Greeks marched through the streets of Athens as part of a general strike; three protesters were killed. If Greece defaulted on its debts or refused to meet the conditions for loans laid out by its creditors, led by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel, the ripple effect would cascade across the Atlantic and threaten the fledgling recovery in America. For a president whose agenda had already been entirely consumed by an economic disaster, the prospect of a renewed depression spelled almost certain defeat. So that was G-Force 1.
G2 was in the Middle East. Ever since Hamas had won control of the Gaza Strip, in 2006, the already-stalled peace process had threatened to degenerate into armed conflict. Back home, that posed a challenge for the administration, which, despite rhetoric to the contrary, hadn’t yet taken grand steps toward a peace deal. And the situation grew more tense by late May, when a flotilla of six ships sailed from Cyprus in an effort to break an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. On May 31, Israeli naval commandos boarded the ships in an effort to force them into an Israeli port. Nine activists were killed, including an American citizen. And while this Gaza mess may seem like a typical Middle Eastern event, it was the timing that was a problem for the president. Israeli issues are one of the few foreign policy areas that can impact domestic politics. And the president was already perceived as not as “pro-Israel” as the rest of his party. And whenever so-called pro-Israel Republicans could highlight that perceived split, they did.
To compound the problem for the president, Turkish citizens had been killed, and for much of his first three years in office, the president was trying desperately to woo Turkey diplomatically. He viewed Turkey as an important intermediary between the Western and Arab worlds. Turkey was one of Israel’s few Arab allies, so this incident threatened to derail whatever remote hope the president had of jump-starting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
But no crisis inspired more fear in the White House than the oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20, a methane bubble traveled up a drill column on an offshore oil rig called the Deepwater Horizon, causing a massive explosion that killed eleven men and sent as much as five million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf. Occurring just five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, the spill represented not just an environmental but a serious political threat. Obama aides remembered well that George W. Bush’s lack of a fast, efficient Katrina response had effectively doomed him to the dustbin of irrelevancy, and they were determined not to repeat his mistakes.
Carol Browner, the former head of Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency who had agreed to serve as Obama’s energy czar, briefed Obama within twelve hours of the explosion. Energy secretary Stephen Chu visited the White House frequently, often with massive PowerPoint presentations that went into excessive detail. Browner, Chu, interior secretary Ken Salazar, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and housing and urban development secretary Shaun Donovan, who were already meeting regularly on environmental issues as part of what they dubbed the Green Cabinet, held daily conference calls to coordinate a response.4 Obama visited the Gulf Coast five times between May and August, including a quick weekend vacation with his family in Panama City, Florida, where he waded into the ocean to send a signal to Americans that it was safe to go back to the region to vacation and swim.
The effort to fix the gusher and skim the oil was one of the largest operations the federal government had ever run, larger even than the D-day invasion of Normandy. Eighty-five days after the initial explosion, the leak was plugged. Technically, what the government pulled off was quite the impressive feat. But politically, this took a big toll on the Obama White House, and eventually they’d get no benefit for solving this problem.
It completely consumed the Obama presidency for those eighty-five days. And in hindsight, it was one of the president’s success stories, if success is measured by mitigating a potential political disaster. From helping to shake down BP for a massive multibillon-dollar recovery fund to the near sole focus of the entire federal government on the cleanup, the White House didn’t seem to let a single ball drop on this operation.
That said, there were plenty of times during this lengthy crisis when folks in the White House thought things looked bleak. Some of it was simply bad luck, including the ability to get a video camera at the site of the leak. While it was an incredible help to the team trying to plug the leak, the footage became a regular feature on every cable TV news outlet, almost as common as the news tickers. What this televised portion of the leak meant was that there were no “down” days for the White House during this crisis. As long as the oil was spewing out of the seabed and the country could see this every single day, the White House and the entire federal government had to be focused on plugging it.
Then there was the president’s slow initial reaction, which is actually typical. The president’s best asset is his even temperament, but politically, his coolness can come across as aloofness, or uncaring—when, for instance, in the case of an oil company responsible for a massive oil leak, he doesn’t publicly get mad.
Robert Gibbs remembers going into the Oval Office in the early days of the leak and begging the president to show some anger. The president replied logically, “And how much oil is that going to clean up?” Gibbs said, “It’ll buy you time and space politically.” The president reluctantly went out that day and showed some anger. But for those who knew him and covered him closely, it was clear he was going through the motions. It’s not that he wasn’t upset, it’s just not how he naturally reacts. Sometimes, we observers forget that the president was raised to be cool under pressure, to never flash anger, to always keep his emotions in check if he wanted to avoid ever being labeled as “angry,” a dangerous description for an African American politician.
In fact, the oil spill cleanup is a fascinating lesson in what Obama is and isn’t as a leader. He had a “whatever it takes” mind-set to get the job done, and that led to people like Stephen Chu working closely with BP management and others to figure out a solution. But politically, while he certainly prevented this spill from becoming a Katrina rerun for the Gulf Coast, the president somehow never looked comfortable running this successful operation. Even his Oval Office address, a speech that the president’s longtime speechwriting partner Jon Favreau calls the worst of the Obama presidency, didn’t exactly send the message to the public that he had this. And yet he and the government did. Of course, that Oval Office address had the unfortunate aspect of a picture-in-picture video of the spewing oil, perhaps making it impossible for anything from the president’s lips to penetrate the public’s consciousness.
And so went the summer of 2010 in a White House distracted by the cumulative effect of so many crises. The staff simply didn’t have the bandwidth to start dealing with the political disaster that was headed their way. In fact, many of the president’s best-laid plans for 2010 got derailed by this G-Force of crises. The president was getting close to hammering out a major energy deal with key Republicans. It was going to include expanded offshore drilling and new nuclear reactors, but the spill put offshore oil drilling on the back burner. And of course less than a year later, the Japanese nuclear power leak ended whatever bipartisan support there was left on the nuke issue. That’s why a major energy deal never happened, and probably won’t for a while.
The G-Force of crises also had a major impact on the political landscape that summer. The oil spill took the president off the fund-raising circuit, but it also paralyzed the party in many ways beyond the issue of money: the president and his party were wholly knocked off message at one of the most critical periods of the 2010 campaign. The spill meant no White House messaging on health care, which was being used as a sledgehammer against Democrats across the country. And that’s only one issue.
The health care debate had come and gone without anything resembling a public option, a key staple of the liberal push for reform; the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which Obama had promised to close, remained open; and Obama had sent tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan, into a war he had promised to end. Worse, Obama had opened parts of the country’s coastline to new oil exploration and drilling only weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, giving environmentalists—who had become an increasingly large part of the Democratic financial base—a major reason to be unhappy with the White House.
By July, it was clear the White House was focused solely on saving the Senate, convinced that the House would fall into Republican hands. On July 11, Gibbs admitted on NBC’s Meet the Press that Democrats could lose the House.5 That enraged Nancy Pelosi, who was working hard to save her speakership. “How could he know what is going on in our districts?” Pelosi fumed at a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus attended by the White House’s top liaison to the House, Dan Turton. “Some may weigh his words more than others. We have made our disagreement known to the White House.”6 Of course, all Gibbs had done was acknowledge the obvious political circumstances.
Gibbs pushed back at the notion that Obama wasn’t helping House Democrats, authorizing the leaking of a memo to reporter Jonathan Martin that highlighted the 227 events White House officials—including Obama—had participated in or were on the calendar. The Democratic National Committee, which had by then become the chief fund-raising and political vehicle for the White House, had pledged $50 million to help Democrats up and down the ballot.
Still, some of those events weren’t done willingly. Emanuel had promised Representative Allen Boyd, a conservative Democrat facing a primary challenge in Florida’s Panhandle, that he would get a visit from First Lady Michelle Obama in 2009, in order to secure Boyd’s vote on energy legislation. But he neglected to check with the First Lady’s office first. Michelle had little interest in campaigning, but she was more in demand than the president; she was the Obama with personal ratings above 50 percent at the time. In this case, she acquiesced and reluctantly headlined an event with Boyd, though she wasn’t happy when she found out his primary challenger was African American. Her anger grew when Boyd voted against one of the early iterations of the health care bill, though he voted for the final package. Boyd survived his primary challenge, but he lost to Republican Steve Southerland in the general election.7
“Every president has been accused by their party of never doing enough,” argues Emanuel in hindsight. “We weren’t distracted, but nothing we were going to be able to do was going to change the dynamics of the race. The biggest dynamic you needed to change was a surging economy and dropping unemployment. We were coming out of a very deep recession that everybody acknowledges always historically takes longer to recoup from. Could we have done one extra fund-raiser here, or an additional this or additional that? Yes. The question though is would that change the fundamentals of the race? No.”
No one felt the pressure about keeping the House in Democratic hands more than Rahm Emanuel. The chief of staff, a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee himself, had poured countless hours of effort into electing a Democratic majority. In many cases, he had recruited the candidates, raised their money, held their hands through difficult times, berated them to do more to help themselves. Now, his candidates were on the front lines of a beating that he was powerless to stop. He saw every poll, he communicated constantly with the candidates, and he commiserated with his friends on Capitol Hill.
But still he argued against sending Obama to help. After all, he worked for the man in the Oval Office, not for Hill Democrats, and his view of politics held that associating with a loser, no matter how close a friend, still makes one a loser. “Rahm’s theory on politics is like a pyramid of strength,” one former coworker said. “Strength begets strength begets strength. So at a certain point when you become weak politically, you can’t get out there and put something on the line because if you lose, that’s weakness.”
And as Election Day crept nearer, every candidate with a D after his or her name started looking like a loser. The fights inside the White House intensified. Emanuel wanted to keep Obama away from candidates who would lose. Gibbs and others believed that the White House had to stand with its allies, especially those who had knowingly taken tough votes that would likely cost them their seats.
And no one had taken tougher votes than Virginia representative Tom Perriello. Perriello owed his seat to Obama and to the thousands of new voters Obama’s campaign had turned out in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had beaten Virgil Goode, the incumbent Republican, by just 727 votes in 2008, thus guaranteeing he would be a top Republican target two years down the road. But he didn’t shy away from tough votes. He voted for the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade legislation, and the health care bill. While other vulnerable Democrats strategically opposed their party on certain issues to craft an independent image, Perriello was a reliable partner when Pelosi whipped her conference toward Obama’s objectives.
So when Perriello asked Obama to come to Charlottesville to rally the voters he had turned out two years before, it should have been an easy request to fulfill. Few other Democrats wanted Obama at their side in the race’s waning days, and while Perriello was almost certain to lose, he had been a good soldier.
Rahm Emanuel didn’t see it that way. Appearing with a loser, he again argued in meetings, only made Obama look weak. Given Perriello’s dismal poll numbers, even a visit from a president who was slightly more popular than the congressman wouldn’t be enough, so why waste the political capital?
Gibbs argued the opposite—loyalty demanded that Obama travel to Virginia for his soon-to-be-fallen comrade. “Tom Perriello has decided he would like this, and we’re going to tell him no, after all the shit he went through?” Gibbs thought. “Don’t we have to be loyal to our friends?”
Gibbs won the argument, and Obama went to Charlottesville on Friday, October 29, where a crowd of 12,000 packed the house.8 But Emanuel was right—four days later, Perriello lost to Republican Robert Hurt by four points.
He wasn’t the only one to lose on November 2. The Republicans won an astounding sixty-three seats in the House, including defeating a record fifty-two incumbents. Republicans won the popular vote for control of the House of Representatives by almost seven points. They won more than seven hundred seats in state legislatures, giving the GOP control over a 2011 redistricting process that would shape the House for a decade to come, and governorships in blue states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Axelrod admitted that even he, the White House’s senior political strategist, with access to every poll conducted for his party’s candidates, didn’t see the totality of the Republican wave until it was too late.
“I can tell you that some election nights are more fun than others. Some are exhilarating; some are humbling,” a clearly humbled Obama told the press at a postelection news conference. “There is not only sadness about seeing them go, but there’s also a lot of questioning on my part in terms of could I have done something differently or done something more so that those folks would still be here. It’s hard. And I take responsibility for it in a lot of ways.”
Two years after a historic victory, the success of the Obama brand, which provided a boost for Democrats from Alaska to Virginia and back, had turned into an albatross for his party. The excitement those first-time voters felt in 2008 had tempered, dampened by a struggling economy and by Obama’s inability to deliver either hope or change. In 2010, Democrats experienced all the downsides of running under an unpopular incumbent president, with none of the upsides of running with an African American named Barack Obama.
“We’ve never figured out how to transfer the passion for him to others, and I’m not sure it’s possible,” Gibbs says. “If it is possible, then you have to nationalize an election almost at the very beginning. You have to make the stakes big at the very beginning. We didn’t do that in [2009], and by the time we tried to do that in 2010 it was simply too late.”
Five weeks after Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives, Joe Biden went to Capitol Hill to commiserate. The vice president knew what it was like to see colleagues lose, knew what it was like when the committee chairmanships, the curtain-draped offices with expansive views of the National Mall, and the power that came with being in the majority were about to fade away. During his time in the Senate, thirty-six long years, he had seen friends and colleagues come and go, win elections and lose. He had been chairman of the powerful and influential Judiciary Committee when Democrats controlled the Senate; after the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans swept to power, he handed the gavel to Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican.
Barack Obama hadn’t shared the joys of victory or the agony of defeat with his colleagues in Congress. In fact, few Democrats in Congress even thought of Obama, who stayed in the Senate for only four years, as one of them. He was the outsider, too cool and aloof and unwilling to play the game when he was on Capitol Hill, too disinterested, as the complaints among House Democrats went, to engage once he was in the White House. All Obama knew of his time in Washington, both personally and professionally, was surprisingly easy success. He won his Senate seat in 2004, Democrats swept control of the House and Senate in 2006, and then he won the presidency in 2008. The 2010 midterms were his first real electoral setback while in Washington.
So when those House Democrats, serving in the final days of the 111th Congress, wanted to talk to the White House about a deal over extending tax cuts first enacted under George W. Bush, they sent for Biden, not Obama. They wanted someone who might actually understand their frustrations.
After all, it was Biden’s deal that had House Democrats upset. After the Republican trouncing that had shunted the Democrats into the minority in the House, the White House realized it was time to deal on the Bush tax cuts. Those cuts were set to expire at the end of the year, and the vice president had spent time shuttling between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue working with Republicans to hammer out an extension. Biden had been negotiating directly with Mitch McConnell, bypassing both the incoming Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the Democrats who for the next three weeks would still technically control Congress.
On December 8, a Wednesday, Biden’s motorcade whisked him once again down the broad six-lane boulevard bookended by the White House and the Capitol. This time, instead of heading to McConnell’s office, he went to the other side of the building, down into the basement, where House Democrats were meeting.
No one in the administration had worked as hard for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in 2010 as Biden had. He had campaigned with eighty-five candidates from coast to coast, almost three times the number with whom Obama had appeared. At the time, because of the oil spill, Biden would regularly sub for Obama at events that were not canceled altogether. And then there was the decision to keep Obama away from the red states—the president had campaigned in only one state, Missouri, that he hadn’t won in 2008, while Biden had spent time in deep-red Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Arizona, and South Carolina.9
Biden spent two hours consoling his fellow Democrats. The ones who had lost were by then resigned to their fates; they knew they would soon be out of jobs. But the ones destined to spend at least the next two years wandering the wilderness of the minority berated the vice president, demanded a better deal, and insisted that Biden go back to the negotiating table. Biden explained, again and again, that his strategic advice to the president was to take the deal as written and to move on to the next fight.
The 2010 voters had sent a message, and with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts looming and only a few weeks of a lame-duck session ahead of them, Biden understood that while Democrats had little room to maneuver, there were important legislative priorities that would get much harder to accomplish once Republicans took control of Congress in January.
For his part, Obama was listening to advice from a number of Democratic quarters. Liberals wanted him to refuse a deal; they saw extending the Bush tax cuts as a way to give the wealthy a break while enforcing cuts in government programs that aimed to help the poor. Some others, like New York’s Chuck Schumer, thought that the longer the administration waited to cut a deal, the more Republicans would give away in order to get their tax cuts. But Biden had an alternate strategy in mind. The START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia was languishing in the Senate, waiting to be ratified. A measure providing health care to first responders to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks also still needed passage. And gay rights advocates were still pushing to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era policy that prohibited gays from serving openly in the military. Biden believed that nothing would get done as long as the tax cuts remained on the table. Make the deal early, Biden told Obama, and the politically wounded president could get the rest of the legislative checklist done with a lame-duck Congress, which would give him a surprisingly productive end to a disastrous 2010.
Biden’s years in the Senate had given him an outlook on legislating—and the deal making that comes with it—that was much different from Obama’s. Aides who watched the president noticed that when Obama sat down at a bargaining table, he negotiated toward a common denominator. His tendency was to strip away areas of a proposal on which the two sides differed until both sides could agree on a framework. It was an idealistic, rational sensibility that began with the premise that some area of common ground always exists in every situation, however small—and it was a very un-Washington way to negotiate. Again and again, he’d immediately identify the common ground as a means of showing the other person that they were on the same side, and that therefore that person’s prejudices and preconceptions should be abandoned. That sensibility had been professionally reinforced during his dozen years lecturing at the University of Chicago, an institution well known for its academic study of rational equilibrium, be it in law or economics, and of the means by which individuals and institutions could be incentivized to pursue long-term benefits over short-term gains.
But rational middle ground wasn’t where Washington started negotiations.
That style of negotiating was taken advantage of in Washington, especially Washington in the twenty-first century. The president regularly revealed too early what he was willing to support. And Republicans would grab it and publicize it, knowing it would become a wedge with congressional Democrats. It’s actually surprising that the president enjoyed playing poker so much, because in legislative negotiations he rarely acted like a sophisticated player. He metaphorically let everyone at the table see his entire hand when it came to policy debates.
Biden took a different, more tried-and-true approach: he offered something his negotiating partner wanted in exchange for something he wanted, with the intention of aggregating mutual political satisfaction toward a bill both sides could claim as a win. One former Biden aide described his style as allowing everyone to declare victory. The resulting bill might be a Frankenstein of gimmes and earmarks and U-turns, but like that monster, it was alive.
And that, in all its inglorious chaos, was how Washington worked for most of the twentieth century and even the early part of the twenty-first. Reagan and Clinton had believed in the process, and so did Biden, almost religiously. Obama’s effort to transcend the “someone has to be declared the winner and someone has to be declared the loser” mentality of Washington in the twenty-first century was admirable in the abstract, but a huge flaw in terms of getting stuff done. One man—even someone as impressive as Barack Obama, someone whose election had been predicated on change—was not going to reinvent that reality. Perhaps nothing could.