Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (11 page)

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As the bus tour was concluding, White House officials put out the word that the president would deliver an economic speech when he returned from vacation. This too was part of the holding pattern as the White House tried to regroup. “There was this huge debate going on about whether the president should have a jobs plan, and so we figured we can suffer through three weeks of jobs planning,” said one of the president’s advisers. “We also thought it would make it easier for him to be on vacation if everyone knew when he came back something big was going to happen.” But first came a misstep that reinforced the impression that Obama’s White House was far from ready for the fall battle. On the morning of August 31, White House chief of staff Bill Daley called John Boehner, who was in Ohio, to inform him that a letter would be forthcoming to the leaders of Congress requesting that the president be allowed to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress on the evening of Wednesday, September 7, the day the House was scheduled to return from its August recess. A little later that morning, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer sent out a tweet with the news that Obama had asked for the joint session speech.

Almost immediately, a White House official got an angry call from Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff. Why weren’t we informed of this? he demanded to know. Apparently Boehner had not relayed to his staff the contents of Daley’s call. The real problem, however, was that the White House was asking for a prime-time speech by the president on the night of the first big post–Labor Day debate among the Republican presidential candidates, scheduled for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. White House officials said the GOP debate was not a factor in the planning, though privately they had begun to explore whether the sponsors of the debate, MSNBC and
Politico,
would consider moving back the start time by an hour. “It is coincidental,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told incredulous reporters. Carney said the existence of one debate on one cable channel was “not enough reason not to have the speech at the time that we decided to have it. Again, there’s one president; there’s twenty-some odd debates.”

The White House talking points only made the president look small and petty. Conservative talk radio whipped up opposition, and by the middle of the afternoon Boehner responded by telling the president to move the speech to Thursday, September 8. Daley called Boehner back and pressed him to schedule the speech as requested, but Boehner would not budge. Obama was furious with his staff, feeling they had put him in the position of appearing to try to jam the Speaker. By nightfall, Obama gave up and agreed to move the speech. It was a one-day hiccup, but one that again reinforced perceptions of a weak president. The
New York Times
wrote an editorial castigating Boehner for petty politics, but could not resist a shot at the president. “
It was distressing
,” the editorial said, “to watch President Obama fail, once again, to stand up to an opposition that won’t brook the smallest compromise. . . . Mr. Obama’s people negotiated with Mr. Boehner’s people behind closed doors. When they emerged, the White House caved, to no one’s surprise.” Daley bore the brunt of the criticism—and accepted the blame. “I’ll take responsibility for that,” he said. It turned out that his days as chief of staff were numbered, though his departure was not primarily because of this episode.

The flap over the speech may have seemed minor—Washington gamesmanship at its worst—but it had a powerful effect on many of Obama’s allies. Some of the president’s political advisers were privately critical of the White House, worried that the debt ceiling fight had bled away confidence in Obama’s leadership. “I just don’t think they looked around the curve on some of the leadership stuff,” Robert Gibbs told me a few days later. “What’s stunning to me on some of these polls is how much those characteristics have taken a real big hit. I mean, this is the guy who killed Osama bin Laden.” Gibbs was frustrated especially about the mishap over the timing of the economic speech. “You want to reset the agenda on jobs,” he said. “So you don’t pick the single most political time slot possible in the week to do it. That’s what I don’t get. If you look weak and political all in the same pitch, I mean, what could be worse?” Gibbs knew the president well, having been with him from the 2004 Senate race forward. “My guess is more than anything he’s frustrated,” he said. “I think for a long time he’s been playing this [the battles with Republicans] as if it’s a little bit more on the level. I think he is more clear-eyed about the game that’s been played.”

The day after the standoff over the speech, I sat down with David Axelrod in Chicago. He was furious with the Republicans. “This is the first time they’ve [Congress] ever turned down a president,” he said. “They knew that we ran on this pledge to try and bring more cooperation and less partisanship to Washington, and I think they were never going to let us do that.” The lesson from the debt ceiling and the embarrassment over the speech was plain. “It really does
take two to tango, and if you’re out there on the dance floor tangoing by yourself you look kind of stupid,” he said. He was deeply worried about the economy and determined not to let the Republicans turn the coming election into a referendum on Obama. “This is the Romney strategy,” he said. “Blame Obama for every ill and offer yourself as the remedy, but mostly blame him for every ill. And if we’re passive in the face of that, then we’ll certainly lose.” He said he did not believe past was prologue and argued that many Americans did not blame Obama for the problems he had been dealing with. That would give the president an opening to climb out of the political hole he was in. “From next week on,” he said, “we have to articulate a clear, clarion-clear economic vision that people see themselves in, not a clinical kind of macroeconomic vision but an economic vision for now and the future that they have an investment in. I think we need to recoup the basic themes that drove him all through his political career, about sort of how do you not just recover from the recession but how do you restore the middle class, how do you restore the sense of fairness and opportunity that we’ve lost? And without clearly articulating that vision—and he hasn’t for sure—we can’t win.”

I said I thought the real question for the president was not whether people blamed him for what had happened as he was coming into office but whether they believed he had the strength of leadership now to do something about it. I said that question seemed more acute now than it had a year earlier. “I agree with that,” Axelrod said. Part of the president’s problem was that what once was seen as strength—his patience, his calmness, and his willingness to compromise—now seemed evidence of weakness. Was he capable of making a shift? I asked. “Well, I think this is a big thing,” he replied. “This is a strategic and tactical question that we have to decide, but it’s also a personal question that he has to decide. I find what these guys [Republicans] are doing deeply offensive, I think he finds it deeply offensive, and I think he needs to show some of that. I think he needs to be very passionate about it. And he needs to be passionate about it in a simple and direct way. And if he is, if he does that, I think we will win. If he doesn’t I think it’s going to be harder. This is not a time for nuance. I think that the battles we’re having on the Hill need to be channeled into a larger fight, because they really are. These fights on the Hill reflect what these Republican presidential candidates are all saying, in part because they’re all worshipping the same false god of this Tea Party crowd. So it’s important that this thing that we’re talking about, this sort of sense of passion and edge, extend to how he talks about all the governmental stuff as well. He can’t be sort of a narrator of the government four days a week and then a campaigner three days a week. I mean, it’s got to be of one piece.”

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Obama addressed Congress and the nation on Thursday, September 8. The speech was ostensibly to present a new package of measures designed to create more than a million jobs. Its other and more important purpose was to make the pivot from negotiation to confrontation, from governing to campaigning. Before the speech, one of his advisers made clear that from that day forward, Obama would not only press for action on his jobs package but also use every tool available to pin the blame on Republicans if his proposals were not passed. He was not going to go behind closed doors with congressional leaders. “We’re not going to sit in the Cabinet Room for weeks at a time,” the adviser said.

Obama spoke with a new sense of urgency. He offered a package of $447 billion in tax cuts and new spending initiatives. The biggest piece by far was an extension of the payroll tax cut that was initially approved in the 2010 lame-duck session. He proposed including employers as well as individuals in the extension. He told lawmakers that some of his ideas were ones Republicans had supported in the past. “You should pass this jobs plan right away,” he said. He talked about the political climate. “The next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here—the people who hired us to work for them—they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months. . . . They need help, and they need it now. He drew a contrast between his philosophy and that of the Republicans: “This larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own—that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”

The joint session speech marked the pivot point for Obama. He saw the jobs package as something that might actually kick-start the economy, and he knew that anything that helped the economy made his path to reelection that much easier. But he also needed a new argument for the campaign. And at heart, he needed Americans to look at him anew. “Obama is a reasonable guy, and you’ve got to be true to who you are,” a senior White House official told me later. “You can’t light yourself on fire. It’s not going to work. But if you focus too much on reasonableness, you can lose strength. Being reasonable in the face of unreasonableness—sometimes you can see how someone can turn that to weakness. That’s what the fall strategy was about, that was what the tone of the joint session was. We needed a circuit breaker on our political narrative. We needed something that would allow everyone who commented on it to say Obama learned this. It was one of the toughest things for us, because we’re all somewhat stubborn and we all sometimes want to just tell the [Washington chattering class] to go to hell. We were reasonable with Boehner before, we’re
talking to these guys. Now we’re not. Now we’re going out to the country and we’re going to be tough, so you need the circuit breaker moment to move on. The speech was about the circuit breaker.”

Obama had returned from his summer vacation focused on the job ahead. Beyond the joint session speech, his advisers had blocked out the first months of the fall for regular travel outside of Washington to make the case for the jobs package. One trip in late September took Obama to an aging bridge over the Ohio River that linked Ohio to Kentucky and by happenstance the areas represented by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. “
Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell
, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama said. “Help us rebuild America. Help us put this country back to work. Pass this jobs bill right away.” It wasn’t exactly Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” but as political theater it got the point across that Obama was now fully in campaign mode. On September 19, Obama defiantly reengaged with Republicans on the deficit. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, he called for $1.5 trillion in new taxes to help produce overall $3.2 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade. “I will not support—I will not support—any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans,” he said. Republicans accused him of political posturing. White House officials saw it as redefining Obama in the face of criticism that he had been weak—and weakened—in the debt ceiling battle.

Rarely had the president been as blunt in his challenges as he was that day.Rarely had he been so willing to draw such sharp contrasts. In just a few weeks, Obama had transitioned from a president who talked openly about how he was prepared to buck his own party on entitlements to a politician determined to reconnect with his base as the two parties headed toward the election campaign. Attempting to stay above the fray and appealing for at least a temporary cessation in the partisan wars in Washington was no longer an option. Obama’s speech also helped reassure some in the Democratic family that he was still one of them, prepared to fight for their values. Daniel Mintz, the campaign director of MoveOn.org, an organization often at odds with the president, issued a statement of praise. “For months, hundreds of thousands of members of the American Dream Movement have been urging Washington to focus on creating jobs and making our tax system work for all Americans, not just the super rich,” he said. “Today, we’re glad to see this message reach the White House.”

That afternoon, I spoke with David Plouffe, who outlined the thinking behind the speech and how it fit together with the jobs package. He said he had never seen the electorate so focused on the issue of fairness and said Obama’s positions drew a sharp contrast with the Republicans, whether candidates like
Mitt Romney and Rick Perry or members of Congress like Paul Ryan. Looking ahead, Plouffe talked about the challenges the economy presented to Obama’s reelection. “There are two certainties of our life for the next fourteen months,” he said. “One, the economy is going to be awfully challenging. Two, we’re going to have a really, really close and tough election. That’s just a fact.” He said that everyone around the president knew people did not give him high grades on the economy, but that the contrast he would draw in the campaign was one the voters would respond to. “I think at the end of the day we can construct a campaign that suggests to people that this is a president who’s in alignment with the world you think we live in and where we need to go as a country,” he said. “But it’s going to be hard. It’s going to have to be a much more contrasted message. It just has to be. Right?”