The evening of March 21, 2010, had been unseasonably warm. It was a Sunday, and the mercury hit 75 degrees in Washington. On Capitol Hill, Democrats scrambled to count votes on what would become the single biggest achievement of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as Speaker of the House of Representatives: after months of difficult negotiations, failed entreaties even to moderate Republicans, loud protests, and the almost constant drumbeat of declining poll numbers, the House was in the home stretch of passing the Affordable Care Act.
Pelosi and her top deputy, House majority whip Steny Hoyer, worked the phones, scrupulously counting every last vote. They knew that Republicans would make the unpopular bill a centerpiece of their campaign to retake Congress later that year. They also knew they wouldn’t be able to persuade Blue Dog Democrats, members who represented conservative districts in the South or Mountain West who had to be against Obamacare (a term the White House decided to start embracing as an attempt to make the derisive use of it by the right less effective), and they wanted to reassure those on the fence that they wouldn’t be the last vote in favor—all too many Democrats remembered Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, the Pennsylvania Democrat who had cast the deciding 218th vote in favor of Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget proposal. As Margolies-Mezvinsky walked onto the House floor to cast her vote, Republicans taunted her: “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye!”
No Democrat wanted to be the 218th vote in favor of health care reform, so Pelosi and Hoyer twisted arms, begged, pleaded, promised help in the coming midterm elections, hoping to get to 219. Finally, a little after 10 p.m., they opened the roll call vote. Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary who had spent her entire tenure promoting the health care law, watched from Pelosi’s box above the floor.
At the White House, secretaries were calling senior advisors at home: the president wanted company. Valerie Jarrett was in her pajamas, she later recalled, when she heard from Obama’s personal assistant.1 Nancy-Ann DeParle ignored the fact that the next day was a school day; she brought her son into the office.2 As the vote tally clicked toward the magic number, at 10:45 Obama’s friends, watching on television sixteen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue, let out a cheer. On the House floor, Democrats broke into a familiar chant: “Yes we can! Yes we can!”3
The party moved onto the White House’s Truman Balcony. The champagne started flowing. The guests stayed late into the night. About 2 a.m., Jarrett asked Obama how that day compared with Election Day a year and a half earlier. “There’s no comparison,” Jarrett remembered the president saying. “Election night was simply the means to get us to this night.”4
But Obama didn’t let his team savor the moment very long that night, three and a half years before Americans without health insurance would be required to sign up for it. The bill was so complicated, with so many interlocking pieces, with regulations to write and rules to implement, that the team that had just engineered passage of one of the largest social programs in American history would have to begin the very next day to make sure it was implemented correctly.5
One of the questions that will plague historians looking back on the presidency of Barack Obama will revolve around this fundamental disconnect: how could a president so powerfully make a law so central to his legacy and then fail so miserably to make it real?
Obama, elected by voters tired of seeing government so badly mismanaged under George W. Bush, had an opportunity before him that liberals hadn’t had since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency: the chance to show voters that government could function properly in an effort to make their lives better. Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over; now Barack Obama could declare the era of smarter, more effective government under way. Instead, the rollout of the health insurance website—rocky, to put it charitably; disastrous, to be more realistic—threatened to undermine Obama’s central promise and the governing philosophy that underpinned his party.
Other Democrats had seen this problem coming.
The first to raise concerns over getting implementation right was Bob Menendez, the highly (some would say overly) political New Jersey Democrat who sat on the Senate Finance Committee and who was tasked with heading up the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. As early as the summer of 2009, a year and a half before Democratic senators would face voters, Menendez joined a series of meetings with DeParle and Jeanne Lambrew, then a high-ranking official at the Health and Human Services Department. Democrats were riding high; with big majorities in the House and Senate, the party could force through almost any legislation they wished. Early that summer, House Democratic strategists believed that included the health care law. The most optimistic members believed they could pass the entire bill before Congress broke for recess in October. Some planners thought the measure could even be fully implemented by 2010, before members of Congress would next face voters. Seems absurd to ponder now, but policy planners were that optimistic.
The White House was skeptical. After all, the model for the Affordable Care Act, Massachusetts’s version, had taken more than a year to implement, and legislators had made significant changes two, three, even six years later. Commonwealth Care covered just one state; it wasn’t likely that a program aimed at insuring tens of millions of people across the nation could be operational in a similar time frame.
White House policy aides were thinking 2012 at the earliest to get everything up and running, with a goal of trying to move things up to 2011. As Senate Democrats were putting together the framework, they debated the sign-up date, and the working assumption was that something akin to HealthCare.gov would be working by October 1, 2012, a full two and a half years after passage; it seemed like a perfectly reasonable amount of time.
That’s when Menendez shook his head and put the final kibosh on the time frame. Menendez didn’t want the Democrats he was responsible for protecting to be swept away if some bureaucrat couldn’t get the job done. “If [implementation] goes well, great,” said one White House advisor, summing up the message Menendez sent the White House. “If it doesn’t, there could be problems with it.”
The White House came to agree. Just as Menendez wanted to protect the electoral interests of Democratic senators, so Obama’s top advisors wanted to protect the president. What if problems arose? Obama’s advisors remembered what had happened when George W. Bush had pushed a prescription drug benefit through Congress: early in the implementation process, glitches prevented some seniors from getting the benefits they were due, and the negative publicity hurt Bush’s approval rating. With their own re-election bid just a few years down the road, why take the risk of similar implementation snafus hurting Obama during the 2012 campaign?
Given what actually happened with the rollout of HealthCare.gov, it’s not hyperbole to say that Bob Menendez saved the presidency for Democrats in 2012 simply by being the political realist in the room.
Political considerations came to define the three-and-a-half-year march from passage to implementation. In fact, the White House was so anxious to avoid political risks that it delayed issuing regulations that would have allowed states and the federal government to make needed progress. In an effort to avoid short-term pain, it made the long-term injury even worse.
Obama’s advisors saw the effort to provide tens of millions of Americans with health insurance as consisting of two key elements, neither of which would work without the other: On one hand, they had to get people to sign up, enrolling either in Medicaid, which would be expanded to include more Americans living just slightly over the poverty line, or in private plans. On the other, they would have to build from scratch a system that allowed those people to sign up—the website, HealthCare.gov. The White House viewed enrollment volume almost as a campaign, one in which it could utilize the vaunted infrastructure built during 2008 and 2012 to push uninsured Americans into health care plans. They viewed the technological side as something that could be run out of the bureaucracy of the Health and Human Services Department.
After that night on the Truman Balcony, Obama would occasionally sit in on meetings dedicated to implementation. Whatever the focus of a given meeting, he would warn: “All of that is well and good, but if the website doesn’t work, nothing else matters.”
Although the two aspects that would make the law a success couldn’t operate without each other, and in spite of the president’s warnings, no one took direct responsibility for building the website. It’s quite mind-boggling that an administration run by the most technologically savvy campaign team in American history botched a website, but the failure really had to do with the fact that, like some of the administration’s other missteps, it was rooted in poor management, in this case not designating someone, anyone, to own implementation—a CEO of sorts.
For three years, even as outside consultants and advisors warned of a problem, there was no single person whose sole job description was responsibility for creating the online portal millions of Americans would need to sign up for insurance. Specific warnings began early. Just two months after the Affordable Care Act passed, David Cutler, a Harvard professor who had advised the White House on health policy, warned in a memo to Larry Summers, then director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag that the administration was hopelessly underqualified to implement the law.
“My general view is that the early implementation efforts are far short of what it will take to implement reform successfully,” Cutler wrote in the memo, obtained later by the Washington Post. “For health reform to be successful, the relevant people need a vision about health system transformation and the managerial ability to carry out that vision. The President has sketched out such a vision. However, I do not believe the relevant members of the Administration understand the President’s vision or have the capability to carry it out.”
He wrote the last sentence in boldface.
In the weeks after the bill’s passage, the White House was consumed with the question of who would be in charge of implementation. Members of the economic team, like Summers and Orszag, and health care advisor Zeke Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, urged Obama to appoint a “czar,” whose sole responsibility would be implementation. But the health care aides who helped pass the bill made the case that they could do the job. Obama sided with the aides and tapped Nancy-Ann DeParle, head of the Office of Health Reform, to manage the process.6
DeParle asked for a spreadsheet listing every provision in the law from Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for its implementation and its current status. The spreadsheet ran for hundreds of pages, underscoring just how complicated implementation would be. Agencies ranging from the Food and Drug Administration to the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service held responsibilities; some, like the GAO, operated quickly, and others, like the FDA, dragged their feet.
To facilitate the complex process, DeParle began holding regular meetings in the Old Executive Office Building. Three times a week, then later twice a week, agencies would send top officials to give updates on the progress of their piece of the pie. The meetings lasted for hours. At the beginning, top officials showed up; later, they sent their deputies. DeParle also held monthly meetings with more senior-level officials, aimed at hashing out the most controversial regulations. Sebelius, treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, Emanuel, and domestic policy advisor Melody Barnes began attending. But the meetings quickly flagged; soon Sebelius was the only principal in the room.
DeParle, who had spent most of her career on health policy and was not fully confident of the team at Health and Human Services, knew she needed help. She reached out to the one man with experience in building something similar: Jon Kingsdale, who had put together the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. Once, while trying to persuade him, DeParle broke White House protocol and took Kingsdale by the Oval Office while Obama was there working. She wanted to impress on Kingsdale the magnitude of the work they needed.
At HHS, Sebelius hired her own czar, a former Missouri insurance commissioner named Jay Angoff. The month the Affordable Care Act was signed, Sebelius named Angoff to head a new agency that would house the implementation efforts: the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.
But Kingsdale, a man of tremendous ego, didn’t want to work for someone else. At the same time, he had his own consulting business, and the idea of full-time government work might not make financial sense to him. Kingsdale met with the Office of Presidential Personnel several times, trying to fashion a deal that would allow him to accept outside clients while working in the White House. Ultimately, he decided he would have to give up too much to help out. DeParle urged him to reconsider; she even offered him her own job.
DeParle had known she wasn’t long for the White House. She had ordered only a hundred business cards when she hired on, and she planned to abandon her tiny West Wing office, which she shared with speechwriters Ben Rhodes and Jon Favreau, before the end of 2010. But with one foot out the door, DeParle was sucked back in: Obama asked her to stay on in a more prestigious role, as deputy chief of staff.
DeParle’s replacement, Jeanne Lambrew, was given even less power. Health care and climate change, two of Obama’s signature issues, were moved under the control of the Domestic Policy Council, once a high-profile panel of advisors but now greatly diminished in stature.
The White House also thought it needed someone capable of leading at HHS, a Sebelius deputy with gravitas and management experience. But the department had trouble recruiting the right person. Throughout 2010, 2011, and 2012, it cycled through a series of folks: Mark Childress, a veteran of Capitol Hill who served as acting general counsel (Childress, a fiery North Carolina native who hasn’t met a swearword he’s afraid to utter, ended up at the White House heading up a messaging war room on health care); Joel Ario, a former Pennsylvania insurance commissioner who served as director of the Office of Health Insurance Exchanges; Steve Larsen, who succeeded Angoff at Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight; and Donald Berwick, who served as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. All of them either didn’t work out or simply didn’t want to stay.
The person who survived was Marilyn Tavenner, Berwick’s onetime deputy, who was promoted when Berwick couldn’t win Senate confirmation. Tavenner, a former health care executive experienced in the economics of running a hospital, served as acting administrator beginning in late 2011; she wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until the middle of 2013. Even then, the administration didn’t always keep her in the loop. When the White House decided to delay a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have required companies with more than fifty employees to contribute to the cost of health insurance, Tavenner told members of Congress that she hadn’t been consulted. In fact, when the delay was announced, Tavenner was on vacation.7
Two other officials tasked with building the actual website were distracted by a game of musical chairs. Todd Park, the chief technology officer at HHS, and Steve VanRoekel, the federal government’s chief information officer, were initially in charge. But Park wanted to go to the White House, to become the federal government’s CTO. His departure would have left Jenny Backus, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, in charge of the website. Backus made the case that the website fell under the auspices of the communications office. But the White House had concerns that HHS underestimated what HealthCare.gov needed to be; it was not simply a messaging tool for a campaign, and they insisted that Park maintain oversight. His dual assignments once again ensured that no individual maintained oversight of the project.
Unlike others the administration recruited to help implementation along, Tavenner earned the respect of the White House. But though she was tasked with implementing the law, it was one of a dozen responsibilities that fell under her purview. Even with Tavenner in place, her attention was divided, and without a point person whose sole job was to make sure the law became reality, the law, and the president, were coming into the focus of eager Republican critics.
Republican opponents of the Affordable Care Act wasted no opportunity to make the White House’s job more difficult. The already-complicated job of building a federal health insurance exchange was made increasingly complex when most states run by Republicans refused to build their own exchanges. That meant the federal exchange would have to cover more people across state lines. And in fairness to the administration, this wasn’t something they’d ever banked on: they really believed that after hemming and hawing, most states would want autonomy over the health care exchanges—after all, when has a governor ever wanted the feds to run anything they could run themselves? But the politics even of expanding Medicaid coverage in these states was so bad for Republicans that almost every state with sole Republican control of the governor’s office and legislature decided to sit the entire law out. No expansion of Medicaid, no separate exchanges, and so an extra burden for which the federal government never really had a contingency plan.
After the Supreme Court ruled constitutional the law’s individual mandate, requiring the uninsured to enroll or buy plans but striking down a provision requiring states to expand Medicaid to cover more people living near the poverty line, states run by Republican governors and legislatures had even more cover for skipping out on accepting the federal funds. That meant low-income earners in their states would have to buy plans, rather than qualifying for free Medicaid, further burdening the new insurance exchange system. If those expanded Medicaid recipients could have been covered sooner, the exchange could have dealt more easily with the consumers it was meant to serve.
Republicans were so determined to overturn the law that they refused to fund a reorganization of HHS that would have given more power to the office overseeing implementation, the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. The office had more than two hundred employees, but it didn’t have the ability to award grants or contracts. Neither did it have the money necessary to build the federal exchange—and congressional Republicans were in no mood to give it to them. Eventually, HHS had to move the office into the larger Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), splintering its locations among Washington, nearby Bethesda, and Baltimore.
At the same time, the White House worried that publicizing regulations and requirements for those state exchanges, rules absolutely required for a state to properly comply with the complex law, would only give Republicans more targets to aim for. Throughout 2011, officials at CMS begged the White House for permission to make public concepts of operation, complex diagrams that would show states how to build their exchanges in order to harmonize with the federal exchange. But Obama advisors remembered the last time a Democratic president had tried to overhaul the nation’s health care system: back in the early 1990s, when a task force spearheaded by Hillary Clinton was working on a reform plan, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had used the task force’s complicated charts to mock their work.
The White House’s solution was much more complicated. CMS administrators were to praise the work of states whose exchanges were heading in the right direction, without sharing the administration’s actual thinking.8
By late March 2013, just six months before the exchanges were to open, McKinsey & Company, the well-respected management consulting firm, had begun sounding another alarm. In a report commissioned by HHS, the firm found the exchange’s timeline seriously behind the curve. The report concluded that development of the website was falling behind thanks in part to indecision by top policy makers, and in part because the contractors charged with building the site weren’t communicating. Perhaps most frightening, the report projected that the department wouldn’t have enough time to test the system from end to end before its expected October 1 launch.9
White House staff insisted they had made adjustments after the McKinsey report reached their desks. But by late August, weeks before the site was to launch, serious bugs were still popping up. As tensions mounted between CMS and the website’s lead contractor, CGI Federal, CMS chief operating officer Michelle Snyder was openly telling colleagues she would have fired the firm if she’d had the option. CMS had sent groups of officials to the company’s headquarters, just outside the Beltway, to spot-check new code, much of which failed to work. CMS officials also complained that CGI wasn’t working well with an alphabet soup of contractors who had won bids to build other parts of the system.
CGI officials believed the timeline they were given for creating a cutting-edge website was hopelessly compressed. The vision the administration had for a fully integrated site just didn’t match what the contractor could pull together in the time allowed.
At a demonstration of the new site on August 27, at CMS’s headquarters in Baltimore, some company officials worried that the system would crash in front of their clients. Others hoped it would, so the administration would take seriously their concerns that the time frame wasn’t long enough. CGI technicians had compiled a list of more than six hundred bugs that needed to be fixed, a monumental task that scared every computer engineer who read it.
For a system that was supposed to handle thousands of new registrants every day, capacity was becoming one of the biggest issues. By late September, the site was crashing in tests of just five hundred simultaneous users.10 And yet despite these inauspicious tests, the problems weren’t being fully communicated to the White House. In fact, almost simultaneously with those failed tests, White House aides led by senior advisor David Simas were leading detailed briefings about the October 1 launch that didn’t merely gloss over the issue of potential bugs in the system, but actually glorified the website, comparing it to popular consumer sites like Kayak and Amazon. Even the president got into the game on September 26, during a campaign-style swing touting the start of the program, bragging about the ease with which the public would be able to shop for insurance, just five days before HealthCare.gov went live.
“Starting on Tuesday, every American can visit HealthCare.gov to find out what’s called the insurance marketplace for your state. Here in Maryland, I actually think it’s called MarylandHealthConnection.gov. [He’s interrupted by applause.] MarylandHealthConnection.gov. But if you go to HealthCare.gov, you can look and they’ll tell you where to go. They’ll link to your state.
“Now, this is real simple. It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak—same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the options.
“It’s buying insurance on the private market, but because now you’re part of a big group plan—everybody in Maryland is all logging in and taking a look at the prices—you’ve got new choices. Now you’ve got new competition, because insurers want your business. And that means you will have cheaper prices.
“So you enter in some basic information about yourself, what level of coverage you’re looking for. After that, you’ll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area. It will say clearly what each plan covers, what each plan costs. The price will be right there. It will be fully transparent.
“Before this law, only a handful of states required insurance companies to offer you instant price quotes, but because of this law, insurers in all 50 states will have to offer you instant price quotes. And so if you’ve ever tried to buy insurance on your own, I promise you this is a lot easier. It’s like booking a hotel or a plane ticket.”
That was the president, just five days before the launch. Five days.
On October 1, when the site went live, the full magnitude of the disaster became apparent. Hardly anyone could finish the complicated process of signing up for a plan; in some cases, users couldn’t even create accounts because identity verification software didn’t work. Software developers began working on individual bug fixes, failing to realize that the problems were systemic. A week into the site’s launch, 30 percent of those who applied weren’t being directed to screens on which they could input information about their income (critical to qualifying for subsidies) or their identity. A few days later, officials found that the website wasn’t calculating those subsidies correctly. There were even questions about data security; one applicant in North Carolina received a letter with personal information about another applicant, from South Carolina.11
The administration had a modicum of cover: October 1 was also the day Republicans on Capitol Hill, led by freshman firebrand Ted Cruz of Texas, shut down the government. Polls showed that the GOP was taking a political beating for refusing to come to a budget agreement. While Democrats lambasted Republicans for their recalcitrance, the shutdown was a political godsend, distracting attention from a badly malfunctioning website. In fact, the public was even willing to assume that the shutdown of the government was probably having an impact on the website.
But the shutdown ended a few weeks later, and attention returned to the site. And then the first cancellation notices began arriving.
Throughout his campaign for the Affordable Care Act, Obama had promised that those who liked their health care plans could keep them. But millions of Americans had health care plans with coverage that didn’t meet the law’s minimum requirements. The White House must have known that those plans would be canceled, making one of Obama’s central promises turn into what PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, later called the “Lie of the Year.”
Barack Obama shares a trait with many of his predecessors: he is not one to admit fault readily. But his “if you like your plan, you can keep it” was turning into a national punch line, and congressional Democrats were reeling. They could picture the attack ads coming—shoot, Republican groups in some states were already bashing their Democratic senators for making the same promise—which, by the way, every Democrat who voted for health care reform uttered. So in a November interview with this author broadcast on NBC, the president did something he rarely does—he offered a full mea culpa.
“I regret very much that—what we intended to do, which is to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want them, as opposed to because they’re forced into it, that, you know, we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place,” Obama said. “I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me. We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them, and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”
Privately, the White House blamed Sebelius. In the months after the botched rollout, Sebelius, once the face of health care reform, was barely visible—about the only way this president fires folks. He simply hides them from the media. The administration had originally wanted Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, to run the Department of Health and Human Services; instead, after Daschle’s nomination was scuttled, they turned to the former Kansas governor, who had little experience in Washington and who proved virtually unable to recruit a strong manager to oversee her side of the project. Daschle had been expected to lead efforts both at HHS and in the White House on health care reform; relying on Sebelius at HHS and DeParle at the White House further fragmented what should have been a seamless operation.
As early as October 2010, doubts about Sebelius as the lead administrator on this task were already bubbling up in the West Wing. Following another status report meeting by DeParle and Sebelius in Rahm Emanuel’s office, when Sebelius left the room, the cold-blooded operator that is Emanuel had wondered aloud whether Sebelius was up to the task. But despite the concern at that point, nothing happened to Sebelius.
That’s hardly a surprise: firing people isn’t in Obama’s DNA. He had let only a handful of officials go, mostly for undermining him. Perhaps the McChrystal episode hadn’t stiffened his spine enough. Politics, too, played a role: Republicans had held up countless nominations, including Berwick’s at CMS. There was a virtual guarantee that anyone Obama chose to replace Sebelius would immediately come to embody health care reform writ large, and would run into a Republican roadblock during the Senate confirmation process.
Sebelius knew her job was on the line. The White House was slow in coming to her defense, and some in the West Wing were mystified—and blindsided—when a story appeared in the New York Times two weeks after the site’s dismal launch, quoting her brother.12 It was a clear attempt by Sebelius to try to save her own skin and make sure she wasn’t totally scapegoated. The president never guaranteed that her job was safe, and indeed in April 2014 she handed in her resignation, in large measure responsible for the train wreck but also partially the scapegoat for a larger problem of communication and leadership.
The tech-savvy president, who couldn’t believe that his legacy might be tarnished over an inability to build a functional website, blamed the Washington bureaucracy. He noted that the way the government contracting process works, his campaign experts couldn’t even bid on the HealthCare.gov contract. This is yet another example of the promise versus the reality of Obama—bring in new technologies and new people, but instead of trying to change the system, talk about change and continue working within the system that would often get the best of him.
Enrollment numbers improved significantly over the next several months, but the initial shock of such a dismal rollout undercut a central promise of Obama’s tenure. There was no CEO in charge of the overall process. Concerns over Obama’s re-election delayed regulations and rules that should have been issued years before they finally were. And for too long, no one was held accountable.
For this president’s domestic agenda at least, actions, it seemed, kept speaking louder than words. And as the year went on, public polls showed that the administration had inflicted the damage on itself: the public trust Obama had held on to for so long was beginning to slip away.
Senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer’s memo, written at the beginning of 2014, had promised a forthcoming year of action. Left unsaid but implicit was the fact that the opportunities of the previous year had been almost entirely squandered. The year 2013, the lost year of the Obama presidency, wore heavily on Obama the human being. Toward the end of the year, one could sense the funk he had slipped into. Between the health care debacle, the NSA, and even the government shutdown, it seemed the president was shrinking in stature by the day.
Obama is someone who can be very introspective; unlike previous presidents who rarely read what was written about them, this one carries his own iPad, and it is loaded with media apps; while he mostly consumes columns—in another life he probably would have been a political columnist instead of a politician—he also reads reports of what’s written about him.
By Thanksgiving, the drumbeat about his lost year and perhaps his lost second term was getting louder. He decided he needed his side of the story out, about 2013 and beyond. So he invited his favorite writer, the New Yorker’s David Remnick, to travel with him.
His talks with Remnick were as much therapy session as they were a tour of current events. There was even a bit of self-pity. At one point during his sit-down with Remnick, he mused, “It turns out Marlon Brando had it easy [in The Godfather]; when it comes to Congress, there is no such thing as an offer they can’t refuse.” It’s a comment that Obama, perhaps, will make again in his own memoirs. Obama truly believes that every single critique of him is rooted in his inability to work with Congress, and he doesn’t blame himself, he blames the Republicans.
But it was clear that 2013, with its series of unending and in most cases unresolved crises, was wearing the president down. Remnick quoted Obama at a fund-raiser to which the writer had gained access, where the best advice Obama could offer partisan Democrats boiled down to one word: “patience.” “One thing that I always try to emphasize is that, if you look at American history, there have been frequent occasions in which it looked like we had insoluble problems—either economic, political, security—and, as long as there were those who stayed steady and clear-eyed and persistent, eventually we came up with an answer.”
It was a long way from Obama the 2008 candidate. Rather than “hope and change,” this was Obama pleading with donors that things weren’t hopeless.
Later, in his Remnick session, he went further in admitting that he had reached the limits of his influence. “If you’re doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it—there’s going to be some aspects of it that aren’t clean and neat and immediately elicit applause from everybody. And so the nature of not only politics but, I think, social change of any sort is that it doesn’t move in a straight line, and that those who are most successful typically are tacking like a sailor toward a particular direction but have to take into account winds and currents and occasionally the lack of any wind, so that you’re just sitting there for a while, and sometimes you’re being blown all over the place.”
These are the words of a beaten-down president. So concerned was the White House that the public would interpret the Remnick interview as the president throwing in the towel, almost admitting that his days as an effective president were numbered, they quietly reminded people of the timing of his Remnick sit-down: it had taken place at the end of a horrible year for him, and he was venting.
When this interview hit newsstands, in January 2014, the picture of a worn-out president didn’t seem to match the man who suddenly seemed to have some energy. Aides now admit that the president probably wasn’t in the best place politically to unburden himself the way he had with Remnick.
Getting a full two weeks off over the holidays, without the threat of a budget or health care crisis to delay his Hawaiian sojourn, was exactly what aides say the president needed. He returned to Washington in January somewhat refreshed. Yes, the scar tissue was there, but there was still a little fight left in him. He wanted to prove that his presidency wasn’t over, that he still had some political juice and he could rally his party to survive the 2014 midterm elections.
Just as victory and defeat are emblematic of Obama’s first five and a half years, they can be used to define this time for the man as well. If Democrats hold the Senate, he can claim victory and use it to make one last attempt to work with Congress on something big, perhaps immigration or even entitlement reform. But if his party loses the Senate, then the l-word (as in “lame duck”) will become common Washington vocabulary.
So engaged is Obama now, he has agreed to frequent fund-raisers and political briefings. Normally not someone who could be confused with being a political junkie, he’s following the ups and downs of every key Senate race in the country.
He even tailored his State of the Union to a message that Senate Democrats, be they in blue Minnesota or red Arkansas, could rally around. This also explains why the 2014 State of the Union was the least ambitious of his presidency, filled with small, attainable goals and lacking a grand agenda. It was downright Bill Clintonesque, filled with “I’m on your side” types of programs. But for Obama, it was a nod to political reality and one that, for the first time, showed him to be a team player regarding the worries about Congress.
Of course, for Obama, the battle for the Senate is about him, and when his own legacy is on the line and his back is against the wall, he does get competitive. History has shown him to be an operator when he has to be. Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats just hope it isn’t too late.