Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (3 page)

In return for her support, Oprah had been promised unique access to the White House by Obama if he won. She would get regular briefings on administration initiatives and advance notice on programs, which would give her invaluable material for her fledgling cable venture, OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.

“Oprah intended to make her unique White House access a part of her new network,” a source close to Oprah said in an interview for this book. “There were big plans, and a team was put together to come up with proposals that would have been mutually beneficial. But none of that ever happened. Oprah sent notes and a rep to talk to Valerie Jarrett, but nothing came of it. It slowly dawned on Oprah that the Obamas had absolutely no intention of keeping their word and bringing her into their confidence. In a snit, Oprah banned the Obamas from her
O, The Oprah Magazine
, and rumors persisted that she would sit out the 2012 election.

“Clearly, Oprah believed she was being rebuffed at the level of Michelle and Valerie,” this source continued. “And just as obviously, President Obama didn’t interfere on Oprah’s behalf. It appeared to Oprah that Michelle was jealous of her, furious that Barack was seeking her advice instead of Michelle’s. For her part, Oprah didn’t like being with Michelle, because the first lady was constantly one-upping the president and anybody else around her. Oprah was hurt and angry and will never make up with the Obamas. She knows how to hold a grudge.”

David Plouffe reminded Valerie Jarrett about the ill feelings between Oprah and the Obamas.

“Oprah has turned her back on us,” he said.

“Don’t believe it,” Jarrett replied. “The president and Michelle believe that Oprah will come running as soon as she’s asked to help.”

But things didn’t turn out the way Jarrett predicted. Instead, Oprah refused to help. Late one night after dinner in the family quarters of the White House, Jarrett broke the bad news to the president and first lady.

“Oprah isn’t going to do shit for us in 2012,” Jarrett said. “She refuses to lift a hand. She’s going to announce publicly that she isn’t going to campaign for us this time around.”

Stunned, the president emitted a nervous laugh.

Michelle didn’t say a word.

With Oprah out of the picture, David Plouffe was counting on Valerie Jarrett to reconsider her hostile attitude toward Bill
Clinton. In this, he was sorely disappointed. For no sooner had Plouffe finished his presentation to the president, ballyhooing the virtues of Bill Clinton as his chief campaign surrogate, than Jarrett spoke her mind.

“I don’t trust that man Clinton,” she said. “We can win without him.”

There was a moment of silence around the table. People became aware that it was hot in the room. Though it was the middle of August, Obama had ordered the air-conditioning turned down.

“He’s from Hawaii, okay?” David Axelrod once noted. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

Obama had removed his custom-tailored Hart Schaffner Marx suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves to mid-forearm. He hated messy confrontations, and the spectacle of David Plouffe, the architect of his 2008 electoral victory, brawling with Valerie Jarrett, his trusted consigliere, made Obama cross and was responsible for his sullen pout.

Usually when he met with his advisers, Obama did most of the talking. But this time was different. He kept silent, though his initial impulse must have been to side with Jarrett. He shared her strong negative feelings about Bill Clinton. In past meetings with his advisers, he had routinely let his scorn for Clinton spill over.

Obama’s animosity toward Clinton sprang from several sources. To begin with, though he and Clinton agreed on many
social
issues, such as gay marriage and gun control, they came from opposing
economic
wings of the Democratic Party—Obama from the far left, Clinton from the center. Obama believed in the
intrinsic goodness of big government, and he could never forgive Clinton for his State of the Union speech in which he had famously declared, “The era of big government is over.”

Then, too, the two men embodied a different set of ethical values. Clinton was the ultimate pragmatist: to win a second term in the White House, he had developed a political theory known as “triangulation,” which allowed him to distance himself from traditional Democratic policies and adopt some of the ideas of his Republican opponents, such as deregulation and a balanced budget. Obama, on the other hand, was so thoroughly convinced of his own rectitude and virtue that he often thought of his opponents as immoral and didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

Most important of all, however, Obama disliked Clinton on a personal level. Some thought that the similarities between the two men were at the root of Obama’s antipathy, for the very qualities that Obama found objectionable in Clinton—his tendency to lecture others, his belief in his own destiny, his insistence on his singular political importance—could be found in Obama himself.

David Plouffe acknowledged that reaching out to Clinton was fraught with danger. Clinton would no doubt try to exact a heavy price for his cooperation. What was more, any bargain that the White House might strike with Clinton, a centrist Democrat, was likely to provoke a backlash from the ultra-liberals in Obama’s base.

“If we make such a deal,” said Plouffe, “it must remain secret.”

Plouffe didn’t see that as a problem. Though Obama had promised to deliver “the most transparent administration ever,” he actually ran the most secretive White House in history. It was rare for outsiders—even members of the White House press corps—to learn the details of who said what to whom in the Oval Office.

“American presidents have often tried to control how they are depicted (think of the restrictions on portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair),” Santiago Lyon, director of photography at the Associated Press, noted in an op-ed piece for the
New York Times
.

          
But presidents in recent decades recognized that allowing the press independent access to their activities was a necessary part of the social contract of trust and transparency that should exist between citizens and their leaders. . . . In hypocritical defiance of the principles of openness and transparency he campaigned on, [the Obama administration] has systematically tried to bypass the media by releasing a sanitized visual record of his activities through official photographs and videos, at the expense of independent journalistic access.

“This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered,” agreed David Sanger of the
New York Times
.

And ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton concluded: “The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk . . . is a disgrace. The president’s day-to-day policy development . . . is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a
responsible job of covering it. . . . This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”

As a result, few unauthorized leaks came from Obama’s inner circle, which consisted of a handful of veteran campaign loyalists. In addition to Jarrett and Plouffe, there was Plouffe’s old business partner and friend, David Axelrod; Jim Messina, the former campaign manager who had gone to Chicago with Axelrod to prepare for the coming campaign; Stephanie Cutter, the sharp-tongued deputy campaign manager; Dan Pfeiffer, the communications operative and one of the most outspoken Clinton haters in the group; Robert Gibbs, the abrasive former press secretary; and Pete Rouse, the battle-tested senior adviser who was charged with keeping the White House’s trains running on time.

Several of these people were participating in today’s strategy session, some of them seated along the table, others on a conference call. One of those conferenced in was Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, who had served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and functioned as a bridge between the Obama and Clinton camps. According to someone who was in Emanuel’s Chicago office during the call, when the mayor got off the phone, he hit his forehead with the heel of his hand and said, “Oy vey!”

“The Sunday night meetings were highly confidential and sacrosanct,” wrote
MSNBC.com
’s Richard Wolffe. “This was the brain trust of the presidential campaign, discussing strategy in total honesty—the equivalent of the Situation Room in the West Wing basement, or the super-secure room inside the Pentagon
known as ‘the tank.’ The enemy was never supposed to know what happened inside [the] sessions.”

However, one of the participants later described the heated argument that erupted between Plouffe and Jarrett.

“We can win without Clinton,” Jarrett repeated, according to this source. “Clinton is toxic. He’s off message, with his own agenda, and still bitter over the last campaign. We can win without being beholden to him.”

Plouffe refused to back down.

“The president asked me to do whatever it takes to win the election,” he said, “and Bill Clinton is what it will take.”

CHAPTER TWO

“NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS”

D
espite Valerie Jarrett’s appearance—a diminutive figure, a singsong voice, expensive designer clothes, and an Audrey Hepburn pixie haircut—she punched well above weight.

No one—not David Plouffe, not even the president of the United States—could intimidate her. She never had to take a bracing shot of vodka or a Clonazepam antianxiety pill before attending meetings with the president, as some of her colleagues secretly did.

Jarrett’s supreme self-confidence stemmed from her unique background. She came from what Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist, described as the “Transcendent” elite of the African American community.

Her grandfather was a noted African American activist; her father was a famous pathologist and geneticist who ran a hospital
in Shiraz, Iran, where Valerie was born and grew up; and her mother was a psychologist who helped found the Erikson Institute for child development in Chicago.

Valerie attended the best schools—Stanford University and the University of Michigan Law School. She was married for a time to the late Dr. William Robert Jarrett, the son of famed
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Vernon Jarrett, who was responsible for landing Valerie her job as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s deputy chief of staff. She was a member of the boards of exclusive cultural institutions in Chicago, such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Art Institute of Chicago. She operated in the rarefied atmosphere of money, power, and politics.

A Chicagoan who worked with Jarrett told me: “Growing up, Valerie had very limited contact with African American working-class people. The closest she came to the [mostly black] South Side was when she drove through it in her Mercedes convertible with the top down. She never had to work her way up. Everything was handed to her because of her pedigree.”

This was not the first time Valerie Jarrett had tangled with Obama’s political strategists over advice to the president. Indeed, Jarrett and David Plouffe embodied different—and often irreconcilable—sides of Obama’s personality.

As the supreme pragmatist in the Obama realm, Plouffe spoke for Candidate Obama, the man who had cut his teeth in Chicago’s brutish politics and managed to snatch the 2008 presidential nomination from the crown princess of the Democratic Party,
Hillary Clinton. For Candidate Obama, the onetime disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, the ends justified the means. You did whatever it took to get elected. Like Alinsky, Obama had no scruples about using every means at his disposal, including ethically questionable methods, to win a political battle. He had a keen political sense and was skilled at getting elected.