At 11:55 a.m. on a clear and bitingly cold January morning in 2013, Barack Obama joined an exclusive club of just sixteen men. Obama was already one of just forty-three men to serve as president of the United States. Now he was part of an even smaller handful who had been elected to two terms. Throughout the hard-fought battle to win that second term, Obama had predicted that the Republicans who had so resisted him during his first term would wake up and, in his words, their fever would break. After so much partisan rancor, wouldn’t the loyal opposition have to recognize that the American people had spoken, again, and that it was time to work together to achieve common goals, and maybe even swap a few horses to reach some more partisan goals? Not only that, the American people, in their great wisdom, re-elected everyone, Democrats to the presidency and the Senate, and Republicans to the House. Translation: figure it out, but figure it out together.
In his second inaugural address, Obama laid out an ambitious agenda: Climate change. Income inequality. An end to a decade of ceaseless wars. Civil rights, pointedly including gay rights by his citing the Stonewall Inn riots along with Selma and Seneca Falls as key monuments on the march to justice.
That day, a newly elected Obama with an approval rating north of 50 percent sketched out his hopes for a second term and the legacy he hoped to leave after exiting office.
A year later, in 2014, looking back on twelve more months of gridlock, mistakes, miscalculations, wasted opportunities, and poll numbers that had sunk to the low 40s, Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s senior advisor, would conclude that the White House needed to seriously revise its approach to the presidency if the president wanted to get anything done before he left for retirement. In a memo to the president in January, Pfeiffer concluded that the White House had failed to use the rules available to an executive to implement policy, and that Obama’s team had abandoned a focus on explaining his agenda to voters. The lack of discipline, the tangles with a still-recalcitrant Congress, and a year of unforeseen crises ranging from a terrorist attack in Boston to a massive security leak, a government shutdown to a disastrously bungled rollout of a critical website, had firmly tarnished Obama’s pristine reputation as a different kind of politician.
But even without those crises, Obama had already set himself on a path to failure; before he even took his second oath of office, he had chosen to focus on issues that would shorten his already-brief honeymoon.
A little more than a month before he was sworn in a second time, the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, had shaken Obama deeply. He had spoken at memorial services for mass shooting victims before, in Tucson, Arizona, and Aurora, Colorado. Serious revisions to the nation’s gun control laws hadn’t emerged from either of those incidents, nor from the dozens of others that had happened under Obama’s watch. But the deaths of innocent children just a few weeks away from celebrating the holidays were too much to ignore.
By pushing so hard to pass gun control legislation, the White House virtually guaranteed that it would start the first year of its second term with a loss—a loss it couldn’t blame on Republicans. The sheen of a newly elected president with a bold, ambitious agenda was being tarnished by the legislative realities of dealing with Congress barely a month into his second term.
Immigration reform should have been different. While there were few political incentives to pass gun control measures, Republicans had almost every excuse in the world to make reforming the nation’s immigration rules a priority in the 113th Congress. After all, Obama had won re-election with more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, the fastest-growing minority population in the country. Republican political strategists worried that if the trend continued, Hispanics would become as reliably a part of the Democratic coalition as African American voters had become.
Hispanic and immigrant rights groups weren’t completely happy with Obama, especially concerning the record-setting number of deportations of undocumented immigrants that had happened during his administration—but they were more willing to back a politician who gave them a seat at the table than a party whose presidential primary contenders pandered to anti-immigrant hard-liners like Iowa representative Steve King, former Colorado representative Tom Tancredo, or any of the talking heads on conservative radio stations who complained that any reform would amount to amnesty for the eleven million people in the country without proper documentation.
Recognizing these trends in electoral politics, some Republicans (including Boehner and his deputy, House majority leader Eric Cantor) did begin calling for immigration reform soon after the 2012 elections. And for Obama, reforming immigration laws could stand as a cornerstone of his second-term legacy. It was a rare moment when both parties’ political interests were ostensibly in alignment. The reality is that the only time big compromise deals happen in Washington is when there is true political benefit for both parties.
To highlight the priority the administration placed on immigration reform, Obama dedicated the first outside-the-Beltway trip of his second term to unveiling the outlines of his plan. A little over a week after being inaugurated, Obama traveled to a Las Vegas high school to call for a quick overhaul of immigration law. The White House had contemplated releasing a full legislative version of its own proposal, but it held back as a bipartisan group of eight senators hammered out its own version.1
And they kept on hammering. The negotiations between the four Democrats (Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and Michael Bennet of Colorado) and four Republicans (Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida) dragged on for months. Ultimately the two sides agreed on a compromise that would have created a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States while expanding employer verification systems and improving work visa options for low-skilled workers, including agriculture workers essential to farms in western and midwestern states.
Immigration hard-liners hated the legislation, and they promised revenge on Rubio, who very clearly had eyes on the White House in 2016. While Republicans could afford to hold unorthodox positions on some issues and still hope for a future in national politics, immigration issues, the hawks believed, were still political nonstarters with the conservative base: touch them and watch your career go up in a puff of smoke.
But Rubio held fast, and so did the other seven members, through an onslaught of proposed amendments designed to weaken or strengthen parts of the bill and upset the delicate balance the gang had struck. The Senate Judiciary Committee heard more than three hundred proposed amendments, then passed the bill by a wide 13–5 margin. Then, on the Senate floor, the gang accepted just one significant amendment—backed by Republicans Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota—to strengthen border protections. That single amendment brought about 10 Republican votes to the final package. On June 27, the Senate passed the compromise package by a 68–32 vote; 14 Republicans eventually supported the bill. It was a successful day on the face of things, but actually terribly disappointing to immigration reform advocates. The fact that more than half of Senate Republicans voted no meant the legislation was likely doomed in the Republican-controlled House. They needed a show of support in the 70s or even 80 to give Boehner the cover he needed. But those numbers were not enough for Boehner to sell to the 100 or so Republicans who might have been persuadable on this issue.
Still, on paper, there did seem to be a bipartisan consensus, at least when it came to some key constituency groups like business and labor.
Interest groups had played a heavy role in forcing through the legislation: labor groups joined with the Chamber of Commerce, and farmworkers joined with big agricultural interests to urge the Senate to pass a bill. McCain, Graham, and Schumer all called New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who had appointed a close political ally to temporarily fill a vacant Senate seat, to urge him to convince the temporary senator, Jeff Chiesa, to vote in favor. He did.2
But only hours after the Senate vote, harsh political reality brought the reform package’s progress to a sharp and painful halt. Despite voicing support for the broader concept of immigration reform, Boehner had been feeling pressure for months from his more conservative members. Boehner’s own 113th Congress had started out inauspiciously: he had only narrowly avoided being denied the speakership when a rump group of conservatives, who didn’t see Boehner as fighting sufficiently for their cause, split apart at the last minute, ruining a planned coup. Boehner hadn’t helped his own politics with conservatives when, just after the president won a second term, he said that “health care is the law of the land.” While it was a statement of fact, it was viewed by some Republicans as surrender. Couple that with Boehner’s unwillingness to fight harder—at least in the eyes of conservatives—to save the Bush tax cuts, and he suddenly had problems.
So Boehner was treading lightly a few months later when immigration came to his turf, and he wasn’t about to take a Rubioesque risk. “I issued a statement that I thought was pretty clear, but apparently some haven’t gotten the message: the House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes,” he said the morning after the Senate vote.3
The political calculus had changed, largely because the two sides that wanted to get something done weren’t fully considering the third faction: the House Republican rank and file.
Boehner, Cantor, and the rest of the Republican leadership had initially seen passing immigration reform as something to be done for the good of the Republican Party as a whole. It might not be popular with the outspoken base, which would label almost anything that included a path to citizenship as amnesty, but it would allow the party to begin anew and try to fix what had been a broken and harmful conversation with the Hispanic community.
The political concerns the rank and file faced, though, were less about the overall political health of the national party and more about their own survival in coming primary elections. How could they go to their voters, the most conservative activists who showed up in a primary election, and brag about voting for immigration reform in Washington? For the average Republican who turned up at a local district meeting or a county convention, the only thing worse than a member of Congress who voted for immigration reform would have been a member voting for immigration reform that Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer also backed.
And let’s not forget another reality for rank-and-file House Republicans: the bizarre U.S. redistricting process has essentially segregated their districts from the rest of the multiethnic population that is growing in this country. Their districts are more homogeneous than the United States as a whole, and since they aren’t dependent on Hispanics to win re-election, how was it in the rank and file’s interest to pass immigration reform? Political logic may have dictated that Republicans would vote in their best interests to see that some kind of pathway to citizenship—the only provision that immigrant rights groups and the most vociferous Democrats would call real reform—made it through Congress. But this assumed that everyone in Washington faced the same math problem; they didn’t, and backbench members of Congress determined to win re-election were going to save themselves before they saved their party.
That meant Boehner’s calculus changed, too: he stood to gain nothing by sticking his neck out on a bill that probably wouldn’t pass his House Republican Conference anyway. There was no logic in suddenly becoming a martyr. Boehner wouldn’t budge, and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, didn’t seem any more interested in moving even piecemeal bills.
What had once looked like a sure thing, a cornerstone of Obama’s second-term legacy and perhaps even the cornerstone of Boehner’s speakership, ground to a halt. By mid-June, immigration was no longer dominating the White House’s radar screen. Once again, instead of proactively pushing the president’s legislation, the administration was thrown into crisis by outside actors—this time a twenty-nine-year-old computer programmer with sandy blond hair and the outlines of a beard.
In 2012, Edward Snowden, a contractor at the defense giant Booz Allen Hamilton, contacted the journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, offering to disclose documents he had downloaded from the servers of a remote, and as it turns out not-so-secure, National Security Agency outpost in Honolulu. After communicating for months using encrypted channels, Snowden flew to Hong Kong on May 20, 2013, having received permission to leave the NSA, ostensibly for treatment of epilepsy. He was still there on June 5, when the Guardian newspaper published its first story under Greenwald’s byline, revealing that the American telecom giant Verizon was collecting millions of phone records from its customers on a daily basis and handing them over to the NSA.4
A day later, the Guardian, under the bylines of Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, and the Washington Post, under Gellman’s and Poitras’s names, revealed that the NSA and the FBI were tapping directly into the data servers maintained by nine top U.S. Internet companies under a program code-named PRISM.
The revelations kept coming, day after day: a presidential policy directive ordered government officials to come up with a list of targets for cyberattacks; the NSA had collected almost three billion pieces of information on U.S. citizens in a single month; U.S. and British intelligence agencies were monitoring foreign leaders and diplomats at a G20 meeting in 2009; a secret court allowed the NSA to use data collected from American citizens without obtaining a warrant. Every morning the two papers revealed new crown jewels of the American and British intelligence networks.
The NSA scrambled to answer basic questions, both to respond to the White House and for its own internal security: How did a low-level contractor collect so much information without being detected? How had he escaped to Hong Kong? Was he working for a foreign power, and how could the United States stem the bleeding?
Six weeks after the leaks first became public, Denis McDonough had Keith Alexander, the four-star army general who headed the NSA, in his office. McDonough wanted answers; Alexander still had few of them. Finally, McDonough snapped: How is it, he demanded, that you can’t tell us what Snowden has stolen? You’re telling me, with the great powers of the NSA, that you can’t figure out what he stole? It took until February 2014 for intelligence officials to finally understand the scope of Snowden’s theft: approximately 1.7 million files, according to testimony NSA officials gave to the House Intelligence Committee.5
Intelligence professionals marveled at the holes within their own networks. The two largest leaks of proprietary national security data had both occurred during the Obama administration, a sign of the increasingly diffuse network of U.S. intelligence outposts. In 2010, army private Bradley Manning had delivered hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and documents to the pro-transparency organization WikiLeaks. Three years later, Snowden’s disclosures rocked the intelligence community anew. Both had been inside jobs; the national security apparatus was apparently expert at keeping other countries out, but their blind spot was inside their own organizations.
If 2013 was the year many Americans who liked Barack Obama began to think he was just another politician, the disclosures of covert NSA activity made 2013 the year foreign leaders began to believe that Obama represented less of a break with George W. Bush’s tenure than he wanted to convey. The anger at Obama over the Snowden revelations seeped out of editorials across once-supportive European papers, while foreign diplomats and leaders voiced their own skepticism.
“Barack Obama—the man who carried so much hope and was long believed to be a very European US president—has become the butt of jokes,” wrote Der Spiegel, the German weekly that published some of Snowden’s revelations under Greenwald’s byline, in a scathing editorial. “Some view [Obama] as the embodiment of the very ‘Big Brother’ once sketched by George Orwell, the dictator who spies on, monitors and controls every citizen without any scruples.”6
Obama’s transformation from European hero when first elected to untrustworthy ally had its deepest impact in Germany. The domestic politics both George W. Bush and Obama faced had meant that there was no way America could bail out struggling countries in Europe, even though those countries’ stability would have a direct and drastic impact on the United States. That meant U.S. officials had to lobby Europe’s stronger economies—particularly France and Angela Merkel’s Germany—to stave off a global depression. Though Obama believed there were few world leaders of great stature serving with him—no Thatchers or Rabins, and even Nicolas Sarkozy had lost his last election—he thought highly of Merkel, the former research scientist who had served as Germany’s chancellor since 2005. Thanks to her performance during the economic recession, when Germany became the saving grace of a European economy on the brink of destruction, and her stature at international meetings, Obama had an overwhelmingly positive impression of Merkel.
And Obama was scheduled to go to Berlin on an official visit, his first since his grand speech at the Brandenburg Gate during the 2008 campaign, just two weeks after the first of Snowden’s stolen documents began hitting newspapers.
Ostensibly, the trip combined a meeting of the G8 economic powers in Northern Ireland with a side trip to Berlin, where Obama hoped to underscore what the White House called the “vital importance of the transatlantic alliance, the deep and enduring bonds between the United States and Germany.”7 The White House and Merkel’s advisors agreed that another speech at the Brandenburg Gate would be well timed to honor the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 speech, when he declared, in grammatically tortured German, that he was a Berliner.
It was also, as advisors would acknowledge later, something of an unofficial campaign swing on Merkel’s behalf: Obama did meet with Peer Steinbrück, the leader of the opposition Social Democrats, but his several appearances with Merkel lent her some of the aura that still existed for Obama in Europe. In federal elections held September 22, Merkel’s party won 41.5 percent of the vote, almost 16 points higher than its nearest rival, Steinbrück’s Social Democrats.
A month after Obama’s visit, Der Spiegel reported that Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, helped the NSA with its data collection. A month after Merkel’s re-election, however, came the real bombshell: on October 23, Der Spiegel revealed that Merkel’s personal cell phone number had been listed in a special NSA catalog, and may have been monitored by American intelligence agencies, for more than ten years.
Merkel placed an outraged phone call to Obama, in which she told the American president she “unequivocally disapproves of such practices and sees them as completely unacceptable,” a Merkel spokesman told reporters. Monitoring allied heads of state, the spokesman said, “would be a grave breach of trust.”8 A White House readout of the call painted it in a different light: “The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel.”9
The White House statement made no mention of the past tense.
For the next year, Merkel agitated for ways to avoid the NSA. Merkel and French president François Hollande began preliminary discussions about building a European communications network to circumvent the NSA’s reach into U.S. data centers.10 The new proposal, and other closed networks that countries might build to avoid sending their data through the United States and into the NSA’s net, would cost U.S. technology companies billions of dollars, given the hardware investments they would have to make in new networks built away from American shores.
Merkel’s outrage was personal: While Deutschland was split into a free West Germany and a Soviet satellite, Merkel grew up in East Germany and saw firsthand the dangers of surveillance. “Privacy” is the freedom Germans, especially East Germans, value perhaps above all other freedoms. While many countries, which of course do their own spying, expressed faux outrage at the NSA disclosures, Merkel’s anger was rooted in something real.
The rift between Germany and the United States over NSA surveillance mirrors the growing divide between Europe, where Obama’s approval ratings once topped every other politician’s and institution’s, and a president five years into the new reality of international politics. When he arrived in Berlin in 2008, he was hailed as a hero, a new kind of American ready to repair the United States’ image abroad. “In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common,” Obama the candidate told 200,000 screaming fans in 2008. “True partnership and true progress require constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other, and, most of all, trust each other.”
Two weeks after Snowden’s revelations began leaking out, Obama went to Berlin again, this time to the Brandenburg Gate. Five thousand invited guests—one-fortieth the size of his initial crowd—showed up.11
By 2013, revelations of NSA spying were but the straw on an overloaded camel’s back. Obama had failed Europeans on so many levels. He failed to close the prison facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, something European diplomats had pushed the United States to do for years. Drone strikes were killing more terrorists than ever—and a significant number of civilians—in countries from Yemen to Pakistan. And the Snowden files confirmed every European stereotype about America, the overbearing superpower that spies on its friends and covertly attempts to influence outcomes for the good only of America, and American industry.
The political damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures is deep and lasting—and not just overseas. Domestically, the revelations contributed to a growing disillusionment with the president, both among his politically active young liberal base and among a burgeoning libertarian strain that is beginning to influence both parties. For the most part, Americans have been accepting of government surveillance under the guise of national security; they are less accepting of surveillance writ large, regardless of which president first gave the okay.
The months of embarrassing revelations that endangered American relations with countries the NSA had spied upon continued. Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, upset at the agency’s eavesdropping over her country’s communications network, became the first foreign leader to refuse a state dinner that had been planned on her behalf at the White House.12 To avoid future uncomfortable moments, the White House quietly began telling its allies what they expected would leak out, desperately trying to get ahead of the sensitive information before it could further damage relations.
Obama has taken heat for failing to engage in foreign policy and its outcomes during his administration, but for misguided reasons. Although the perception is that Obama isn’t engaged, White House advisors say he is actually more engaged in foreign policy debates than in domestic policy debates, especially as a recalcitrant Congress blocks his agenda.
And yet critics, both at home and abroad, maintain that Obama has not done enough to break with Bush’s administration. While the American commitment to Afghanistan is winding down, it and Iraq remain troubled, and the totality of America’s position in the world over the six years of Obama’s presidency is nowhere near as materially different from the Bush-era image as Obama once pledged it would be.
Instead, the changing world order is threatening America’s place, and there isn’t much Obama or any other president can do about it. Rising economic powers like Brazil and China are amassing power, though they aren’t ready to become major diplomatic players and start actually influencing outcomes à la the Western powers. Something Obama has attempted—a pivot to Asia, aimed at confronting China’s growing power—has run into problems as traditional American allies Japan and South Korea feud over century-old issues.
The European Union, rather than assisting in hot spots like northern Africa and the Middle East, is still dealing with economic challenges in its own backyard, from countries like Italy, Portugal, and Greece. And Russia is reasserting itself as America’s main rival even while the United States tries to keep the relationship friendly. On virtually every major foreign crisis, whether it’s Iran’s nuclear program or North Korea or Syria, even the recent tug and pull between pro-European and pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, Russia has set itself on the side opposite the United States. Where Obama once had a good working relationship with President Dmitry Medvedev, Medvedev’s patron, predecessor, and successor, Vladimir Putin, has seemingly taken it upon himself to score points by antagonizing, and in some cases besting, the United States.
Obama has had trouble, he has told advisors, understanding why world leaders like Putin in Russia, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, won’t engage, while he remains willing to negotiate. It mirrors the frustration Obama has felt among Republicans on Capitol Hill: Obama believes that both his domestic opponents and his global negotiating partners are too reactive to immediate domestic politics. More of his initiatives have been stopped in their tracks, the White House believes, because other world leaders are too concerned with the short run. But despite his frustration, one thing he seems incapable of doing internationally is playing true hardball. Obama argues there is only a certain amount of cajoling that can be done with some allies and countries like Russia, which are more rivals than straight-out adversaries. But it does seem as if, as is the case with Congress, there is only a certain amount of elbow grease the White House is willing to apply.
Back in Washington, Obama wasn’t the only one having a difficult year in 2013. Republicans on Capitol Hill, eager to bog down the administration under a flurry of subpoenas amid aggressive oversight, began to see two possible opportunities to go much further and label Obama as more than ineffective, as somehow corrupt: investigations into the murder of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, in the early fall of 2012 and the Internal Revenue Service’s close scrutiny of conservative groups held the potential to bring down senior administration officials.
But in both cases, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, the aggressive California Republican, faced a choice: On one hand, he could build a case demonstrating that the Obama administration had a competence problem, exemplified by insufficiently protecting diplomats in dangerous places and by allowing a government agency to go rogue by inappropriately targeting groups with a specific political ideology. On the other, he could try to make the larger case that the administration had actually covered up what it knew and when it knew it—and in Washington, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. His choice, in essence, lay between settling for a single or swinging for the fences.
Issa swung away, and instead of winding up on base, Republicans missed an opportunity to undermine Obama’s credibility to a far greater degree than it had been undermined to date.
The events in Benghazi, on September 11, 2012, are well documented. A group of militants launched an assault on two U.S. diplomatic outposts, one of which was actually a covert CIA outpost. Four Americans, including Stevens, were killed. But back in the White House, seven hours behind local time in Libya, the facts on the ground were far from clear.
In advance of major events like the anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks, the Super Bowl, or a presidential inauguration—anything that might present terrorists with an attractive target—national security staffers run through a meeting known as the threat assessment. In the Obama White House, John Brennan, then the president’s counterterrorism advisor, led the meeting earlier that week. Threat assessments are designed to explore all potential threats, which by their very nature makes them frightening. But September 11, 2012, was a bright and, by all indications, quiet day. Tommy Vietor, then the NSC spokesman, met his girlfriend for lunch, something he had never had time to do before.
A few hours later, the mood changed. A diplomatic outpost half a world away had been attacked. The State Department knew that Stevens had been in Benghazi, but the White House doesn’t track the movements of individual ambassadors on a daily basis; the problem was that State didn’t know for sure where Stevens was after the attack.
The NSC staff, meeting in the Situation Room, patched in the State Department’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, the room designed to allow video communications without risk of interception. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, was sitting before the camera as both the White House and the State Department struggled to wade through the rumors flying through the intelligence community. One rumor held that an American was alive at a hospital; they worked to get video or photo confirmation. Another source heard that the hospital could be a trap, and that any State Department or CIA personnel who went to find the American would become the next victim.
One person in the Situation Room that afternoon realized how serious it was when he heard the loud, distinctive clack of the SCIF’s big metal door. Over the video link he could see Mills look at the off-screen door, then get up to make room for the person who had walked in: Hillary Clinton.
Clinton didn’t deal with many ambassadors individually; that was left to one of her deputies. But Stevens was no ordinary ambassador. He had been on the front lines in post–civil war Libya, the latest hot spot in the Arab Spring, which meant that he and Clinton had communicated more than usual. Clinton was clearly worried for the safety of her personnel. “This wasn’t some ambassador that people didn’t really know,” the person present in the Situation Room said later. “This was the guy who led the charge in Libya.”
Upstairs in the Oval Office, Thomas Donilon, the national security advisor, had informed Obama. As late night turned to early morning in Libya, Donilon, who had moved to the Situation Room, kept the president updated on the search for Stevens. Obama had ordered Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to get military units into the area as fast as possible. There weren’t many assets close by, even though it hadn’t been that long since U.S. military assets had been used to help topple the Libyan regime. But Libya was one of those rare U.S. interventions where, after the success, zero military presence was left to deal with the likely fallout—a policy decision by the Obama administration that will be debated by some for years.
In those early hours there was little evidence that the assault was premeditated—there still isn’t. It appears now that it was an opportunistic attack, something planned in theory but timed for that day simply due to the unrest taking place in other capitals in the region. The raw intelligence flooding into the CIA pointed to a spontaneous attack; the agency’s assessment made that point.
The next morning, in the Rose Garden, Obama condemned the “outrageous and shocking attack.” “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” he said.13
To some Republicans, the attack on the diplomatic consulate proved an opportunity to take on one of Obama’s greatest strengths as a president: the fact that he had ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Here, finally, was proof that Obama’s counterterrorism strategy was flawed, the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil—technically the consulate, a diplomatic property, was part of the United States—in eleven years. The conservative media, hypersensitive to Obama’s perceived lack of interest in condemning everything in the Islamic world in the harshest terms, leapt on Obama’s choice of language and the relatively few times Obama used the word “terror” or “terrorism.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign decided to try to use the attack to undercut Obama’s credentials on national security. The campaign seized on a statement, issued by the U.S. embassy in Egypt hours before the attack in neighboring Libya began, that was critical of an offensive video about the prophet Muhammad that had touched off riots in Cairo and other cities.
“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney said in a statement provided to the New York Times two minutes after Clinton confirmed the death of one American—unnamed—on September 11.
The White House was surprised by Romney’s statement, and it wasted no time in swinging back. “We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack,” the Obama campaign’s Ben LaBolt said.14
The mainstream media scrambled to get an administration official on the following Sunday morning’s talk shows. Clinton, who hates doing weekend television shows, refused. Donilon, who might have been the logical choice, was so risk averse that he made for bad television, and hesitancy on TV would have made the administration look worse. The White House tapped Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations, thinking she would be able to convey in human terms the cost of losing a fellow ambassador.
Rice used talking points that had been approved by both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. But the intelligence community had stuck to one particular assessment that would eventually help bring down Rice’s bid to follow Clinton: she insisted, repeatedly, that the attack was the result of a protest that had boiled over into violence. That, the White House would privately admit later, had never been the case: the intelligence community was wrong.
The conservative media continued to bang the drum, insisting that the administration had covered up a terrorist attack in the heat of a presidential campaign, and it became certain that Obama would have to answer questions about Benghazi again, in the second presidential debate, which was to focus on foreign policy.
Obama couldn’t understand the logic: Republicans were criticizing him for refusing to admit, in their minds, that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. Never mind that Obama’s intelligence advisors at the CIA and other intelligence agencies didn’t find a link to any known al Qaeda operative; Obama didn’t see the logic in giving al Qaeda credit, what amounted to a public relations win, at all.
Still, the team practiced their answers on Benghazi time and again leading up to the foreign policy debate with Romney. The night before, after a particularly arduous preparation session, Obama got frustrated. “I called it terrorism,” he said of the Benghazi attack.
Ben Rhodes stopped him. “No sir, you didn’t. You called it an act of terror.”
The following night, Rhodes’s reminder served Obama well. Romney criticized the president for continuing with campaign events after the tragedy. Obama fired back: “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror. And I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime. And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews [actually Dover] Air Force Base and grieving with the families. And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.”15
Romney tried to push back on the “terrorism” point again during the back-and-forth and got caught in that “act of terror” choice of words when even the moderator of the debate jumped in to Obama’s defense and told Romney he was wrong that the president had used the term “terrorism.” Of course, the White House in those few days after the attack was hesitant to use the word “terrorism.” It wasn’t until a hearing a week later on Capitol Hill that they fully embraced the idea that the Benghazi attack was indeed a planned act of “terrorism.” Still, Romney looked shallow in that moment when he went after Obama on the use of the word “terror” or “terrorism,” rather than hitting him on having a security issue in the country or questioning the entire “leading from behind” policy. Yet another instance of the Romney campaign trying too hard to win a news cycle and missing the bigger picture.
Even after Obama beat Romney, Republicans continued to insist that a cover-up had taken place. Fox News ran frequent reports, and in an interview taped before the Super Bowl in 2014, Bill O’Reilly used one of his questions to press the president. Issa and Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who served on his committee, maintained that the party would continue its investigations into the midterm years.
But report after report concluded the same thing: The State Department could have done more to protect its diplomats. There were no smoking guns, no explicit efforts to cover up any information. Instead, there were only botched assessments that led to incorrect talking points. The House Armed Services Committee, run by Republicans, took the White House and the State Department to task for failing to account for serious security risks, though it couldn’t make broader conclusions even after reviewing thousands of pages of documents.16 The Republicans swung, but they missed: Benghazi remains a cause célèbre on the right, and it is likely to come up again if Clinton runs for president, though few in the mainstream media take the incident, and the administration’s response, seriously as a scandal. A botched policy? Perhaps, but a cover-up? There’s just no evidence. Everyone was playing politics at the margins of the event itself, from Romney to Obama, but the politics being played was the predictable image kind of the moment, not something as salacious as the right has tried to claim.
Issa’s committee, and Republicans across the country, got another chance to paint the administration as either incompetent or corrupt in the spring of 2013, when an inspector general at the IRS revealed that the agency had used improper criteria for determining which nonprofit groups deserved special attention. Some auditors in the agency’s Cincinnati office and two other regions had singled out groups with names that included words like “Tea Party” or “patriot,” or that focused on opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
Once they got their hands on the report, Republicans on Capitol Hill erupted. It was, in their telling, nothing less than a government assault on a particular political ideology, one that just so happened to stand against the president. Fox News, once again carrying the conservatives’ banner, painted the still-unfolding scandal as directed from the administration’s highest levels—made clear, they believed, by the fact that the head of the IRS had been cleared for entry into the White House more than one hundred times. (Doug Shulman, the IRS chief, had been cleared in for meetings on how to implement the Affordable Care Act, though he attended those meetings only a handful of times, preferring instead to send a deputy. It is standard practice to be cleared for White House access even if you never end up going. For instance, many news organizations clear backup correspondents and reporters for White House press access every working day for months even if that person never actually enters. It’s done in case the person decides to show or needs to be there.)
On May 14, the day the report was formally released and two days after Republicans began clamoring for an investigation, the White House issued a statement from the president. “The report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable. The federal government must conduct itself in a way that’s worthy of the public’s trust, and that’s especially true for the IRS. The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity. This report shows that some of its employees failed that test,” Obama said.17
The statement hardly expressed the outrage so many felt. The IRS had erected certain walls to ensure that the agency would not be used for political purposes after Richard Nixon had his enemies audited and harassed; now it appeared that the IRS had waded into politics. If nothing else, the White House should have recognized the impending danger of allowing that impression to linger.
The White House believed the facts were on its side: there was no proof, it insisted, that the administration had anything to do with the actions of agency auditors hundreds of miles from the Beltway. Indeed, no proof has ever emerged that the White House was involved at all. The press shop insisted that it would wait for the proper investigations, by treasury secretary Jack Lew and Attorney General Eric Holder, to play out and vindicate their position.
But the reliance on rationality and logic that so defines Obama and his White House ignores the irrationality of politics. The scandal wasn’t about the misguided actions of bureaucrats in some little-known agency; it was the IRS, the most hated institution in government. It reeked of the kinds of awful politics that had brought down the Nixon administration; the burden of proof, in the irrational world of politics, lay with the Obama administration, not with its critics. The idea that the president’s team didn’t see the pitfalls in this story is implausible; it’s as if not a single person in the West Wing had paid attention to the power of the conservative media complex, from talk radio to Drudge to Fox and the blogs. Did they have amnesia during the birther mess?
Issa launched more investigations. Lois Lerner, a top-ranking IRS official who had tried to apologize for the agency’s actions before the results came out, invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Shulman testified that he had visited the White House, but not to discuss targeting conservative groups. The Treasury Department asked for and accepted the resignation of the IRS’s acting commissioner; the new commissioner, Danny Werfel, asked for Lerner’s resignation, then put her on administrative leave after she refused. She retired a few months later.
In January 2014, the FBI said it would not file any criminal charges relating to the investigation. But like Benghazi, the story lives at the margins of conservative media because no smoking gun was ever found.
Republicans had spent 2013 hunting for a scandal that would kill the Obama administration. While doing so, they missed the opportunity to portray the administration as incompetent, either because it hadn’t stopped the IRS’s scrutiny of conservative groups, because it hadn’t protected diplomats in a dangerous situation, because it hadn’t stopped the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history, or even because it couldn’t build a functioning website for its signature domestic achievement. It was a missed opportunity for a party so desperate to oust a president that it overreached, again and again, when all it had to do was chip away.
Ironically, by the summer of 2014, after yet another scandal of incompetence, this time at the Veterans Administration regarding how it handled—or mishandled—veterans’ waiting times for medical care, the public’s outrage caught up with the irrational exuberance of the right. The weight of the seemingly unmanageable bureaucracies of the federal government was too much for the public, and as bad as 2013 was for the president politically, the summer of 2014 was even worse on this front. His approval ratings began dipping below 40 percent; a majority of the country believed Obama was no more or less competent at running the federal government than Bush was post-Katrina. It was a dip in his sixth year that many a two-term president had experienced before him, from Nixon and Reagan to Clinton and Bush. Two recovered (Reagan and Clinton) and two didn’t (Nixon and Bush).