One year after the 2008 election it was fair to wonder whether the most profound moment of the Obama era would be its first. Obama himself had said at a press conference, in March, 2009, that the “justifiable pride” the country had taken in electing the first black President had “lasted about a day.” This did not seem to concern him much. “Right now,” he said, “the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged”—on performance. And yet by the time the year was over, his visions of post-partisan comity had given way to the reality of prolonged battle with congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats. In the 2008 election, Obama had won some unlikely states, including Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado. Now, for many Americans, including independents who had voted for Obama, the sense of dissatisfaction ran deep. In Massachusetts, a Republican of slender gifts named Scott Brown was elected to replace the late Edward Kennedy in the Senate. Obama moved quickly to put his campaign manager, David Plouffe, in charge of the Democratic effort in the 2010 midterm elections, but that was hardly a guarantee that the Party would avoid a disaster like the 1994 midterms.
After Scott Brown’s win, Barry Blitt, the New Yorker artist who had drawn the controversial cover called “The Politics of Fear,” drew another—a four-paneled cover that showed Obama walking on water in radiant dawn light. But, as he draws closer to the viewer, he loses his miraculous footing and plunges into the drink. The morning that issue of the magazine was on the newsstands, I got a call from Eric Lesser, David Axelrod’s assistant, saying that Axelrod and Obama were laughing about the cover: could I send a framed copy signed by Barry Blitt to the President? A couple of days later, Obama told some correspondents about his amusement; their meeting was off the record but it quickly leaked. I couldn’t help thinking that while Obama might actually have thought the drawing was amusing, he was also eager to broadcast his own sense of humor and the idea that he had never believed in his own hype.
It was hard to imagine that any President would have remained popular for long in a time of terrible unemployment, record deficits, and political rancor. During the transition period, Obama learned more about the depth of the economic crisis. “Things were plummeting. The skies were darkening,” Axelrod told me. “All the economic data pointed to the likelihood of a deep, deep recession. This was not the way we wanted to start the Presidency. I remember talking to Obama and saying, ‘It would be fun to start this without a recession and two wars to deal with.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.’” The terror threat on the day of the inauguration, Axelrod said, “was a raw initiation into the responsibilities of the Presidency.”
Some of Obama’s achievements during his first year in office were related to what did not happen. Thanks to government interventions, neither the banking system nor the automobile industry collapsed. By most accounts, the country had not only avoided a depression, it was, slowly, fitfully, and unequally, emerging from recession. And yet the reality of ten-per-cent unemployment and the galling spectacle of investment bankers’ coming to Capitol Hill to justify their gaudy bonuses prevented any sense of gratitude or celebration. There were other achievements. Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. He liberalized national science policy. He set a firm timetable to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He moved against discriminatory policies toward homosexuals in the military. Despite the pleas of some of his advisers, Obama also began his term by calling on Congress to overhaul the health-care system; he got further in that effort than any President in a half-century, but he lost momentum when Brown won his seat in the Senate. At the same time, there were policies sure to dismay those Obama voters who, despite the evidence accumulated during his relatively brief career as a state and U.S. senator, believed he would forgo the habit of compromise. His failure to follow through on a promise to close Guantánamo within a year; his dismissal of his chief counsel, Gregory Craig; and many other decisions did little to encourage the left. The Democratic left probably did not imagine that arguably the most influential member of the Obama cabinet would be a Republican fixture of the capital, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Surely the most absurd moment of Obama’s first year in office came not long after he committed more than thirty thousand new troops to Afghanistan. On October 9, 2009, Robert Gibbs woke the President with a call at around six in the morning to tell him that there had been an announcement in Oslo: Obama, after less than nine months in office, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The President’s reaction was a more elongated and colorful version of “Shut up.”
“It was not helpful to us politically,” Obama told me in an interview at the Oval Office in mid-January, 2010. “Although Axelrod and I joke about it, the one thing we didn’t anticipate this year was having to apologize for having won the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo brought to mind his 2002 anti war speech on Federal Plaza, in Chicago. Neither was the statement of a pacifist and, as such, neither wholly pleased its audience. Obama could admire King, but he could never be him. He was not the leader of a movement; he was a politician, a commander-in-chief.
“The speeches are of a piece, and they reflect my fundamental view of the issues of war and peace, which is that we have to recognize that this is a dangerous world and that there are people who will do terrible things and have to be fought,” Obama said. “But we also have to recognize that in fighting against those things, there’s the possibility that we ourselves engage in terrible things. And so, trying to maintain that balance of the tragic recognition that war is sometimes necessary but never anything less than tragic and never worthy of glorification is, I think, one of the best attributes of America’s own character. That’s why I celebrate Lincoln. That’s why I think we survived the Civil War—because we had a leader of such wisdom and depth that there was no triumphalism on his part at the end, or at all.”
One lesson that Obama seemed to internalize early in his term was that there was no percentage in talking about race when it was not on his terms. In July, 2009, at the very end of a press conference on domestic policy, Obama was asked about an incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which a police officer handcuffed and arrested a Harvard professor and pioneer in African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his own home after a neighbor reported that someone might have been breaking into the house.
Obama, who had worked on racial-profiling issues during his years in the Illinois state legislature and was even pulled aside for an extra search at Logan Airport after his triumphant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, waded in. “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry,” Obama told the reporters. “Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.”
In the coming days, Obama was criticized for sins ranging from a disrespect for the police to mouthing off without knowing both sides of the story. Although he was a great deal more right than wrong in his defense of Gates, Obama and his advisers regretted the furor, not least because it raised a sensitive subject precisely when he was trying to push an ambitious political agenda in an era of bitterly partisan political rhetoric. You got the feeling that the White House staff would have preferred to talk about anything—Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, anything—other than Professor Gates and Sergeant James Crowley. Obama tried to resolve the affair with a “beer summit” at the White House, but in the months to come, at some of the conservative Tea Party rallies around the country and elsewhere, there were signs of persistent resentment about the incident and, more worrying, about the spectacle of a black President’s speaking out honestly, even emotionally, about race in general. The angriest of the Tea Party demonstrators usually avoided overtly racist language; instead they spoke of “taking our country back.”
Obama was extremely cautious in talking about the racial component of the opposition to him. Certainly it was not the dominant strain of opposition, but it was a presence. “America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful,” Obama told me. “People don’t progress in a straight line. Countries don’t progress in a straight line. So there’s enormous excitement and interest around the election of an African-American President. It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some backlash, potentially, to what that means—not in a crudely racist way, necessarily. But it signifies change, in the same way that immigration signifies change, in the same way that a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy signifies change, in the same way that the Internet signifies change and terrorism signifies change. And so I think that nobody should have ever been under the illusion—certainly I wasn’t, and I was very explicit about this when I campaigned—that by virtue of my election, suddenly race problems would be solved or conversely that the American people would want to spend all their time talking about race. I think it signifies progress, but the progress preceded the election. The progress facilitated the election. The progress has to do with the day-to-day interactions of people who are working together and going to church together and teaching their kids to treat everybody equally and fairly. All those little interactions that are taking place across the country add up to a more just, more tolerant, society. But that’s an ongoing process. It’s one that requires each of us, every day, to try to expand our sense of understanding. And there are going to be folks who don’t want to promote that understanding because they’re afraid of the future. They don’t like that evolution. They think, in some fashion, that it will disadvantage them or, in some sense, diminishes the past. I tend to be fairly forgiving about the anxiety that people feel about change because I think, if you’re human, you recognize that in yourself.”
In matters of décor, Obama altered the Oval Office only slightly. The Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes, is still there; an antique grandfather clock still ticks the seconds, an unnervingly loud reminder to the occupant that his stay is brief. Obama, however, made one striking change. He returned a bust of Winston Churchill by the sculptor Jacob Epstein to the British government, which had lent it to George W. Bush as a gesture of solidarity after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and replaced it with busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. For Obama, the black freedom struggle defines not just the African-American experience, but the American experience itself.
“I am a direct beneficiary of their sacrifice and their effort—my entire generation is,” he said. “There is a certain awe that I continue to hold when I consider the courage, tenacity, and audacity of the civil-rights leaders of that time. They were so young. That’s what always amazes me. King was twenty-six when Montgomery starts. At the height of his fame and influence, he’s in his mid-thirties. I mean, he’s a kid. And that was true for all these leaders. So, part of what I was trying to communicate in Selma”—in March, 2007—“was this sense that the battles they fought were so much more difficult, fraught with so many risks, that it would be foolish to compare me running for the Senate, or for that matter the Presidency, to them risking their lives in a highly uncertain and dangerous situation.” Obama disavowed the comparison between their struggles and his political campaigns, saying, “They are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement, even in the midst of anger, despair, Black Power, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, all that stuff, there is a voice that is best captured by King, which is that we as African-Americans are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union—which is a very optimistic story, in the end.”
When there are no television cameras around, Obama speaks even more deliberately than usual. I could hear the grandfather clock ticking during his long pauses. Outside his door, a flock of advisers was accumulating. There was little over a week left before the State of the Union address.
“It’s fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries,” Obama said finally. “There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries—that sense that through the deliverance of the least of these, the society as a whole is transformed for the better. And, in that sense, what I was trying to communicate is: we didn’t quite get there, but that journey continues.”