Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (29 page)

          
Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 with the thinnest résumé since JFK, a half century earlier. When Mr. Obama was in his 20s, he headed a staff of 13 as a community organizer in Chicago and later directed a staff of 10 in a six-month get-out-the-vote campaign that also had 700 volunteers. At Harvard Law School, he ran the law review. Otherwise, Mr. Obama had been a writer, instructor at the University of Chicago Law School, an Illinois state legislator for eight years and a U.S. senator for four with a staff of three dozen or so.

              
However brilliant a politician he may be, this sort of background offers scant preparation for the managerial challenge of wrangling the executive branch with its stupendous bureaucracy and the high-tech military, not to mention the most fractious Congress in memory. Mr. Obama’s response has essentially been not to try
to manage much except foreign policy, where success could charitably be described as elusive.

It was one thing to call Obama the captain of a rudderless ship (as Hillary did), or a “failed manager” (as Kosner did), or an “amateur” (as I did, eventually joined by
Time
’s Joe Klein, the
New York Times
’ Maureen Dowd, and Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer, among others). It was something quite different—and far more consequential—to conclude that Obama’s behavior appeared to be borderline delusional.

And yet, what else could one think?

For even as the Obama administration was falling apart on every front—Syria, the debacle of the Obamacare website, and the National Security Agency’s bugging of telephone conversations by world leaders—the president seemed strangely oblivious to the wreckage. He gave no indication that he was aware of the coming crack-up. He told members of his inner circle that the future looked so bright that “I need to wear dark sunglasses in the White House.” He exchanged high-fives with his senior advisers following their “victory” over the Republicans during the government’s sequester shutdown, despite the fact that his reputation suffered almost as badly as the Republicans’.

Worse yet, Obama acted as though his domestic adversaries were babbling fools who had no valid arguments and as though the scandals that engulfed his administration—Benghazi, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, the Justice Department’s collection
of AP phone records, the monitoring of reporter James Rosen’s phones and emails, “Fast and Furious,” and solicitation by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, of donations from companies regulated by her department—were false crises created by enemies who were caught up in partisan rancor and motivated by barely concealed racism.

How could Obama be so out of touch with reality?

Part of the explanation could be found in the way he was cosseted by advisers like Valerie Jarrett. They filtered out any advice that might run counter to their boss’s opinions. They created layers between him and those who might upset him with contrary or negative thoughts. As a result, he was ill informed and stuck in wishful thinking. It had yet to sink in with him, for example, that America was more unpopular around the world today than it had been under George W. Bush, or that America’s allies—including most especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also Brazil and Japan and countless others—had lost faith in Washington’s resolve.

During the spring and summer of 2013—before the bungled Syrian policy and the botched Obamacare rollout—the president and his closest aides talked as though the second half of his second term was going to turn into a triumph. Valerie Jarrett predicted that the Tea Party would lead the Republicans “off the cliff like lemmings.” She saw Democrats everywhere on the march: New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker won election to the Senate; Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe triumphed over his Tea Party opponent in the governor’s race; and left-wing populist Bill de Blasio won election as mayor of New York City by a landslide.

To the Obamans, “progressivism”—a word they used in place of the discredited label “liberalism”—was the order of the day in American politics. Obama said that inequality—rather than jobs, the economy, and the ballooning national debt—was “the defining challenge of our time.” Jarrett and several other White House advisers felt optimistic that Democratic candidates would ride to victory in the 2014 midterm elections on the wave of class warfare. Things would break their way, the House would flip to the Democrats, and Nancy Pelosi would become the Speaker again.

Jarrett was equally upbeat about the way things were going overseas. The White House, which had exercised a firm grip over foreign policy when Hillary was secretary of state, gave her successor, John Kerry, plenty of room to exercise his vaunted ego. Kerry was happily scurrying around the globe, attempting to get the Iranians and Syrians to act more responsibly, pursuing the chimera of an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, and trying for a career-capping Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, American troops were scheduled to leave Afghanistan in 2014, ending the last of America’s foreign wars. Talk of another American military intervention in the Middle East had receded. The focus had turned back home, where Obama’s White House team wanted it.

Then came Obama’s famous red line.

As things turned out, the red line wasn’t even the worst of Obama’s blunders on Syria.

In late August 2013, Obama ordered the Pentagon to send an expeditionary force of bombers, ships, and submarines to the eastern Mediterranean. And he dispatched Secretary of State Kerry to make a public case for U.S. military action against Syria. Kerry assailed Assad as “a thug and a murderer” and compared the Syrian tyrant to Hitler. The world braced for shock and awe—a fusillade of American cruise missiles raining down on Syrian chemical weapon sites.

And then . . . Obama blinked.

Two things made him back down. First, Prime Minister David Cameron lost a vote in the British House of Commons to authorize participation in an allied strike against Syria. In an instant, Obama found himself deserted by his most important ally. And second, Valerie Jarrett convinced the president to seek political cover by making Congress complicit in any military strike.

That evening, after Jarrett’s Oval Office scolding, Obama took a stroll around the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough. To McDonough’s astonishment, Obama said that he intended to ask Congress for authorization to launch a strike against Syria.

“The plan,” reported Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, “was immediately met with robust resistance from a whiplashed Obama team. . . . Obama’s National Security Council had believed . . . that requiring a vote was not even on the table.”

Obama’s advisers argued that he was taking an unnecessary political risk by going to Congress. Half of Congress—the House—was in the hands of Republicans, who distrusted
Obama’s leadership, and the other half—the Senate—was in the hands of liberal Democrats, who had no stomach for war.

“I can’t understand the White House these days,” said Representative Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat. Obama, Moran pointed out, should have called House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to say, “I’m thinking of sending this vote to the Congress. How do you think it might turn out?” “She would have said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ She knows where the votes stand.”

When Obama sent Secretary Kerry to testify before the Senate, Kerry smudged the red line even further.

“Some have tried to suggest that the debate we’re having today is about President Obama’s red line,” said Kerry. “I could not more forcefully state that is just plain and simply wrong. This debate is about the world’s red line. It’s about humanity’s red line.”

But the Congress wasn’t buying it. The Senate prepared to vote “no” on a resolution to authorize force. Obama appeared to have stumbled into a dead end.

He was rescued at the last moment by an off-the-cuff remark made by John Kerry. During a London press conference, the secretary of state said that the United States would forgo an attack on Syria if Assad put his chemical weapons under international control. Quicker than you could say “Vladimir Putin,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov announced that his country would see to it that Assad turned over Syria’s entire chemical stockpile if America took its military threat off the table.

Obama accepted Lavrov’s offer, even though it meant that the United States would have to negotiate the chemical weapons accord with none other than Bashar al-Assad. Under the agreement between Washington and Moscow, Assad would be allowed
to remain in power, free to kill as many of his countrymen as he wished. In short, Barack Obama was outmaneuvered by his chief foreign nemesis, Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“Mr. Putin,” groaned the editorial writers of the
New York Times
, “has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the Syria crisis. He is offering a potential, if still highly uncertain, alternative to what he has vocally criticized as America’s militarism and reasserted Russian interests in a region where it had been marginalized since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Forbes
, the business magazine well known for its annual lists and rankings, went even further. It dropped Barack Obama to the number-two spot behind Vladimir Putin on the 2013 “World’s Most Powerful People” list.

“Internationally,” explained Steve Forbes, “Obama is the weakest President of the post–World War II years. Even the in-over-his-head Jimmy Carter was more of a factor in foreign affairs than Barack Obama. Diplomats are still astonished, for instance, at how little prep work Obama engages in before international conferences. He doesn’t arrive with much of an agenda, nor does he interact with other leaders in advance to line up support. He more or less just shows up. . . . Do you think Israel today, after Obama’s red line to Syria . . . really believes that this White House has its back?”

For Obama, 2013 was an annus horribilis—the Latin phrase once used by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth to describe the year in
which Princess Diana published her tell-all book and Windsor Castle caught fire. Obama had a comparable list of horribles:

          
•
   
The promise of Obamacare (“If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it”) turned to dust.

          
•
   
Revelations of NSA surveillance became a constant humiliation.

          
•
   
Obama’s vanishing red line exposed him as a toothless tiger.

          
•
   
The president’s approval ratings hit record lows not seen since the dark ages of George W. Bush.

At a year-end press conference, Obama was asked about his biggest mistake. He cited the healthcare rollout, and then added: “Not that I don’t engage in self-reflection. I’ve probably beaten myself up more than [CBS News correspondent] Major Garrett or [Fox News Channel correspondent] Ed Henry does on any given day. . . . I’ll have even better ideas after a couple of days of sleep and sun.”