Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 3

  But if the distraction happened to be named Trump, that was a different story.

  • • •

  WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL BOB BAUER took one look at the booklet in Obama’s hand and knew it wasn’t the birth certificate. It was just a commemorative keepsake, the kind of thing hospitals give to parents as a token of the blessed day. But that Monday morning, April 18, in the Oval Office, the booklet proved to be something more: a spur to the Obamans to revisit a question they had debated many times before—whether to make a run at obtaining the actual long-form certificate from Hawaii.

  Bauer had been Obama’s chief legal adviser since his days in the Senate and was among the most preeminent campaign attorneys in the Beltway bar. He was against the idea, as he always had been, and for a straightforward reason. Under Hawaiian state law, Bauer pointed out, the short-form “certification of live birth” that the campaign had posted online three years earlier was Obama’s birth certificate, and putting out the long form might be treated by some as tantamount to admitting that all along the short form had been insufficient.

  Plouffe had a different objection. Listen, having this issue out there isn’t the worst thing in the world for us, he said. Most voters think that the president was born in Hawaii, and most voters think the birthers are nuts. The more oxygen Donald Trump gets, the better off we are long term.

  Nevertheless, Plouffe saw another side to the coin. The White House was starting to take incoming from the liberal punditocracy—MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had been on a tear—for not putting the issue to rest. There were also implications for governing. If half of the Republican electorate believed that Obama was an illegitimate president, Plouffe observed, that only made it harder for their representatives on the Hill to do business with the White House.

  Obama’s views were more nuanced—and more personal. He and Michelle were both avid consumers of political commentary. Her habit was cable, and especially Morning Joe. (She watched the show religiously while working out, then fired off agitated e-mails to Jarrett about what this or that talking head had said.) The president indulged in a greater degree of channel flipping than he admitted, but was more immersed in the blogosphere, and not just its leftward precincts. On his iPad, to which he was so attached it seemed like an appendage, he monitored the hard-right realms of the online echo chamber, surprising friends with his familiarity with the work of ultra-con tyro Michelle Malkin. As for Fox News, he believed the network’s relentless hostility toward him shaved five points off his approval ratings.

  For two years, the conservative quadrants of the freak show had labored to delegitimize Obama, often in race-freighted fashion—from the suggestions that he was a closet Muslim to the idea, floated by writer Dinesh D’Souza and latched on to by Newt Gingrich, that he could be grasped only through the prism of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.” The president rarely complained about the racial overtones of such commentary. “We all know what that’s about,” he would say, sloughing off the subject. But the birther charge was a provocation too far, especially as real topics were being ignored.

  “This is everything that’s wrong with our politics,” Obama said that Monday in the Oval Office meeting after his Chicago trip. I understand that politically this is probably good for us, since it makes their party look crazy. But let’s pop the balloon and shut down this foolishness once and for all.

  Bauer was tasked with approaching the Hawaii department of health and requesting a waiver that would allow the release of the original long-form certificate. Nine days later, on April 27, the document was in hand in the West Wing and a press conference scheduled. There was never any doubt that the president would unveil it himself, delighting in the opportunity to shame the press and cuff the freak show. As he walked into the prep session before the presser, he spied Bauer and his lead wordsmith, Jon Favreau.

  “We’ve got the lawyer and the speechwriter here, so this must be a big deal,” Obama cracked.

  By coincidence, Trump, as part of his dalliance with a presidential bid, was traveling to New Hampshire that day. As if to affirm Obama’s belief that the media required a slap upside the head, a number of TV networks carried the two events—the Donald touching down in his branded helicopter in Portsmouth, the POTUS taking the podium at the White House—using a split screen.

  “Normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press at any given day and I’ve got other things to do,” Obama said. He noted that, in a week in which he and House Republicans put out competing budgets, “the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.” Then Obama delivered the Trump de grâce: “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers . . . We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”

  • • •

  THE BARKER IN QUESTION, up in the Granite State, gave no indication that he realized the joke had been on him. “Today, I’m very proud of myself,” Trump declared. “I’ve accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish . . . I am really honored, frankly, to have played such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue.”

  Favreau had no intention of allowing Trump to miss the point the next time—and oh, yes, there would be a next time, just four days later, when The Donald attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, at which Obama would, by custom, deliver a presidential stand-up routine.

  The morning of the dinner, Axelrod, Favreau, and another speechwriter, Jon Lovett, tromped into the Oval Office to run through the president’s script with him. Favreau and Lovett wanted to do more than torment Trump; they wanted to torpedo his putative White House run. They recruited Hollywood comedy kingpin Judd Apatow, of Bridesmaids and Knocked Up fame, to help out with Obama’s script. And Apatow, riffing over the phone, had contributed a cutting gibe that referred to an episode of Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice.

  Axelrod, Daley, and Plouffe all wondered whether Obama would find the Apatow joke too barbed. But the president pronounced it one of his favorite set pieces in the script. There was only one joke, in fact, to which Obama objected, and it didn’t involve Trump. It was about another GOP presidential prospect, the former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty. “He seems all-American,” the script said, “but have you heard his real middle name? Tim Osama bin Pawlenty.”

  “Osama is the middle name? I think we could do something a little more original than that,” Obama said.

  Favreau was perplexed. “What about Hosni?” he asked.

  “That’s great,” said Obama. “Let’s just go with Hosni.”

  That night, Obama took to the stage in the basement ballroom of the Washington Hilton, in front of twenty-five hundred bejeweled women and black-tied men—celebrities, congresspeople, presidential wannabes, even some reporters. With impeccable comic timing, the president lit into Trump: “No one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” The crowd roared with delight.

  They howled again when Obama unloaded Apatow’s Apprentice takedown: “The men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks, and there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so, ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”

  Trump, meanwhile, sat rocking in his chair, simmering, simmering, his face turning burnt umber.

  Only one of Obama’s jokes fell flat: Tim Hosni Pawlenty. Favreau, in the audience, was rueful in the kn
owledge that it could have been so much funnier.

  The next night, Favreau learned the reason for Obama’s edit, when the president took to the airwaves to announce that halfway around the world in Pakistan, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden. No member of Obama’s political team except Daley had been aware of the secret special-ops mission during its months of planning. The Obamans were stunned, overjoyed, and awestruck at their boss’s composure the night before—his pitch-perfect comic performance just hours after giving the fateful order, as its outcome hung in the balance. Little did we know, Axelrod said to Favreau, we were just a bunch of Seinfelds in a Tom Clancy novel.

  For Obama, the decision to launch the raid had entailed gargantuan risks. On the president’s national security team, there was no consensus. Joe Biden and defense secretary Robert Gates counseled him to wait for more intel. Biden told an aide he believed that Obama had wagered his presidency on the move; had the mission gone awry and turned into another Desert One, the political consequences would have been catastrophic. When one of the helicopters crash-landed during the raid, two words appeared like a billboard in Obama’s mind: Jimmy Carter.

  After Obama finished his brief and sober speech to the nation from the East Room, some of his advisers wanted to celebrate. How about a fucking beer? thought Daley. Out in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, a frenzied, flag-waving crowd was chanting, “Obama got Osama! Obama got Osama!” But there would be no triumphalism inside the gates, at least not that night. The president walked silently to the elevator that would carry him up to the residence and to bed.

  In the days ahead, Obama reveled plenty. True, there were tough fights with Republicans on the horizon, especially about raising the federal government’s $14.7 trillion debt ceiling, over which the GOP was threatening a showdown, and about the budget. Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin had recently released a plan to cut the deficit by $4.4 trillion, which Obama attacked as draconian, putting forth his own $4 trillion alternative.

  But there was no denying the glory and gratification of taking out bin Laden and taking down Trump in the space of twenty-four hours. The pursuit of OBL had bedeviled Bush for years. Now its completion had earned Obama the ne plus ultra national security credential heading into 2012 and sent his approval ratings skyward. And although beating back the birthers might have seemed more trivial, it lifted a weight from Obama’s shoulders. A few weeks later, on a trip to Ireland, he jubilated in the discovery that—after all the right-wing insinuations that he was exotic, not a real American—his genetic roots stretched back to a small town on the Emerald Isle.

  “My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall O’Bamas,” he proclaimed at Trinity College in Dublin. “And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

  2

  THE WEAKNESS MEME

  THE FOURSOME HIT THE LINKS at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, on Saturday morning, June 18: Obama, Biden, and a pair of Republicans from Ohio, John Boehner and the state’s new governor, John Kasich—all four clad in polo shirts, Biden and Boehner wearing shorts.

  Since the midterms, Obama had been encouraged by an assortment of establishment grandees to socialize with Boehner, get to know him, establish a human connection. Invite him up to Camp David, Obama was told, or to the White House to watch a movie. You and Boehner both smoke; bring him over, then break out the butts and a bottle of nice merlot, counseled one Beltway wise man.

  Daley was a big proponent of this approach. It was Politics 101. But Obama and his people had come a long way practicing Politics 2.0. That winter, when the new chief of staff had floated the Camp David plan—a weekend getaway for the congressional leadership and their spouses—Michelle’s East Wing staff shot it down: who wanted to be cooped up on a cold day in the woods with Mitch McConnell? The smoking summit was a nonstarter, too, since Obama apparently had finally quit although Daley marveled at how much Nicorette his boss chomped through every day. (It’s embarrassing, Daley thought, restraining himself from chastising Obama. Hey! Enough with the fucking gum!)

  The idea of a shared golf round was more promising. At first, Obama brushed off the idea, saying, “Nah, Boehner’s too good.” But now, with the deadline on lifting the debt limit looming, Republicans seeking $2 trillion in spending cuts for raising the ceiling, and Biden leading bipartisan negotiations with the Hill that were stuck in quicksand, Obama decided the time was ripe to hit the fairway. The famously competitive president wasn’t about to lose to the speaker, though. When the Ohioans arrived at Andrews, their expectations of teaming up against the Democrats were dashed by an executive switcheroo.

  “Hey, Boehner,” Obama announced, “you and I, we’re gonna take these two on.”

  Obama-Boehner edged Biden-Kasich on the final green. (Boehner described the narrow victory as a whipping, while Biden moaned about his swing and Kasich informed the VP that shorts were not a good look for him.) When the group repaired to the nineteenth hole, the conversation turned to the debt ceiling. Boehner pointed out that, despite the difficulties of the Biden talks, all sides—the White House, the Republicans, and Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit commission—agreed in principle on the $4 trillion deficit-reduction goal. And Boehner said he still believed such a “big deal” was possible. Obama concurred and proposed that the two of them chat in more detail, one on one.

  Four days later, Boehner arrived at the White House and huddled with Obama on the Truman Balcony. Achieving a big deal, the speaker said, would require entitlement reform, meaning significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security, programs that Democrats were loath to touch.

  I’m open to that, Obama said. But Republicans would have to accept new tax revenues, which they’d been adamantly opposing.

  We’re not raising rates, Boehner countered, but we can do broad tax reform. “If we lower all the rates, clean out the garbage in the code, you know, there could be some revenues,” he said.

  Obama and Boehner circled each other warily, but with a dawning sense that they might be able to do business—that the big deal, a “grand bargain,” was worth pursuing. They agreed to keep talking and have their staffs start consultations, all in strictest confidence.

  After the meeting, Obama briefed his senior advisers. On a personal level, he liked Boehner, saw him as an old-fashioned Republican—a Kiwanis Club guy, a Rotarian. A conservative, sure, but not a nuthouse conservative, and certainly no Tea Partier. And therein lay the problem. Unlike Gingrich, who led the insurgency that seized the House in 1994, Boehner had played little part in fomenting the latest GOP revolution. Now he was coping with a caucus filled with raucous freshmen, over whom his sway was modest.

  Like his boss, Plouffe was skeptical about whether Boehner could deliver. But from his place at the president’s side, with one eye trained on governing and the other on reelection, the potential benefits of a big deal were simply too great not to chase. It would be another, far more powerful, demonstration of the president’s ability to forge bipartisan consensus, as he had in the lame-duck session. And, in particular, it would help remediate the president’s weakness with independent voters, who saw him as an insuppressible spender. Just as bin Laden’s killing would make it hard for Republicans to attack Obama on national security, a grand bargain would neutralize them on the deficit. Heading into 2012, he would be clothed in a doubly dense suit of chain mail.

  Not everyone in the White House was convinced that Obama would need such thick armor. In the afterglow of the OBL triumph, some had lost sight of just how dicey his reelection prospects were. Plouffe had not. In mid-June, Daley had arranged a senior staff retreat at Fort McNair, a leafy Washington Army base on the peninsula at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, but it was Plouffe who dominated the proceedings. In a detailed presentation, he ran through several swing states, showing how dips of only a few percentage points from 2008—in Obama’s support among independents, in turnout among young voters or
African Americans—could spell defeat in 2012.

  “Guys, we have no margin for error here,” Plouffe told his colleagues. What he was thinking was more pointed: I need to scare the shit out of these people.

  Obama wasn’t especially scared or even mindful of the electoral details that kept Plouffe awake at night. His focus was on the macro picture, not the micro-politics. His main objective was to avoid a default on America’s debt, which would wreak financial havoc—and, for all its perils, a grand bargain that spread the pain around equally might actually be easier to pull off than a smaller one. It would boost business confidence, bolstering the economy. And it would put America’s fiscal house in order for a decade or more.

  But while the country’s finances were his top priority, he wasn’t ignoring his campaign’s, or the epic clash of cash that the race ahead would bring. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed unlimited spending by outside groups, a raft of conservative tycoons were lining up to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to smite him down. Obama hoped that a grand bargain might reduce their ardor, along with that of their amen corner in the broader business world. Watching the Republican presidential field take shape, he and his people saw Mitt Romney as the likeliest nominee. They took him seriously as a candidate, yet he did not make them sweat. The money, however, was another story—in more ways than one.

  • • •

  TWENTY-SIX HOURS AFTER Obama hosted Boehner on the Truman Balcony, the president’s motorcade deposited him at a venue that was a mite less exclusive but nearly as ornate: the restaurant Daniel, on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Unlike the House speaker, the people in the dining room were supporters of Obama’s, the kind willing to part with $35,800—the maximum annual contribution to a presidential candidate and his party—to share his company for an hour. Yet Obama brought a certain trepidation to the fund-raiser, for the crowd mostly hailed from Wall Street, a community with whom his relationship was, to put it gently, suboptimal.