On the Sunday afternoon before
Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One
wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his
signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most
ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century
ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per
cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted
that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that
“turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat
lip.”
That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I.
headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he
got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who
stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle
Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a
self-described “shellacking” in the midterm elections, Obama caught an
elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a
dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of
the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn’t invited to
play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed “For Rey, the
only guy that ever hit the President and didn’t get arrested. Barack.”
This
time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named—“I think it
was the ball,” Obama said—but the President needed little assistance in
divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits
were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans
had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years
earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and
overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under
the tree: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security
Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration
reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a
coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was
“disengaged,” allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political
persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation
as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days,
before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment—and
yet it was the President’s miseries that dominated the year-end
summations.
Obama worried his lip with his tongue and the tip
of his index finger. He sighed, slumping in his chair. The night before,
Iran had agreed to freeze its nuclear program for six months. A final
pact, if one could be arrived at, would end the prospect of a military
strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the hell that could follow:
terror attacks, proxy battles, regional war—take your pick. An agreement
could even help normalize relations between the United States and Iran
for the first time since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Obama put the
odds of a final accord at less than even, but, still, how was this not
good news?
The
answer had arrived with breakfast. The Saudis, the Israelis, and the
Republican leadership made their opposition known on the Sunday-morning
shows and through diplomatic channels. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli
Prime Minister, called the agreement a “historic mistake.” Even a
putative ally like New York Senator Chuck Schumer could go on “Meet the
Press” and, fearing no retribution from the White House, hint that he
might help bollix up the deal. Obama hadn’t tuned in. “I don’t watch
Sunday-morning shows,” he said. “That’s been a well-established rule.”
Instead, he went out to play ball.
Usually, Obama spends
Sundays with his family. Now he was headed for a three-day fund-raising
trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, rattling the cup in one
preposterous mansion after another. The prospect was dispiriting. Obama
had already run his last race, and the chances that the Democratic
Party will win back the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm
elections are slight. The Democrats could, in fact, lose the Senate.
For
an important trip abroad, Air Force One is crowded with advisers,
military aides, Secret Service people, support staff, the press pool.
This trip was smaller, and I was along for the ride, sitting in a guest
cabin with a couple of aides and a staffer who was tasked with keeping
watch over a dark suit bag with a tag reading “The President.”
Obama
spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane,
in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the
trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for
a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami
Dolphins–Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white
shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed
leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes
wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired
players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so,
before I left, I asked if he didn’t feel at all ambivalent about
following the sport. He didn’t.
“I would not let my son play
pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing,
right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”
The Miami defense was
taking on a Keystone Kops quality, and Obama, who had lost hope on a
Bears contest, was starting to lose interest in the Dolphins. “At this
point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he went on. “These guys,
they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is
no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you
know?”
Obama chewed furtively on a piece of Nicorette. His carriage and the
cadence of his conversation are usually so measured that I was thrown by
the lingering habit, the trace of indiscipline. “I’m not a purist,” he
said.
I—ON THE CLOCK
When
Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a
memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David
Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought
that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars
for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve
million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already
started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago
businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s
legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing
all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was
writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and
write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s
going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say,
‘Let’s go.’ ”
Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as
human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local
community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his
career, I see him as an international and national community
organizer.”
Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as
worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to
eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be
accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone
call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock.
Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the
House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before
the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.
“The
conventional wisdom is that a President’s second term is a matter of
minimizing the damage and playing defense rather than playing offense,”
Obama said in one of our conversations on the trip and at the White
House. “But, as I’ve reminded my team, the day after I was inaugurated
for a second term, we’re in charge of the largest organization on earth,
and our capacity to do some good, both domestically and around the
world, is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.”
In
2007, at the start of Obama’s Presidential campaign, the historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin, who worked in the
Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, visited him in his Senate office.
“I have no desire to be one of those Presidents who are just on the
list—you see their pictures lined up on the wall,” Obama told them. “I
really want to be a President who makes a difference.” As she put it to
me then, “There was the sense that he wanted to be big. He didn’t want
to be Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce.”
The question is
whether Obama will satisfy the standard he set for himself. His biggest
early disappointment as President was being forced to recognize that his
romantic vision of a post-partisan era, in which there are no red
states or blue states, only the United States, was, in practical terms, a
fantasy. It was a difficult fantasy to relinquish. The spirit of
national conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama’s
2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which had
brought him to delirious national attention. It was also an elemental
component of his self-conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited
to transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day. Obama is
defensive about this now. “My speech in Boston was an aspirational
speech,” he said. “It was not a description of our politics. It was a
description of what I saw in the American people.”
The
structures of American division came into high relief once he was in
office. The debate over the proper scale and scope of the federal
government dates to the Founders, but it has intensified since the
Reagan revolution. Both Bill Clinton and Obama have spent as much time
defending progressive advances—from Social Security and Medicare to
voting rights and abortion rights—as they have trying to extend them.
The Republican Party is living through the late-mannerist phase of that
revolution, fuelled less by ideas than by resentments. The moderate
Republican tradition is all but gone, and the reactionaries who claim
Reagan’s banner display none of his ideological finesse. Rejection is
all. Obama can never be opposed vehemently enough.
The dream
of bipartisan coöperation glimmered again after Obama won reëlection
against Mitt Romney with fifty-one per cent of the popular vote. The
President talked of the election breaking the “fever” in Washington. “We
didn’t expect the floodgates would open and Boehner would be Tip
O’Neill to our Reagan,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the President,
said. But reëlection, he thought, had “liberated” Obama. The second
Inaugural Address was the most liberal since the nineteen-sixties. Obama
pledged to take ambitious action on climate change, immigration, gun
control, voting rights, infrastructure, tax reform. He warned of a
nation at “perpetual war.” He celebrated the Seneca Falls Convention,
the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and the Stonewall riots as events in a
narrative of righteous struggle. He pledged “collective action” on
economic fairness, and declared that the legacy of Medicare, Social
Security, and Medicaid does “not make us a nation of takers; they free
us to take the risks that make this country great.” Pfeiffer said, “His
point was that Congress won’t set the limits of what I will do. I won’t
trim my vision. And, even if I can’t get it done, I will set the stage
so it does get done” in the years ahead. Then came 2013,
annus horribilis.
Obama’s
election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In
the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially
divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters
in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The
popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites
who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a
globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop
in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s
no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they
don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip
side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who
really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because
I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of
late.
“There is a historic connection between some of the
arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our
country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went
on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about
the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s
bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think
that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But
what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the
history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement
and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And
so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand
arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton
or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms
and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who
were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The
flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and
answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they
understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand
Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in
Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we
are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire
country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just
Massachusetts are healthy.”
Obama’s advisers are convinced
that if the Republicans don’t find a way to attract non-white voters,
particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose the White House for two
or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort
to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were
still out there somewhere in the middle distance. “There were times in
our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to
the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or
white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to
the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to
be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police
abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all
fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the
only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already
feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit.
And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a
process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that
same process.”
For the moment, though, the opposition party is
content to define itself, precisely, by its opposition. As Obama, a fan
of the “Godfather” movies, has put it, “It turns out Marlon Brando had
it easy, because, when it comes to Congress, there is no such thing as
an offer they can’t refuse.”
II—THE LONG VIEW
At
dusk, Air Force One touched down at the Seattle-Tacoma International
Airport. Obama and his adviser Valerie Jarrett stood for a moment on the
tarmac gazing at Mt. Rainier, the snow a candied pink. Then Obama
nodded. Moment over. They got in the car and headed for town. Obama’s
limousine, a Cadillac said to weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds,
is known as the Beast. It is armored with ceramic, titanium, aluminum,
and steel to withstand bomb blasts, and it is sealed in case of
biochemical attack. The doors are as heavy as those on a Boeing 757. The
tires are gigantic “run-flats,” reinforced with Kevlar. A supply of
blood matching the President’s type is kept in the trunk.
The
Beast ascended the driveway of Jon Shirley, in the Seattle suburb of
Medina, on Lake Washington. (Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates live in town,
too.) Shirley earned his pile during the early days of high tech, first
at Tandy and then, in the eighties, at Microsoft, where he served as
president. Shirley’s lawn is littered with gargantuan modern sculptures.
A Claes Oldenburg safety pin loomed in the dark. The Beast pulled up to
Shirley’s front door.
One of the enduring mysteries of the
Obama years is that so many members of the hyper-deluxe
economy—corporate C.E.O.s and Wall Street bankers—have abandoned him.
The Dow is more than twice what it was when Obama took office, in 2009;
corporate profits are higher than they have been since the end of the
Second World War; the financial crisis of 2008-09 vaporized more than
nine trillion dollars in real-estate value, and no major purveyor of
bogus mortgages or dodgy derivatives went to jail. Obama bruised some
feelings once or twice with remarks about “fat-cat bankers” and
“reckless behavior and unchecked excess,” but, in general, he dares not
offend. In 2011, at an annual dinner he holds at the White House with
American historians, he asked the group to help him find a language in
which he could address the problem of growing inequality without being
accused of class warfare.
Inside Shirley’s house, blue-chip
works of modern art—paintings, sculpture, installations—were on every
wall, in every corner: Katz, Kline, Klein, Pollock, Zhang Huan, Richter,
Arp, Rothko, Close, Calder. The house measures more than twenty-seven
thousand square feet. There are only two bedrooms. In the library, the
President went through a familiar fund-raiser routine: a pre-event
private “clutch,” where he shakes hands, makes small talk, and poses for
pictures with an inner group—the host, the governor, the chosen.
Down
the hall, in a room scaled like an airplane hangar, about seventy
guests, having paid sixteen thousand dollars each to the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee kitty, ate dinner and waited. Near some
very artistic furniture, I stood with Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s most
intimate consigliere. To admirers, Jarrett is known as “the third
Obama”; to wary aides, who envy her long history with the Obamas and her
easy access to the living quarters of the White House, she is the Night
Stalker. Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe, and
many others in the Administration have clashed with her. They are gone.
She remains—a constant presence, at meetings, at meals, in the Beast.
While we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked Jarrett
whether the health-care rollout had been the worst political fiasco
Obama had confronted so far.
“I really don’t think so,” she
said. Like all Obama advisers, she was convinced that the problems would
get “fixed”—just as Social Security was fixed after a balky start, in
1937—and the memory of the botched rollout would recede. That was the
hope and that was the spin. And then she said something that I’ve come
to think of as the Administration’s mantra: “The President always takes
the long view.”
That appeal to patience and historical
reckoning, an appeal that risks a maddening high-mindedness, is
something that everyone around Obama trots out to combat the hysterias
of any given moment. “He has learned through those vicissitudes that
every day is Election Day in Washington and everyone is writing history
in ten-minute intervals,” Axelrod told me. “But the truth is that
history is written over a long period of time—and he will be judged in
the long term.”
Obama stepped up to a platform and went to
work. First ingratiation, then gratitude, then answers. He expressed awe
at the sight of Mt. Rainier. Being in Seattle, he said, made him “feel
the spirit of my mom,” the late Ann Dunham, who went to high school
nearby, on Mercer Island. He praised his host’s hospitality. (“The only
problem when I come to Jon’s house is I want to just kind of roam around
and check stuff out, and instead I’ve got to talk.”) Then came a
version of the long-game riff: “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.”
As Obama ticked off a list of first-term
achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job
growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy
technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters
speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest
consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent
impression, get paid, and avoid injury. Even in front of West Coast
liberals, he is always careful to disavow liberalism—the word, anyway.
“I’m not a particularly ideological person,” Obama told Jon Shirley and
his guests. “There’s things, some values I feel passionately about.” He
said that these included making sure that everybody is “being treated
with dignity or respect regardless of what they look like or what their
last name is or who they love,” providing a strong defense, and “leaving
a planet that is as spectacular as the one we inherited from our
parents and our grandparents.” He continued, “So there are values I’m
passionate about, but I’m pretty pragmatic when it comes to how we get
there.”
Obama said he’d take some questions—in “boy, girl,
boy, girl” order. He tried to rally the Democrats and expressed dismay
with the opposition. (“There are reasonable conservatives and there are
those who just want to burn down the house.”) He played both sides of
the environment issues, rehearsing the arguments for and against the
Keystone pipeline and sympathizing with the desire of China and India to
lift millions out of poverty—but if they consume energy the way the
United States has “we’ll be four feet under water.” This is the
archetypal Obama habit of mind and politics, the calm, professorial
immersion in complexity played out in front of ardent supporters who
crave a rallying cry. It’s what compelled him to declare himself a
non-pacifist as he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo, and
praise Ronald Reagan in a Democratic primary debate.
And that
was the end of the performance. A few minutes later, the motorcade was
snaking through the streets of suburban Seattle—kids in pajamas holding
signs and sparklers, the occasional protester, Obama secured in the back
seat of the Beast. He could hear nothing. The windows of his car are
five inches thick.
III—PRESIDENTIAL M&M’S
The
next morning, a Monday, I woke early and turned on CNN. Senator Lindsey
Graham, who is facing a primary challenge from four Tea Party
candidates in South Carolina, was saying with utter confidence that Iran
had hoodwinked the Administration in Geneva. Next came a poll showing
that the majority of the country now believed that the President was
neither truthful nor honest. The announcer added with a smile that GQ
had put Obama at No. 17 on its “least influential” list—right up there
with Pope Benedict XVI in his retirement, the cicadas that never showed
up last summer, and Manti Te’o’s fake dead girlfriend.
In the
hotel lobby, I met Jeff Tiller, who works for the White House press
operation. In college, he became interested in politics and later joined
Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. From there, he volunteered at the
White House, which led to a string of staff jobs, and eventually he was
doing advance work all over the world for the White House. The aides on
the plane were like Tiller—committed members of a cheerful, overworked
microculture who could barely conceal their pleasure in Presidential
propinquity.
I’m twenty-seven and this is my thirty-second time on Air Force One.
“I pinch myself sometimes,” Tiller said. Dan Pfeiffer, who has been
with Obama since 2007, was so overworked last year that he suffered a
series of mini-strokes. “But no worries,” he told me. “I’m good!”
We
arrived in San Francisco, and the motorcade raced along, free of
traffic and red lights, from the airport to a community center in
Chinatown named after Betty Ong, a flight attendant who perished when
American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked and crashed into the World
Trade Center. Obama was to give a speech on immigration. Out the window,
you could see people waving, people hoisting their babies as if to
witness history, people holding signs protesting one issue or
another—the Keystone pipeline, especially—and, everywhere, the iPhone
clickers, the Samsung snappers.
The Beast pulled under a
makeshift security tent. Obama gets to events like these through
underground hallways, industrial kitchens, holding rooms—all of which
have been checked for bombs. At the Ong Center, he met with his hosts
and their children. (“I think I have some Presidential M&M’s for
you!”) People get goggle-eyed when it’s their turn for a picture. Obama
tries to put them at ease: “C’mon in here! Let’s do this!” Sometimes
there is teasing of the mildest sort: “Chuck Taylor All-Stars! Old
style, baby!” A woman told the President that she was six months
pregnant. She didn’t look it. “Whoa! Don’t tell that to Michelle. She’ll
be all . . .” The woman said she was having a girl. Obama was
delighted: “Daughters! You can’t beat ’em!” He pulled her in for the
photo. From long experience, Obama has learned what works for him in
pictures: a broad, toothy smile. A millisecond after the flash, the sash
releases, the smile drops, a curtain falling.
A little later,
Betty Ong’s mother and siblings arrived. Obama drew them into a huddle.
I heard him saying that Betty was a hero, though “obviously, the
heartache never goes away.” Obama really is skilled at this kind of
thing, the kibbitzing and the expressions of sympathy, the hugging and
the eulogizing and the celebrating, the sheer animal activity of human
politics—but he suffers an anxiety of comparison. Bill Clinton was, and
is, the master, a hyper-extrovert whose freakish memory for names and
faces, and whose indomitable will to enfold and charm everyone in his
path, remains unmatched. Obama can be a dynamic speaker before large
audiences and charming in very small groups, but, like a normal human
being and unlike the near-pathological personalities who have so often
held the office, he is depleted by the act of schmoozing a group of a
hundred as if it were an intimate gathering. At fund-raisers, he would
rather eat privately with a couple of aides before going out to perform.
According to the
Wall Street Journal, when Jeffrey Katzenberg
threw a multi-million-dollar fund-raiser in Los Angeles two years ago,
he told the President’s staff that he expected Obama to stop at each of
the fourteen tables and talk for a while. No one would have had to ask
Clinton. Obama’s staffers were alarmed. When you talk about this with
people in Obamaland, they let on that Clinton borders on the
obsessive—as if the appetite for connection were related to what got him
in such deep trouble.
“Obama is a genuinely respectful
person, but he doesn’t try to seduce everyone,” Axelrod said. “It’s
never going to be who he’ll be.” Obama doesn’t love fund-raising, he
went on, “and, if you don’t love it in the first place, you’re not
likely to grow fonder of it over time.”
Obama has other
talents that serve him well in public. Like a seasoned standup comedian,
he has learned that a well-timed heckler can be his ally. It allows him
to dramatize his open-mindedness, even his own philosophical
ambivalences about a particularly difficult political or moral question.
Last May, at the National Defense University, where he was giving a
speech on counter-terrorism, a woman named Medea Benjamin, the
co-founder of the group Code Pink, interrupted him, loudly and at
length, to talk about drone strikes and about closing the American
prison at Guantánamo Bay. While some in the audience tried to drown her
out with applause, and security people proceeded to drag her away, Obama
asserted Benjamin’s right to “free speech,” and declared, “The voice of
that woman is worth paying attention to.”
At the Ong Center,
an undocumented immigrant from South Korea named Ju Hong was in the
crowd lined up behind the President. Toward the end of Obama’s speech,
Ju Hong, a Berkeley graduate, broke in, demanding that the President use
his executive powers to stop deportations.
Obama wheeled
around. “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing
laws in Congress, then I would do so, but we’re also a nation of laws,”
he said, making his case to a wash of applause.
At the next
event, a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at a music
venue, the SFJAZZ Center, Obama met the host’s family (“Hold on, we got
some White House M&M’s”) and then made his way to the backstage
holding area. You could hear the murmur of security communications:
“Renegade with greeters”—Renegade being Obama’s Secret Service handle.
Obama
worked with more enthusiasm than at the midday event. He did the polite
handshake; the full pull-in; the hug and double backslap; the
slap-shake; the solicitous arm-around-the-older woman. (“And you stand
here. . . . Perfect!”)
The clutch over, the crowd cleared away, Obama turned to his aides and said, “How many we got out there?”
“Five hundred. Five-fifty.”
“Five-fifty?”
Obama said, walking toward the wings of the stage. “What are we talking
about? Politics? Can’t we talk about something else? Sports?”
The
aides were, as ever, staring down at their iPhones, scrolling, tapping,
mentally occupying a psychic space somewhere between where they were
and the unspooling news cycle back in Washington.
“We’re off the cuff,” Pfeiffer said. No prepared speech.
“Off the cuff? Sounds good. Let’s go do it.”
Obama
walked toward the stage and, as he was announced, he mouthed the words:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
Then
it happened again: another heckler broke into Obama’s speech. A man in
the balcony repeatedly shouted out, “Executive order!,” demanding that
the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions. Obama
listened with odd indulgence. Finally, he said, “I’m going to actually
pause on this issue, because a lot of people have been saying this
lately on every problem, which is just, ‘Sign an executive order and we
can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.’ ”
Many
in the crowd applauded their approval. Yes! Nullify it! Although Obama
has infuriated the right with relatively modest executive orders on gun
control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the
fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush.
“Wait,
wait, wait,” Obama said. “Before everybody starts clapping, that’s not
how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing
about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and
there’s no shortcut to democracy.” The applause was hardly ecstatic.
Everyone knew what he meant. The promises in the second inaugural could
be a long time coming.
IV—THE WELCOME TABLE
For
every flight aboard Air Force One, there is a new name card at each
seat; a catalogue of the Presidential Entertainment Library, with its
hiply curated choices of movies and music; baskets of fruit and candy; a
menu. Obama is generally a spare eater; the Air Force One menu seems
designed for William Howard Taft. Breakfast one morning was “pumpkin
spiced French toast drizzled with caramel syrup and a dollop of fresh
whipped cream. Served with scrambled eggs and maple sausage links.” Plus
juice, coffee, and, on the side, a “creamy vanilla yogurt layered with
blackberries and cinnamon graham crackers.”
The most curious
character on the plane was Marvin Nicholson, a tall, rangy man in his
early forties who works as the President’s trip director and ubiquitous
factotum. He is six feet eight. Nicholson is the guy who is always
around, who carries the bag and the jacket, who squeezes Purell onto the
Presidential palms after a rope line or a clutch; he is the one who has
the pens, the briefing books, the Nicorette, the Sharpies, the Advil,
the throat lozenges, the iPad, the iPod, the protein bars, the bottle of
Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He and the President toss a football
around, they shoot baskets, they shoot the shit. In his twenties,
Nicholson was living in Boston and working as a bartender and as a clerk
in a windsurfing-equipment shop, where he met John Kerry. He moved to
Nantucket and worked as a caddie. He carried the Senator’s clubs and
Kerry invited him to come to D.C. Since taking the job with Obama, in
2009, Nicholson has played golf with the President well over a hundred
times. The Speaker of the House has played with him once.
A
fact like this can seem to chime with the sort of complaints you hear
all the time about Obama, particularly along the Acela Corridor. He is
said to be a reluctant politician: aloof, insular, diffident, arrogant,
inert, unwilling to jolly his allies along the fairway and take a 9-iron
to his enemies. He doesn’t know anyone in Congress. No one in the House
or in the Senate, no one in foreign capitals fears him. He gives a
great speech, but he doesn’t understand power. He is a poor executive.
Doesn’t it seem as if he hates the job? And so on. This is the knowing
talk on Wall Street, on K Street, on Capitol Hill, in green rooms—the
“Morning Joe” consensus.
There are other ways to assess the
political skills of a President who won two terms, as only seventeen of
forty-four Presidents have, and did so as a black man, with an African
father and a peculiar name, one consonant away from that of the world’s
most notorious terrorist. From the start, however, the political
operatives who opposed him did what they are paid to do—they drew a
cartoon of him. “Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Karl
Rove said, in 2008. “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful
date, holding a Martini and a cigarette, that stands against the wall
and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” The less malign
version is of a President who is bafflingly serene, as committed to his
duties as a husband and father—six-thirty family dinner upstairs in the
private residence is considered “sacrosanct,” aides say—as he is to his
duties as Cajoler-in-Chief.
Still, Obama’s reluctance to break
bread on a regular basis with his congressional allies is real, and a
source of tribal mystification in Washington. “Politics was a strange
career choice for Obama,” David Frum, a conservative columnist, told me.
“Most politicians are not the kind of people you would choose to have
as friends. Or they are the kind who, like John Edwards, seem to be one
thing but then turn out to have a monster in the attic; the friendship
is contingent on something you can’t see. Obama is exactly like all my
friends. He would rather read a book than spend time with people he
doesn’t know or like.” Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia who
was elected to the Senate three years ago, said recently that Obama’s
distance from members of Congress has hurt his ability to pass
legislation. “When you don’t build those personal relationships,”
Manchin told CNN, “it’s pretty easy for a person to say, ‘Well, let me
think about it.’ ”
Harry Truman once called the White House
“the great white jail,” but few Presidents seem to have felt as
oppressed by Washington as Obama does. At one stop on the West Coast
trip, Marta Kauffman, a Democratic bundler who was one of the creators
of “Friends,” said that she asked him what had surprised him most when
he first became President. “The bubble,” Obama said. He said he hoped
that one day he might be able to take a walk in the park, drop by a
bookstore, chat with people in a coffee shop. “After all this is done,”
he said, “how can I find that again?”
“Have you considered a wig?” she asked.
“Maybe fake dreads,” her son added.
The President smiled. “I never thought of that,” he said.
Obama’s
circle of intimates is limited; it has been since his days at Columbia
and Harvard Law. In 2008, Obama called on John Podesta, who had worked
extensively for Bill Clinton, to run his transition process. When
Clinton took office, there was a huge list of people who needed to be
taken care of with jobs; the “friends of Bill” is a wide network. After
Podesta talked to Obama and realized how few favors had to be
distributed, he told a colleague, “He travels light.”
Obama’s
favorite company is a small ensemble of Chicago friends—Valerie Jarrett,
Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician, and Eric
and Cheryl Whitaker, prominent doctors on the South Side. During the
first Presidential campaign, the Obamas took a vow of “no new friends.”
“There
have been times where I’ve been constrained by the fact that I had two
young daughters who I wanted to spend time with—and that I wasn’t in a
position to work the social scene in Washington,” Obama told me. But, as
Malia and Sasha have grown older, the Obamas have taken to hosting
occasional off-the-record dinners in the residence upstairs at the White
House. The guests ordinarily include a friendly political figure, a
business leader, a journalist. Obama drinks a Martini or two (Rove was
right about that), and he and the First Lady are welcoming, funny, and
warm. The dinners start at six. At around ten-thirty at one dinner last
spring, the guests assumed the evening was winding down. But when Obama
was asked whether they should leave, he laughed and said, “Hey, don’t
go! I’m a night owl! Have another drink.” The party went on past 1
A.M.
At
the dinners with historians, Obama sometimes asks his guests to talk
about their latest work. On one occasion, Doris Kearns Goodwin talked
about what became “The Bully Pulpit,” which is a study, in part, of the
way that Theodore Roosevelt deployed his relentlessly gregarious
personality and his close relations with crusading journalists to
political advantage. The portrait of T.R. muscling obstreperous foes on
the issue of inequality—particularly the laissez-faire dinosaurs in his
own party, the G.O.P.—couldn’t fail to summon a contrasting portrait.
The
biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest. Caro’s ongoing volumes
about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the
promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of
the legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy,
including Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly,
Johnson said of Kennedy, “I had to take the dead man’s program and turn
it into a martyr’s cause.” Privately, he disdained Kennedy’s inability
to get his program through Congress, cracking, according to Caro, that
Kennedy’s men knew less about politics on the Hill “than an old maid
does about fucking.” Senator Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, admitted
that he and his Dixiecrat colleagues in the Senate could resist Kennedy
“but not Lyndon”: “That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and
beat your head in with it.”
Obama delivers no such beatings.
Last April, when, in the wake of the mass shootings in Newtown,
Connecticut, eighty-three per cent of Americans declared themselves in
favor of background checks for gun purchases, the
Times ran a
prominent article making the case that the Senate failed to follow the
President’s lead at least partly because of his passivity as a tactical
politician. It described how Mark Begich, a Democratic senator from
Alaska, had asked for, and received, a crucial favor from the White
House, but then, four weeks later, when Begich voted against the bill on
background checks, he paid no price. No one shut down any highway lanes
in Anchorage; no Presidential fury was felt in Juneau or the Brooks
Range. The historian Robert Dallek, another guest at the President’s
table, told the
Times that Obama was “inclined to believe that sweet reason is what you need to use with people in high office.”
Yet
Obama and his aides regard all such talk of breaking bread and breaking
legs as wishful fantasy. They maintain that they could invite every
Republican in Congress to play golf until the end of time, could deliver
punishments with ruthless regularity—and never cut the Gordian knot of
contemporary Washington. They have a point. An Alaska Democrat like
Begich would never last in office had he voted with Obama. L.B.J.,
elected in a landslide victory in 1964, drew on whopping majorities in
both houses of Congress. He could exploit ideological diversity within
the parties and the lax regulations on earmarks and pork-barrel
spending. “When he lost that historic majority, and the glow of that
landslide victory faded, he had the same problems with Congress that
most Presidents at one point or another have,” Obama told me. “I say
that not to suggest that I’m a master wheeler-dealer but, rather, to
suggest that there are some structural institutional realities to our
political system that don’t have much to do with schmoozing.”
Dallek
said, “Johnson could sit with Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader,
kneecap to kneecap, drinking bourbon and branch water, and Dirksen would
mention that there was a fine young man in his state who would be a
fine judge, and the deal would be cut. Nowadays, the media would know in
an instant and rightly yell ‘Corruption!’ ”
Caro finds the
L.B.J.-B.H.O. comparison ludicrous. “Johnson was unique,” he said. “We
have never had anyone like him, as a legislative genius. I’m working on
his Presidency now. Wait till you see what he does to get Medicare, the
Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act through. But is Obama a poor
practitioner of power? I have a different opinion. No matter what the
problems with the rollout of Obamacare, it’s a major advance in the
history of social justice to provide access to health care for
thirty-one million people.”
At the most recent dinner he
attended at the White House, Caro had the distinct impression that Obama
was cool to him, annoyed, perhaps, at the notion appearing in the press
that his latest Johnson volume was an implicit rebuke to him. “As we
were leaving, I said to Obama, ‘You know, my book wasn’t an unspoken
attack on you, it’s a book about Lyndon Johnson,’ ” Caro recalled.
L.B.J. was, after all, also the President who made the catastrophic
decision to deepen America’s involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam.
“Obama seems interested in winding down our foreign wars,” Caro said
approvingly.
When Obama does ask Republicans to a social
occasion, he is sometimes rebuffed. In the fall of 2012, he organized a
screening at the White House of Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln.”
Spielberg, the cast, and the Democratic leadership found the time to
come. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and three other Republicans
declined their invitations, pleading the press of congressional
business. In the current climate, a Republican, especially one facing
challenges at home from the right, risks more than he gains by
socializing or doing business with Obama. Boehner may be prepared to
compromise on certain issues, but it looks better for him if he is seen
to be making a deal with Harry Reid, in the Senate, than with Barack
Obama. Obama’s people say that the President’s attitude is, Fine, so
long as we get there. Help me to help you.
When I asked Obama
if he had read or seen anything that fully captured the experience of
being in his office, he laughed, as if to say, You just have no idea.
“The truth is, in popular culture the President is usually a side
character and a lot of times is pretty dull,” he said. “If it’s a
paranoid conspiracy-theory movie, then there’s an evil aide who is
carrying something out. If it’s a good President, then he is all-wise
and all-knowing”—like the characters played by Martin Sheen in “The West
Wing,” and Michael Douglas in “The American President.” Obama says that
he is neither. “I’ll tell you that watching ‘Lincoln’ was interesting,
in part because you watched what obviously was a fictionalized account
of the President I most admire, and there was such a gap between him and
me that it made you want to be better.” He spoke about envying
Lincoln’s “capacity to speak to and move the country without
simplifying, and at the most fundamental of levels.” But what struck him
most, he said, was precisely what his critics think he most avoids—“the
messiness of getting something done.”
He went on, “The real
politics resonated with me, because I have yet to see something that
we’ve done, or any President has done, that was really important and
good, that did not involve some mess and some strong-arming and some
shading of how it was initially talked about to a particular member of
the legislature who you needed a vote from. Because, 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.”
The
politician sensitive to winds and currents was visible in Obama’s coy
talk of his “evolving” position on gay marriage. Obama conceded in one
of our later conversations only that it’s “fair to say that I may have
come to that realization slightly before I actually made the
announcement” favoring gay marriage, in May of 2012. “But this was not a
situation where I kind of did a wink and a nod and a
hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.” The turn may not have been a sudden
one-eighty; to say that your views are “evolving,” though, is to say
there is a position that you consider to be more advanced than the one
you officially hold. And he held the “evolved” position in 1996, when,
as a candidate for the Illinois state senate, he filled out a
questionnaire from
Outlines, a local gay and lesbian newspaper, saying, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages.”
When
I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the
legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any
dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I
smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very
different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through
a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than
alcohol.”
Is it
less dangerous? I asked.
Obama
leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is
interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing
himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks
in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in
the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the
grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”
Less
dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.
It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s
a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” What clearly does
trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations
for marijuana among minorities. “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up
for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids
and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the
resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he
said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long
stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws
have probably done the same thing.” Accordingly, he said of the
legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that “it’s
important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to
have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or
another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”
As
is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. “Having said all that,
those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all
these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There
is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that’s going to be
taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a
challenge.” He noted the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. “I
also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the
user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start
getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully
legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a
negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than
vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely
calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth,
are we O.K. with that?”
V—MAGIC KINGDOMS
By
Monday night, Obama was in Los Angeles, headed for Beverly Park, a
gated community of private-equity barons, Saudi princes, and movie
people. It was a night of fund-raisers—the first hosted by Magic
Johnson, who led the Lakers to five N.B.A. championships, in the
eighties. In the Beast, on the way to Johnson’s house, Obama told me,
“Magic has become a good friend. I always tease him—I think he supported
Hillary the first time around, in ’08.”
“He campaigned for her in Iowa!” Josh Earnest, a press spokesman, said, still sounding chagrined.
“Yeah,
but we have developed a great relationship,” Obama said. “I wasn’t a
Lakers fan. I was a Philadelphia 76ers fan, because I loved Doctor
J.”—Julius Erving—“and then became a Jordan fan, because I moved to
Chicago. But, in my mind, at least, what has made Magic heroic was not
simply the joy of his playing.” Obama said that the way Johnson handled
his H.I.V. diagnosis changed “how the culture thought about that—which,
actually, I think, ultimately had an impact about how the culture
thought about the gay community.” He also talked about Johnson’s
business success as something that was “deeply admired” among
African-Americans—“the notion that here’s somebody who would leverage
fame and fortune in sports into a pretty remarkable business career.”
“Do you not see that often enough, by your lights?” I asked.
“I don’t,” Obama said.
The
Obamas are able to speak to people of color in a way that none of their
predecessors could. And the President is quick to bring into the public
realm the fact that, for all his personal cool, he is a foursquare
family man. He has plenty of hip-hop on his iPod, but he also worries
about the moments of misogyny. Once, I mentioned to him that I knew that
while Malia Obama, an aspiring filmmaker, was a fan of “Girls,” he and
Michelle Obama were, at first, wary of the show.
“I’m at the
very young end of the Baby Boom generation, which meant that I did not
come of age in the sixties—took for granted certain freedoms, certain
attitudes about gender, sexuality, equality for women, but didn’t feel
as if I was having to rebel against something,” Obama said. “Precisely
because I didn’t have a father in the home and moved around a lot as a
kid and had a wonderfully loving mom and grandparents, but not a lot of
structure growing up, I emerged on the other side of that with an
appreciation for family and marriage and structure for the kids. I’m
sure that’s part of why Michelle and her family held such appeal to me
in the first place, because she did grow up with that kind of structure.
And now, as parents, I don’t think we’re being particularly
conservative—we’re actually not prudes. . . . But, as parents, what we
have seen, both in our own family and among our friends, is that kids
with structure have an easier time of it.”
He talked about a
visit that he made last year to Hyde Park Academy, a public high school
on Chicago’s South Side, where he met with a group of about twenty boys
in a program called Becoming a Man. “They’re in this program because
they’re fundamentally good kids who could tip in the wrong direction if
they didn’t get some guidance and some structure,” Obama recalled. “We
went around the room and started telling each other stories. And one of
the young men asked me about me growing up, and I explained, You know
what? I’m just like you guys. I didn’t have a dad. There were times
where I was angry and wasn’t sure why I was angry. I engaged in a bunch
of anti-social behavior. I did drugs. I got drunk. Didn’t take school
seriously. The only difference between me and you is that I was in a
more forgiving environment, and if I made a mistake I wasn’t going to
get shot. And, even if I didn’t apply myself in school, I was at a good
enough school that just through osmosis I’d have the opportunity to go
to college.
“And, as I’m speaking, the kid next to me looks over and he says, ‘Are you talking about
you?’
And there was a benefit for them hearing that, because when I then
said, You guys have to take yourselves more seriously, or you need to
have a backup plan in case you don’t end up being LeBron or Jay
Z . . . they might listen. Now, that’s not a liberal or a conservative
thing. There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so
thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle
and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of
institutional barriers and racism, and we’re engaging in sort of
up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger
society off the hook.” Obama thought that this reaction was sometimes
knee-jerk. “I always tell people to go read some of Dr. King’s writings
about the African-American community. For that matter, read Malcolm
X. . . . There’s no contradiction to say that there are issues of
personal responsibility that have to be addressed, while still
acknowledging that some of the specific pathologies in the
African-American community are a direct result of our history.”
The
higher we went up into Beverly Hills, the grander the houses were. This
was where the big donors lived. But Obama’s thoughts have been down in
the city. The drama of racial inequality, in his mind, has come to
presage a larger, transracial form of economic disparity, a deepening of
the class divide. Indeed, if there is a theme for the remaining days of
his term, it is inequality. In 2011, he went to Osawatomie, Kansas, the
site of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 New Nationalism speech—a signal
moment in the history of Progressivism—and declared inequality the
“defining issue of our time.” He repeated the message at length, late
last year, in Anacostia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington,
D.C., this time noting that the gap between the rich and the poor in
America now resembled that in Argentina and Jamaica, rather than that in
France, Germany, or Canada. American C.E.O.s once made, on average,
thirty times as much as workers; now they make about two hundred and
seventy times as much. The wealthy hire lobbyists; they try to secure
their interests with campaign donations. Even as Obama travels for
campaign alms and is as entangled in the funding system at least as much
as any other politician, he insists that his commitment is to the
middle class and the disadvantaged. Last summer, he received a letter
from a single mother struggling to support herself and her daughter on a
minimal income. She was drowning: “I need help. I can’t imagine being
out in the streets with my daughter and if I don’t get some type of
relief soon, I’m afraid that’s what may happen.” “Copy to Senior
Advisers,”
Obama wrote at the bottom of the letter. “This is the person
we are working for.”
In one of our conversations, I asked him
what he felt he must get done before leaving office. He was silent for a
while and then broke into a pained grin. “You mean, now that the Web
site is working?” Yes, after that. “It’s hard to anticipate events over
the next three years,” he said. “If you had asked F.D.R. what he had to
accomplish in 1937, he would have told you, ‘I’ve got to stabilize the
economy and reduce the deficit.’ Turned out there were a few more things
on his plate.” He went on, “I think we are fortunate at the moment that
we do not face a crisis of the scale and scope that Lincoln or F.D.R.
faced. So I think it’s unrealistic to suggest that I can narrow my focus
the way those two Presidents did. But I can tell you that I will
measure myself at the end of my Presidency in large part by whether I
began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into
the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in
this society.”
Obama met last summer with Robert Putnam, a
Harvard political scientist who became famous for a book he wrote on
social atomization, “Bowling Alone.” For the past several years, Putnam
and some colleagues have been working on a book about the growing
opportunity gap between rich and poor kids. Putnam, who led a Kennedy
School seminar on civic engagement that Obama was in, sent the President
a memo about his findings. More and more, Putnam found, the crucial
issue is class, and he believes that a black President might have an
easier time explaining this trend to the American people and setting an
agenda to combat it. Other prominent politicians—including Hillary
Clinton, Paul Ryan, and Jeb Bush—have also consulted Putnam. Putnam told
me that, even if legislation combatting the widening class divide
eludes Obama, “I am hoping he can be John the Baptist on this.” And
Obama, for his part, seems eager to take on that evangelizing role.
“You
have an economy,” Obama told me, “that is ruthlessly squeezing workers
and imposing efficiencies that make our flat-screen TVs really cheap but
also puts enormous downward pressure on wages and salaries. That’s
making it more and more difficult not only for African-Americans or
Latinos to get a foothold into the middle class but for everybody—large
majorities of people—to get a foothold in the middle class or to feel
secure there. You’ve got folks like Bob Putnam, who’s doing some really
interesting studies indicating the degree to which some of those
‘pathologies’ that used to be attributed to the African-American
community in particular—single-parent households, and drug abuse, and
men dropping out of the labor force, and an underground economy—you’re
now starting to see in larger numbers in white working-class communities
as well, which would tend to vindicate what I think a lot of us always
felt.”
VI—A NEW EQUILIBRIUM
After
the event at Magic Johnson’s place—the highlight was a tour of an
immense basement trophy room, where Johnson had installed a gleaming
hardwood basketball floor and piped in the sound of crowds cheering and
announcers declaring the glories of the Lakers—the Beast made its way to
the compound that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers built. Haim Saban,
who made his billions as a self-described “cartoon schlepper,” was born
in Egypt, came of age in Israel, and started his show-business career as
the bass player in the Lions of Judah. His politics are not ambiguous.
“I am a one-issue guy,” he once said, “and my issue is Israel.” His
closest political relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he
was crushed when she lost to Obama, in 2008. Saban publicly expressed
doubts about whether Obama was sufficiently ardent about Israel, but he
has come around.
The main house on Saban’s property is less of
an art museum than Jon Shirley’s, though it features a Warhol diptych
of Golda Meir and Albert Einstein over the fireplace. The fund-raiser
was held in back of the main house, under a tent. Addressing a hundred
and twenty guests, and being peppered with questions about the Middle
East, Obama trotted around all the usual bases—the hope for peace, the
still strong alliance with Israel, the danger of “lone wolf” terror
threats. But, while a man who funds the Saban Center for Middle East
Policy at the Brookings Institution may have warmed to Obama, there is
no question that, in certain professional foreign-policy circles, Obama
is often regarded with mistrust. His Syria policy—with its dubious “red
line” and threats to get rid of Bashar al-Assad; with John Kerry’s
improvised press-conference gambit on chemical weapons—has inspired
little confidence. Neither did the decision to accelerate troop levels
in Afghanistan and, at the same time, schedule a withdrawal.
Obama
came to power without foreign-policy experience; but he won the
election, in part, by advocating a foreign-policy sensibility that was
wary of American overreach. If George W. Bush’s foreign policy was
largely a reaction to 9/11, Obama’s has been a reaction to the reaction.
He withdrew American forces from Iraq. He went to Cairo in 2009, in an
attempt to forge “a new beginning” between the United States and the
Muslim world. American troops will come home from Afghanistan this year.
As he promised in his first Presidential campaign—to the outraged
protests of Hillary Clinton and John McCain alike—he has extended a hand
to traditional enemies, from Iran to Cuba. And he has not hesitated in
his public rhetoric to acknowledge, however subtly, the abuses, as well
as the triumphs, of American power. He remembers going with his mother
to live in Indonesia, in 1967—shortly after a military coup, engineered
with American help, led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of
people. This event, and the fact that so few Americans know much about
it, made a lasting impression on Obama. He is convinced that an
essential component of diplomacy is the public recognition of historical
facts—not only the taking of American hostages in Iran, in 1979, but
also the American role in the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the
democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953.
The
right’s response has been to accuse Obama of conducting a foreign policy
of apology. Last year, Republican senators on the Foreign Affairs
Committee, including Marco Rubio, of Florida, demanded to know if
Samantha Power, Obama’s nominee for U.N. Ambassador and the author of “A
Problem from Hell,” a historical indictment of American passivity in
the face of various genocides around the world, would ever “apologize”
for the United States. (In a depressing Kabuki drama, Power seemed
forced to prove her patriotic bona fides by insisting repeatedly that
the U.S. was “the greatest country on earth” and that, no, she would
“never apologize” for it.) Obama’s conservative critics, both at home
and abroad, paint him as a President out to diminish American power.
Josef Joffe, the hawkish editor of
Die Zeit, the highbrow German
weekly, told me, “There is certainly consistency and coherence in his
attempt to retract from the troubles of the world, to get the U.S. out
of harm’s way, in order to do ‘a little nation-building at home,’ as he
has so often put it. If you want to be harsh about it, he wants to turn
the U.S. into a very large medium power, into an XXL France or Germany.”
Obama’s
“long game” on foreign policy calls for traditional categories of
American power and ideology to be reordered. Ben Rhodes, the deputy
national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me that
Washington was “trapped in very stale narratives.”
“In the
foreign-policy establishment, to be an idealist you have to be for
military intervention,” Rhodes went on. “In the Democratic Party, these
debates were defined in the nineties, and the idealists lined up for
military intervention. For the President, Iraq was the defining issue,
and now Syria is viewed through that lens, as was Libya—to be an
idealist, you have to be a military interventionist. We spent a trillion
dollars in Iraq and had troops there for a decade, and you can’t say it
wielded positive influence. Just the opposite. We can’t seem to get out
of these boxes.”
Obama may resist the idealism of a previous
generation of interventionists, but his realism, if that’s what it is,
diverges from the realism of Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft. “It
comes from the idea that change is organic and change comes to countries
in its own way, modernization comes in its own way, rather than through
liberation narratives coming from the West,” Fareed Zakaria, a writer
on foreign policy whom Obama reads and consults, says. Anne-Marie
Slaughter, who worked at the State Department as Hillary Clinton’s
director of policy planning, says, “Obama has a real understanding of
the limits of our power. It’s not that the United States is in decline;
it’s that sometimes the world has problems without the tools to fix
them.” Members of Obama’s foreign-policy circle say that when he is
criticized for his reaction to situations like Iran’s Green Revolution,
in 2009, or the last days of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, in 2011, he
complains that people imagine him to have a “joystick” that allows him
to manipulate precise outcomes.
Obama told me that what he
needs isn’t any new grand strategy—“I don’t really even need George
Kennan right now”—but, rather, the right strategic partners. “There are
currents in history and you have to figure out how to move them in one
direction or another,” Rhodes said. “You can’t necessarily determine the
final destination. . . . The President subscribes less to a great-man
theory of history and more to a great-movement theory of history—that
change happens when people force it or circumstances do.” (Later, Obama
told me, “I’m not sure Ben is right about that. I believe in both.”)
The
President may scorn the joystick fantasy, but he does believe that his
words—at microphones from Cairo to Yangon—can encourage positive change
abroad, even if only in the long run. In Israel last March, he told
university students that “political leaders will never take risks if the
people do not push them to take some risks.” Obama, who has pressed
Netanyahu to muster the political will to take risks on his own, thinks
he can help “create a space”—that is the term around the White House—for
forward movement on the Palestinian issue, whether he is around to see
the result or not.
Administration officials are convinced that
their efforts to toughen the sanctions on Iran caused tremendous
economic pain and helped Hassan Rouhani win popular support in the
Iranian Presidential elections last year. Although Rouhani is no
liberal—he has revolutionary and religious credentials, which is why he
was able to run—he was not Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s favored candidate.
Khamenei is an opaque, cautious figure, Administration officials say,
but he clearly acceded to Rouhani as he saw the political demands of the
population shift.
The nuclear negotiations in Geneva, which
were preceded by secret contacts with the Iranians in Oman and New York,
were, from Obama’s side, based on a series of strategic calculations
that, he acknowledges, may not work out. As the Administration sees it,
an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a violation of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, and a threat to the entire region; it could
spark a nuclear arms race reaching Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.
(Israel has had nukes since 1967.) But the White House is prepared to
accept a civilian nuclear capacity in Iran, with strict oversight, while
the Israelis and the Gulf states regard any Iranian nuclear technology
at all as unacceptable. Obama has told Netanyahu and Republican senators
that the absolutist benchmark is not achievable. Members of Obama’s
team believe that the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf
states, who are now allied as never before, want the U.S. to be their
proxy in a struggle not merely for de-nuclearization in Iran but for
regime change—and that is not on the Administration’s agenda, except,
perhaps, as a hope.
Republican and Democratic senators have
expressed doubts about even the interim agreement with Iran, and have
threatened to tighten sanctions still further. “Historically, there is
hostility and suspicion toward Iran, not just among members of Congress
but the American people,” Obama said, adding that “members of Congress
are very attentive to what Israel says on its security issues.” He went
on, “I don’t think a new sanctions bill will reach my desk during this
period, but, if it did, I would veto it and expect it to be sustained.”
Ultimately,
he envisages a new geopolitical equilibrium, one less turbulent than
the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle. “It
would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if
Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he told me.
“And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to
get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist
organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other
countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an
equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf
states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not
an active or proxy warfare.
“With respect to Israel, the
interests of Israel in stability and security are actually very closely
aligned with the interests of the Sunni states.” As Saudi and Israeli
diplomats berate Obama in unison, his reaction is, essentially,
Use that.
“What’s preventing them from entering into even an informal alliance
with at least normalized diplomatic relations is not that their
interests are profoundly in conflict but the Palestinian issue, as well
as a long history of anti-Semitism that’s developed over the course of
decades there, and anti-Arab sentiment that’s increased inside of Israel
based on seeing buses being blown up,” Obama said. “If you can start
unwinding some of that, that creates a new equilibrium. And so I think
each individual piece of the puzzle is meant to paint a picture in which
conflicts and competition still exist in the region but that it is
contained, it is expressed in ways that don’t exact such an enormous
toll on the countries involved, and that allow us to work with
functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there.”
During
Obama’s performance under Saban’s tent, there was no talk of a
Sunni-Israeli alignment, or of any failures of vision on Netanyahu’s
part. Obama did allow himself to be testy about the criticism he has
received over his handling of the carnage in Syria. “You’ll recall that
that was the
previous end of my Presidency, until it turned out
that we are actually getting all the chemical weapons. And no one
reports on that anymore.”
VII—HAMMERS AND PLIERS
Obama’s
lowest moments in the Middle East have involved his handling of Syria.
Last summer, when I visited Za’atari, the biggest Syrian refugee camp in
Jordan, one displaced person after another expressed anger and dismay
at American inaction. In a later conversation, I asked Obama if he was
haunted by Syria, and, though the mask of his equipoise rarely slips, an
indignant expression crossed his face. “I am haunted by what’s
happened,” he said. “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in
another Middle Eastern war. It is very difficult to imagine a scenario
in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome,
short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope
similar to what we did in Iraq. And when I hear people suggesting that
somehow if we had just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that
somehow Assad would be gone by now and we’d have a peaceful transition,
it’s magical thinking.
“It’s not as if we didn’t discuss this
extensively down in the Situation Room. It’s not as if we did not
solicit—and continue to solicit—opinions from a wide range of folks.
Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze
examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a
country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with
much. We have looked at this from every angle. And the truth is that the
challenge there has been, and continues to be, that you have an
authoritarian, brutal government who is willing to do anything to hang
on to power, and you have an opposition that is disorganized,
ill-equipped, ill-trained, and is self-divided. All of that is on top of
some of the sectarian divisions. . . .
And, in that environment, our
best chance of seeing a decent outcome at this point is to work the
state actors who have invested so much in keeping Assad in power—mainly
the Iranians and the Russians—as well as working with those who have
been financing the opposition to make sure that they’re not creating the
kind of extremist force that we saw emerge out of Afghanistan when we
were financing the mujahideen.”
At the core of Obama’s
thinking is that American military involvement cannot be the primary
instrument to achieve the new equilibrium that the region so desperately
needs. And yet thoughts of a pacific equilibrium are far from anyone’s
mind in the real, existing Middle East. In the 2012 campaign, Obama
spoke not only of killing Osama bin Laden; he also said that Al Qaeda
had been “decimated.” I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now
flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria;
Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.
“The
analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a
jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,”
Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think
there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden
and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against
the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power
struggles and disputes, often sectarian.
“Let’s just keep in
mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that,
independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines.
And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough
that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take
place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist
Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to
wade into.”
He went on, “You have a schism between Sunni and
Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or
abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed
states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and
criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can
control resources, populations, territory. . . .
And failed states,
conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our
long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources
that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the
same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who
want to blow up the World Trade Center. We have to be able to
distinguish between these problems analytically, so that we’re not using
a pliers where we need a hammer, or we’re not using a battalion when
what we should be doing is partnering with the local government to train
their police force more effectively, improve their intelligence
capacities.”
This wasn’t realism or idealism; it was something closer to policy particularism (
this thing is different from
that
thing; Syria is not Libya; Iran is not North Korea). Yet Obama’s
regular deployment of drones has been criticized as a one-size-fits-all
recourse, in which the prospect of destroying an individual enemy too
easily trumps broader strategic and diplomatic considerations, to say
nothing of moral ones. A few weeks before Obama left Washington to scour
the West Coast for money, he invited to the White House Malala
Yousafzai, the remarkable Pakistani teen-ager who campaigned for women’s
education and was shot in the head by the Taliban. Yousafzai thanked
Obama for the material support that the U.S. government provided for
education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and among Syrian refugees, but she
also told him that drone strikes were “fuelling terrorism” and
resentment in her country.
“I think any President should be
troubled by any war or any kinetic action that leads to death,” Obama
told me when I brought up Yousafzai’s remarks. “The way I’ve thought
about this issue is, I have a solemn duty and responsibility to keep the
American people safe. That’s my most important obligation as President
and Commander-in-Chief. And there are individuals and groups out there
that are intent on killing Americans—killing American civilians, killing
American children, blowing up American planes. That’s not speculation.
It’s their explicit agenda.”
Obama said that, if terrorists
can be captured and prosecuted, “that’s always my preference. If we
can’t, I cannot stand by and do nothing. They operate in places where
oftentimes we cannot reach them, or the countries are either unwilling
or unable to capture them in partnership with us. And that then narrows
my options: we can simply be on defense and try to harden our defense.
But in this day and age that’s of limited—well, that’s insufficient. We
can say to those countries, as my predecessor did, if you are harboring
terrorists, we will hold you accountable—in which case, we could be
fighting a lot of wars around the world. And, statistically, it is
indisputable that the costs in terms of not only our men and women in
uniform but also innocent civilians would be much higher. Or, where
possible, we can take targeted strikes, understanding that anytime you
take a military strike there are risks involved. What I’ve tried to do
is to tighten the process so much and limit the risks of civilian
casualties so much that we have the least fallout from those actions.
But it’s not perfect.”
It is far from that. In December, an
American drone flying above Al Bayda province, in Yemen, fired on what
U.S. intelligence believed was a column of Al Qaeda fighters. The
“column” was in fact a wedding party; twelve people were killed, and
fifteen were seriously injured. Some of the victims, if not all, were
civilians. This was no aberration. In Yemen and Pakistan, according to
the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, American drones have killed
between some four hundred and a thousand civilians—a
civilian-to-combatant ratio that could be as high as one to three. Obama
has never made it clear how the vast populations outraged and perhaps
radicalized by such remote-control mayhem might figure into his
calculations about American security.
“Look, you wrestle with
it,” Obama said. “And those who have questioned our drone policy are
doing exactly what should be done in a democracy—asking some tough
questions. The only time I get frustrated is when folks act like it’s
not complicated and there aren’t some real tough decisions, and are
sanctimonious, as if somehow these aren’t complicated questions. Listen,
as I have often said to my national-security team, I didn’t run for
office so that I could go around blowing things up.”
Obama
told me that in all three of his main initiatives in the region—with
Iran, with Israel and the Palestinians, with Syria—the odds of
completing final treaties are less than fifty-fifty. “On the other
hand,” he said, “in all three circumstances we may be able to push the
boulder partway up the hill and maybe stabilize it so it doesn’t roll
back on us. And all three are connected. I do believe that the region is
going through rapid change and inexorable change. Some of it is
demographics; some of it is technology; some of it is economics. And the
old order, the old equilibrium, is no longer tenable. The question then
becomes, What’s next?”
VIII—AMONG THE ALIENS
On
his last day in Los Angeles, Obama romanced Hollywood, taking a
helicopter to visit the DreamWorks studio, in Glendale. Jeffrey
Katzenberg, Obama’s host and the head of DreamWorks Animation, is one of
the Democrats’ most successful fund-raisers. But it is never a good
idea for the White House to admit to any quid pro quo. When one of the
pool reporters asked why the President was going to Katzenberg’s studio
and not, say, Universal, a travelling spokesman replied, “DreamWorks
obviously is a thriving business and is creating lots of jobs in
Southern California. And the fact of the matter is Mr. Katzenberg’s
support for the President’s policies has no bearing on our decision to
visit there.”
That’s pretty rich. Katzenberg has been a
supporter from the start of Obama’s national career, raising millions of
dollars for him and for the Party’s Super
PACs.
Nor has he been hurt by his political associations. Joe Biden helped
pave the way with Xi Jinping and other officials so that DreamWorks and
other Hollywood companies could build studios in China. (In an awkward
postscript, the S.E.C. reportedly began investigating, in 2012, whether
DreamWorks, Twentieth Century Fox, and the Walt Disney Company paid
bribes to Chinese officials, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act.)
A flock of military helicopters brought the
Obama party to Glendale, and, after a short ride to DreamWorks
Animation, Katzenberg greeted the President and gave him a tour. They
stopped in a basement recording studio to watch a voice-over session for
a new animated picture called “Home,” starring the voice of Steve
Martin. Greeting Martin, Obama recalled that the last time they saw each
other must have been when Martin played banjo with his band at the
White House.
Martin nodded. “I always say the fact that I played banjo at the White House was the biggest thrill of his life.”
Katzenberg
explained that “Home” was the story of the Boov, an alien race that has
taken over the planet. Martin is the voice of Captain Smek, the leader
of the Boov.
“Where did
we go?” Obama asked Tim Johnson, the director. “Do they feed us?”
“Mostly ice cream.”
Katzenberg said that, unlike dramatic films with live actors, nineteen out of twenty of DreamWorks’ animated pictures succeed.
“My kids have aged out,” Obama said. “They used to be my excuse to watch them all.”
Katzenberg
led Obama to a conference room, where the heads of most of the major
movie and television studios were waiting. There would be touchy
questions about business—particularly about the “North versus South”
civil war in progress between the high-tech libertarians in Silicon
Valley and the “content producers” in Los Angeles. The war was over
intellectual-property rights, and Obama showed little desire to get in
the middle of these two constituencies. If anything, he knows that
Silicon Valley is ascendant, younger, more able to mobilize active
voters, and he was not about to offer the studio heads his unqualified
muscle.
Finally, the subject switched to global matters. Alan
Horn, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, raised his hand. “First,” he
said, “I do recommend that you and your family see ‘Frozen,’ which is
coming to a theatre near you. ”
Then he asked about climate change.
IX—LISTENING IN
On
the flight back to Washington, Obama read and played spades with some
aides to pass the time. (He and his former body man Reggie Love took a
break to play spades at one point during the mission to kill Osama bin
Laden.) After a while, one of the aides led me to the front cabin to
talk with the President some more. The week before, Obama had given out
the annual Presidential Medals of Freedom. One went to Benjamin C.
Bradlee, the editor who built the Washington Post by joining the Times
in publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, and who stood behind Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they began publishing the Watergate
exposés that led to the fall of the Nixon Presidency. I asked Obama how
he could reconcile such an award with his Administration’s aggressive
leak investigations, which have ensnared journalists and sources, and
its hostility to Edward Snowden’s exposure of the N.S.A.’s blanket
surveillance of American and foreign communications.
After a
long pause, Obama began to speak of how his first awareness of politics
came when, as an eleven-year-old, he went on a cross-country bus trip
with his mother and grandmother and, at the end of each day, watched the
Watergate hearings on television. “I remember being fascinated by these
figures and what was at stake, and the notion that even the President
of the United States isn’t above the law,” he said. “And Sam Ervin with
his eyebrows, and Inouye, this guy from Hawaii—it left a powerful
impression on me. And so, as I got older, when I saw ‘All the
President’s Men,’ that was the iconic vision of journalism telling truth
to power, and making sure our democracy worked. And I still believe
that. And so a lot of the tensions that have existed between my White
House and the press are inherent in the institution. The press always
wants more, and every White House, including ours, is trying to make
sure that the things that we care most about are what’s being reported
on, and that we’re not on any given day chasing after fifteen story
lines.”
Then Obama insisted that what Snowden did was “not
akin to Watergate or some scandal in which there were coverups
involved.” The leaks, he said, had “put people at risk” but revealed
nothing illegal. And though the leaks raised “legitimate policy
questions” about N.S.A. operations, “the issue then is: Is the only way
to do that by giving some twenty-nine-year-old free rein to basically
dump a mountain of information, much of which is definitely legal,
definitely necessary for national security, and should properly be
classified?” In Obama’s view, “the benefit of the debate he generated
was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing
it.” Once again, it was the President as Professor-in-Chief, assessing
all sides, and observing the tilt of the scales. (The day before his
speech last week on reforming the N.S.A., he told me, “I do not have a
yes/no answer on clemency for Edward Snowden. This is an active case,
where charges have been brought.”)
The coverage of the leaks,
Obama complained, paints “a picture of a rogue agency out there running
around and breaking a whole bunch of laws and engaging in a ‘domestic
spying program’ that isn’t accurate. But what that does is it synchs up
with a public imagination that sees Big Brother looming everywhere.” The
greater damage, in his view, was the way the leaks heightened
suspicions among foreign leaders. Obama enjoyed a good relationship with
Angela Merkel, but he admitted that it was undermined by reports
alleging that the U.S. tapped her cell phone. This, he said, felt “like a
breach of trust and I can’t argue with her being aggravated about
that.”
But, he said, “there are European governments that we
know spy on us, and there is a little bit of Claude Rains in
‘Casablanca’—shocked that gambling is going on.” He added, “Now, I will
say that I automatically assume that there are a whole bunch of folks
out there trying to spy on me, which is why I don’t have a phone. I do
not send out anything on my BlackBerry that I don’t assume at some point
will be on the front page of a newspaper, so it’s pretty boring reading
for the most part.”
Obama admitted that the N.S.A. has had
“too much leeway to do whatever it wanted or could.” But he didn’t feel
“any ambivalence” about the decisions he has made. “I actually feel
confident that the way the N.S.A. operates does not threaten the privacy
and constitutional rights of Americans and that the laws that are in
place are sound, and, because we’ve got three branches of government
involved and a culture that has internalized that domestic spying is
against the law, it actually works pretty well,” he said. “Over all,
five years from now, when I’m a private citizen, I’m going to feel
pretty confident that my government is not spying on me.”
Obama
has three years left, but it’s not difficult to sense a politician with
an acute sense of time, a politician devising ways to widen his legacy
without the benefit of any support from Congress. The State of the Union
speech next week will be a catalogue of things hoped for, a resumption
of the second inaugural, with an added emphasis on the theme of
inequality. But Obama knows that major legislation—with the possible
exception of immigration—is unlikely. And so there is in him a certain
degree of reduced ambition, a sense that even well before the
commentariat starts calling him a lame duck he will spend much of his
time setting an agenda that can be resolved only after he has retired to
the life of a writer and post-President.
“One of the things
that I’ve learned to appreciate more as President is you are essentially
a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history,”
he later told me. “You don’t start with a clean slate, and the things
you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable. But you can
move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn
out to be fairly significant. I suspect that Ronald Reagan, if you’d
asked him, would not have considered the earned-income-tax-credit
provision in tax reform to be at the top of his list of accomplishments.
On the other hand, what the E.I.T.C. has done, starting with him, being
added to by Clinton, being used by me during the Recovery Act, has
probably kept more people out of poverty than a whole lot of other
government programs that are currently in place.”
Johnson’s
Great Society will be fifty years old in 2014, but no Republican wants a
repeat of that scale of government ambition. Obama acknowledges this,
saying, “The appetite for tax-and-transfer strategies, even among
Democrats, much less among independents or Republicans, is probably
somewhat limited, because people are seeing their incomes haven’t gone
up, their wages haven’t gone up. It’s natural for them to think any new
taxes may be going to somebody else, I’m not confident in terms of how
it’s going to be spent, I’d much rather hang on to what I’ve got.” He
will try to do things like set up partnerships with selected cities and
citizens’ groups, sign some executive orders, but a “Marshall Plan for
the inner city is not going to get through Congress anytime soon.”
Indeed,
Obama is quick to show a measure of sympathy with the Reagan-era
conservative analysis of government. “This is where sometimes
progressives get frustrated with me,” he said, “because I actually think
there was a legitimate critique of the welfare state getting bloated,
and relying too much on command and control, top-down government
programs to address it back in the seventies. It’s also why it’s ironic
when I’m accused of being this raging socialist who wants to amass more
and more power for their own government. . . . But I do think that some
of the anti-government rhetoric, anti-tax rhetoric, anti-spending
rhetoric that began before Reagan but fully flowered with the Reagan
Presidency accelerated trends that were already existing, or at least
robbed us of some tools to deal with the downsides of globalization and
technology, and that with just some modest modification we could grow
this economy faster and benefit more people and provide more
opportunity.
“After we did all that, there would still be
poverty and there would still be some inequality and there would still
be a lot of work to do for the forty-fifth through fiftieth Presidents,”
he went on, “but I’d like to give voice to an impression I think a lot
of Americans have, which is it’s harder to make it now if you are just
the average citizen who’s willing to work hard and has good values, and
wasn’t born with huge advantages or having enjoyed extraordinary
luck—that the ground is less secure under your feet.”
In the
White House, advisers are resigned by now to the idea that some liberal
voters, dismayed by a range of issues—drones, the N.S.A., the half
measures of health care and financial reform—have turned away from Obama
and to newer figures like Elizabeth Warren or Bill de Blasio. “Well,
look, we live in a very fast-moving culture,” Obama said. “And, by
definition, the President of the United States is overexposed, and it is
natural, after six, seven years of me being on the national stage, that
people start wanting to see . . .”
“Other flavors?”
“Yes,”
he said. “ ‘Is there somebody else out there who can give me that spark
of inspiration or excitement?’ I don’t spend too much time worrying
about that. I think the things that are exciting people are the same
things that excite me and excited me back then. I might have given fresh
voice to them, but the values are essentially the same.”
X—WHAT TIME ALLOWS
Obama
came home from Los Angeles in a dark, freezing downpour. The weather
was too rotten even for Marine One. He hustled down the steps of Air
Force One and ducked into his car.
A few weeks later, I was
able to see him for a last conversation in the Oval Office. The Obamas
had just had a long vacation in Hawaii—sun, golf, family, and not much
else. The President was sitting behind his desk—the Resolute desk, a
gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes—and he was reading from a
folder marked “Secret.” He closed it, walked across the room, and
settled into an armchair near the fireplace. “I got some rest,” he said.
“But time to get to work.”
Obama has every right to claim a
long list of victories since he took office: ending two wars; an
economic rescue, no matter how imperfect; strong Supreme Court
nominations; a lack of major scandal; essential support for an epochal
advance in the civil rights of gays and lesbians; more progressive
executive orders on climate change, gun control, and the end of torture;
and, yes, health-care reform. But, no matter what one’s politics, and
however one weighs the arguments of his critics, both partisan and
principled, one has to wonder about any President’s capacity to make
these decisions amid a thousand uncertainties, so many of which are
matters of life and death, survival and extinction.
“I have
strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every
person,” Obama said. “I do think one of my strengths is temperament. I
am comfortable with complexity, and I think I’m pretty good at keeping
my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin.
And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions
against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding
that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and
that America makes; understanding that there are going to be limits to
the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there’s
going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part
of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and
basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up
with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most
Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than
worse.”
The cheering crowds and hecklers from the West Coast
trip seemed far away now. In the preternaturally quiet office, you could
hear, between every long pause that Obama took, the ticking of a
grandfather clock just to his left.
“I think we are born into
this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and
sins of the past,” he said. “But we also inherit the beauty and the joy
and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short
time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little
stretch that we have.” The long view again. “But I think our decisions
matter,” he went on. “And I think America was very lucky that Abraham
Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the
course of history would be very different. But I also think that,
despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it
took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had
anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think
that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that
at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to
get our paragraph right.”
A little while later, as we were
leaving the Oval Office and walking under the colonnade, Obama said, “I
just wanted to add one thing to that business about the great-man theory
of history. The President of the United States cannot remake our
society, and that’s probably a good thing.” He paused yet again, always
self-editing. “Not ‘probably,’ ” he said. “It’s
definitely a good thing.”
♦
