Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (6 page)

Obama arrived at his destination, Blue Heron Farm, in a twenty-car motorcade. The lavish 28.5-acre estate in Chilmark rented for $50,000 a week and had a five-bedroom Victorian farmhouse, a swimming pool, a hot tub, a horseback riding ring, a golf practice tee, volleyball and basketball courts, vast gardens, a boathouse, and beach access to Squibnocket Pond.

According to local lore, the Vineyard was the setting of Barack Obama’s decision to run for president. Back in the summer of 2004, after Obama gave his famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Valerie Jarrett invited him to visit her in Oak Bluffs, an enclave of quaint cottages and pink Victorian houses on Martha’s Vineyard where affluent African Americans have congregated for generations. At the time, Jarrett was co-chairman of Obama’s campaign for the United States Senate, and she arranged for him to make an appearance at Edgartown’s Old Whaling Church, where his old Harvard Law professor, Charles Ogletree, was holding his annual summer forum on race issues. Obama was introduced to the crowd by another Harvard professor, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, as “my pick for president in 2012.”

“[Skip] was a little off in terms of how soon it would happen,” Ogletree reportedly recalled with a chuckle. “Barack walked into
the Old Whaling Church through the back door and the place was packed and folks went wild. I expected him just to wave and thank people, but he gave a wonderful talk. . . . He made quite a splash.”

The next day, Obama was the guest of honor at a reception at Skip Gates’s house in Oak Bluffs.

“It was a remarkable gathering of Vineyard veterans who relished the idea that this guy was popular beyond measure,” Ogletree said.

All of this took place shortly after Obama’s forty-third birthday—and before he had accomplished anything noteworthy beyond his Boston convention speech. He had never worked in the trenches of the Democratic Party, and during his seven years as an Illinois state senator he had taken a pass on tough issues by voting “present” 129 times. But Obama’s lack of experience and preparation for high office didn’t faze Valerie Jarrett, and during his stopover on Martha’s Vineyard she encouraged him to run for president.

As things turned out, it didn’t take much coaxing on Jarrett’s part. Obama had been thinking about the presidency long before the epiphany on Martha’s Vineyard. He already had the White House in his sights.

Valerie Jarrett had been fanning Obama’s political ambitions practically from the day they met, in Chicago back in the early 1990s, when Barack was a community organizer and his fiancée, Michelle Robinson, worked for Jarrett in Mayor Daley’s city hall. Jarrett virtually adopted the Obamas after they married and introduced the neophyte politician to the city’s power brokers and
Lakefront millionaire fund-raisers who would back his political ascension.

Many of the people I interviewed for this book told me that, for all Obama’s egotism and vanity, he was acutely aware that he would never have become president if it weren’t for Valerie Jarrett. And after he won the White House, Obama rewarded Jarrett by installing her in the second-floor West Wing office once occupied by Karl Rove, and before that by First Lady Hillary Clinton.

On the wall of her office, Jarrett hung a gift from Obama—a framed copy of the original 1866 petition asking Congress to amend the Constitution to give women the right to vote and, beside it, the final resolution passed by Congress in 1919 granting women that right. “Valerie,” Obama wrote, “You are carrying on a legacy of strong women making history! Happy Birthday, Barack Obama.”

“Valerie Jarrett is my wife’s cousin,” Vernon Jordan told the author of this book. “Valerie’s mother and my wife Ann are first cousins. I see Valerie at family Sunday night suppers in Washington. She has a huge amount of influence in the White House. The president has the utmost confidence in her and relies on her advice.

“Her power derives from one simple fact—proximity,” Jordan continued. “No one except Michelle Obama is closer to the president than Valerie. Every cabinet member and politician wants to be on Air Force One and in the Oval Office, and the president has given Valerie the power to handle all that.”

Early in Obama’s first term, Jarrett often stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom and carried an overnight bag that she kept in her office.
But staying over became such a routine that she moved permanently into a room in the family’s private quarters, referred to by the White House staff as “the Residence.” She redecorated the room to suit her taste and kept a complete day-into-evening wardrobe, which was curated by her daughter, Laura, and included expensive designer dresses and gowns from Badgley Mischka and Alexander McQueen.

It quickly became apparent to others who worked in the White House that Jarrett was at the top of the pecking order. She was more powerful than the president’s first chiefs of staff, Rahm Emanuel and William Daley.

“Rahm thought he was running the White House, but he wasn’t,” said one of Emanuel’s close political associates. “His advice was sometimes taken and sometimes not. There were people who were much closer to the president than Rahm, especially David Axelrod, Michelle, and Valerie Jarrett, and Rahm didn’t get along with two of them—Michelle and Valerie. There was a lot of dysfunction around the president, and saying yes to Rahm was saying no to Michelle and Valerie. Eventually, Rahm was shoved out of the White House by those women.”

The story was pretty much the same with Rahm’s replacement, Bill Daley. When Daley quit the White House in frustration after less than a year, he told friends how Jarrett had made his job impossible. Frequently, he said, he and the president would agree on a plan of action, such as the selection of a new domestic policy adviser. Then Jarrett would get into the elevator and go to the second-floor Residence, where she had dinner with the president
and first lady. By the time she returned, the decision had been reversed.

Jarrett had a staff of about forty people and her own Secret Service detail. She could pick and choose which White House meetings to attend, and her tentacles reached into the remotest corners of the federal government. When she spoke at a meeting, she made it clear that she was speaking for the president or first lady. If the meeting took place in the Oval Office, she stayed behind after everyone left and had the last word with the president. You had to reach back nearly seventy years, to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and his alter ego, Harry Hopkins, to find a presidential adviser who possessed the kind of power exercised by Valerie Jarrett.

“She moves the players around like chess pieces,” said a woman who used to work on Jarrett’s staff in the White House. “You can hate her, and most people in the White House do, but she is brilliant at a lot of things, from economics to politics to public administration. And she works staggering hours, seven days a week, probably fourteen hours a day. Sometimes she falls asleep at her desk.

“Her capacity for juggling a dozen things at once is truly amazing,” this former Jarrett aide continued. “She never forgets a name or date or detail. That’s the only way it’s possible to control such a huge and unwieldy thing as the federal government.

“She is obsessed with disloyalty and laziness, and she finds both everywhere. Valerie assumes that you are lazy and disloyal unless you prove otherwise over a long period. Even then, your performance doesn’t count if she decides that you are lazy and disloyal.”

CHAPTER SIX

THE THIRD MEMBER IN THE MARRIAGE

“A
mong the narrative threads that course almost uninterrupted throughout the history of the American presidency,” observed Robert Draper in the
New York Times Magazine
, “is the inevitable presence in the White House of The One Who Gets the Boss. Karen Hughes got George W. Bush. Bruce Lindsey got Bill Clinton. Jim Baker got the elder Bush. And so on, back to William Seward’s evolving closeness with Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong reliance on the counsel of James Madison. Each such aide has served his or her president in a way that reveals the latter’s psychology.”

Valerie Jarrett’s unique hold on Obama—and the ultimate source of her power—could only be understood by examining the role she played in Obama’s emotional life. By acting as his all-knowing, all-powerful guru, Jarrett made Obama feel that he
was under her protection. She watched over him and made him feel safe. He was her special charge, the Chosen One. She focused on him, doted on him, and devoted her entire life to him. She gave him the kind of unconditional love that he had never received from his mother, who frequently abandoned him as a child.

Several biographers have pointed out that as a child, Obama felt he had to earn his mother’s love; it was never unconditional. He won her approval by proving through his achievements that he was destined for greatness. Failure was regarded as a catastrophe; it made him feel worthless and contemptible. In his book
The Audacity of Hope
, he wrote about losing the race for a congressional seat from the South Side of Chicago in 2000 to Bobby Rush. “It’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community,” he wrote, and that “everywhere you go, the word ‘loser’ is flashing through people’s minds.”

In Michelle Obama, he chose a wife who was in many respects like his mother. He had to win Michelle’s approval by living up to her exacting standards, and when he fell short, he suffered her devastating criticism, sarcasm, and cold rejection—a psychological replay of his mother’s abandonment.

Although there was no question that Barack Obama loved his wife, their relationship was fraught with tension. To begin with, Michelle never let him forget that it was she, not he, who had made all the sacrifices in the marriage, and that she’d had to accommodate to a life that was not what she had envisioned for herself.

“She has to put up with me. And my schedule and my stresses. And she’s done a great job on that,” Obama said with noticeable overtones of guilt. “But I think it would be a mistake to think that my wife, when I walk in the door, is,
Hey, honey, how was your day? Let me give you a neck rub
. It’s not as if Michelle is thinking in terms of, How do I cater to my husband? I think it’s much more, We’re a team, and how do I make sure that this guy is together enough that he’s paying attention to his
girls
and not forgetting the basketball game that he’s supposed to be going to on Sunday? So she’s basically managing me quite effectively.”

Early in Obama’s first term, while he and Michelle were growing accustomed to living in the White House pressure cooker, they were frequently at each other’s throats. They had trouble sleeping and agreed to use separate bedrooms—an arrangement that continues to this day. They discussed their problems with a physician, but they refused his suggestion to take antidepressants to reduce their stress and anxiety.

During their early months in the White House, the Obamas gave a joint interview to Jodi Kantor of the
New York Times
. “It was clear that the perfect-seeming couple that had glided across the dance floor at the inaugural balls nine months earlier were still privately grappling with the very fact of being president and first lady,” Kantor later wrote.

          
Michelle Obama said she still asked her husband, whenever she found him seated behind John F. Kennedy’s desk, a few feet away, “What are you doing there? Get up from there!” When I asked how it was possible to have an equal marriage when one person was president,
the first lady let out a sharp “hmmmpfh,” as if she were relieved someone had finally asked, then let her husband suffer through the answer. It took him three stop-and-start tries. “My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,” he finally said, before she rescued him with an answer about how their private decisions were made on an equal basis.