In the midst of the president’s planning the bin Laden raid and juggling the Arab Spring, another distraction that was making some Democrats nervous was coming to a bombastic conclusion. For years, almost since the moment Barack Obama appeared on the national stage, rumors had swirled in the ugly corners of the Internet that he wasn’t who he said he was. A virtual cottage industry of right-wing conspiracy theorists, led by Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, their followers hanging on their every word, had spread rumors that Obama had in fact been born outside the United States and that he was doing all he could to cover up the circumstances of his birth.
The level of detail these so-called birthers fabricated was elaborate: Obama’s paternal stepgrandmother had let slip that the president had been born in Kenya, some said. (The tape of the interview is cut off before Sarah Obama is able to clarify that her stepgrandson was born in Hawaii.) Others believed he had taken Indonesian citizenship when he lived there with his mother and stepfather as a child (an easily debunked claim), or that the birth announcements, published nine and ten days after his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, had been planted there so that he would have a credible claim of citizenship when, decades later, he ran for president. It didn’t strike any of the conspiracy theorists as odd, however, that the supposed originators of the grand plan to plant some kind of Manchurian candidate bent on destroying America didn’t bother to give Barack Hussein Obama a less conspicuous name. But then, consistency had gone out the window along with rationality.*
Regrettably, some Republicans were all too willing to play along with their rabidly anti-Obama base. Beck and Jones successfully fed the conspiracies to their audiences, who then recycled them in town hall meetings and one-on-one interactions with their elected officials. John McCain, Obama’s opponent in 2008, had famously disabused a woman of this notion at a town hall meeting, assuring her that Obama wasn’t the pretender the Internet rumors had made him seem, but he was distinctly in the minority of those in attendance.
At first the White House found the questions a minor irritation that they actually used for political gain. In fact, when fringe politicians like Michele Bachmann, Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, or Sarah Palin repeated some debunked rumor, they provided Democrats with a means of painting their Republican rivals with the crazy brush. In one interview in 2010, Robert Gibbs laid into former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for a comment Gingrich had made—Obama, Gingrich had declared, displayed “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”
“You would normally expect better of somebody who held the position of Speaker of the House, but look, it’s political season, and most people will say anything. And Newt Gingrich does that on a genuinely, on a regular basis,” Gibbs said.1 “Birtherism,” as the conspiracy theory had been labeled, could be a cudgel used to marginalize Obama’s opponents.
But the White House started to take notice when more serious Republicans—actual legislators, interested in passing actual legislation—started dipping their toes in the birther waters. A small Alabama newspaper reported that Richard Shelby, who was first elected to the Senate as a Democrat and now was the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, had commented that he hadn’t seen a birth certificate from the commander in chief. Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who had served in House leadership and was running for a Senate seat, said he didn’t understand why Obama couldn’t produce a birth certificate. “I don’t know anybody else that can’t produce one,” Blunt told a conservative writer.2 Perhaps most worrying to the commander in chief, at least one army officer, a lieutenant colonel based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, refused to deploy to Afghanistan because he didn’t believe Obama had the authority to order him to go. Birtherism had slowly crept from the dark recesses of Internet conspiracy theorists to the fringes of the mainstream.
But no one did more to vault the false issue to the cable news echo chamber than Donald Trump, the wealthy, eccentric Manhattan real estate mogul. Few have the raw need for attention that Trump exhibits on a regular basis. His bombastic displays regularly grab headlines, and his rises and falls from grace have been chronicled in gossipy New York tabloids and respectable business publications for three decades.
Trump had publicly flirted with a run for president in 2012, and he was stung when few respected political analysts took him seriously. Trump took to calling reporters to convince them he was serious, even offering at least one of them a well-staked bet that he would run.*
But the real bet Trump made was that birtherism would be good publicity. Beginning with a March 2011 appearance on Good Morning America, Trump questioned Obama’s birthplace. Early the next month, he said on the Today show that he had sent investigators to Hawaii to track down the birth certificate. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he said.3
Trump’s outlandish claims, never backed up by any evidence, were nonetheless great for television ratings; no matter how often the fact-checkers debunked the outlandish assertions, no matter how often journalists laced their reporting with caveats and their own debunking, the media couldn’t stop itself from interviewing yet another birther. Trump’s ridiculous declarations were great for his publicity-hungry ego, but they were beginning to worry the White House, which believed they were doing real damage. A Time magazine survey conducted as early as August 2010 showed that 46 percent of Republicans believed Obama was a Muslim. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey around the same time showed that 31 percent of Republicans thought the same thing.4 A February 2011 poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, the Democratic-leaning firm, showed 51 percent of voters who planned to cast a ballot in the Republican primaries believed Obama had not been born in the United States. The president’s chief political strategist, David Plouffe, monitored polls religiously, and the results worried him: the extreme fringe of the conservative movement had infected mainstream Republicans. And this was creating a serious governing problem: Plouffe truly worried that some Republicans would find themselves unable to work with the president if this conspiracy theory wasn’t debunked once and for all. After all, with re-election on the horizon, Plouffe needed some points on the scoreboard with Congress, and if the country thought this president couldn’t work with the other side, it might actually punish him and not the GOP.
In an era of constant, debilitating partisanship, it is hardly surprising that the Republican base would see a Democratic president in a harshly unfavorable light. But the depth of the Republican base’s hatred for Obama had begun to have a severe impact in Washington and back home. A Republican politician who negotiated a deal with the president would have to answer to an increasingly radicalized base; even working across the aisle on a health care bill that never came to a vote had cost Utah senator Bob Bennett his seat in the 2010 elections. It was no coincidence that Senator Mitch McConnell, who viewed the Tea Party movement as a potential threat to his own re-election bid in 2014—he didn’t want to have to face a challenge from the right—would only be seen dealing with Vice President Joe Biden, the lesser evil in the mind of the Republican base.
The birther question only made things worse. If Republicans would refuse to work with Obama because any compromise would be detrimental to their own political well-being, then Obama was going to have a tough time getting anything done in his remaining years in office. And if military officers were actually questioning the authority of their commander in chief, the damage to the constitutional fabric of the nation could extend long past his own presidency.
In early April, Plouffe called Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, to figure out exactly how they could go about obtaining a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate. Bauer told Plouffe to go to Judith Corley, Obama’s personal attorney, who could formally request a copy from Hawaii’s department of health. The department of health had a long-standing policy of providing only the so-called short-form, or abbreviated, birth certificate, but in this case Corley asked for the full document. Corley’s letter was accompanied by a two-paragraph letter from the president authorizing Corley to accept the certified copies on his behalf.
Loretta Fuddy, head of the health department, had been besieged by requests for the birth certificate from conspiracy theorists (and presumably Trump’s “investigators”) for years. Only too glad to comply, in a letter dated April 25, 2011, she wrote to Obama: “I have the legal authority to approve the process by which copies of such records are made. Through that authority, in recognition of your status as President of the United States, I am making an exception to current departmental policy which is to issue a computer-generated certified copy.” Then, in a fit of bureaucratic frustration, Fuddy added, “We hope that issuing you these copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth will end the numerous inquiries received by the Hawaii Department of Health to produce this document. Such inquiries have been disruptive to staff operations and have strained State resources.”5
Two days later, on April 27, just four days before he would announce to the world the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, Obama entered the White House briefing room at 9:48 a.m., not to hold a planned press conference or officially announce Panetta as his new defense secretary (which was among the items the reporters assumed the president was going to address). No way was he going to add to the public spectacle of birtherism—so thought just about everyone in that room. But Obama strolled in with the confidence of a man who has the truth on his side. He even made a joke at a television reporter’s expense, but inside he was irritated by what he had to do. And while Obama never liked to say publicly that race was driving birtherism, he couldn’t help wondering whether a white president would have to go through this demeaning spectacle.
“Over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement. I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going,” he said. “We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.
“Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on any given day and I’ve got other things to do,” Obama went on. “But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that are represented here.
“I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest. But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them—not on this.”6
The decision to track down and release Obama’s long-form birth certificate, in response to what had begun as the maniacal rantings of a few wing nuts, was not one the White House made lightly. His advisors didn’t want to give legitimacy to the fringe, which they worried might set a dangerous precedent for future presidents. But it had become necessary, aides explained later, simply to get the issue out of the way. And they knew that while the vast majority of Americans believed the truth, even releasing the actual birth certificate wouldn’t completely assuage the conspiracy theorists.*
The absurdity of the situation was clear, both to the White House and to the reporters who covered it. The president of the United States had been forced to release a document no other president had been asked for, all because of the rantings of a few conspiracy theorists and one of the country’s biggest blowhards. That absurdity must have been doubled for Obama, because as this was going on, he was engaging in a much more important attempt to match a place with a face: the next day he gathered his advisors in the Situation Room for a final review of military options aimed at that compound in Abbottabad a mere three days later. The meeting dragged on for hours as Obama went around the table, asking every member of the team for his or her opinion. After all, Panetta’s analysts at the CIA had estimated that there was only a 60 to 80 percent chance that bin Laden was at the compound.
Clinton, Mullen, Panetta, and John Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor, favored hitting the compound. Biden was against it—“Don’t go,” he told Obama.7 James “Hoss” Cartwright, Mullen’s vice chairman at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a four-star marine general who was personally close to Obama, argued once again for his own version of an air strike—a small missile fired from a drone, aimed at the tall man pacing in the yard—rather than putting boots on the ground. Gates and Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, came to agree with Cartwright.
Obama left the room leaning toward ordering the strike to proceed, but he told his team he wouldn’t make a decision until he had thought more. The failed Iranian operation still weighed heavily on Gates; the loss of a Black Hawk helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 was weighing on Obama.
The next morning, Obama summoned Tom Donilon, his national security advisor, along with Donilon’s deputy, Denis McDonough, Brennan, and Bill Daley to the Diplomatic Room. He had made his call: “It’s a go.”
The strike team had a window of the next three days—when the moon was new enough to provide cover of darkness—in which to conduct the raid. If the weather didn’t cooperate, they would have to wait another month.
The president and his advisors went to great lengths to avoid letting anyone know that something was afoot. Obama kept his scheduled meetings with the speechwriting staff, who were still trying to come up with jokes that wouldn’t bomb at the correspondents’ dinner (which as it turned out would take place just twelve hours before the bin Laden raid). Obama had all but guaranteed that his birth certificate and Trump would be the dinner’s dominant theme, especially since Trump was going to attend.
Gates, who would be leaving the Pentagon later that year, had agreed to attend his first and only correspondents’ dinner as a guest of CBS reporter Bob Schieffer. That Saturday, with the commando team grounded in Afghanistan by bad weather in Abbottabad, Gates had invited Geoff Morrell to his home for a predinner cocktail. Although the two men traded gossip about Pentagon personnel and other classified missions, Gates never let Morrell in on the secret operation to come. At the correspondents’ dinner, Morrell watched Gates chatting with Leon Panetta backstage, the two veteran Washington hands sharing a laugh without hinting that something larger was weighing on their minds—a reminder in hindsight that, yes, folks in Washington can keep a secret.
Obama’s speech went fine, beginning with the president’s entrance music: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,”* and then his various shots at Trump, who was there as a guest of the Washington Post, over his birtherism obsession, which brought down the house. The next morning, Obama kept up appearances. He left the White House at 9:42, bound for the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, his fifth round of golf in as many weeks. It was a somewhat familiar foursome on this Sunday, two close aides who were both scratch golfers, including junior White House official Ben Finkenbinder and the president’s chief personal aide, Marvin Nicholson, as well as Energy Department staffer David Katz. They played nine holes—an unseasonably cold day and a few sprinkles of rain cut short their round, the press pool report said—and arrived back home at 2:04, about two hours before the raid was set to begin.8
As the helicopters took off from their base in Afghanistan, two of them bound across the border to Abbottabad and another three carrying a rapid reaction force that could rescue the assault team if anything went wrong, Obama’s national security advisors gathered in the Situation Room. The name is a bit misleading—there’s actually more than one room. Most of Obama’s team was huddled in the larger space, a conference room with television screens on every wall. At the moment, the screens showed only someone in another room, monitoring a second feed, a grainy black-and-white overhead shot from a drone. Obama’s team couldn’t hear the troops in the field; they heard only from McRaven, who was overseeing the mission from Afghanistan, and Panetta, who was narrating from his office at CIA headquarters in Langley.
Biden, Gates, and General Brad Webb were in the second, smaller conference room, monitoring the overhead feed. They could see the helicopters enter the visual field, but other than that, details were scarce. They couldn’t even tell that one of the helicopters had gone down. One of the common assumptions based on the famous Situation Room photo of the president and the entire national security team was that their startled looks (particularly Hillary’s) must have been in response to the chopper going down. That was not the case. McRaven’s voice was the only indication they had that something had gone wrong. Sitting beside the president, Gates, who had watched the 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Tehran go so wrong, felt a sickening sense of déjà vu. But half a minute later, McRaven relieved the tension: the troops were okay, and the mission would continue. McRaven ordered one of the three backup Chinook helicopters to fly to Abbottabad, to scoop up the SEALs who had flown in on the downed chopper.
Donilon had suggested that the president watch the raid, as it were, through Panetta, who was connected to the Situation Room by video link. Panetta was at Langley helping to facilitate the images for everyone back in the room, including the president. After the helicopter went down, Obama got up and walked into the smaller conference room, joining his vice president.
One by one, those in the larger conference room followed Obama so they could watch the overhead feed, anything to get closer to the action. The second room, a fraction the size of the larger space, was crammed. Biden and Gates watched from opposite sides of a table. Clinton sat next to Gates, a binder and a notebook on her lap. Next to her sat McDonough, arms folded and ramrod straight. Daley, Donilon, Brennan, Mullen, and James Clapper, director of national intelligence, stood. Obama, in a white polo shirt and a light black coat, sat in a corner, leaning forward, tense.
With only a high-altitude view of events, the tension soon returned. In between the scenes of the commandos breaching walls and encountering hostile combatants there were “these periods of silence where you’re like, what the fuck is going on?” remembered one person in the room. Brennan said later that “the minutes passed like days.”9
The audio feed crackled to life again. “Visual on Geronimo,” a voice said.10 The code word confirmed that the CIA analysts had been correct—bin Laden was in Abbottabad and at that compound. A few minutes later, they confirmed that Geronimo was dead.
“Looks like we got him,” Obama said.11
The main goal of the mission had been achieved. While the official mission was “capture or kill” Geronimo, there weren’t many U.S. officials, the president included, who wanted to deal with an alive bin Laden. Just what would his rights be at that point? Where would he be housed? It’s more than a decade since 9/11, and the U.S. government is still trying to figure out how to even try Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind behind those attacks. So while nobody will ever claim that the president, McRaven, Panetta, or anyone else ordered that bin Laden be taken dead, it was the preferred outcome. Of all the contingency plans the SEALs had prepared, the one that many hoped they wouldn’t have to use was the one for taking bin Laden alive. But a secondary mission was only beginning: the SEALs feverishly shoveled every bit of data they could find—files, papers, computers—into bags they had brought along. The documents would be used against others in bin Laden’s network, critical intelligence that would deal what those in Washington hoped would be a decisive blow against al Qaeda.
That bagging dragged on, seemingly for an eternity. “The post–bin Laden piece of the operation took a lot longer than the pre–bin Laden piece of the operation,” recalls one official who was in the room. “You’re just sitting there waiting for them to get the hell out of there.”
And then it was time to go. As the helicopters departed Pakistani airspace, Mullen called the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence network, Kayani, to inform him of the incursion, and a few hours later Obama called Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president—a couple of phone calls that did not go well. It was with a combination of insult and embarrassment that the Pakistanis received the news. They were insulted that the United States would invade their airspace and not inform them until after the fact, a harsh reminder of just how little trust there was in Washington among the Pakistani leadership. And, of course, there was embarrassment that bin Laden was not merely in Pakistan but hiding in plain sight in a city that essentially was that country’s West Point.
Rhodes stepped out of the Situation Room and e-mailed Plouffe, Pfeiffer, and the fairly new press secretary, Jay Carney, none of whom had been included in the planning phases. It was a Sunday afternoon, but Rhodes explained to them that they had to immediately come to the White House, though he couldn’t tell them why. The three advisors showed up as quickly as they could and waited in Carney’s office, where they tried to guess at the reason for the late summons. Rhodes walked in, a smile on his face. “Hey guys, guess what?” he said.
In and around Washington, rumors began swirling. Christopher Isham, CBS’s Washington bureau chief, and David Martin, a CBS correspondent, called Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, around 6:30 p.m. They had a single source, they said, who was telling them bin Laden was dead, but they couldn’t find a second source. Another insider reached out to NBC, simply saying, “It’s somebody we’ve been looking for, for a long time.” That comment helped torpedo the other rumor that had suddenly engulfed Washington, that somehow Libya’s strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, had been killed. After all, the only “new” military exercise that Washington knew about that May evening was the no-fly zone in Libya.*
The calls kept coming. Morrell told everyone who rang that it should be obvious that he couldn’t confirm anything; after all, he wouldn’t be answering his phone if he did know something. In between the calls, he dialed his direct superior, the Pentagon’s chief of staff. Morrell was told that an announcement was coming, but it wouldn’t be coming from a Pentagon spokesman.
At 11:35 p.m., Obama walked down a long red carpet to a podium in the East Room of the White House. He had no staff or supporters following him. It was just the president, and a long empty hall behind him.
“Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children,” Obama said. “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”12
In ordering the assault, the option that put the largest number of American lives at risk, Obama had taken a huge gamble, one that could have dealt a fatal blow to his presidency if something had gone wrong. The failed rescue mission in 1980 had further damaged Jimmy Carter at a crucial moment. Now, the Obama team was going to make sure they took advantage of the political payoffs.
The following morning, operating on little sleep and still buzzing with excitement over the enormity of the achievement, many of the same people who had crammed into the small conference room to watch the grainy feed met again, this time to plot how they would tell their story. The White House felt an intense pressure from a media ravenous for even the slightest detail about the raid, and the Obama team felt it had to get in front of the story—in the words of one defense community observer, “feed the beast.”
As the White House officials debated their communications strategy, Gates piped up. “I have [a communications strategy],” he said. “It’s called shut the fuck up.”
The White House and some national security officials disagreed. Nevertheless, Gates and Mullen were flabbergasted when Brennan joined Carney at his daily press briefing to give details of the raid, details that were still unconfirmed and that would later inevitably change simply due to the fog of war. Brennan dished out nuggets of operational detail, including the fact that they hadn’t contacted the Pakistanis until American troops were back in Afghanistan’s airspace. Brennan also announced that the commandos had acquired actionable intelligence, a hint to remaining al Qaeda leaders that their security had been further breached.
“We have released a tremendous amount of information to date,” Brennan said at one point in the briefing. “At the same time, we don’t want to do anything that’s going to compromise our ability to be as successful the next time we get one of these guys and take them off the battlefield.”13
Gates and Mullen thought Brennan had already crossed that line, and in pursuit of something that had already been achieved. “The conventional view is somehow they needed to further enhance the President’s bona fides,” Mullen said later. “And my view is, you just killed the number one enemy in the world, [who] killed more Americans than anybody else. What else—you don’t need it! That’s it! You got him! And that just never penetrated.”
“The world wanted to know how we did this, and they went out to talk about it before they had the full story,” said one administration official who sympathized with Gates and Mullen. The observer saw “an erosion of the secrecy around operational tactics and procedures. How we do things is such a part of what distinguishes us from everybody else.” But the race to disclose details reflected the mind-set of the White House at that period, when Obama’s approval ratings were middling at best and his prospects for re-election looked shaky.
Four days later, on Thursday, Gates, Morrell, and Gates’s top military assistant took a Pentagon Gulfstream to the special forces base in Virginia Beach to meet the team of heroic SEALs. Gates had heard the classified after-action report that had been delivered at the White House, but he wanted to hear it from the SEALs themselves.
What stood out to Morrell was their demeanor. Here was a team of men who had just risked their lives to take down the most wanted man in the world, and had flown through another not-so-friendly country’s sovereign airspace to do so. They were home, safe and successful. They should be thrilled, joyous and jubilant. Instead, Morrell said, it was as if there was no adrenaline pumping through their veins. “It was much more clinical than I expected,” he said, even “sterile.”
The next day, Obama flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where the SEAL team gathered once again in a drab classroom. Obama, too, was struck by their appearance—they didn’t look like action stars. McRaven had told Obama they would answer every question he had, except which of them had pulled the final trigger. Obama didn’t ask; instead, he wanted to know about the helicopter pilot who had maneuvered a crashing aircraft into a safe landing. He wanted to know about the translator who had helped turn neighborhood residents away, to minimize potential civilian casualties. The team used a model of bin Laden’s compound to show the president, in detail, what they had done.
Obama also wanted to know about Cairo, the dog the team had with them. “I would like to meet that dog,” he said.
“Mr. President, then I would advise you to bring treats,” one of the SEALs replied.14
From Donald Trump on a Tuesday to Osama bin Laden on a Sunday, it would be hard to find a weirder week for the Obama presidency. Yet in many ways, that week sums it up about as well as any seven-day period: major high, frustrating low, bizarre twenty-first-century media firestorms that the White House decided to both feed and put out, leaving supporters relieved, opponents frustrated, and observers at times confused. This was Barack Obama’s White House life, especially in the first term, trying to do great big things while simultaneously having to deal with some of the smallest of small politics of Washington and the media, successful in killing one of the world’s greatest villains and yet unable to vanquish ferocious, sometimes lunatic, distraction and obstruction at home.
And it’s also why no normal American ever seeks the presidency or fully appreciates the need for a president to be such a compartmentalizer. A week before meeting the SEALs who killed bin Laden, the president was calling a hasty press conference to answer a false charge from one of the great self-promoters of the modern era. As he was busy telling jokes to a crowd of Washington press and VIPs, he was overseeing what was likely the most daring American military operation in decades. He was also still trying to feel his way with regard to the Arab Spring, including at this moment trying to help Libyan protesters topple their longtime authoritarian leader, Muammar Gaddafi. During this period of the presidency, Obama was starting to relish opportunities to deal with national security challenges because he could avoid Congress.
If one looked closely, there was a pattern that would only grow: when he had to work with other elected officials, Obama found himself hitting wall after wall. When he didn’t, when his team was small and the line of command clear, he achieved much of what he set out to accomplish. Of course, later he could come to learn that some of his successful small, defined operations internationally didn’t always end cleanly. From Ukraine to Syria and even Egypt, the president would come to view many of his national security challenges as being as difficult as dealing with the House Republicans. There was no doubt that Republicans in Congress were doing everything they could to destroy the president’s agenda, but if Barack Obama wanted to glimpse the other great obstruction, he needed only to look into the mirror. Because while he didn’t have a willing dance partner, he seemed completely flummoxed by how to navigate these political waters and ask for a dance.