Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (4 page)

Valerie Jarrett represented something different in the Obama domain. As the woman who had helped launch Barack and Michelle Obama on their political trajectory from Chicago to Washington, Jarrett played the role of protective mother figure. Thanks to her proximity to the president and first lady, she had unprecedented influence and had become, in the eyes of some close political observers, a virtual co-president to Chief Executive Obama—the dedicated leftist who sought to transform America into a European-style democratic socialist state. Her closeness to both the president and first lady was the cause of much envy and bitterness among the White House staff; even those who didn’t hate her nevertheless feared her and tried to stay out of her way.

Jarrett’s Chief Executive Obama, unlike Plouffe’s Candidate Obama, was aloof and detached from everyday concerns. His head was in the ideological clouds. He failed to grasp the secret of getting things done in Washington: compromise, concessions, cutting deals.

“Obama really doesn’t have the joy of the game,” remarked Lawrence Summers, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama. “Clinton basically loved negotiating with a bunch of other pols, about anything. If you told him, ‘God, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got to allocate all the office
space in the Senate. If you could come spend some time talking to the majority leader in figuring out how to allocate office space in the Senate,’ Clinton would think that was pretty interesting and kind of fun. Whereas Obama, he really didn’t like these guys.”

“Consultation is not in the DNA of the Obama administration,” Vernon Jordan, a longtime Democratic Party wise man, told the author of this book. “Some time ago, while Obama was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, he invited me to join a foursome and play a round of golf at the Vineyard Golf Club in Edgartown. I was paired with the president’s assistant, Marvin Nicholson, and the president played with Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, who at the time was being considered as a possible replacement for [Timothy] Geithner as secretary of the Treasury. When the round of golf was over, the president immediately left. And Bloomberg turned to me and said, ‘I played four hours of golf with the president and he didn’t ask me a goddamn thing.’

“The Obama administration resembles the [Jimmy] Carter administration in being closed like that,” Vernon Jordan went on. “No matter how obstructive the Republicans may be, Obama has the responsibility of leadership. I’m worried that he’s overplaying his hand in saying that it’s all the Republicans’ fault. That may be true, but what are
you
, Mr. President, going to do to bring them around?”

As I pointed out in my book
The Amateur
, Obama was inept in the arts of management and governance. He didn’t learn from his mistakes, but repeated policies that made the economy less robust and the nation less safe. He was, in short, a strange kind of president—one who derived no joy from the cut and thrust of
political horse trading, but who clung to the narcissistic life of the presidency.

The disconnect between these two Obamas—the skillful Candidate and the incompetent Chief Executive—raised a perplexing question in the minds of many people: how could such a talented and successful political campaigner turn out to be so woefully inept in the arts of governance?

One answer to that question was provided many years ago by the political scientist Richard E. Neustadt in his 1960 landmark study,
Presidential Power
. “The Presidency is no place for amateurs,” wrote Neustadt. “[The office of the president needs] experienced politicians of extraordinary temperament. . . . That sort of expertise can hardly be acquired without deep experience in political office. The Presidency is a place for men of politics. But by no means is it a place for every politician.”

It was no place for Barack Obama.

Barack Obama’s amateurism was the worst-kept secret in Washington.

“The people who make the decisions in the White House are a small band of loyalists who helped get Obama elected,” explained a member of the Business Roundtable who dealt frequently with the administration. “They make the decisions in the Oval Office without any of the cabinet members or department heads present, not even the secretary of state or the secretary of defense or the national security adviser. Administratively, that process limits the president’s capacity as a leader to do more than
two things at a time. There is no mechanism for internally rounding out the process so that the key people with responsibility to carry out policy decisions are in on the decisions. The result, on issue after issue, when the Obama administration says there is a priority, there is no bill sent to Congress. The dynamic is dysfunctional within the Obama administration. In the Bush White House, Karl Rove kept a firm grip on policy. There is no one in the Obama administration that has the talent or ability to do that.”

At some level, Obama was aware of his own shortcomings. For instance, shortly before he was scheduled to address the Business Roundtable, Jack Lew, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget, was asked if there was any subject the business leaders should not raise with the president. “Yes,” said Lew. “Don’t ask about leadership. He’s sensitive about the criticism that he hasn’t provided strong leadership.”

One explanation for the discrepancy between the two Obamas was obvious: campaigning and governing require entirely different talents, and Obama was superb at one and woefully deficient in the other. He might not have been good at governing, but in the words of Glenn Thrush of Politico, he “always preferred winning ugly to losing nobly.”

Jarrett and Plouffe—his most influential advisers—appealed to different sides of Obama’s personality. Jarrett’s job was to protect him from the unpleasant: she walled him off from critics, kept contending voices at bay, and reinforced his narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence—that he could achieve things that were beyond the reach of ordinary mortals simply by wishing them so. Her task was to conceal the fact that Obama was not only inexperienced but also shockingly immature.

“Valerie is very smart,” said a former Democratic governor of a large Eastern state. “When I was governor, I talked to her once or twice a week. She was good on substantive things, like whether the president should weigh in on a production tax credit for the wind industry. But she was not terrific on politics. She was not great on getting the president to have good relations with other politicians, labor leaders, and business leaders. Like the president, Valerie has not had much executive experience.”

David Plouffe’s job was completely different from Jarrett’s. His task was to drag the childish and amateurish Obama back to cold, harsh political realities and tell the candidate the unvarnished truth.

And in the summer of 2011, the truth was that Barack Obama’s chances of winning reelection looked uncertain. Over the past several months, he had suffered one crushing setback after another.

To begin with, he had taken what he admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections. The Republicans recaptured the House, gaining sixty-three seats—the largest midterm seat change since the 1938 midterm elections. This put an effective end to Obama’s sweeping progressive agenda, and the experience left him pained and confused.

Obama had barely recovered from that punch when the Republicans in Congress handed him another humiliating blow during the debt-ceiling negotiations, forcing him to agree to an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. To quell a revolt by his base,
Obama swallowed his pride and invited Bill Clinton to join him in a press conference in the White House briefing room and defend the president’s actions. As Obama might have expected, Clinton upstaged him. Obama left after a few minutes to attend a Christmas party, allowing Clinton to answer reporters’ questions for twenty-three uninterrupted minutes and prove once again that he was the pro, and Obama the amateur.

After that embarrassing performance, Obama froze Clinton out of the White House and refused to have anything to do with him. But his problems didn’t stop there. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the federal government’s credit rating for the first time in America’s history, and the economic recovery that Obama had promised was just over the horizon stalled once again. Unemployment stubbornly remained stuck above 9 percent, and more and more people simply gave up looking for work. And according to the latest Pew poll, independent voters were deserting the president in droves, with only 31 percent saying they would vote to reelect him—down from the 52 percent who voted for him in the 2008 election. Worse, the president’s overall approval numbers fell to an all-time low of 38 percent, heading toward the unelectable zone.

For campaign strategist David Plouffe, desperate times called for desperate measures, and his argument in favor of using the loathed Bill Clinton in Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign came down to a simple statement: Plouffe wanted to win more than he needed to hate.

He was counting on the fact that Obama felt the same way. To stay in power, Obama was going to have to do what other politicians did. He’d have to raise a disgraceful amount of money,
figure out how to get around the campaign finance laws, make sure the super PACs were in place, run TV spots that were sometimes absolute lies, drop mail that didn’t tell the truth—and, most important of all, use Bill Clinton, whose poll numbers among Democrats and independents were in the high sixties. As things worked out, Obama went even further than that: in one TV commercial, he practically accused Mitt Romney of murder.

CHAPTER THREE

MICHELLE’S PLEA

I
t wasn’t so easy for Valerie Jarrett to put aside her loathing of Bill Clinton. She was still bitter over Clinton’s underhanded attacks on Obama during the brutal 2008 Democratic Party primary contest. In this, as in many other things, Jarrett reflected the feelings of Michelle Obama, who, if anything, despised the Clintons even more than her husband did.

Like many modern first ladies, Michelle exercised enormous behind-the-scenes power in the White House. But she had become careful not to be seen getting directly involved in political decision making in the West Wing. She had learned her lesson from bitter experience—the negative reaction to her gauche remark, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” and the widespread criticism following her wildly expensive vacation in Spain that masqueraded as a state visit. Under the
skillful orchestration of the East Wing’s public relations machine, there were no more cheeky remarks from the first lady about the president, such as this classic Michelle blooper: “We have this ritual in the morning. We get up and [Sasha and Malia] want ten more minutes so they can come in my bed and if Dad isn’t there—because he is too snore-y and stinky, they don’t want ever to get in the bed with him.”

But her handlers were careful not to get in her way when Michelle tried to exercise influence over her husband. If she wanted him to do something that required immediate attention, she asked her best friend Valerie Jarrett to carry the message.

One of the things that irritated Michelle most was how Barack dithered. According to a story that Jarrett told friends, Michelle complained that “Barack had a hell of a time making a decision on which tie to wear in the morning or whether he wanted the chicken or the fish for dinner at night.” When it came to complicated policy decisions, Michelle grumbled, “Barack sometimes gets tied in knots and allows warring factions to pull him in one direction and then another.”

When Michelle heard from Valerie that David Plouffe intended to use Bill Clinton in the 2012 campaign, she went ballistic. According to Jarrett, Michelle’s chief fear was that Clinton would have too much influence over her vacillating husband and thereby lessen the influence that she and Jarrett had over him. If Clinton, with his popularity and charisma, could help push Barack over the top in the coming election, he could just as easily throw Barack off the cliff if he chose to do so. Michelle Obama’s and Valerie Jarrett’s mistrust of Bill and Hillary went well beyond mere political considerations. It reflected something more visceral—their
deep personal feelings as African Americans that the Clintons were, like most white people, racists. Michelle and Valerie recalled, for instance, Bill Clinton’s famous line (passed on by Senator Edward M. Kennedy), “A few years ago, this guy would be getting us coffee.”