Mike Strautmanis has a long pedigree as a Washington hand. He had been chief of staff to the general counsel at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton years, then served as legislative director to Representative Rod Blagojevich. During law school, he had worked at the legal firm Sidley Austin, where he met Michelle Obama and eventually her husband, Barack. Because of that friendship, in November 2004 he had been tasked with showing the senator-elect from Illinois around Capitol Hill.
At one point, the two men paused in the Hart Senate Office Building to take a break. “So, Mike,” Obama said, “what do you want to do in my Senate office?”
Strautmanis thought about it. He had been around Washington long enough to want a shot at the chief of staff’s job. He’d never run a Senate office before, but he had seen how a good office operates, and he thought he was up to it.
But Obama had a different idea. After all, he asked Strautmanis, did he really think both the senator and the chief of staff should be learning the ropes of their new jobs at the same time? For his part, Obama didn’t have any experience running such a big office. His budget, provided by the Senate, would be about $3.5 million a year, and he would have to use that money to set up field offices, then divide salaries among senior, legislative, and constituent service staffs. And for all the attention Obama drew to his healthy ego, he acknowledged his shortcomings. In fact, he had already approached the man he wanted to run his Senate office—Pete Rouse.
What Barack Obama was good at was oratory, as he had demonstrated during his Senate campaign and the convention speech on John Kerry’s behalf that vaulted him into the national political spotlight in 2004. What he was not good at was organizing and managing a staff. Even before Rouse had come on board, Obama had hired Robert Gibbs, his campaign spokesman, and then a scheduler; Rouse told him to build an organizational chart, making decisions about how many Illinois-based staffers and Washington-based staffers he wanted first and filling in the names later.
Gibbs and David Axelrod had wanted Obama to move quickly to open offices downstate, to increase his visibility in the most Republican parts of Illinois. They wanted to open nine or ten offices throughout the state, which would eat up a big part of his budget. But Rouse talked them out of this; if they decided to shuffle priorities later and to hire more legislative staffers in Washington, it would generate bad press in downstate newspapers if doing so meant shuttering an office in a smaller community. Wait until the office is established and priorities are set, Rouse counseled, before you commit to opening too many outposts back home.
Those were the sorts of decisions that counted as important before Barack Obama ran for president. And even the decisions he had to make as a candidate were relatively straightforward, since he had Axelrod and Plouffe organizing the ground game and fund-raising sides of things. They established and fixed the primary schedule; mapped out the appearances with intent; and timed the debates so that he could practice in advance. Running for president is hard until you actually get elected, and then you miss the predictability of it.
That simplicity ended the moment Obama’s mailing address changed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The man who had never led a group of employees larger than the Harvard Law Review staff, a statewide campaign, the resulting Senate office, and a small circle of presidential campaign advisors would now head the four-million-employee executive branch. He would be learning to manage on the fly, and it wouldn’t always be pretty.
To a degree, every president faces the same challenge: no other organization in the world completely changes its top leadership—in essence, its entire headquarters staff—every four or eight years. Furthermore, every White House organizational chart is different: the way Bill Clinton set up his staff was completely different from the way George W. Bush did. And while every new White House tries to learn from the mistakes of its predecessors, there is no better reminder that the presidency of the United States is the most difficult job in the world than the length of time it takes a new White House to figure out exactly how to operate.
Even before he was elected, Obama let it be known that he had been influenced by the last president from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. He frequently mentioned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln’s cabinet, Team of Rivals, and hinted that he wanted to model his own cabinet in the same fashion. Some of his choices reflected that wish: Clinton, Gates, Tom Vilsack.
Obama, many of his advisors and close associates say, wanted the best available staff for any given role, and he pursued those individuals with little regard for the way they would interact. One advisor compared Obama’s staffing decisions to those of a basketball coach who pursues LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and Chris Paul—the five best players in the NBA—rather than a team composed of players who would work well together. Superstars bring with them heavy egos; so did Obama’s initial staff. The good news for Obama in that early period is that everyone wanted to work for him, and many were willing to take lesser titles if they had real portfolios. But the importance of teamwork was one of the big lessons he’d learn before his first Fourth of July in the White House.
In most White Houses, the chief of staff is a gatekeeper of sorts, controlling the volume and flow of paper that would cross the president’s desk and the advisors who would walk into the Oval Office. While each chief of staff serves his purpose, the general authority of the position rarely fluctuates. But to Obama, a famously introverted person who trusted the counsel of only a few close advisors, the chief of staff became but one leg of the stool supporting the president. There were four centers of power in Obama’s White House—the chief of staff; the senior political advisor (first David Axelrod, then David Plouffe); Pete Rouse, who had virtually unlimited access to the president; and Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longest-serving and most trusted personal counselor. Of these four power centers, Jarrett’s was the most controversial internally. She was, essentially, the “first friend,” not an unimportant position in any White House. She was the one person who knew Obama before he was Obama, and although having that perspective is important to most presidents it can chafe on the professional staff, who can quickly grow resentful if the friend gets the last word on big decisions. Jarrett was not well thought of by many of the president’s new West Wing team, especially Rahm and Gibbs but even Axelrod, though Axelrod could hide his annoyance a lot better than his more hotheaded colleagues.
Gibbs, Axelrod, and Plouffe all had run-ins with Jarrett, and their negative feelings toward her probably influenced Rahm’s opinion more than he will admit. But Jarrett had a trump card that none of the other senior advisors had, a close relationship with the First Lady, which is why every attempt Rahm, Gibbs, Plouffe, and others made at convincing the president to push Jarrett aside never came to fruition. Their issues with Jarrett were substantive: in particular her portfolio was building relationships with the business community, an effort that many in the West Wing believe she failed at. And yet they didn’t get why she didn’t pay a price—in a nutshell, that’s where the resentment came from.
Advisors come and go, but for the president, Valerie was someone who was around before the presidency, and she’ll be someone who will be there after it. Most important, as a few of these aggrieved senior staffers would come to learn and in fact appreciate, Jarrett kept the “East Wing” in check. Michelle Obama is not a shrinking violet, but she understood that politically she couldn’t be another Hillary Clinton as First Lady, even if she wanted to. Michelle trusts and knows Valerie, and the same cannot be said for any other senior advisor to her husband. One advisor remembers the president sympathizing with a particular critique of Jarrett, but he made it clear that it was important that she be in the room, because it was important to Michelle that Valerie be in the room.
To Rahm Emanuel, the fact that he was but one of four power centers chafed. Emanuel had held virtually every job in Washington—a member of Congress, a member of Democratic leadership, a top staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and a staffer in Bill Clinton’s White House. That’s what had attracted Obama in the first place: Rahm had been there and done that, and Obama needed someone to help him navigate the rocky shoals of governing.*
But what Emanuel saw was a president trying to be his own chief of staff. Rahm, upon reflection, drew parallels between Obama and John F. Kennedy. In his Portrait of Camelot, the historian Richard Reeves wrote that Kennedy had realized he was trying to play that same role. It was no small thing, Emanuel believed, that Obama and Kennedy had been senators. In that role, it was possible to be both the elected official and the chief of staff—to make sure the mail got out, the trains ran on time, the legislation was filed when it needed to be, and that he was on time to get to a speech. Famously frenetic himself, Emanuel had done the same thing when he was in Congress. But you just couldn’t do that as president.
Not so secretly, Rahm hated his job. He felt Obama had regularly encouraged others to go around the chief of staff. Even when Emanuel got results—passing cap-and-trade legislation through the House, or getting a health care bill—he didn’t see his sphere of influence within the White House expanding. It became immensely frustrating. So when the longtime mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election, it took Emanuel about a minute to decide to leave the White House, return home to Chicago, and run for one of the two offices he had long coveted. Emanuel had given up his hopes of becoming Speaker of the House when his president had called him to service; realizing he was nearing the “sell-by” date of most chiefs of staff, Emanuel had decided he wouldn’t pass up another opportunity to achieve one of his life’s goals.
Emanuel’s departure coincided with another change in Washington. As the man brought in to work with the Democratic Congress, many of whom he had helped elect during his time in House leadership, Emanuel had watched in agony as Republicans had taken back 63 House seats—and the Speaker’s gavel—in the 2010 midterm elections. So to work with the new Republican majority, and to bring more order to the White House than Rahm had, Emanuel and Axelrod told Obama to reach out to another Chicago ally, Bill Daley.
On paper, Daley was an excellent choice: he had served in Bill Clinton’s administration during an era of divided government, and he had deep connections within the business community, which could serve the administration well as it tried to pressure Republicans on Capitol Hill.
But almost from the beginning, Daley proved a poor fit. Though he was from Chicago and knew Obama socially, the two had little real rapport. (In their first meeting, Obama told Daley he liked to be out of the office and back home for dinner by 6:30 so he could spend time with his daughters. Daley admired Obama’s commitment to his young family, but it served as an early indicator for the new chief of staff that Obama, unlike Clinton, had little patience for politics as usual.) And Washington itself had changed in the decade since Daley had last worked inside the Beltway. Gone were the politicians—Democrats and Republicans—whom Daley had worked with.
Almost immediately, Daley wondered just how much power he would have over a staff someone else had built. When chiefs of staff had rolled over in the past, some senior staffers would go with them. “What Bill Daley remembers was that the first day Erskine Bowles became chief of staff [for Bill Clinton], he fired Harold Ickes, who was a twenty-year personal friend of the Clintons and a key person who got Bill Clinton elected in 1992,” recalled Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff.
But Obama liked his crop of advisors, and he wouldn’t let Daley bring in his own people. Daley was allowed to bring a single staffer, David Lane, to the White House with him. Less than a month into the job, Daley went to Obama with a plan for a dramatic shake-up, mostly in the communications department; about the only person Daley didn’t want to at least think about replacing was Plouffe, who had just assumed Axelrod’s job (and actual office) in the West Wing. By spring Daley would still be pushing for big changes, and even suggested firing himself. Obama didn’t think that necessary, even as his poll numbers sank.
Obama had introduced Daley to the White House press corps on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Two days later, a deranged gunman shot nineteen people, including Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, killing six. Daley didn’t yet have his security clearance when he was called to the Situation Room. In February, a massive earthquake off the coast of Japan sent a tsunami roaring onto the coast, badly damaging a nuclear power plant at Fukushima and setting off the most dangerous nuclear disaster since Chernobyl—never mind the Arab Spring and the bin Laden raid, which all came in the first five months of Daley’s tenure. But chaotic external events are actually expected; it was the clash with Republicans in Congress, a slow-motion train wreck that everyone saw coming, that would turn into Daley’s greatest challenge.
It had been routine in years past for Congress to simply automatically raise the country’s credit card spending limit, known as the debt ceiling, but Plouffe began to worry almost immediately after Republicans won back control of the House that this time would be different. Republicans believed they had won a mandate to cut spending and shrink government, and they viewed the debt ceiling as a way to extract concessions from the White House. The more extreme faction of the House Republican Conference didn’t believe the debt ceiling should be raised at all, making the politics—both for the White House and for House Speaker John Boehner—even more complicated.
Beyond the external crises, Daley got off to a rocky start with the staff he inherited. He saw no point in continuing the daily 8:30 a.m. meeting that included dozens of lower-ranking staffers; everyone who came, Daley thought, reported to someone who attended the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting, which drew about twenty people. Staff who were used to attending the later gathering valued it as a way to get a little face time with the boss; they griped later that Daley was cold and corporate.
Daley also cut out some senior advisors. His morning meeting became a very tight circle, just Pete Rouse, Valerie Jarrett, David Plouffe, and Bob Bauer, the White House counsel; once a week Daley would convene a broader meeting with about thirty-five attendees, more for show than to actually decide policy or politics—a decision that chafed many in the White House communications shop in particular, but also many in the policy offices that littered the second and third floors of the West Wing.
Daley wasn’t making any friends outside the building, either. He had been brought in specifically to work with Boehner; the deal they came up with to fund the government, which made deep cuts to social spending programs, was what voters wanted to see, according to the polling Plouffe was reading. But when the deal was announced, Democrats on Capitol Hill were apoplectic. Harry Reid and his chief of staff, David Krone, believed Daley had given away the store and gotten little in return. Nancy Pelosi, now House minority leader, was incensed that her caucus had been cut out of the negotiations. That was Daley’s biggest mistake: he did a terrible job of communicating to congressional Democrats what exactly he was doing with the House Republicans.
As the year progressed, Daley’s relationship with Reid’s office deteriorated. In an interview with the journalist Roger Simon, Daley made the mistake of saying, “On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive.”1 The comment so angered Reid that he called Nancy-Ann DeParle, by then Daley’s deputy chief of staff, and Obama himself to complain. (It didn’t help Daley’s cause that he hadn’t bothered informing the White House press shop before he gave the interview. But at that point, Daley had little regard for the press shop.)
And there was no evidence that Daley’s relationship with Boehner had helped the White House. The two men spoke frequently, and Boehner tried to convey the difficult political position he faced. His conference wanted to slash any spending they could, and the typical deal making that had defined Washington for generations would be much harder to do; it certainly was going to take a lot more elbow grease on the White House’s part, which may or may not have succeeded anyway given the “don’t give in to anything” strategy that the rank-and-file House Republicans demanded of their Speaker. Looking back, Daley would admit that he hadn’t fully appreciated the position Boehner was in. But blaming House Republican intransigence was seen by some as a cop-out. While Daley counts himself among those ex–West Wingers who have come to believe House Republicans were impossible to negotiate with, there was never a “get caught trying” attitude. Of course, it’s an attitude that comes from the top. Obama is someone who is comfortable accepting a station in life and working around it. So rather than try four straight months of daily one-on-one meetings with Republican senators trying to hammer out, say, a deal on immigration, the president would prefer the executive action route. The president’s thinking: he assumes he’ll get nowhere, so why waste the time; do what you can and move on. It’s a perfectly rational way to look at things, but in Washington it’s seen as giving up.
It was obvious early on that Boehner didn’t have full control of his conference the way previous Speakers had, but the White House never attempted much of an alternate outreach strategy to woo some of the really powerful conservative players. Instead it kept going back to establishment standbys like the Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders, entities that the conservative base had given up on. In hindsight, there are some who do wish the White House had tried to find its own working caucus of conservatives to at least talk with in the House, similar to the strategy Ronald Reagan used in the early 1980s with conservative Democrats. It may not have worked, but it would have been better to try. Whether fair or not, Daley was going to be judged on how well he made things work between the White House and House Republicans, and by the summer, many of the president’s close aides had begun to question the Daley hire altogether.
At one point, after the debt ceiling negotiations had sent his approval rating plunging to dangerous new lows, Obama wanted to reset the conversation and return the White House’s focus to jobs and the economy. On August 31, Daley called Boehner to ask that the president be allowed to address a joint session of Congress the following Wednesday, September 7. He thought Boehner had given him the okay; White House aides tweeted the news about an hour and a half after Daley hung up the phone.2 But at the Capitol, Boehner denied he had agreed to anything—he’d heard Daley, he said, but that didn’t mean he had agreed to call a joint session and it certainly didn’t mean he had agreed to a date. After all, Republican presidential candidates were scheduled to debate the night of September 7, and an address to the nation would step on the GOP’s moment in the spotlight. By afternoon the snafu had been fixed when the White House agreed to give the speech the following day, September 8—an hour and a half before the Green Bay Packers kicked off the NFL season against the New Orleans Saints, and well before prime-time viewers were glued to their televisions. It was a minor mistake, but with Daley’s standing inside the West Wing and among congressional Democrats, a costly one for him, given the appearance of the president “stepping to the side,” and a bit of amateurism from a chief of staff who was supposed to bring precision and order.
The end of summer 2011 could not have come soon enough for the Obama White House, and for the fledgling campaign building its foundations in Chicago. They were fighting wars on two fronts—one against the Republican House of Representatives in Washington, the other against a loud and raucous field of Republican presidential candidates traveling in Iowa and New Hampshire who were united only by their deep loathing for the man in the White House.
One war had been fought to a stalemate; the White House had tried, and failed, to reach a grand bargain with Speaker John Boehner. The potential disaster of smashing through the debt ceiling had been averted, but at what cost? Congress’s approval ratings were in shambles, which was a positive for a president who still valued his image as an outsider come to change the nation’s capital. But Obama’s ratings sank as well, not as low as Congress’s, but to the low 40s, the nadir of his first term. The entire political system in Washington never fully recovered from the debt ceiling debacle, and to this day, both the president and Congress have seen their approval ratings essentially stuck in this spot.
In early September, as they were digging out of the debt ceiling mess, Messina and Plouffe, the two men who would have the largest share in crafting Obama’s re-election efforts, discussed whether the race was still winnable. It was the first moment in which Messina had contemplated the prospect that Barack Obama might be a one-term president. It was amazing to Plouffe, who had spent the first two years of Obama’s presidency outside the White House bubble, how oblivious many in the West Wing were to the president’s precarious political position. It was so bad at the start of 2011, when Plouffe became a full-time West Winger, that he decided to give a presentation at a staff retreat organized by Daley at Fort McNair, just across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, to walk everyone through how easily the president could lose. The presentation was classic Plouffe, not very emotional and filled with data, including a reminder of how Republicans had just won key races in 2010 in a slew of states the president had carried in 2008, including Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa; toss in Virginia’s slight move to the right in both 2009 and 2010, and the path to defeat for the president was fairly obvious to Plouffe. And now it was to the rest of the folks stuck in the bubble. As one senior official remembers, “Most people were walking around here for a long period of time blithely unaware of how hard our election would be. It ended up being easier than we thought and less painful than we thought, for a whole host of reasons having to do with Mitt Romney.”
But it was amazing how difficult it was for Plouffe and others to convince the West Wing elite that they could lose. There were two main reasons why Democratic elites were so cocky about 2012, 2010 notwithstanding. One was demographics, the assumption that the minority vote (both black and Hispanic) was only going to grow and it wasn’t going to the Republicans. The second reason was the unimpressive Republican presidential field; these folks couldn’t imagine even a candidate like Romney beating Obama. The only senior official who did drink that bitter anti–Kool-Aid was communications director Dan Pfeiffer, but others dismissed Pfeiffer’s daily “we’re going to lose” fears as simply “Dan being Dan.”
As for Messina, he was more of a realistic optimist. Messina’s résumé was chockablock with prestigious jobs that screamed Washington insider—stints as a top aide to Max Baucus, the senator from Messina’s adopted home state, Montana, and with a dozen campaigns around the country. His boyish face complemented the impression of him as soft-spoken, a trait that belied his penchant for swearing up a storm at the slightest provocation. He was another of those Obama White House oddities, a creature of Washington who now worked to change it.
After the 2008 primaries had concluded, Plouffe, whose people skills are one of his weak points, had threatened to quit; he wanted to focus more on strategy, not on being a manager. But Obama wanted to find a compromise, so the decision was made to hire a deputy to help Plouffe but not give him a title that included the word “deputy” (titles always matter with Beltway types). Messina had a mind for organization thanks to the battles he had fought in other campaigns, so the Obama team brought him in with the goal of orchestrating the meteoric staffer growth that happens when a primary campaign begins focusing on a general election.
Messina would take the original Obama for America from a 550-person organization focused on primary states to a 3,000-person group with outposts in nearly every city and town of any size in a battleground state. He was the chief operating officer, and it became clear that he would be the campaign-manager-in-waiting when 2012 rolled around—essentially the same role he played in 2008, but with more authority.
Months before the midterm elections, when it had become clear that Democrats would lose the House and when Messina and others were focusing on key Senate races they believed would preserve the Democratic majority, he and the president spoke briefly about the campaign to come. How, Obama wanted to know, would Messina organize a re-election campaign? At this point, Plouffe had already made the decision that the headquarters should remain in Chicago, unlike the re-election efforts of Bush and Clinton, who both chose the Washington area for their re-election headquarters instead of going back to Austin and Little Rock, respectively. So Messina started to outline an organization that was similar to 2008’s, but with an obvious acknowledgment that the campaign still had to be run out of the White House, simply for continuity purposes. But that was the extent of what they mapped out; Plouffe was still the chief architect and ultimately would be the campaign CEO. Messina and Obama held off on any more discussions until after the midterm elections; in Hawaii that winter, during Obama’s annual family vacation and after another exhausting session of a lame-duck Congress, Obama formally offered Messina the job.
Among those who had been welcomed to the White House to offer Obama advice had been Ken Mehlman. Like some of the other informal advisors (such as Ken Duberstein, who had intimated his interest in joining the White House staff), he was a Republican, but he had been in a position similar to Messina’s just a few years earlier. As George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2004, Mehlman had steered his candidate to a second term despite weak poll numbers and what looked like a strong opponent—coincidentally, also from Massachusetts. What’s more, Mehlman had managed a race that included a big-thinking überstrategist, Karl Rove, who would guide the campaign from a 30,000-foot level. Their relationship would be roughly equivalent to the way Messina and Plouffe, who would handle Obama’s overarching strategy, would interact.
After a post-2004 stint as chairman of the RNC, Mehlman had publicly retired from politics to take a lucrative job with a Wall Street firm. But he had that personal connection with Obama that few in Washington shared: they were law school buddies. And while not close friends, the two men had a very good “professional” relationship. Such relationships, born of tangential histories and convenience, usually qualify as friendships in Washington, and were precisely the type Obama was not keen on establishing or maintaining. He made an exception for Mehlman, perhaps out of loyalty or for that political convenience he generally recoiled from. Indeed, Team Obama loved leaking anecdotes about this “personal friendship” with Mehlman, especially during times when official Washington was being extracritical of the president for what appeared to be a lack of outreach to Republicans.
From Mehlman and the Bush 2004 campaign, Messina took a few key lessons: Mehlman and Rove had disagreed frequently, occasionally sharply, giving rise to various factions within the campaign and, from time to time, inconvenient media stories about internal feuds. Messina and Plouffe wanted desperately to avoid that; they agreed early on they would have a daily phone call, just between the two of them, to hash out any disagreements they might have. The conclusion they came to would be the united front they presented to the world, and they would never take their disputes public, even with other senior staffers on the campaign.
Mehlman also warned Messina about the dangers of allowing conclusion by committee. Decision making must be controlled by just a few top aides, he advised; the tighter the circle, the fewer details would leak to the media. That was music to Plouffe’s ears and potentially uncomfortable for Messina, who never enjoyed being on the “losing” side of a debate; he cherished political cover and consensus. Plouffe was a different cat, comfortable ruling with an iron fist even if uncomfortable sending the message campaignwide.
Finally, Mehlman advised, make sure the mechanics of communications are correct. The White House is used to controlling everything about the president, from his schedule to his message. But the campaign would increasingly drive those decisions, and eventually, by virtue of the demands of the calendar, it would become the dominant player in the president’s life. Communicating between the White House and Chicago, and establishing processes to do so, would be critical to keeping the president and his campaign on message.
Plouffe had always been one to hold decisions and deliberations close to the vest. He believed in keeping the circle of decision makers small and tight, to avoid both public sniping and leaks to the media. In that regard, it was easy to see why Obama trusted Plouffe so much; Plouffe was so similar to Obama, in the eyes of many West Wingers, that they referred to him as a white clone. But at the beginning of the president’s re-election campaign, Obama and his senior aides tried to be inclusive. This was in response to the growing narrative in Democratic Party circles that Obama was only about Obama, Team Obama was only about Obama, and oh, by the way, we’re not that interested in the advice of folks who were involved in losing campaigns (read: Hillary and Kerry).
One strategy session, in the fall of 2011, included so many people that the meeting had to be held in the State Dining Room, a 1,700-square-foot venue that can accommodate up to 140 guests.3 Messina, who didn’t like unnecessarily large meetings any more than Plouffe did, couldn’t believe who had been included: two members of the First Lady’s staff, three from Biden’s, and even, for some reason, Rob Nabors from the Office of Congressional Liaison, who at the time was supposed to be all about legislation and had little experience outside Washington. These folks were in addition to dozens of senior aides and a few outside consultants—all in all, the size of a meeting that should have been called only to rally troops and fire them up, not to share strategy, let alone elicit ideas. The only thing missing was a podium and a line of cameras. It appeared to be an “event” that the press should cover, not some secret strategy meeting.
After formalities and a presentation by Messina, the president himself took control of the gathering. He dropped his guard—something even close aides had seen him do only a handful of times—and offered frank assessments of his performance. He talked about what had worked in the first three years and what hadn’t, about how he wanted the campaign to play out. Most strikingly, he talked about his own flaws and shortcomings, offering the audience a glimpse into his famously private thinking. Then he made a special point of asking his staff not to repeat what he had said. It represented, Obama said, his raw, unfiltered feelings, which he had shared only because he trusted his staff so much.
A few weeks later, reporter John Heilemann called Messina. The coauthor of the wildly popular book Game Change, about the 2008 election, was in the process of reporting a sequel about the 2012 campaign. Heilemann, along with coauthor Mark Halperin, were desperate to source build at the highest levels of the re-election effort, and in an apparent attempt to coerce Messina to play ball, Heilemann proceeded to read Messina a recap of what Obama had said at the supposedly private meeting, in startling detail. Obama’s words would become public.
Messina was shaken. If deliberations that should have been secret were leaking out this early and quickly, the campaign had a problem—doubly so, given that Obama had made a point of asking for confidentiality.
Before the next meeting, which included most of the same people, Messina and Obama had lunch on the White House veranda. Messina had asked for the lunch, and Obama was immediately suspicious. “Plouffe says you have something to tell me,” Obama began. Messina related what had happened: a senior staffer had betrayed the president’s trust. Messina had been fingered, many times unfairly, as a frequent leaker in the first term of the Obama presidency, and he didn’t want that reputation for the campaign, which served as a motivator for him to make sure his boss knew about what had happened.
Obama was furious. In the strategy meeting that followed about a week later, Messina opened with his usual presentation, to get the White House and Chicago on the same page. Obama stopped him and took the floor. He railed against the leak and the leaker, making clear how wounded he was that one of his own would relate such sensitive information. He said he would be in the Oval Office if the leaker wanted to confess without retribution. Then he stormed out and waited. And waited some more.
With Obama stewing in the Oval Office, Biden was the next one to take the floor. For forty minutes the vice president—the man who had run against Obama in 2008—laid into the staff. For Joseph R. Biden there was no deeper insult, no greater betrayal, than a breach of trust like that. What makes every one of his gaffes forgivable in Obama’s eyes is Biden’s loyalty. “How could you do this?” Biden yelled, red-faced. “You know I ran against him. Name one time I’ve been disloyal to him.”
After Biden was done, the next yeller in the room was Robert Gibbs, who was known to be friendly with the media but was always considered loyal, sometimes to a fault. That Gibbs was yelling was nothing new to that crowd—the Alabama transplant had a quick temper, as everyone who had ever worked with him knew, usually firsthand. Others chimed in as well, including David Axelrod and Anita Dunn, less in an attempt to shame the leaker into coming forward than to remind the assembled that someone might have leaked this by accident. Some in that room interpreted the remarks by Dunn and Axelrod as potential confessions. Perhaps they had told a friend what the president said, and that person then told Heilemann or Halperin.
Despite all the pleas, all the yelling, all the guilt, the leaker never came forward. There was finger-pointing, but some of it seemed to be about airing a grievance against someone that one member of the team didn’t like. For instance, there isn’t a lot of love lost between Dunn and Gibbs. Meanwhile, Obama sat alone in the Oval Office. It was the last time so many people were included in a strategy meeting. No serious campaign meeting, held every Sunday until Election Day, included more than a handful of close aides, the small cabal that Obama felt could be trusted: Plouffe, Messina, Axelrod, hard-charging communications expert Stephanie Cutter, Larry Grisolano, who oversaw the campaign’s advertising, Rouse, Jarrett, new chief of staff Jack Lew, and Pfeiffer. And the happiest person in that room: Plouffe.
Obama had initially offered Daley the chief of staff job with the understanding that he would stay through the 2012 re-election. But again, Daley was disappointed; by the summer of 2011, it became clear that he wouldn’t have a major role in crafting the campaign, a role he coveted. Plouffe, along with Messina in Chicago, would control the campaign’s message and strategy. Meanwhile, the campaign wanted little to do with Democrats on Capitol Hill or the fights they were having with Republicans. Daley said later he had never met a group of people more disdainful of Congress than the White House staff he worked with—an irony, given that so many of them had gone to work for Obama after long careers on the Hill. In fact, this had infuriated many Washington veterans: not that Obama was dismissive of them; they could accept that, it was who he was. What really chafed some of the Beltway crowd about the insular White House was that these same people worked on Capitol Hill in the 1990s, and they all used to complain about how insular the Clinton White House was. Plouffe was a Gephardt guy back in the day, and yet he would hold the same contempt for Congress that the president did.
That created, in Daley’s mind, two universes—one based in Chicago, dedicated to campaign politics, and the other based on Capitol Hill, dedicated to Washington politics. And he wasn’t involved in either one.
During a weeklong vacation over the December holidays, Daley decided he wanted to return home to Chicago. He told Obama shortly after New Year’s, just a few days before his first anniversary on the job and only ten months before Obama would face voters. Obama asked him to reconsider, not because he was thrilled with the job Daley had been doing but because of the upheaval a new chief of staff at the start of an election year could cause; a day later, Daley hadn’t changed his mind.4
A week later, when Obama thanked Daley for his service, he introduced his third chief of staff, a policy wonk named Jack Lew, who had run the Office of Management and Budget. White House staffers, and Capitol Hill, breathed a collective sigh of relief. Lew was a Washington veteran who was leading the one part of the executive branch that actually has its fingers in every part of the government. There really isn’t a better position to be in if you want to truly understand how the entire government works, but more important in this age of budget fights, his appointment meant there was no need for on-the-job training for the biggest battles the chief might have to face.
Leading OMB is a job that’s nearly as stressful as running the White House. It requires a breadth and depth of knowledge about the machinations of government and policy unlike almost any other, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that Obama’s two predecessors had also turned to their OMB directors when the chief of staff job opened up—George W. Bush had plucked Josh Bolten out of OMB, and Bill Clinton had elevated Leon Panetta.
Lew was in many ways the antithesis of Obama’s first two chiefs of staff. Where Emanuel and Daley were bombastic, possessed of big personalities, and prone to snapping at staff, Lew was calm and collected. Where Emanuel was a master of politics and Daley a networker extraordinaire, Lew was a career manager—he had run OMB under Bill Clinton, then managed operations for New York University before serving as chief operating officer for a branch of Citigroup. John Podesta had pushed Hillary Clinton to hire him at the State Department; Lew’s first job in the Obama administration was deputy secretary of state for management and resources.
An observant Jew who took his devotion to the Sabbath seriously, Lew brought his discipline as well as organizational and supervisory skills to a White House badly in need of staff leadership and a morale boost. For the first time since Obama took office, staffers started to recognize process; a policy idea ran through channels, from a low-level policy advisor to his or her supervisor, and on up the chain. Only those issues that demanded a presidential decision landed on Obama’s desk.
Perhaps most crucially, where Emanuel feuded with his old colleagues on Capitol Hill and then mourned with them after their defeats, and Daley couldn’t speak to Harry Reid without one of them throwing something, Lew enjoyed good relations with Congress. Like most of Obama’s senior advisors, he had come from the Hill, working for Tip O’Neill in the 1980s before taking a series of administration jobs. But unlike those who felt disgust and disdain for members of the opposing congressional party, Lew had worked and negotiated with Democrats and Republicans for years.
Emanuel served at a time when managing Hill Democrats was crucial to Obama’s agenda; Daley’s purpose had been to reach out to the business community. Lew would fill two roles—he would put together a management structure, and he would negotiate with Hill Republicans over the budget cuts and debt limit expansion that had dominated 2011, issues that sat comfortably in his wheelhouse.
But even though Lew was a better fit with Obama’s developing sense of a chief of staff’s role, he, too, clashed with his negotiating partners. Members of Congress felt he talked down to them, using his mastery of the federal budget and its intricacies to bludgeon them into submission. It got so bad during the debt ceiling negotiations that Boehner and Eric Cantor asked the White House to send Gene Sperling, head of the National Economic Council, to negotiate instead of Lew.5
While Lew brought veteran experience to the running of the White House, Robert Gates, a veteran of four previous administrations, was noticing a profound generational change elsewhere. As he’d sat around the Situation Room or in the Oval Office when George H. W. Bush had been president, the decision-makers in the room influencing the president were few in number and senior in rank. Usually only the president, the vice president, and the national security advisor were involved.
But now, Gates was sitting in meetings with Ben Rhodes, who was half his age, and Samantha Power, who had returned to the White House in a post at the NSC, among other more junior staffers. And everyone, he noticed, was taking notes. (“Everybody’s a note-taker,” Gates bemoaned to one top aide.) Gates was exasperated; in Bush’s administration, that sort of thing would have invited a presidential rebuke
Those younger foreign policy aides were the ones who more accurately reflected Obama’s worldview. But Obama was letting more voices into the room than previous presidents, older advisors complained. And those voices were winning the argument, because they were playing Obama’s tune. The younger aides were “total idealists,” said one Gates advisor. “It’s honorable that they have these positions and they believe so much in the president’s policy and the power of communications in this world, but you’ve also got guys who are much more experienced foreign policy–wise who… were trumped.” Regardless of political positions, this addition of more and more voices was emblematic of Obama’s management style—for better and for worse.
There was one thing the no-drama Obama had never been good at—firing someone. During his Senate career, during his campaigns for federal office, no one had really been fired. People were simply layered or worked around. Daley made his own decision to quit. Daley’s brother, the mayor of Chicago, gave Rahm Emanuel incentive to quit by saying he wouldn’t run again. Jim Jones had opened the door on his own.
But if people didn’t volunteer to depart, they usually stayed, further complicating the White House dynamic. Where there should have been a clear chain of command, there were official and unofficial hierarchies. Sometimes this meant that voices that would have been excluded were heard, to positive effect. But it also meant a lack of focus and follow-up, with inadequate clarity on who was ultimately responsible—themselves or the other people who seemed to be taking ownership of a decision.
Instead of giving someone a pink slip, Obama tended to promote them to another position somewhere else in government. Folks were shuffled, escorted out of the way, but not fired. A rare exception began to unfold on June 21, 2010, when a young press aide named Tommy Vietor walked into Robert Gibbs’s office.
Vietor had in his hands a story that would run in the next month’s issue of Rolling Stone, due to hit newsstands three days later. It was a piece about Stanley McChrystal, the army general who headed U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Already, McChrystal had gotten in trouble with the White House for publicly pooh-poohing Vice President Joe Biden’s position that American troops should pull out of Afghanistan. And the White House still suspected that McChrystal had leaked his own strategy review, which called for an additional 40,000 troops to surge into Afghanistan, to the media in order to box the president in.
But the article, written by the late Michael Hastings,6 went a lot farther. In the piece, Hastings quoted McChrystal’s aides mocking Biden, Richard Holbrooke (at the time Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan), and Ken Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. It portrayed a commander whose advisors openly questioned the president’s interest in military affairs and who did little to stop such inappropriate chatter.
Gibbs barely finished reading the piece before he went to Rahm Emanuel’s office. Emanuel told him to call Obama, who had returned to the residence to have dinner with his family. Gibbs met Obama in a walk-through that connects the residence and the Oval Office; after he’d read three paragraphs, Obama’s normally cool demeanor began to crack. “I’ll be in the Oval [Office] in ten minutes,” the president told Gibbs. “Go get whoever’s left in the building.”
Hours beforehand, McChrystal had called Biden7 while the vice president was flying between Illinois and Washington, aboard Air Force Two. Over a line crackling with static, McChrystal offered his apology for the remarks attributed to his staff but that would also be interpreted as opinions he shared. It was all news to Biden because the article had not yet gone public. Biden said he was sure nothing would come of it and rang off. Puzzled, the vice president called Obama to check in.8
At the Pentagon, alarm bells were ringing. But while both Robert Gates and Mike Mullen had spoken with McChrystal before about his hard edge, they believed in his strategy; what’s more, he had only been on the job for a year, and both Gates and Mullen thought changing commanders in the middle of a war a second time, especially after just a few months on the job, could destabilize the situation on the ground.
Gates called the White House. He wanted an OK to put out a statement saying that nothing would happen to McChrystal, who was sure to be contrite. Losing McChrystal at that moment, Gates worried, would sap the momentum the United States had begun to build in Afghanistan.
But Obama was furious. “Tell him not to put out the statement,” Obama told Gibbs. Obama summoned the general to the White House for a meeting.
As the Pentagon scrambled to save its general, McChrystal was strangely silent. He was an old-school soldier, someone who believed in owning up to his mistakes. He didn’t offer excuses or shift the blame; indeed, it had been his officers who made the disparaging comments, not the general. But in taking the fall, McChrystal seemed to be giving his allies in the Pentagon no room to defend him.
Gibbs, who had defended the president since his days in the Senate, took particular offense at McChrystal’s comments. At his press briefing on June 22, Gibbs refused repeatedly to say that McChrystal’s job was safe. In the story, McChrystal’s aides had told Hastings that Obama appeared disengaged and distracted during meetings on Afghanistan war strategy. “[McChrystal] will have [Obama’s] undivided attention tomorrow,” Gibbs shot back.
There was another question, one asked by the press but also foremost on Gates’s mind: did the president still have faith in McChrystal’s ability to run the war in Afghanistan? “We should wait and see what the outcome of that meeting is,” Gibbs replied.9
Geoff Morrell, watching from his desk at the Pentagon, thought the answer sounded like nails being enthusiastically driven into a coffin. Morrell even told a reporter that he thought the press secretary was enjoying taking McChrystal to the woodshed. (He later called Gibbs to apologize for the cheap shot.) But the fact of the matter was, the president had no choice but to fire McChrystal if he was going to assert himself as commander in chief.
McChrystal knew it, too. And yet he found a strange sense of peace aboard the airplane that flew him from Kabul to Washington. He had “hours for reflection, free from the cacophony of opinions,” he wrote later. McChrystal realized he was about to lose his job, yet he still didn’t seek advice from any mentors.10
While McChrystal was still in the air, the conversation in Washington began about who would take over for him. The war was at a turning point, and both the White House and the Pentagon thought they needed a commander of stature to guide it if McChrystal was forced out.
Gibbs, who was as worried about the politics of the moment as anything else, floated the name of David Petraeus. McChrystal had become something of a minor celebrity as he ran the war effort in Afghanistan, but Petraeus was practically a legend since his counterinsurgency strategy had helped turn around the war in Iraq. He had cultivated relations with the press, whose glowing profiles never failed to mention his torturous jogging regimen, his tireless work habits, and his muscular physique; more than a few articles included anecdotes about the push-up contests he won against much younger soldiers serving in the field. He was so popular that some Republicans were talking about him as a future presidential candidate. (Adding fuel to the fire, albeit unintentionally, Petraeus’s status as a native of New Hampshire meant that he’d show up in that first-in-the-nation primary state from time to time.)
At that moment, Petraeus was leading U.S. Central Command. Located in Tampa, CentCom (as it is known in military shorthand) is the site from which most modern wars, including Persian Gulf Wars I and II, are actually directed. Obama liked the idea of tapping a known quantity like Petraeus, and he took Gibbs’s suggestion to Gates. The defense secretary had already thought of Petraeus, but he hadn’t brought it to the White House because he thought Obama wouldn’t go for it, given concerns about Petraeus’s close relations with the media. Hearing this idea from the president actually made Gates more comfortable with the idea of relieving McChrystal of his duties.
Hours before Obama was to sit down with McChrystal, Petraeus’s name came up again, at a White House senior staff meeting. Again, Gibbs spoke up in favor of the idea. But the senior advisors were less certain about whether Obama should give McChrystal the boot. Donilon, who had just assumed the title of national security advisor, couldn’t seem to make up his mind.
“Tom,” Pete Rouse injected, “you’re going to see the president in an hour. He wants a recommendation on whether to fire General McChrystal. Now, the press secretary has a recommendation. And a replacement,” Rouse continued, suggesting that if Gibbs’s lack of national security experience didn’t mean he couldn’t come up with an idea, surely the in-house national security expert could. “I’d suggest that you, as the national security advisor, get one or two of those before you go see the president,” lectured Rouse. It was a rare moment when Rouse publicly let loose against a peer.
And yet even in the Oval Office, Donilon seemed to argue both sides of the question. It was a habit of his that frustrated the other members of the president’s inner circle no end. Donilon was known as well organized, a great person to execute someone else’s decision and even pretty good at running meetings designed to share information. But as a decision-maker he was notoriously ineffective. The consummate staffer, he was smart as a whip, but his fear of being on the wrong side of a presidential decision would get the best of him. Ultimately that indecisiveness would be why the president went in the opposite direction when selecting Donilon’s replacement; Susan Rice would not be afraid to disagree with the president, and in fact sometimes had the ability to change his mind, something Donilon wouldn’t even try to do.
While the senior staff was, sort of, making the case for Petraeus to the president, McChrystal was meeting with Gates and Mullen at the Pentagon. Both the secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs were working behind the scenes to convince Obama to stick with McChrystal, but the general was resigned to his likely fate.
As Obama contemplated the situation overnight, he decided that he couldn’t tolerate the public expression of discontent from a military officer. If the military respects anything, it’s the chain of command, and the president concluded that if he allowed McChrystal to dishonor that chain, he’d be setting the wrong example for the rest of the uniformed. He called Petraeus to offer him the job. (Of course, Petraeus himself would fall victim to controversy a little over two years later, after a year in command and then a year as director of the CIA. Citing an extramarital affair, he handed his own resignation in to the president.)
McChrystal’s meeting in the Oval Office was short, he wrote later, and professional.11 In the Rose Garden not long thereafter, Obama announced that he had accepted McChrystal’s resignation.
“I don’t make this decision based on any difference in policy with General McChrystal, as we are in full agreement about our strategy. Nor do I make this decision out of any sense of personal insult. Stan McChrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully,” Obama said. “But war is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general, or a president. And as difficult as it is to lose General McChrystal, I believe that it is the right decision for our national security. The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system. And it erodes the trust that’s necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.”12
The executive who had built a reputation for keeping a small team of loyalists around him had demonstrated what happens when that loyalty is broken. McChrystal returned to his home at Fort McNair, where his wife, Annie, was waiting. He told her that their life in the army was over.13
For the president, it was a critical moment in his professional career, the first person of significance he had ever fired, not just as president but in his entire political life. It wasn’t easy to get fired in the Obama White House, a fact that frustrated even some loyalists.
Many hoped that this McChrystal incident would stiffen the president’s spine; down the road, arguably bigger mistakes would be made on the domestic side and would call for some equally decisive executive action. But as even the new team of advisors would find out early in the second term, Obama doesn’t easily get talked into firing anyone.