A Promised Land is former U.S. President Barack Obama’s memoir, taking us on his journey from being a biracial kid raised by a single mother to a transformative historical figure as the nation’s first African-American president. Published in 2020, A Promised Land is Obama’s third book (preceded by 1995’s Dreams From My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream), and it is the first in a planned series of memoirs covering his presidency from 2009 to 2017.
At every step of his political career—from obscure state senator to national convention keynote speaker to U.S. Senator to President—Barack Obama was guided by a deep and abiding faith in the fundamental unity of Americans, the potential and promise of America, and the power of the democratic system to effect real change for ordinary people.
In telling the story of Barack Obama’s rise, A Promised Land functions on one level as a simple biography, one that many readers are likely familiar with. Obama describes his political awakenings as a young man, his early career as an Illinois state senator, his electrifying keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and his election in 2008 as the country’s first Black president.
Once in office, Obama details the challenges his administration faced, including:
Beyond the straightforward narrative of Obama’s life and career, A Promised Land explores several important themes:
Growing up as the biracial child of a Black father and a white mother, Barack Obama understood from an early age just how important race was in American life. His biracial parentage marked him out as unique, growing up in an era when interracial marriages and relationships were rare—and even still prohibited by law in some U.S. jurisdictions.
He was keenly aware that being Black marked him out as different, “other.” His schoolmates would sometimes remark on how he failed to conform to Black stereotypes they saw in film and television; other times, he noticed that his family seemed to exist on a financial knife’s edge, in a way that those of his peers didn’t. It was impossible to miss the powerful and often decisive role that race played in American social and cultural life, as well as the inescapable link between race and class.
Obama saw how important race was, not only as it pertained to his personal life and identity, but to American social, political, and economic life. As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, he saw how the city government overlooked the needs of Black communities, from sanitation to education and health to asbestos removal.
Later, as president trying to ameliorate the economic damage from the 2008 financial crisis, he saw how disproportionately the nation’s wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies had hit America’s Black and Latino population. And he observed how racially tinged politics like the “birther” movement (which held that he hadn’t been born in the United States and thus, wasn’t eligible to be president) still had tremendous power to sow division, hate, and mistrust in 21st-century America.
As a presidential candidate, and later as president, Obama sought to use his platform to defuse tensions between Black and white Americans. He observed that long-simmering Black feelings of betrayal and anger at their historical experience in America could occasionally boil over into overheated rhetoric and unfair accusations of racism toward whites.
At the same time, he noted how many whites felt offense and resentment at the presumption of racism. Many working-class, blue-collar white voters viewed the national conversation about race and racism as a rejection of their own struggles and hardships, a way of saying that economic and social problems within white communities were irrelevant and unworthy of attention.
Despite Obama’s attempts to transcend racial barriers and present himself as a unifying figure, he could not overcome the centrality of race as a defining issue in American politics. As the nation’s first Black president, he was the target of a burgeoning racialized style of right-wing politics.
On issues ranging from foreclosure relief to health care reform, Republicans and their allies in right-wing media cast Obama’s policy proposals as socialist and un-American, while portraying Obama himself as a dangerous outsider who represented an existential threat to the traditional American way of life.
The Tea Party movement arose as a direct response to the Obama presidency. The Tea Party was a right-wing populist movement focused on opposition to progressive taxation and the welfare state. A core message of the movement was that the lazy and undeserving “takers” were draining the resources of the hardworking “makers” through overly generous redistributive public programs.
Obama understood the movement as a racially driven reaction to himself, with the definition of who was a “taker” (urban Blacks) and who was a “maker” (suburban and rural whites) strongly implied. Tea Partiers frequently highlighted this component of their message by waving Confederate flags at their rallies and displaying signs and racist placards that, for example, depicted the nation’s first Black president as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.
Clearly, the election of a Black president alone was insufficient to heal America’s racial wounds.
Obama’s faith in democracy was a constant throughout his political career.
In college, Obama studied figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In hearing the stories of their struggle and endurance, he saw the awesome potential of mass democracy and of a politics based on empowerment instead of power. And he realized that he wanted to make his mark on the world by pursuing these ideals.
Obama believed that there was nothing more powerful, efficacious, healing, or unifying than ordinary people coming together through the democratic process to improve their lives, strengthen their communities, and overcome their divisions. He believed democracy in America worked because what united Americans as a people was far greater than what divided them.
From his days as a community organizer to when he was at the height of his power as president, Obama observed that the traditional dividing lines in political life—white and Black, native born and immigrant, conservative and liberal—obscured how most voters generally shared the same set of concerns.
Despite the (often passionate) political disagreements, people everywhere worried about universal concerns—the cost of health care, the quality of education, and making sure their kids could enjoy even greater opportunities than they’d had. And he believed that the democratic process was the best way to address those shared concerns and empower communities. By urging Americans to focus on their shared civic heritage and rich democratic traditions, Obama believed that a more unifying, healing, and empowering form of politics was possible—and he would constantly strive to bring that political vision to life.
As he built a political career, Barack saw that meaningful change could come—and often needed to come—from inside the system. This approach, of being a reformer rather than a revolutionary, would become central to Obama’s theory of political change and became a constant theme running through his presidency.
As a young man, however, Obama had had a distaste for traditional politicians and electoral politics in general. He believed that politicians were venal, transactional figures motivated more by power and money than by ideals or public service. During this period, he believed that activists could only effect change through radical, revolutionary means—attacking the system from the outside rather than reforming it from the inside.
But Obama’s attitude toward the electoral process began to change when he saw the success of the Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington (1922-1987) in the 1980s, when the future president was working as a community organizer. Washington took on the city’s political machine, and he built a genuine multiracial, multiethnic movement of working people. It taught Obama that engaging in electoral politics wasn’t “selling out” or giving in to the establishment. Rather, running progressive candidates and using the power of government to meaningfully improve people’s lives was a crucial part of effecting change.
As president, Obama found that bringing about change from within existing political institutions necessarily entailed making compromises and setting aside more ambitious plans if they couldn’t be accommodated within that system. He always took the pragmatic approach and was willing to accept partial success and incremental changes if they could deliver real benefits to working Americans.
When the Obama administration took office, it was confronted with a once-in-a-generation economic crisis that demanded a sweeping response from Washington. The economic team believed that, given the scale of the crisis, a stimulus bill on the order of $1 trillion would be necessary to restore the economy to full health. But given Congress’s unwillingness to spend that much, “only” $787 billion was possible.
Obama also wanted to use the stimulus bill to make long-term infrastructure investments. But he accepted that these projects would take too long to bring to fruition and would be relatively inefficient at putting money into people’s pockets. Instead, his administration crafted the bill to provide additional funding for well-established, existing programs like unemployment insurance, food stamps, business and individual tax cuts, and aid to state and local governments.
Despite the compromises, the stimulus aligned closely with what Obama wanted, delivered major benefits to ordinary people, helped rescue the domestic economy from a recession, and made a number of farsighted investments in the country’s future.
When Obama was looking to craft a health care bill that would take the nation toward a system of universal coverage, he adopted a similarly pragmatic, results-driven approach. The bill was ultimately modeled on a centrist health care reform law signed by Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. The Massachusetts law had relied on a mixture of regulation of the health insurance market and state subsidies for disadvantaged citizens to purchase insurance in order to bring down costs and expand coverage.
Obama knew that the model wasn’t perfect—the state subsidies were often too stingy, and the system still preserved a crucial role for the for-profit insurance industry. Nonetheless, it was the best model available with a genuine track record of real-world success.
It was Obama’s innate pragmatism in action. If they’d been designing the U.S. health care system from scratch, they would have created a more left-wing, single-payer system in which the government simply provided health insurance directly to all citizens. But they weren’t starting from scratch. They were trying to reform an existing system, one that most people were already familiar with and were highly resistant to changing. If the administration wanted to get something done to improve the lives of Americans, they needed to work within the framework of that existing system. He wasn’t looking to blow up the system as it was. He wanted to make it deliver better results for people. As ever, he was a reformer—not a revolutionary.
When Obama came into office at the height of the Great Recession brought on by the 2008 financial crisis, there was tremendous public anger toward the banks. Voters felt that the banks’ recklessness and irresponsibility had destroyed the global economy.
While broadly sympathetic to this view, Obama knew that the welfare of the country depended on stabilizing the country’s teetering financial system. He disregarded the suggestions of liberal commentators and left-wing advisors to punish the banks by nationalizing them and seizing their assets. He recognized that such an approach could send the financial system into further chaos, causing even more suffering for ordinary Americans. Instead, he adopted a more pragmatic, moderate approach to restore public confidence in the banks by having the government conduct a thorough audit and requiring financial institutions to hold more assets in reserve.
In deciding this course of action, Obama relied on consensus-building, careful study, spirited debate, and input from all sides. This rational and transparent approach ultimately delivered the desired outcome, as the audits revealed that the banks were fundamentally sound—encouraging investors to recapitalize the banks and get credit flowing to America’s homeowners and small businesses. This marked the beginning of what would become the longest stretch of economic growth in U.S. history—running through the rest of Obama’s two terms in office and beyond.
Throughout his political career, Barack Obama maintained an abiding faith in the idea of America and its potential to be a force for progress.
As an African-American, he could not help but notice the connection between race and poverty and the long shadow that racism continued to cast in American life. He certainly acknowledged the darker, uglier, side of American history—it was impossible not to. But at the same time, he never accepted the idea of America as being irredeemably racist, oppressive, and rotten to the core.
Obama saw America as underachieving. For him, America was not just a nation: It was a set of ideals based in representative democracy, human rights, and the equality of all before the law. True, it usually fell short of those ideals, but its promise and potential were noble and empowering. He came to see it as his political mission to inspire Americans to help their nation fulfill its highest ideals.
For Obama, the historic nature of his successful run for president was proof of America’s exceptional character.
An African-American winning a major-party nomination, let alone becoming president, was still largely unthinkable to many in 2006 when he began preparing his campaign. He wanted to run for president because the world would forever look at America differently if he won. If a mixed-race kid from a poor background with a funny-sounding name could become president, it would send a message to kids everywhere who thought of themselves as outsiders or that America wasn’t truly for people like them: America was for everyone.
His victory stood as a vindication of his longstanding faith in the power and efficacy of people-driven democracy and of America’s potential to overcome its racial divisions.
Although America’s international reputation had greatly diminished as a result of the war in Iraq and revelation of torture committed by the U.S. during the War on Terror, Obama found that when he traveled internationally as president, there was still a great deal of enthusiasm among both foreign leaders and the general public for the United States. The idea and symbol of America still meant a great deal to people around the world, even if the reality had fallen short. After all, the U.S. was the world’s only remaining superpower, one that had spearheaded the generally peaceful and prosperous postwar order through its role in creating lasting institutions like the UN, NATO, World Bank, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund.
Despite its many mistakes and miscalculations, Obama understood that the U.S. had been a relatively generous and benevolent world power by historical standards. There was still an enormous reserve of goodwill and hope for the United States.
The dominant foreign policy issue at the start of the Obama administration was the fight against international terrorism. While there was broad agreement in the administration that the U.S. needed to dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda’s overseas networks, there was also agreement that the Bush administration’s approach had been ill-conceived, ineffective, and contrary to American values.
Obama wanted to prosecute the War on Terror in line with America’s democratic and constitutional values, rejecting Bush-era policies of unilateral war, torture, and disregard for the Constitution. He believed this would not only be more just but also more effective in the long run, by restoring American moral authority and making it easier to secure the much-needed cooperation of partners in the Muslim world.
This was why his administration focused on winding down the Bush-era torture program, closing extrajudicial detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay, codifying counterterrorism practices under a legal framework in line with the Constitution, and making genuine outreach to Muslims around the world.
In the closing chapters of A Promised Land, Obama tells the story of two simultaneous events that took place in the spring of 2011: the planning and execution of the successful raid to kill terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and the political rise of Donald Trump. By closing on these twin events, Obama demonstrates what he sees as the best and worst of the nation and expresses both his highest hopes and deepest concerns for the country’s future.
In the success of the mission to bring the murderous bin Laden to justice, Obama saw some of the best of America on display. The bravery and professionalism of the Navy SEAL team that flawlessly executed the raid on bin Laden’s compound provided a cathartic, celebratory, and unifying moment for America as the nation saw some of its wounded pride restored. While killing Al Qaeda’s leader could never undo all the damage he had wrought or return those who had been lost, it nevertheless demonstrated the country’s strength, resolve, and commitment to justice, no matter the cost.
But at the same time, the rise of Trump represented an uglier, darker side of America. As the bin Laden raid was being planned, Trump launched himself into national politics by publicly and loudly embracing the cause of birtherism—the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States, and thus, was not eligible to serve as president.
Trump’s antics proved popular with Republican voters, with polls indicating that he was their preferred nominee for the 2012 presidential election. Although the mainstream press and Democratic Party establishment continued to treat Trump as an entertaining sideshow and political lightweight, Obama knew better.
The president understood that spectacle and outlandishness could command media attention—and that made Trump powerful. The dark forces of demagoguery and right-wing populism that Trump was stirring up had a long history in American politics. Trump may have been a con man and carnival barker, but he also represented something dangerous for the future of American democracy.
Looking at Trump’s disturbing and divisive rise on the one hand and the exuberant, unifying celebrations of bin Laden’s death on the other, Obama wondered about the future of the country. Could Americans muster the same patriotism and unity of purpose toward building a better society as they could for war and killing terrorists? Could he be the one to rally Americans to unite behind a spirit of national purpose when it came to educating children, providing health care to their fellow citizens, expanding access to voting, or protecting the natural environment?
Obama wasn’t sure he could answer this question. But it would be the work of the rest of his time in office—and after—to push the nation toward these goals.
A Promised Land is former U.S. President Barack Obama’s bestselling memoir, taking us on his journey from being a biracial kid raised by a single mother to a transformative historical figure as the nation’s first African-American president. Published in 2020, A Promised Land is Obama’s third book (preceded by 1995’s Dreams From My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream), and it is the first in a planned series of volumes covering his presidency from 2009 to 2017.
At every step of his political career—from obscure state senator to national convention keynote speaker to U.S. Senator to President—Barack Obama was guided by a deep and abiding faith in the fundamental unity of Americans, the potential and promise of America, and the power of the democratic system to effect real change for ordinary people.
In telling the story of Barack Obama’s rise, A Promised Land functions on one level as a simple biography, one that many readers are likely familiar with. Obama describes his political awakenings as a young man, his early career as an Illinois state senator, his electrifying keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and his election in 2008 as the country’s first Black president.
Beyond the straightforward narrative of Obama’s life and career, A Promised Land explores several important themes:
Growing up as the biracial child of a Black father and a white mother, Barack Obama understood from an early age just how important race was in American life. He was keenly aware that being Black marked him out as somehow different, “other.” It was impossible to miss the powerful and often decisive role that race played in America’s social, political, and economic life.
Later, as president, he would see how racially tinged politics like the “birther” movement (which held that he hadn’t been born in the United States and thus, wasn’t eligible to be president) still had tremendous power to sow division, hate, and mistrust, even in 21st-century America.
Obama’s faith in democracy was a constant throughout his political career. He believed there was nothing more powerful, efficacious, healing, or unifying than ordinary people coming together through the democratic process to improve their lives, strengthen their communities, and overcome their divisions. He believed democracy in America worked because what united Americans as a people was far greater than what divided them.
For Obama, the democratic process was the best way for Americans to address their shared concerns and empower their communities. By urging Americans to focus on their common civic heritage and rich democratic traditions, Obama believed that a more unifying, healing, and empowering form of politics was possible—and he would constantly strive to bring that political vision to life.
As he built a political career, Obama saw that meaningful change could come—and often needed to come—from inside the system. This approach, of being a reformer rather than a revolutionary, would become central to his theory of political change and became a constant theme running through his presidency.
As president, Obama found that bringing about change from within existing political institutions necessarily entailed making compromises and setting aside more ambitious plans if they couldn’t be accommodated within the system. He always took the pragmatic approach and was willing to accept partial success and incremental changes if they could deliver real benefits to working Americans.
Throughout his political career, Barack Obama maintained an abiding faith in the idea of America and its potential to be a force for progress. As an African-American, he could not help but notice the connection between race and poverty and the long shadow that racism continued to cast in American life. But at the same time, he never accepted the idea of America as being irredeemably racist, oppressive, and rotten to the core.
For him, America was not just a nation: It was a set of ideals based in representative democracy, human rights, and the equality of all before the law. Though the country often fell short of these lofty standards, Obama came to see it as his political mission to inspire Americans to help their nation fulfill its highest ideals.
Barack Obama spent his early years—as he would spend much of his adult life—straddling two worlds. As a child and then as a young man, he would struggle to reconcile the two halves of his identity.
Barack was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to mother Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-1995) and father Barack Obama Sr. (1936-1982). His mother was a white woman whose family came from Kansas and was descended from Scots-Irish stock. His father was a Black man from Kenya who’d met Ann when he traveled to the U.S. to study at the University of Hawaii, where she was a student.
Barack’s biracial parentage marked him out as unique at an early age, growing up in an era when interracial marriages and relationships were rare—and even still prohibited by law in some U.S. jurisdictions.
Even as an adolescent growing up in Hawaii, Barack was keenly aware that being Black made him different, “other.” His schoolmates would sometimes remark on how he failed to conform to Black stereotypes they saw in film and television; other times, he noticed that his family seemed to exist on a financial knife’s edge, in a way that those of his peers didn’t.
Although he was still in his formative years, Barack was beginning to understand, on some basic level, the powerful and often decisive role that race played in American social and cultural life, as well as the inescapable link between race and class.
The absence of any sort of father figure growing up brought Barack closer with the white, maternal side of his family—his mother, Ann; his half-sister, Maya; and his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham (affectionately known by Barack for the rest of his life as “Toot” and “Gramps”).
Barack Obama Sr. abandoned the family and returned to Kenya when his son was still an infant. Apart from one month-long visit by the elder Obama to Hawaii when Barack was 10, the future president never knew his father outside of occasional letters (the contents of which revealed that father Obama knew next to nothing about his son).
While he was struggling to make sense of his biracial identity and find his place as a young Black man being raised within a white family, Barack’s outlook on the world began to take shape, thanks to the crucial influence of his mother, Ann.
Ann Dunham was an iconoclast who'd rebelled against convention as a teenager and young adult. A product of the 1960s counterculture, she refused to conform to how mid-century mainstream American society dictated that a young person—especially a young woman—ought to behave.
She traveled the world, married and remarried several times, and never quite settled into an established career. As a result, she was often financially dependent on her parents, well into adulthood and motherhood. Still, her headstrong personality, her cosmopolitanism, and her rebelliousness deeply shaped Barack’s outlook.
Although she was a free thinker and questioner of conventional wisdom, Ann maintained a clear, almost black-and-white sense of right and wrong. She was appalled by the racism she saw both at home in the U.S. and during her travels abroad, viewed the Vietnam War as an immoral disaster, and was outraged by the revelations of corruption and lawbreaking during the Watergate hearings in 1973-1974.
Ann practiced what she preached and instilled in young Barack the importance of empathy. When she found out that he’d been part of a group at school that was bullying a classmate, she sat her son down and told him that he had a choice to make. He could either be someone who thought about others as people, or someone who only saw others as objects to be manipulated and discarded for his own ends—the choice of which path he would take was entirely his. It was a lesson he would never forget.
Although Barack was always described as intelligent by those who knew him during this time (or at least “smart-mouthed,” according to Gramps), he was unmotivated as a teenager. Hardly a star student and certainly no one’s idea of an overachiever, Barack’s favorite pastimes at this age were hanging out with friends, drinking beer, and smoking marijuana.
Although these were fairly typical experiences for a teenager growing up in the 1970s, they spoke to what Barack would later describe as a certain aimlessness during this period of his life. But during high school, literature began to stir an intellectual awakening within him. Prodded by his mother, who’d instilled in him a reading habit as a child, Barack began to dip his toes into the world of ideas and great thinkers.
In his later high school years in Honolulu, he could frequently be seen devouring works by authors ranging from Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison. It was still self-directed learning at this age. There was no system to how or what he read, nor did he fully understand the texts he was burning through. But he had discovered something far more valuable—a lifelong thirst for knowledge.
Barack matriculated at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the fall of 1979. Although he brought with him a certain intellectual fervor, he was still the typical college freshman in many ways, interested in parties and coeds (often hoping to impress attractive female classmates with his eclectic reading choices).
But Barack did begin to develop some of his core political beliefs during his time at Occidental College. While he was still cynical about political parties and the efficacy of electoral politics (an attitude he had inherited from his mother, who viewed all politicians as corrupt, self-serving, and phony), his conversations with professors and his experiences with a diverse student body taught him that broad social movements had enormous power to catalyze political change.
For Barack, figures like Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), and young civil rights leader John Lewis (1940-2020) were the real agents of change—people who mobilized grassroots coalitions to help the oppressed find their voice and achieve agency over their own lives and futures.
For the first time, Barack Obama began to see the awesome potential of mass democracy and a politics based fundamentally on empowerment instead of power. He realized that he wanted to make his mark on the world by pursuing these ideals.
After two years at Occidental, Barack transferred to Columbia University in New York City in 1981. In his early days in New York, Barack’s outlook and manner were fairly typical for the kind of bookish, intelligent young man that he was. He was highly idealistic, but also brooding, serious, and humorless.
He lived an ascetic life in a series of small Manhattan apartments, surviving on a self-imposed austere diet of tuna fish and hard-boiled eggs. Rather than engaging with the world he hoped to change, Barack—now in his early twenties—spent most of his time reading about it, pondering it, and railing at it for not living up to the ideals he thought it should.
But he soon realized that his brooding earnestness wasn’t useful or productive—rather, it was indulgent, off-putting, and putting him on the path to becoming an embittered cynic and crank. He recognized that his idealism was nothing without drive and focus. Accordingly, he embarked on a regimen of ceaseless self-improvement, both mental and physical. He started working out, taking long runs through Central Park.
Most importantly, he began to question his assumptions about the world, gain some much-needed humility, and to take himself less seriously.
Barack’s life in New York City in the early 1980s was important to his personal, as well as his political, maturation. As a young African-American man, he could not help but notice the wrenching poverty in majority-minority communities in Harlem and the Bronx. It was impossible not to see the connection between race and poverty and the long shadow that racism continued to cast in American life.
Many young people on the left had become deeply cynical about American politics and society during this time. It was the peak of the Reagan era, when conservatism was ascendant and the nation seemed to be turning away from the liberal idealism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Barack’s contemporaries embraced a worldview that saw America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and hypocritical. Rather than the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, which had declared all men to be equal, they saw the real story of America as the enslavement of Black people, the genocide of native peoples, the support of murderous dictators abroad, and the economic and social inequities that defined their contemporary Reagan era.
Barack certainly acknowledged the darker, uglier, side of America—it was impossible not to. But at the same time, he could no longer embrace the cynicism, bitterness, and resignation of his peers on the left. He had traveled the world with his mother and spent a significant part of his childhood in Indonesia, where Ann had moved the family when she met her second husband. There, he had seen poverty and oppression that dwarfed anything he had seen in America.
Barack could not accept the idea that America was rotten to the core. Instead, he saw it as underachieving. For him, America was not just a nation: It was a set of ideals. True, it usually fell short—often tragically short—of those ideals, but its promise and potential were noble and empowering. Over time, this belief would become a cornerstone of his political philosophy: a faith in the idea of America, and the duty of ordinary Americans to help their nation fulfill its highest ideals.
After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Barack wanted to put his ideals into action—to be a part of something that empowered ordinary Americans to force the country to live up to its promise. In 1983, he took a job as a community organizer with a group that was working to help inner-city Chicago residents cope with the economic and social challenges presented by rapid and widespread deindustrialization.
This was a pivotal experience for Barack. For the first time, he was working with real people and learning the nuts-and-bolts of how change was actually made at the most grassroots level. As an organizer, Barack worked with mostly (although by no means exclusively) Black Chicagoans to help them pressure the city government to allocate much-needed resources and services, including installation of stop signs and asbestos removal, to underserved communities.
This was putting Barack’s highest ideals into action—ordinary people coming together and using the democratic process to fight for meaningful improvements in their daily lives. He saw that people did have the power to hold political leaders to account, even in a city like Chicago, whose political establishment had notoriously paid little attention to the health, housing, and educational needs of its Black residents.
In working with members of the community, Barack learned to listen rather than talk, helping him step away from the insular, brooding, and self-serious young man he’d been back in New York. Hearing their stories gave him perspective—as well as some much-needed humility.
Despite witnessing firsthand the efficacy of grassroots democratic activism, Barack still had a distaste for electoral politics. He broadly shared his mother’s view that politicians were venal, transactional figures motivated more by power and money than by ideals or public service. Seeing how the entrenched, white political establishment in Chicago continually ignored the needs of its minority communities certainly didn’t do anything to shake this last vestige of his youthful cynicism.
But his attitude toward the electoral process began to change when he saw the success of the mayoral campaign of Harold Washington (1922-1987). Washington was a U.S. Representative representing a district on the South Side of Chicago. In his 1983 mayoral campaign, he took on the city’s political machine, dominated by the powerful Daley political family.
Barack saw that what Washington had built was more than just a typical municipal election campaign. It was a movement that inspired a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working people. The volunteers who packed Washington’s campaign offices had never participated in a campaign before, but they were moved by the possibility of electing the first Black mayor in a city that had long been scarred by racism and the resulting de facto segregation and economic inequality.
Washington shocked the political world when he beat the Daley machine to win the election. The victory and the movement that had inspired it were a revelation for Barack. He saw that a people-powered movement choosing to engage in electoral politics wasn’t “selling out” or giving in to the establishment. Rather, running progressive candidates and using the power of government to meaningfully improve people’s lives was a crucial part of effecting change.
But as stirring as the Washington campaign had been, the experience of governing was another matter altogether. Barack watched with dismay as the entrenched Chicago Democratic establishment used its control of the city’s board of aldermen (drawn from racially gerrymandered districts created to dilute the voting power of the city’s minorities) to block many of Washington’s initiatives for racial justice and poverty reduction.
Washington was certainly a charismatic leader and had succeeded in getting long-disengaged communities involved in the political process. But he hadn’t succeeded in building lasting institutions, structures, and organizations that could bring about real change over the long term.
Although he did manage to reduce the influence of patronage within the city’s civil service and help to ensure that municipal services were spread on a more equitable basis across the city, his political movement proved to be fleeting and temporary. Ultimately, it disintegrated after his death from a heart attack in 1987.
Still, Barack saw that meaningful change could come—and often needed to come—from inside the system. Seeing the successes and failures of Harold Washington’s movement helped convince Barack that someday he might do it better. Although the opportunity didn’t exist yet, Barack now knew that he wanted to run for public office.
In 1988, Barack entered Harvard Law School. He was now fiercely ambitious, although this hardly distinguished him from his Ivy league classmates. He relished the experience of studying and debating the law, while grappling with the same ideas that had fascinated him since his teenage years. What was the individual’s relationship to society? How much of a role should the government play in regulating the free enterprise system? And what are the mechanisms that drive social change?
He learned that the power of the law had often been wielded on behalf of the wealthy and powerful—but that it could also be used to give voice to the voiceless and empower the powerless. Barack excelled at Harvard Law, and in 1990 was named the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also inked a publishing deal to write the book that would become his first memoir: Dreams From My Father.
Barack was at a crossroads. With his achievements and trailblazing status at Harvard, the door to a prominent (and lucrative) law career was wide open. He could have a prestigious clerkship with a federal judge, possibly even a Supreme Court justice, and then land a coveted partnership at any high-powered law firm he chose.
But he wasn’t sure that this was the path he wanted to take. It would have given him a comfortable and privileged life—but would it satisfy his hunger to effect sweeping change?
While he was weighing his options for his future, Barack met a young woman who would change the course of his life. In 1989, he was working a summer internship at a Chicago law firm when he met a young associate named Michelle Robinson.
Barack was immediately drawn to Michelle—her beauty, her quiet self-confidence, and her fierce intelligence. Michelle soon became not just Barack’s lover, but the closest friend he’d ever known—the closest friend he ever would know.
Although Michelle was no less driven than Barack, her path to success was different. As a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, she knew that that path was beset by potential pitfalls and roadblocks. Because of her race and her gender, she understood that she would always have to prove to others that she belonged in the room—whether that room was at a high-powered Chicago law firm or, later, the White House.
Still, she was tenacious, able to challenge Barack, but also push him to fulfill his highest potential. For her part, Michelle was attracted to Barack’s idealism and his ability to inspire hope in others. A life with the ambitious Barack meant romance and adventure; a life with Michelle and her family promised Barack the stability and sense of rootedness that he’d so often lacked during his childhood. They made an ideal couple, complementing one another and giving each what the other lacked.
Crucially, she knew Barack, as no one else could—even himself. She recognized that he was incapable of taking the easy way out or taking the path of least resistance. Whenever he was faced with an easy path or a hard one, he would always choose to embrace the struggle. Her insight would prove prescient as they built their lives together.
(Shortform note: To learn more about her thoughts and reflections on her life with Barack and her experiences as the nation’s first African-American first lady, read our summary of Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming.)
Barack and Michelle were married in 1992 at Trinity United Church of Christ, with the service officiated by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.—a figure who would later play a significant role in Barack’s political career.
After marrying Michelle and settling in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Barack chose to forego several high-paying opportunities to work at high-powered law firms in the city. He was instead drawn to public service, to the idea of working for social justice and political empowerment. He took up a teaching position at the University of Chicago School of Law and worked for a small civil rights-focused law firm (mostly dealing with employment discrimination cases).
During the 1992 election cycle, Barack successfully ran Project VOTE!, the largest voter-registration drive in the history of Illinois up to that time. In this role, he had the opportunity to build on the lessons he’d learned as a community organizer—while making some early political connections across the state.
In 1995, a new opportunity opened up that would set Barack on the path that would define the rest of his and Michelle’s lives. That fall, his district’s seat in the Illinois State Senate became available when the incumbent, Alice Palmer, announced that she would be leaving to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Before long, local political leaders—including Palmer herself—were encouraging Barack to run for the state senate seat. When Barack first presented the idea to Michelle, she was skeptical. Did they really want to get involved in the notoriously hardball world of Chicago politics? Did Barack really want to spend time away from Michelle in the state capital in Springfield?
Despite her reservations, however, Michelle recognized that this was something Barack needed to do. With some reluctance, she gave the idea her blessing. Barack would make the race.
But if Barack thought his campaign for state Senate would be marked by high-minded rhetoric and wonkish position papers, he was to be sorely mistaken.
Grizzled Chicago campaign veterans Ron David and Carol Anne Harwell bluntly advised him to knock off the “League of Women Voters shit.” This wasn’t a debate at Harvard Law; it was a street-level brawl for the state Senate, where the Chicago political machine would be doing everything it could to keep an outsider like Barack Obama off the ballot.
More than anything else, he needed to collect valid signatures from Democratic voters in the district to get his name on the primary ballot—in fact, he’d need many times more signatures than the legal requirement, because the Democratic establishment would comb through every one of his signatures trying to disqualify his nominating petitions.
During this campaign, Obama was far from being the oratorical master he’d later become. His early speeches were stilted, wooden, and overly reliant on facts and figures. But he got better and learned how to make a more deep, resonant, and emotional connection with voters as he spoke to groups throughout the district and articulated his vision for why he was their best choice to represent them in Springfield.
During this first campaign, Obama learned that he had to fight and win political battles in order to make the change he wanted to see.
Alice Palmer shocked him when she decided to reenter the primary race for the state Senate seat after she’d failed in her bid for the U.S. House. Obama felt betrayed—Palmer had endorsed him and all but anointed him as her successor in Springfield. Now, she was double-crossing him because she wanted to maintain her own political power.
Barack was conflicted about what to do. His campaign managers advised him to aggressively challenge Palmer’s own nominating petitions, which they suspected were filled with invalid signatures—from non-registered voters, non-Democrats, and people who lived outside the district.
Still, he felt that trying to knock Palmer off the ballot would be embracing the very kind of dirty, hardball politics that he found so distasteful. But his campaign managers quickly cured him of his naivete. Palmer had betrayed him, lied to his face. He shouldn’t be resigned and timid, they argued; he should be angry and fired up. And he wouldn’t be able to make any difference in the state capital if he lost the race.
In the end, Barack agreed. His campaign aggressively challenged Palmer’s petitions, which, sure enough, turned out to be filled top-to-bottom with invalid signatures. Palmer was knocked off the ballot, leaving Barack to run unopposed in the March 1996 Democratic primary. In the overwhelmingly Democratic district, this was tantamount to election. In the November 1996 general election, Barack defeated the token Republican opposition and won with an overwhelming majority of the vote. He had won his first public office and was headed to Springfield.
But while Barack was embarking on his political career, his family life was about to absorb a devastating loss. In 1995, as he was making the preparations for his state Senate run, Barack learned that his mother, Ann, was terminally ill with uterine cancer.
She declined far quicker than the family or her doctors expected. When he visited her in Hawaii in September 1995, she had already advanced to stage 4 cancer and hardly had the strength to move or speak. But even in her weakened condition, Ann could still summon up the strength to encourage her son to fulfill the potential she had always seen—and nurtured—in him.
She brushed aside any idea that Barack should abandon the campaign to care for her. Barack put on a brave face for her, but wept for his impending loss and his mother’s suffering when he returned to his hotel room.
Sadly, this September 1995 visit would be the last time Barack would see Ann. She succumbed to her illness on November 9, 1995, mere months before the state Senate primary election. Not only was Barack grief-stricken, but he felt shame. He felt he had been so caught up in his own ambition for public office that he’d never had a proper chance to say goodbye to his mother.
Despite the devastation of losing Ann, Barack had a promising political career to look forward to when he finally took office in the Illinois State Senate in January 1997. A newcomer to Springfield, Obama was quickly taken under the wing of the Democratic minority leader, Senator Emil Jones. Although Jones was an old-school Chicago machine politician, he found much to admire in Obama’s reform-minded approach to politics and saw great upside in his political future.
In Springfield, the business of making legislation and state budgets was far more about money, power, lobbying, and relationships than it was about principle. Everything seemed to come down to backroom deals between legislators, the influence of corporate lobbyists, and the power of special-interest groups. Lobbyists showered lawmakers with gifts, with hardly any ethical concerns at all. In short, it was a complete insiders’ game, with the interests of the communities they represented a secondary priority for most state legislators.
Obama believed that the state capital functioned (or dysfunctioned) this way because most voters weren’t paying attention to state politics. Most people didn’t know who their state senator was, let alone their senator’s voting record. Outside of hot-button issues like abortion or gun control, most Springfield politicans knew they could cut backroom deals and hand lucrative tax giveaways to shadowy special interests without paying a political price.
To make matters worse, Democrats were in the minority, with the GOP in full control of the chamber. This made it difficult for Democrats to get any pieces of their agenda on the legislative calendar.
Despite these obstacles to reform, Obama did manage to make some meaningful progressive contributions. He was able to tweak a mostly regressive welfare reform bill to ensure that it contained some transitional financial support for those whom the bill would be throwing off the relief rolls. He also used his relationship with Jones to pass a ban on some of the more egregious lobbying practices in Springfield.
But, for the most part, he was a backbencher, unable to wield much influence. Once during that first legislative session, Barack rose to the floor of the Senate to denounce in fiery oratory a GOP-backed corporate tax giveaway. The GOP leader cockily walked up to Barack, congratulated him on a fine speech, and confidently assured him that his rhetorical flourishes had done nothing to change even a single vote.
It was another political lesson for Barack. All the beautiful speeches and soaring rhetoric in the world weren’t enough to make change. If he wanted to reform institutions, he had to gain power within them.
While he was getting his start as a state legislator in Springfield, Barack’s life changed forever in a different, yet far more profound way. In 1998, Barack and Michelle had their first child, Malia Ann Obama.
Barack was overwhelmed with love and joy when he set eyes on Malia. He saw her birth as an opportunity to be there for his daughter, unlike his own father, who had never been there for him. While these early years of parenthood were full of joy and fulfillment for the young Obama family, they also proved to be a time of great stress and anxiety.
Michelle was an excellent and nurturing mother, but she also struggled to balance the demands of motherhood with her own ambitious career. On top of that, she felt that Barack was stretching himself too thin between his state legislative duties (which kept him in Springfield, away from his wife and daughter), his legal work, and his teaching duties at the university.
The overburdened Michelle felt that she was doing it all on her own, that Barack’s work outside the home was—however unintentionally—imposing a patriarchal structure on their household. For the first time, there was real strain in their relationship. Barack had vowed that he would never repeat the mistakes his own father had made. But how to balance that against his own ambitions? Was it worth sacrificing his young family?
As Barack struggled to achieve work-life balance, he took another political step—this time, in entirely the wrong direction. In 2000, he mounted an ill-fated primary challenge against U.S. Representative Bobby Rush.
Looking back, Obama recognized that this campaign was not motivated by any notion of public service or a belief that he could represent the voters of the district better than Rush. It was nothing more than pure ambition and a need to prove to himself—and the increasingly weary Michelle—that being in public office was truly worth it.
These dubious motives were reflected in the slapdash and lackadaisical nature of Obama’s campaign. Unlike previous (and subsequent) races, he put little planning into this effort, articulated no clear vision, and made no compelling case as to why the voters should replace a well-respected public servant like Rush with what seemed like a young, inexperienced, power-hungry upstart like Obama.
With no name recognition in the district (much of which lay outside his state senate district), Obama turned in a miserable performance in the primary, losing to Rush by a whopping 30 percentage points. This was the low point of Barack’s political career, the only race he’d lost—and, as it turned out, the only race he ever would lose.
But Obama didn’t know then what lay ahead. All he could see at the time was that he was an obscure state legislator with little opportunity to make an impact in Springfield, and who had just been embarrassingly rejected in a bid for higher office.
When he travelled to the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Obama was such a low-ranking figure within the party that he lacked proper credentials to even get onto the convention floor. This was the moment when he truly could have turned his back on a political career, and he seriously considered doing so. Little did he know that a mere four years later, he would be back at the Democratic National Convention—but under very different circumstances.
Not long after his humiliation in his 2000 race for the House, Barack became a father for a second time when Michelle gave birth to Sasha Obama in June 2001. Now with a second child, Barack seriously considered settling into a quieter life of practicing law and teaching in Chicago, spending time with his growing family, and working on community-based issues at the local level—instead of continuing to try to make change in the world of electoral politics.
But changing political fortunes in Springfield convinced Barack to stay in office. After the 2000 census, the Democrats in the Illinois state legislature won the right to control the redistricting process for the next decade. This meant that they would be able to draw state senate districts that would more efficiently and favorably distribute their voters, clearing the path for them to take the majority for the first time in a decade.
Sure enough, Democrats swept the 2002 state elections and took the majority in the state Senate. With his party in control of the chamber and his close relationship with Emil Jones—who would now be the majority leader—Barack would finally have an opportunity to meaningfully shape state legislation.
Shortly after first taking office in the state Senate in 1997, Barack observed that political, racial, and ethnic divisions were making it impossible for even the most public-spirited politicians to come together to address real challenges for ordinary citizens.
Divided into districts, each with their own local interests (and often gerrymandered to ensure racial or ethnic homogeneity), legislators lacked the political freedom of action to work on legislation that would serve the common good, rather than the parochial interests of their particular districts. This was what made so much of politics inherently oppositional and dysfunctional.
In 2002, Barack began traveling outside of his Chicago district and into those of some of his colleagues, especially in the more conservative southern part of Illinois. He wanted to better understand the concerns and hopes of these Illinoisans from other corners of the state. After all, if he was to work with the senators who represented them, he would need to have a more firm understanding of their political needs.
In speaking with more conservative voters, Barack realized that the traditional dividing lines in political life—white and Black, native born and immigrant, conservative and liberal—obscured how most voters generally shared the same set of concerns.
There were political disagreements, often passionate disagreements. But everywhere he went, people worried about bread-and-butter issues like the cost of health care, the quality of education, and making sure their kids could enjoy even greater opportunities than they’d had. Despite the divisions, what united Illinoisans was far stronger than what divided them.
Obama’s travels around the state also helped him make some important statewide political connections. Newly fired up, he recognized that his state Senate district and even a larger U.S. House district was too small a political base to effect meaningful change.
Representing a majority-Black district, he would always have to cater to “Black” issues and interests. There was simply no opportunity to address common concerns from the confines of a narrowly drawn legislative seat. He needed a bigger canvas on which he could paint his vision for a healing, uniting politics.
With that, he began making tentative plans for Illinois’s U. S. Senate election in 2004. One of the first people he approached was Chicago-based political consultant David Axelrod (affectionately known as “Axe”). Axe initially tried to dissuade Obama from even seeking the U.S. Senate nomination in 2004 and was reluctant to take him on as a client. Obama was unknown, had a foreign-sounding name that could turn off more traditionalist downstate voters, had little statewide political base, and had thus far shown no capacity to fundraise on the level that he would need to make this run.
But for all his political calculations, Axe was at heart an idealist. Obama appealed to his vision of a more inclusive, aspiring politics. Together, Obama argued, they could continue the legacy of great progressive figures like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy—people who’d used politics to effect sweeping changes that demonstrated the very best of what America was capable of being.
With no small hesitation, Axelrod agreed to take on Obama as a client—although he told the aspiring U.S. Senator that he would need to raise at least $5 million to even have a shot.
Axelrod wasn’t the only person to whom he needed to make a hard sell—he also had to convince Michelle. As with his first run for state Senate, Michelle had deep reservations about Barack running for U.S. Senate. A statewide campaign would be a marathon, taking up more time and energy than any of his previous efforts. And, if he won, his senatorial duties in Washington, D.C. would take him farther away from Michelle and the girls, while bringing unwanted media attention on the family.
Barack was willing to put his political career on the line, pledging to Michelle that he would give up politics forever if he lost this race. With no small amount of hesitation, Michelle agreed to Barack’s run for U.S. Senate.
As unlikely as his candidacy was when it began, things started breaking Obama’s way soon after he made his decision to run. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, decided not to run for reelection in 2004, meaning that Barack would be running for an open seat rather than taking on a sitting senator.
Then, a prominent rival for the Democratic nomination, former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, decided to forego the Senate race to launch an ill-fated presidential campaign. All of a sudden, the path to the U.S. Senate was beginning to widen.
The new Democratic majority in the Illinois State Senate also boosted Obama’s political stock. Now, he finally had the chance to pass progressive bills that would have a real impact in the state. During this session in the state legislature, he successfully wrote and sponsored legislation that required the videotaping of interrogations in cases where capital punishment was being considered, and he got a significant expansion of the state-level Earned Income Tax Credit passed through the legislature—bringing real relief to working Illinois families and boosting Obama’s statewide political profile.
In October 2002, Barack made his first public comments on national issues when he attended an anti-war rally and spoke out against the impending U.S. War in Iraq. In his remarks, Barack said that while he was not a pacifist opposed to all wars, he was opposed to ill-planned and counterproductive military adventures—like the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq that, Obama argued, would do nothing to improve U.S. national security or advance America’s global strategic interests.
Obama believed that pouring resources into Iraq was a distraction from the real war in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, the militant jihadist organization that had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, was based. His position as an anti-war candidate represented a political risk. Both the war and President George W. Bush were highly popular at the time. But Obama was unwilling to compromise his principles for political expediency by pretending to support a war that he believed to be wrong.
Later, when the Bush administration’s incompetence in conducting the war became better known to the public, and it became clear that Iraq did not possess a hidden stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Obama’s anti-war stance would prove to be not only correct—but politically astute.
Throughout 2003, Barack traveled Illinois, hearing from voters directly about what most concerned them and what they hoped their representatives in Washington could do to help them.
Everywhere he went, he heard the same universal concerns, shared by voters of every race, color, gender, sexual orientation, and political ideology. They were worried about the cost of medical care, the economic devastation wrought upon small towns by deindustrialization, the difficulty of paying for college tuition for their children.
For the most part, voters weren’t focused on the color of Obama’s skin or his foreign, vaguely Muslim-sounding name. They wanted to build better lives for themselves and their families and wanted Washington to help them fulfill those dreams. Obama saw that his campaign wasn’t about himself or his ambition. It was about this unifying vision of America and the ability of ordinary citizens to come together to make their communities stronger through democracy. As Barack refined and articulated his vision for how Washington should work, this belief in the fundamental unity of Americans would be his guiding principle.
The theme of unity and hope was summed up in the tagline for the campaign’s television advertisements: Yes We Can.
With his unifying message, key endorsements from the state’s five largest newspapers, and growing stature in the Illinois State Senate, Obama cruised to victory in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary on March 16, 2004. With several other candidates on the primary ballot, he won a staggering 53 percent of the vote—29 percentage points ahead of his closest competitor.
The victory in the primary turned him into a national political figure overnight, with the media and Democratic insiders now recognizing him as a rising star within the party. Of course, this brought a level of media attention on Barack and his family that they had never known before—and would never truly be free of again. Reporters all wanted to get to know this young African-American candidate who seemed to represent the future of the Democratic Party.
Barack didn’t just talk about American unity; his very life story vindicated it. After all, he was the son of a Black Kenyan immigrant and white mother from Kansas, raised by his single mom with the support of his white grandparents.
This was the new, diverse America personified in a candidate. And it was a biography and message that was resonating more and more with an electorate sick of the divisive, angry, bitter, partisan politics that defined the Bush years.
As the 2004 Democratic National Convention approached, presidential nominee John Kerry’s campaign decided to take Obama’s political brand and message to the next level—they would ask him to deliver the convention’s keynote address.
In an unusual move for a candidate for national office, Obama chose to write the bulk of the speech himself rather than having his team handle it. In his address—his true introduction to a national audience—he articulated his political vision
Obama told the convention crowd that he did not see an America made up of red states and blue states; for him, there were only the United States of America. Being raised in a family that had shown him unconditional love despite its racial barriers was proof that, whatever its shortcomings, the idea of America was fundamentally decent—and that what united Americans was far greater than what divided them.
Looking back, Barack remembers much of his dazzling convention speech as a blur. But he still sees the moment where he connected with the audience, both on the convention floor and the millions watching at home. He knew he had tapped into something profound—a collective yearning for hope that America’s divisions could be healed.
If he was a well-known politician after his victory in the U.S. Senate primary, Obama was a full-fledged celebrity in the wake of his electrifying convention speech. Barack, Michelle, and the girls were no longer able to take family trips to the park or the zoo without being mobbed by media, fans, and onlookers, all eager to catch a glimpse of the man who, overnight, had become one of the nation’s biggest political figures.
Riding the wave of enthusiasm for his candidacy, Obama crushed his Republican opponent, the hapless conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, in a 40-point landslide in the November general election. While he and his team were overjoyed by the victory, Barack’s enthusiasm was tempered by the knowledge that he would be forced to spend even more time away from Michelle and his daughters while he was in Washington three days per week.
It was also a bittersweet night politically. Obama’s victory in the U.S. Senate race had long been a foregone conclusion, but John Kerry’s narrow defeat in the presidential election at the hands of George W. Bush was a crushing blow to Democrats. Even worse, the GOP had retained control of the U.S. Senate and even defeated the Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle in his bid for reelection. The party was in its weakest political position in decades.
In 2005, with the Republican Party seemingly ascendant, Obama was sworn in as the junior Senator from Illinois. He wanted to make a mark in the Senate, but as a total outsider to Washington, he recognized that he would need the help of experienced hands. He hired longtime Democratic operative Pete Rouse as his chief of staff. Rouse quickly helped Obama staff his core team, hiring several key figures who would later play prominent roles in the Obama presidential campaign and administration.
In the Senate, Obama formed close friendships and strategic partnerships with key figures in the Democratic caucus, including Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. Although they came from different personal and political backgrounds, Obama admired Reid’s tenacity, mastery of Senate rules and procedure, and hard-nosed and unemotional nature. Indeed, Reid was famous for his bluntness during phone calls, often ending conversations by simply hanging up without a “goodbye.”
To his great happiness, Barack found that he was easily able to fly back to Chicago to be with Michelle and the girls. During this period, he and Michelle enjoyed a new connection and rediscovered a closeness and intimacy that had been strained by the chaos and upheaval of the previous few years.
Ironically, despite being a national media sensation, he and Michelle were able to enjoy a level of domestic tranquility with family and friends back home in Hyde Park that they hadn’t experienced in years. Eschewing the career-climbing Washington cocktail party circuit, Barack and Michelle enjoyed being with one another more than anything else.
Of course, the intensifying media scrutiny meant that their family life would never be quite the same again. On one occasion when he was taking the girls to the zoo, he was mobbed by fans and media (Malia suggested that Barack use “Johnny McJohn John” as an alias on future family excursions).
Of course, Barack knew that this was what he’d signed up for when he made the decision to run for office. But it was hard to not feel some pain to see the girls no longer having a father who belonged exclusively to them.
Less than a year after Obama took office in the Senate, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans as a Category 3 storm in September 2005. The devastation it wrought on the city was immense—80% of the city inundated with water, tens of thousands of people made homeless, nearly 1,500 deaths, and over $160 billion in damage.
The inadequate federal response to the hurricane was widely seen as a national disgrace and a stunning indictment of the Bush administration’s laissez-faire approach to running the government. For his part, Obama was appalled by the incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration, which had allowed a once-great American city to drown on its watch.
The way Obama and many others saw it, people in the poor, majority-Black city had been abandoned and left to drown and starve by the Republicans. Their callous indifference to the fate of New Orleans was a stark reminder of the GOP's cavalier attitude toward intergenerational poverty and the broader political, social and economic forces that made it possible.
Unable to stay silent, Obama began making the rounds on national television to decry the gross failures of the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Administration under Bush.
That same year, Obama visited U.S. troops in Iraq as part of a congressional delegation. Although he had been an early and consistent opponent of the war, he now saw firsthand the true costs of George W. Bush’s military adventurism.
The vicious sectarian violence on the ground had been exacerbated by a series of disastrous missteps and miscalculations by the Bush administration, chief among which was the move to disband the Iraqi Army after the fall of Saddam Hussein. This greatly destabilized the country and contributed to the deteriorating security situation.
U.S. soldiers were embroiled in a hopeless cycle of violence marked by suicide bombings and guerilla warfare tactics. Obama didn’t blame the soldiers—he blamed the incompetence and arrogance of Republican political leaders like Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had sold the war to the American people on the basis of a series of lies about Iraq’s stockpile of WMDs and its supposed responsibility for 9/11 (neither of which was true). They’d then invaded the country with no real plan to rebuild, simply assuming that the overwhelming American military might would paper over their planning failures.
Disturbingly, even many of his prominent Senate Democratic colleagues had voted to authorize the war, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. To Obama, the behavior of these Democrats showed the downside of playing the Washington political game—the need to posture and appear “tough,” the pompous decorum and easy collegiality that, if you weren’t careful, could sap you of all your principles.
Washington was more broken than Obama had thought. Things needed to change—and quickly. And he recognized that he might need to play a vital role in bringing about that change.
2006 was a midterm election year, and it was a crucial one for the Democratic Party and the nation. The midterms were widely viewed as a referendum on the Bush administration’s poor record in Iraq and its failed response to Hurricane Katrina.
Obama spent most of the 2006 cycle aggressively campaigning for Democratic candidates in swing seats and districts. Not only was he lending some of his national star power to help fellow Democrats, he was also making important connections with donors and party leaders from across the country.
There was already a flood of media speculation that Obama’s barnstorming was a prelude to a 2008 presidential run. But Obama’s initial instincts were not to run and instead step aside to allow better-established Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden seek the nomination.
Party leaders, however, did not share Obama’s initial reluctance to make a presidential bid. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid encouraged him to run, arguing that he alone could assemble a coalition of young people, racial minorities, white suburbanites, and even some white conservatives. Not only could such a coalition win the presidency, but it could enable down-ballot Democrats to win in states like Virginia and North Carolina where they’d rarely been competitive in recent years.
Party stalwarts like Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York agreed with Reid’s assessment of Obama as a once-in-a-generation political talent who represented Democrats’ best hope for 2008. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts (1932-2009), brother of the slain JFK and RFK and the longtime de facto leader of the liberal faction of the Democratic Party, reminded Obama that he had a unique power to inspire people to his vision.
He told the young senator that the enthusiasm for him had only been matched by JFK. Kennedy reminded Barack that this could be his only moment to seize the opportunity before him to rally the nation to his vision of a politics that transcended traditional divisions.
Before he could commit to anything, Barrack needed to discuss the idea with the person whose opinion mattered most to him—Michelle.
When he floated the idea of a presidential run to her, Michelle demanded to know when he would be satisfied, when his insatiable drive would finally be quenched. She recognized that Barack had a hole that he needed to fill—whether it was blind ambition, a desire to prove himself to his absent father, or his own self-doubt about his proper place in the world because of his mixed-race background.
The risks were obvious. By running, he would disrupt the domestic tranquility they had found and put the family at the forefront of media attention. He would also open himself up to vicious partisanship on a scale he’d never experienced before.
Barack had to question his own motives too. Was he motivated by higher principles, or was he just another power-hungry politician? He tried to square his ambition by aligning it with the ideals that defined his politics. Still, he did believe that he was indispensable, that he was America’s savior, or that only he had the ability to bring America together and solve the nation’s greatest challenges.
There was no higher power calling on him to run; running was a choice. And every day, by not publicly declaring that he was not a candidate, he was coming closer to making his decision.
While campaigning for the Democratic ticket in Iowa (a critical early state in the presidential nominating process) in 2006, Obama received a rapturous welcome everywhere he went. Iowa political pros privately told him that they’d never seen a candidate draw the kind of crowds they were seeing and that he had an excellent chance to win the 2008 Iowa caucuses if he were to run.
Unable to head off the intense media speculation, Obama conferred with his core political team of David Axelrod, David Plouffe (Axelrod’s business partner in their Chicago-based political consulting firm), and press secretary Robert Gibbs. In fall 2006, they agreed that he would go on Meet the Press and announce that he was considering a presidential campaign.
The preliminary polling showed that Obama’s campaign theme of “change” was deeply resonant with voters disgusted by Washington. With his newcomer status and unique biography, he represented something new and fresh, which was precisely what the public seemed to be craving. As they began laying the groundwork for the campaign, Obama had a growing anxiety—he could actually win.
After the 2006 midterms, which saw Democrats take control of the Senate and House of Representatives, Obama’s team began preparing him for the reality of what a presidential campaign would be like. The schedule would be grueling and nonstop, warned Axelrod and Plouffe. He would need to crisscross the country, withstand constant media scrutiny, and raise enormous sums of money just to be competitive.
Plouffe, a born political battler, was selected as campaign manager. He carefully laid out the strategy to win the Democratic nomination. They needed to win the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses to prove that his candidacy was serious. They would also be efficient with their campaign spending by investing heavily in grassroots, on-the-field organizers instead of pricey and often-ineffectual political consultants. Lastly, the campaign would have to run a near-perfect, gaffe-free operation to have a shot at beating more well-established candidates like Hillary Clinton.
In the months that followed, Plouffe began executing this strategy, building an unprecedented network of field organizers, small donors, and volunteers inspired by Obama’s historic candidacy and his message of hope and change.
The historic nature of Barack’s candidacy was not lost on either him or Michelle. He would be the first African-American with a realistic chance of winning a major-party nomination.
This was still largely unthinkable to many in 2006. Barack told Michelle that he wanted to run for president in no small part because the world would forever look at America differently if he won. If a mixed-race kid from a poor background with a funny-sounding name could become president, it would send a message to kids everywhere who thought of themselves as outsiders or thought that America wasn’t truly for people like them: America was for everyone.
Barack’s victory would stand as a vindication of his longstanding faith in the power and efficacy of people-driven democracy and of America’s potential to overcome its racial divisions. After struggling for months to explain to Michelle why he wanted to run, this was the vision he articulated to her.
And, she had to admit, it was a great reason to run. Now, there would be no turning back.
Think about how change is made in systems and organizations.
Have you ever been part of a system, culture, or organization (school, workplace, etc.) that you felt was in need of reform? Briefly describe the situation.
Did you articulate this need for change? If so, how was this received by the organization and what roadblocks did you face in implementing change?
Based on this experience, do you think that organizational or systemic reform comes from working inside that system or pushing for radical change from the outside? Briefly explain your answer.
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama officially announced his candidacy for president on the steps of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858.
In his announcement speech, he emphasized his vision of securing universal, affordable health care; guaranteeing that every child in America had access to a first-rate education; a withdrawal from the War in Iraq that had done so much to damage America’s prestige in the eyes of the world; and the need for Americans of all stripes to come together to renounce the old partisan struggles of the past and forge a new vision for the future of the country.
It was a powerful and compelling message. But now, he would have to take that vision on the road and sell it to the American people.
Beyond the soaring rhetoric and grand vision, there was now the day-to-day grind of waging a competitive primary battle for the most powerful political office in the world.
Obama’s every word was now pored over by campaign journalists eager to catch the candidate making a misstep. In one early debate, he remarked that soldiers’ lives were being “wasted” in Iraq. Although he meant it as a criticism of the Bush administration’s failures, it came across as arrogant and condescending toward members of the military. It was an early lesson in the high-stakes nature of presidential politics, where even a single ill-chosen word or phrase could sink a candidate.
Beyond the need to speak with extreme caution, there was also the grueling campaign schedule. The experience of living on the road, sleeping in motels, being away from his family, and delivering the same speeches day in and day out (usually multiple times per day) was emotionally and physically exhausting. What kept Obama going, however, was the enthusiasm of his campaign team—people like his personal aide and “body man” Reggie Love. Obama drew inspiration from them and their passion for what his candidacy represented. During long trips in the campaign bus or sleepless nights in motels in Iowa, the companionship of the Obama team remained a powerful source of motivation and strength.
In the early months of 2007, Barack struggled to connect with voters or clearly articulate his vision for the country—or, critically, why the country should elect him president. In debates, he found that his command of issues paled in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s mastery of complex policy matters like health care.
Axelrod told Obama that he needed to make an emotional connection with voters, not simply bury them with facts and figures. The president was not a technocrat or an engineer; instead, the job was about rallying people behind a vision for the future. Axelrod told Obama that, with his unique life story, the historic nature of his candidacy, and his vision of a unifying politics, he was the only candidate in the race who could truly mobilize Americans toward a common purpose.
Clinton, for all her intelligence and policy chops, could never do that. As a former first lady and object of intense dislike by Republicans, she would never be able to transcend the stale and tired politics of the past. Only Obama represented true change—this was the message he needed to sell to the voters.
The historic nature of his candidacy was brought home to Obama when he traveled to Birmingham, Alabama in March 2007 to make the commemorative walk across the famed Edmund Pettus Bridge—the site where, in 1965, Alabama police attacked civil rights protestors attempting to march to the state capital to demand an end to segregation.
At the event, Obama spoke to civil rights leaders Fred Shuttlesworth, John Lewis (a U.S Representative from Georgia), and Otis Moss. Moss told Obama that his presidential campaign was the fulfillment of a historic destiny, carrying on the work of the first generation of civil rights crusaders like the slain Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama knew that the unimaginable courage of these figures is what had made his entire life story possible—and given him the opportunity and duty to carry their legacy forward. Whatever struggles he’d experienced in life, they paled in comparison to what these brave men and women had faced and overcome. Never had the stakes of his historic campaign been so clear to him.
The Obama campaign team knew that winning the Iowa caucuses was crucial to their strategy. Securing a win in the first-in-the-nation contest would send a message to the political establishment and the media that his campaign deserved to be taken seriously.
This would be a boost to their volunteer recruitment and small-donor fundraising strategy, which would put them in a position to win subsequent contests on their path to the nomination.
The campaign followed a unique (and, ultimately, groundbreaking) bottom-up approach to organizing.
Paul Tewes, a longtime Democratic political operative in the Midwest, was in charge of running the Obama campaign’s field efforts in Iowa. He was a remarkable organizer and motivator, helping the campaign set up offices in each of the state’s 99 counties.
Paid staffers in the county field offices were then tasked with building their own grassroots political organizations and making connections in the communities where they worked by speaking at local events, getting the word out about Barack’s vision for America, and recruiting new volunteers.
Tewes’s mantra (and Obama’s) was always respect, empower, include. The campaign was not a transactional operation, in which Iowans were being “sold” a candidate; it was a people-driven, bottom-up movement, a vehicle by which ordinary people could come together with their neighbors and effect change for their communities—and, ultimately, the country.
There had never been a field operation like what the Obama team built in Iowa in 2008. In his diverse, young campaign staff and volunteers, Barack saw his vision of a new, inclusive politics come to life.
As the Iowa campaign wore on into the summer and fall of 2007, Obama began to distinguish himself as a candidate. He began performing better in debates, making the emotional connection to voters that he’d failed to make earlier in the race.
Importantly, more than any of his Democratic rivals, he was willing to challenge stale Washington orthodoxy and butt heads with Democratic Party-aligned special interest groups (such as when he argued before powerful teachers unions that bad teachers should be held accountable).
This boldness added to his image as a new, fresh face in politics, untethered to the politics of the past—and it proved more and more popular with Democratic voters. His position in the polls began to rise relative to rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, with surveys now showing him as a genuine contender in Iowa.
The campaign could feel it in the air—they had tapped into the mood of the moment.
As rival campaigns began to recognize Obama as a legitimate threat, the tone of the primary race grew more heated and nasty.
As other candidates began to drop out, the contest for Iowa and the nomination became a two-person race between Obama and Clinton—and with every passing day, Obama’s campaign seemed to be gaining the upper hand.
He felt that the changing tone was a reflection of the growing desperation within the Clinton camp, as a nomination they thought they had well in hand appeared to be slipping away. Increasingly, her team resorted to smear tactics against Obama (such as initiating a risibly false whisper campaign that he’d dealt drugs while in high school). These smears, however, tended to backfire as voters saw the vindictiveness of her campaign to be divisive and distasteful.
On January 3, 2008, the grassroots organizing efforts of the Obama campaign and its army of volunteers paid off with an eight-point victory in the Iowa caucuses.
He was the first Black candidate to win the caucuses, putting him in the strongest position that any minority candidate had ever been in to secure a major-party nomination. In the breakdown of the results, Obama saw a vindication of his unifying vision of politics—he carried every racial, age, and gender group in the state.
As he and his team celebrated their victory, his thoughts turned to the political as well as the personal. He thought of the significance of the win, what it meant for racial healing in America, and his long-held belief that the great project of American life was to perfect the vision that the Founders had started.
But he also thought of his late mother, Ann. At this moment of great triumph, he realized how terribly he missed her and how proud she would have been to see what her son had achieved.
As exhilarating as the Iowa victory was, the Obama campaign was still far from securing the nomination. Indeed, they would be sorely disappointed a mere five days later when Hillary Clinton scored a narrow win in the New Hampshire primary.
The Obama team in New Hampshire had worked hard to win the state. But Obama and the top leadership within the campaign became somewhat complacent after winning in Iowa, believing the New Hampshire contest to be in the bag. Their loss taught them that they were in for a long and drawn-out primary fight. The campaign shook off the New Hampshire loss and remained focused on the big picture.
They knew they had an advantage over the Clinton operation because of their superior organization and better understanding of the Democratic Party’s proportional delegate allocation rules. These rules enabled a candidate to win some pledged delegates from a state, even if they did not win an outright majority of votes in that state’s primary election.
Thus, the Obama team could strategically focus resources and maximize their fundraising and volunteer efforts on small states where they could win more delegates without spending large sums on expensive television advertising. In the larger states with more expensive media markets, meanwhile, they knew they could win some delegates due to proportional allocation rules, without spending needless resources trying to “win” these states outright. After all, you won the nomination by winning delegates—not states.
On the campaign trail, despite some racial obtuseness (and occasional overt hostility) Obama found that most white voters were open to his message.
He needed to win white voters to win the nomination and the general election. Plus, his entire vision of politics was based around building a cross-racial coalition. Therefore, he saw it as his task to help more conservative or traditionalist whites make the psychological leap of supporting a Black candidate for president.
This occasionally meant spending what seemed to some Black supporters like an inordinate amount of time and energy on assuaging the concerns of whites. Obama certainly understood this frustration (and in some ways shared it), especially when his campaign had to make some decisions to deemphasize certain racial issues during the campaign.
But he also knew that his success depended in large part on avoiding being seen as a “Black candidate,” as earlier candidates like Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm had been perceived. This wasn’t just a strategic decision. It reflected Obama’s genuine vision of a universalist politics based on Americans’ shared civic heritage.
Regardless of the tradeoffs and messaging decisions made with respect to white voters, enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy was growing in the Black community. But that enthusiasm was also tempered by fear and anxiety rooted in the Black historical experience in America—that his support would collapse, or, more darkly, that he would be assassinated.
These racial dimensions of the primary became even clearer when the campaign headed down to South Carolina for the primary on January 26. There, the Clinton campaign (and former president Bill Clinton in particular) began making barely coded racial appeals to white voters. Bill Clinton told white audiences that the Obama message and candidacy were a “fairy tale” and assured them that, unlike Barack, Hillary was the only one who truly “got them.”
The message was that Barack Obama was somehow a dangerous, unacceptable “other.” Media pundits amplified that message by casting shadows over Obama’s childhood years in Indonesia, his refusal to wear an American flag lapel (a concern that was never raised with white candidates who similarly made the choice not to wear one), and the characterization of Michelle as an “angry Black woman.”
Despite the mounting ugliness of the campaign, Barack’s team managed to appeal to Black South Carolinians as no other candidate ever had, uprooting them from a cynicism born of a legacy of disenfranchisement, poverty, and racial violence.
With his message of empowerment, the Black vote in South Carolina powered the Obama team to a smashing win in South Carolina. Still, as the ebullient crowd at Obama headquarters chanted “Race doesn’t matter,” Obama had his misgivings. Indeed, the campaign up to that point had taught him that race still did matter a great deal.
As the primary campaign wore on past Super Tuesday (the date when the largest number of states hold their caucuses and primaries), Obama’s delegate lead over Hillary Clinton continued to grow. He boasted a substantial delegate lead by the end of February. The nomination looked to be his to lose.
Despite the early skepticism and doubt from the media and rival campaigns, it was clear that he had a national appeal and a winning message. Obama was delighted to see how the campaign was inspiring a new generation of young people and minorities to empower themselves through electoral politics for the first time. But at the same time, he was also apprehensive about the hype.
Since his college days, he had always wanted to build a mass movement, not a vehicle for his own power and celebrity. He feared that he was becoming just another charismatic leader, one onto whom supporters as well as opponents could project whatever they wished to see. He feared that such a movement would not be cohesive or ideas-driven enough to effect real change if it became too centered on one individual.
In March 2008, the campaign was upended when footage surfaced of Reverend Jeremiah Wright—Barack and Michelle’s pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ—delivering a fiery sermon in which he shouted the phrase “God damn America.” Wright also made remarks praising Nation of Islam leader (and notorious anti-Semite) Louis Farrakhan and claiming that the HIV virus had been deliberately released into the Black community by the U.S. government.
Obama knew this story would cause major trouble for his campaign. He understood the context in which Reverend Wright had given his remarks. Although Wright was a serious theologian and respected figure within Chicago’s religious community, he also had a propensity to give voice to pent-up feelings of collective Black anger over America’s clear and undeniable legacy of racial injustice.
Thus, an ordinary sermon might be peppered with references to slavery, Jim Crow, and the mass incarceration of young Black men as a result of the War on Drugs. In its proper context, such rhetorical flourishes made sense and were generally uncontroversial. But thrown into the context of a presidential election featuring an African-American candidate, they proved explosive.
Despite the political pain Wright was causing him, Obama felt empathy for his pastor. Wright could indeed sometimes channel the voice and persona of a 1960s radical. Especially when he knew he was speaking to primarily Black audiences at his church. But Obama also knew that Wright was a serious theologian and thoughtful, nuanced figure. He deserved far better than the caricature that was being made of him by the national media.
Nevertheless, Obama recognized that his campaign hinged on addressing the Wright controversy. On March 18, 2008, he delivered a historic and widely viewed speech in Philadelphia on America’s racial legacy.
Speaking as much to a white audience as he was to his Black supporters, Obama used the Wright controversy to explain long-simmering Black feelings of betrayal and anger at their historical experience in America, and why that frustration occasionally boiled over into overheated rhetoric like that which Wright had espoused.
At the same time, he used the occasion to explain to Black supporters why many whites felt offense and resentment at the presumption of racism. Many working-class, blue-collar whites viewed the national conversation about race and racism as a rejection of their own struggles and hardships, a way of saying that economic and social problems within white communities were irrelevant and unworthy of attention.
With the major networks carrying the speech, over one million people saw his remarks live. The media and the voters felt that Barack had deftly and eloquently addressed the Wright controversy. His polling position began to recover—the campaign had survived its toughest moment.
The Obama team continued to rack up wins in primaries and caucuses throughout the spring, adding to their delegate lead and making the path to the nomination more and more difficult for Hillary Clinton.
Clinton still refused to concede, however. This became a growing point of contention within the Obama camp, which feared that Clinton continuing her increasingly longshot campaign would only serve to split the Democratic Party and make it more difficult for the eventual nominee to beat the Republicans in November.
It all finally came down to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, held on May 6. Obama had the opportunity to secure a delegate majority in these contests and clinch the nomination. The night before these primaries, Obama relaxed with longtime friends Eric Holder (who would soon be Attorney General in the Obama administration), Martin Nesbitt, and Valerie Jarrett (later to serve as Senior Adviser to the President).
The four friends remarked on the utter surreality of the moment—four African-Americans from Chicago, having chicken and beer, with one of them about to make history as the first Black presidential nominee of a major American political party.
Sure enough, Obama’s near-tie with Clinton in Indiana and his smashing 14-point victory in North Carolina mathematically clinched the nomination. The moment was moving and humbling. There could be no question about the awesome responsibility that had been placed in his hands by Michelle, his family, his staff, supporters, the party—and the country.
Barack Obama, a biracial kid from Hawaii and former community organizer from the South Side of Chicago, was now the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States.
While the weight of the historic moment wasn’t lost on anyone (least of all Obama himself), the campaign had no time to rest on their laurels—there was a general election campaign to be waged and won against the Republican nominee, famed war hero and U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona.
The 73-year-old McCain’s biography was the stuff of political legend. During the Vietnam War, he’d been captured by the enemy and tortured for over five years—refusing multiple offers by the Vietnamese to be set free unless the offer was extended to his fellow POWs.
Obama had long been an admirer of McCain. The Arizona senator had repeatedly shown political independence and courage by bucking GOP orthodoxy by voting against George W. Bush’s regressive tax cuts, sponsoring a bipartisan campaign-finance reform package, and speaking out against figures on the Religious Right as “agents of intolerance.”
But Obama believed that McCain had shamelessly pandered to the party’s far-right flank in order to win the 2008 Republican nomination—effectively selling his principles out for political gain. The onetime maverick was now little more than a standard-issue Republican. The Obama team was determined to make sure that the country also saw him that way.
To counter claims by the McCain campaign that he was inexperienced in foreign policy and ill-prepared to serve as commander-in-chief, Obama and his team arranged a June 2008 foreign trip to Israel, France, the UK, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, where U.S. troops had been present since 2001, Obama saw to his dismay that the U.S.-backed leader Hamid Karzai held little real power outside the capital of Kabul. Worse, his government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the country’s rural population. U.S. troops on the ground, meanwhile, had been placed in an impossible situation and deployed in numbers too small to contain the violence that was quickly engulfing the country.
In Iraq, Obama found a similar situation, with the U.S.-installed provisional government barely keeping the security situation stable as Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian tensions raged. In a private conversation, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed with Obama’s position that it was time for the U.S. to begin a phased withdrawal of troops.
General David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq, disagreed with the Democratic candidate’s position. But Obama was already beginning to think like a president. He knew that as commander-in-chief, he would have to make tough decisions, weigh consequences and trade-offs, and act in the best interests of the country—even if that meant overriding the opinions of experts on the ground like Petraeus.
The trip was a rousing success in terms of campaign optics, with the media agreeing that he “looked presidential.” But Obama was becoming concerned with more important things than the optics. With a strong polling lead over McCain as the summer wore on, he knew there was a growing chance that he would win.
He couldn’t afford to just look like a president. He would have to be one.
The love and fortitude of his family kept Barack going during the intense slog of the election.
The demands of the campaign certainly imposed a burden on Michelle, Malia, and Sasha. Barack felt guilty that the grueling campaign schedule made him less and less available to be a husband to Michelle or a father to the girls. He quietly mourned the birthdays, recitals, and countless other milestones he was missing.
At one campaign stop in Butte, Montana on July 4, the campaign team organized an impromptu 10th birthday party for Malia in the conference room of a local Holiday Inn. One staffer even grabbed an iPod and put on dance music as the entire staff (and Barack himself) danced around the conference room. As they danced, Malia lovingly came up to her father and told him that it was the best birthday she’d ever had.
It was a reminder that he might have been running to be the most powerful man in the world, but he had already taken on the most important responsibility he ever would—fatherhood.
Before the Democratic National Convention which was set to begin in Denver on August 25, Barack would need to select his vice presidential nominee to serve as his running mate.
The first qualification, of course, was someone who Obama believed would be able to effectively carry out the duties of the vice presidency—and step into the role of president if need be. But he also wanted someone who might help assuage the concerns of some older, more conservative and traditionalist white voters about voting for a relatively inexperienced Black candidate.
Indeed, Obama viewed the selection of the right running mate as an important part of helping white voters overcome the psychological hurdle of a Black man in the Oval Office.
The figure who became the strongest choice was the senior Senator from Delaware—Joseph R. Biden. In many ways, Joe Biden represented a strong contrast to Barack Obama.
If Obama was a relative newcomer to national politics, Biden was a long-established figure, having first been elected to the Senate in 1972. Moreover, he was an old-school politician from working-class Irish-American roots in the industrial town of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Where Obama was cerebral, reserved, and cool, Biden was a warm, gregarious, hand-shaking, baby-kissing, backslapping kind of politician. Most importantly, however, Obama admired Biden’s intelligence, fierce work ethic, and loving heart. He knew that Biden had experienced near-unimaginable personal grief when his wife and daughter were killed in a road accident in December 1972, mere weeks before he first took office in the Senate.
Biden had had the strength to recover from that awful loss—and the experience of it gave him a unique sense of empathy and perspective that was rare among career Washington insiders. When Biden accepted Obama’s offer to run with him, Obama was delighted—he knew he’d chosen someone who was fundamentally decent, honest, loyal, and, above all, qualified.
On August 27, 2008, Barack Obama took the stage at the Pepsi Center in Denver to formally accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. In a strikingly symbolic historical coincidence, it was the 45th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It represented a stunning political rise for Obama, who a mere eight years before, had not even had credentials to get on the floor of the convention. Now, he was addressing it as the nominee. For Barack, the highlight of the convention was Michelle’s electrifying speech, in which she discussed her upbringing on the South Side of Chicago, the sacrifices her parents had made to build a better life for her and her siblings, and what her unlikely journey said about what was truly possible in America.
As he stood on the stage, Barack’s thoughts were on the significance of the moment, especially for the millions of African-Americans who never thought they’d live to see such a day.
Shortly after the convention, real-world events would permanently alter the dynamic of the race. The 2008 election was already being waged in the context of two unpopular wars and the Bush administration’s failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But in September, the 2008 financial crisis began in earnest, ushering in the years-long economic slump that would become known as the Great Recession.
Lax lending standards in the mortgage industry combined with financial deregulation had helped to inflate a housing bubble in the 2000s. Unscrupulous mortgage underwriters had encouraged unqualified borrowers to take on far more mortgage debt than they could actually afford, with the promise that they could always refinance their mortgages or take advantage of (what appeared to be) constantly rising real estate prices to “flip” their houses and pay off their mortgages.
These underwriters then worked with big banks, who bundled these home loans to unqualified borrowers (now infamously known as subprime mortgages) into complex financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Thanks to the combined incompetence and corruption of the private credit-ratings agencies, these highly risky and poorly understood financial products were given AAA investment ratings (the highest mark of credibility) and sold off to unwitting investors.
By 2008, these shaky financial products had spread like a contagion throughout much of the U.S. financial system, with major financial institutions, government regulators, and the press seemingly unaware of just how widely and systemically the risk had spread.
As long as the housing bubble stayed inflated and home prices kept rising, the deck of cards upon which the U.S. financial system was increasingly built could keep from collapsing. But when home prices started falling beginning in 2007 and into 2008, the default rate on subprime mortgages began to skyrocket—meaning that the once-valuable MBSs and CDOs were shedding value and plunging the financial system into collapse.
(Shortform note: For a more in-depth look at the 2008 financial crisis, explore our summary of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.)
As Obama watched these extraordinary economic events unfold, he recognized that the epidemic of subprime defaults could trigger a full-on collapse of the banking system, leading to a run of bank failures and a credit crunch not seen since the Great Depression.
In September 2008, mere weeks after Barack accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, financial giant Lehman Brothers collapsed. At $600 billion, it was (and remains) the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
The knock-on effects were severe. Businesses fearing a dry-up of credit began massively scaling back plans for investment and laying off workers. These layoffs triggered a collapse in demand in the consumer economy, leading to even more layoffs across nearly every sector of the economy.
For Obama, it was a moment of revelation that revealed just how ailing the American economy was before the crash. The long-term problems wrought by skyrocketing income inequality, irresponsible financial deregulation, and deindustrialization had been laid bare.
He knew that, if elected, he would need to rally people behind a progressive, activist vision of government, in which the public sector would play the leading role in rebuilding the American middle class and restoring public confidence in the nation’s institutions.
Despite the calamitous events befalling the country, McCain refused to seriously engage with the crisis in any constructive way. Instead, he pulled a series of ill-advised (and ultimately fruitless) campaign stunts in an attempt to politically capitalize on it.
In September, he announced that he was “suspending his campaign” to head to Washington to “fix” the financial crisis (despite having claimed that same week that the U.S. economy was in fundamentally sound shape). The move designed to make McCain look like a mature, responsible statesman and portray Obama (who refused to stop campaigning) as a vapid, power-obsessed politician.
The move backfired, however, as it was widely seen as a self-serving gimmick that did nothing to actually help solve the mounting crisis.
That same month, the increasingly flailing McCain orchestrated a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House between himself, Obama, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and the congressional leadership of both parties.
The ostensible goal of the meeting was to hammer out the details of an estimated $700 billion bailout package for failing financial institutions (later to be passed as the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, or TARP). Such legislation was politically toxic for members of Congress in both parties, as the public was in no mood to spend taxpayer money on bailing out bankers. But if both presidential candidates endorsed it, the desperately needed rescue package might become more politically palatable and stand a greater chance of speedy passage.
Obama had his doubts. The negotiations were already fraught and tense. Inserting the hoopla of the presidential campaign into them seemed like a recipe for disaster, especially when the survival of the U.S. economy was hanging in the balance.
But McCain, to Barack’s shock and dismay, had nothing constructive to add during this meeting that he had asked for and that Bush had granted out of respect. He had little to add to the discussion, as his ignorance on economic matters became apparent to everyone present.
It was clear that the meeting had been nothing more than a McCain campaign stunt, more akin to a photo-op than a real summit to discuss important legislation. The Republican congressional leadership was little better. They demurred and delayed taking action, with House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both saying they needed more time to “study” the issue.
As the exasperated Democrats, as well as Bush, explained, there was no more time. For Barack and his congressional Democratic allies, it was obvious that the GOP had no plan, would take no action, and was generally completely unable and unwilling to address the crisis. Unfortunately, this was behavior with which he would become all too familiar with during his presidency.
In the end, TARP passed both houses of Congress, albeit with mostly Democratic votes. Obama saw that the GOP, led by its presidential nominee, had utterly abdicated any responsibility for governing the country.
McCain’s leadership failures also showed itself in his pick for vice president—Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin.
Palin presented herself as a gun-toting, right-wing populist, religious conservative. With her attacks on the mainstream media and her perceived enemies among “urban elites,” she thrilled the Republican base when she entered the national stage at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Obama, however, saw McCain’s selection of Palin as yet another desperation move, an effort to shore up his support among the conservative base that still distrusted him. Indeed, it was Palin—not McCain—who became the real star of the Republican ticket, drawing huge, adoring crowds of the GOP faithful at campaign rallies, far outpacing any enthusiasm that McCain himself was able to generate.
Despite her initially electrifying effect on the GOP base, however, Obama suspected that Palin would ultimately become a liability for McCain and only highlight his recklessness. Sure enough, the shine began to wear off on Palin. In media interviews, she demonstrated shocking ignorance on even the most basic questions of public policy or political thought, famously being unable to answer a softball question about which books and newspapers she read.
Palin’s increasingly shambolic performance on the campaign trail raised questions about her fitness for office, especially given McCain’s advanced age and the very real possibility that she might ascend to the presidency if the GOP ticket won.
More disturbingly, Palin exhibited an anti-intellectual and xenophobic political style on the campaign trail that appealed to the crowd’s worst and basest instincts. She regularly hurled nativist invective at Obama, claiming that he didn’t understand America the way she and her audience did—a not-so-subtle reference to his race and Kenyan heritage. At one campaign visit, she even accused Obama of “palling around” with domestic terrorists, a baseless and dangerous charge that incited members of the audience to yell “Kill him!”
The tenor of McCain-Palin rallies set an ominous tone and proved to be a harbinger of the kind of race-baiting, xenophobic, style that would soon become standard in Republican Party rhetoric.
(Shortform note: For a deeper analysis of how Palin’s rhetoric set the tone for the “birther” conspiracy theory which Donald Trump later successfully used to launch his political career, see our summary of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die.)
With the McCain campaign spiraling and the polls giving him a commanding lead, Barack Obama was the odds-on favorite to win the November 4 general election.
But in the closing days of the campaign, Barack received unsettling news from back home in Hawaii—his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham (whom he always knew as “Toot”) was seriously ill and was unlikely to survive much longer.
Toot had done much to shape who Barack had become. Growing up as a young woman during the Dust Bowl in Kansas, Toot had known poverty and hardship. Although she was not college educated, Barack’s grandmother had always exhibited a fierce intelligence, tempered by her Midwestern practicality.
Toot believed in the value of hard work and strived to instill that in her grandson. Like him, she had been a trailblazer of sorts, becoming the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii. She also embodied what Barack saw as the best of America. She was a white woman born in 1922, who had overcome the severe racial prejudices of the time and place in which she’d been born to embrace her biracial grandson—and his Black family—with unconditional love. In Toot’s story, Barack saw a microcosm of what he believed to be the fundamental goodness and decency of Americans.
He visited her to say goodbye in Honolulu on October 23, 2008, a mere 12 days before the November 4 election. As he left her for what would be the last time, he wistfully thought of Toot as the last surviving link to his childhood in Hawaii. Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham passed away on November 2, 2008 at the age of 86, two days before her grandson became the first African-American president of the United States. It was a symbolic closing of one chapter of Barack’s life—and the opening of another.
November 4, 2008, two days after Toot’s death, was election day. After the mad rush of the last two years of campaigning, Barack enjoyed a relatively light schedule. He voted at his polling place in Chicago and waited for the results to come in with a few close friends, family, and campaign staff.
The day was poignant and emotional for everyone, but perhaps for no one more so than his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson. Marian had grown up in Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s, when the city’s neighborhoods were heavily segregated and African-Americans were effectively excluded from much of the city’s cultural, political, and economic life. Barack wondered what she must be thinking as the once-unimaginable idea of a Black president slowly became a reality before her eyes.
Around 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 4, 2008, the networks called the race for Barack Obama. He won a landslide seven-point victory in the popular vote and a 365-173 margin in the Electoral College. The campaign had scored Democratic victories in Republican strongholds like Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, and Colorado and brought Democrats large majorities in both the House and Senate.
Obama had done the once-unthinkable. The biracial, former underachiever from Honolulu with a funny name had been elected the nation’s first Black president. As he accepted McCain’s gracious concession speech and delivered his victory speech to a raucous crowd of more than 200,000 in Chicago’s Hyde Park, it was impossible not to feel the weight of history on his shoulders.
In November and December 2008, Barack Obama—now President-elect Obama—was preparing to assume the most powerful office in the world. Beyond the obvious gravity of the responsibilities he was set to assume, Barack and his family saw their daily lives changing before their eyes, their privacy and normalcy melting away, never to return again.
Michelle and the girls now had to get used to living under the shadow of the Secret Service and adhering to the myriad security protocols necessary for protecting the nation’s first Black First Family. Barack saw—with some amusement, but also disquiet—how he now entered and left buildings through deserted service entrances and side doors, accompanied by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Even in the midst of bustling cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., the security procedures left him living in a virtual ghost town wherever he went.
But there was little time to focus on this. He now had the monumental task before him of forming a government during the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Obama first needed to assemble his core White House team. Although the vast majority of the rank-and-file employees across the various executive and independent agencies were career civil servants and thus, would not have to be replaced by a new administration, there were still thousands of political appointments that would need to be filled during the transition.
As Obama began to fill out his core team, he (and many of his more progressive supporters) had to learn a tough lesson: Governing was different from campaigning. In order to make change, he would need to work with people who knew how to work the system in Washington—and that meant relying on Washington pros and insiders. Most of the team he assembled consisted of former Clinton administration officials. In general, they were center-left policy wonks, who tended to be older than Obama and have more market-friendly views than some of the liberal activists who’d flocked to the Obama campaign.
Obama needed to start at the top, finding a White House Chief of Staff who could coordinate the day-to-day activities of the Office of the President, build alliances across the executive branch and Congress to implement the president’s agenda, and generally serve as the chief executive’s eyes and ears in Washington. Although not a constitutional role, the White House Chief of Staff had unrivaled access to the president and was generally considered to be one of the most powerful jobs in the country—if not the world.
For his first chief of staff, Obama selected Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel was a veteran of the Clinton White House, a former member of Congress, and a former investment banker.
His mix of political experience, relationships on Capitol Hill, background in the world of finance, and personal relationship with Obama (the two men knew each other from the Chicago political scene) made him an attractive choice for Obama.
Emanuel was known as a take-no-prisoners political brawler with a brash style and a famously expletive-laden speaking style. Obama knew that his chief of staff would be a fearless public advocate for his agenda, but still independent-minded enough to give him the necessary tough advice that others might be afraid to give a president.
Still, the choice of Emanuel wasn’t uniformly popular among Obama’s backers. Some, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party, disliked his background with the famously centrist Clintons—especially coming after the tough 2008 primary fight.
They saw Emanuel as an unprincipled Clinton-style centrist, someone who would always try to position Obama away from left-wing policy positions and tack toward the political center—regardless of the policy merits of such an approach.
Obama understood this criticism. He recognized that Emanuel could sometimes be more concerned with earning something he could label as a political “win” rather than the actual substance of that “win.” Nevertheless, he respected his chief of staff’s political instincts and knowledge of how Washington worked.
With Rahm Emanuel in place as chief of staff, Obama next pivoted to building his core economic team. Given the unfolding economic crisis, these were the most important and most closely watched of his early staffing choices.
Obama selected Timothy Geithner, an experienced Washington insider, to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. Geithener had been closely involved in monetary policymaking as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, after having served in a senior role at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration.
Despite his relative youth at age 47, Geithner was widely regarded as smart, experienced, pragmatic, and solution-oriented. However, he came in for the same line of criticism as Rahm Emanuel. As a key central banker, he’d been in a position of responsibility during the inflation of the housing bubble and resulting crash. During the Clinton years, he’d been part of a Treasury department that had started the wave of financial deregulation (continued eagerly under Bush) that had contributed to the financial crisis.
But Obama was a pragmatist. He believed that it was essential to tap people who had the right mix of relevant experience and ideology, even if they may have been “tainted” by involvement with bad policies in the past. Although he had campaigned as a fresh-faced outsider and genuinely believed that there were serious problems with America’s governing class in both major parties, he was not a revolutionary. Obama wanted the best, most competent people in place.
While someone not in a position of responsibility might have the luxury of imagining a fundamental reworking of the economic order, Obama was not in such a position. He was in charge during a crisis that threatened the livelihoods of millions of American families. His job was to stave off an economic disaster, not impose upon the nation a left-wing economic revolution.
For Secretary of State, the nation’s top diplomat, Obama selected his chief rival from the primaries, Hillary Clinton.
Since defeating Clinton in the primary, Obama knew that he would need to tap her skills and experience. Although he and his team quickly decided that having Hillary serve as vice president would be too awkward a pairing (and potentially give former President Bill Clinton too large a role in the Obama White House), Obama never considered shutting her out of the administration—especially since she’d selflessly put aside the divisions of the primary and been a loyal and dedicated campaigner for him during the general election.
Her selection as Secretary of State was not, however, made for political considerations or out of a desire to unify the Democratic Party. Obama selected Clinton because he believed she was the most qualified candidate for the job.
America had suffered deep damage to its international reputation during the Bush years due to the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and its clear scorn for international opinion as it waged the so-called War on Terror.
Obama believed that Hillary Clinton’s sterling reputation as a policy expert, her famed work ethic, and her international star power would make her an effective representative for the U.S. on the world stage as she worked to rebuild America’s frayed network of alliances.
Perhaps the most interesting cabinet decision Obama made in his first term was to retain the Republican Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Gates had been installed by the Bush administration after the failures of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at Defense.
Gates certainly cut a contrasting figure from Obama: He was a Republican, former Cold War hawk, and a supporter of the invasion of Iraq that Obama had so fiercely opposed. But, like Obama’s cabinet selections at other departments, Gates also had the relevant experience—in his case, managing the vast and powerful bureaucracy of the Pentagon. Moreover, Gates was not some wild-eyed neoconservative ideologue in the mold of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. Rather, he was a realist and a pragmatist, with a keen understanding of the limitations of American military power.
Indeed, he’d delivered real success in Iraq, significantly improving the situation from the chaotic mess he’d inherited—giving the nascent Iraqi government some space to operate. Perhaps most promising for Obama, Gates agreed with him on the need for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which the outgoing Bush administration had long rejected.
Obama hoped that keeping Gates on at Defense would show Republicans that he was serious about his commitment to bipartisanship. He also hoped that having an experienced and trusted hand like Gates on board would help both the military and the civilian bureaucracy at the Pentagon (both of which Obama assumed would be generally distrustful of a liberal president who’d never served in the armed forces) acclimate themselves to the new administration.
Choosing Gates was a demonstration of Obama’s innate pragmatism. Despite his opposition to the War in Iraq, Obama was not a pacifist opposed to war in all cases. As awful as it was, Obama recognized that war was sometimes necessary for national security, human rights or the nation’s strategic interests. He wanted policies and personnel that would be effective more than he wanted to tick boxes on the left-wing agenda.
As Barack was assembling his cabinet, Michelle and the girls were preparing to make the full-time transition from Chicago to Washington. Although Michelle was set to become the first lady—and thus, one of the most high-profile people in the world—she remained a mother to Malia and Sasha first.
That meant busying herself with school tours in Washington for the girls, hoping to find a school that would be sensitive to their unique family situation and give her daughters as much privacy and normalcy as possible (she and Barack ultimately settled on Sidwell Friends).
Still, the changes took a toll on Michelle, especially seeing her beloved girls now needing to be escorted everywhere by an armed Secret Service detail.
To help with the transition, Barack and Michelle invited Marian Robinson, Michelle’s mother, to move into the White House full-time to help with the girls. In this role, Marian would become the glue of the family. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, she had a loving—albeit no-fuss and no-nonsense—demeanor that helped keep Malia and Sasha grounded as they were soon enveloped in a world of luxury and privilege in the White House.
One highlight of the transition period was meeting the warm and accommodating White House household staff, who would soon become deeply close to the Obama family. The cooks, housekeepers, butlers, and gardeners would take care of the family’s every need. While luxurious, Barack always found it somewhat odd and disconcerting to be waited on hand and foot. Both he and Michelle worried about the girls growing too coddled or privileged by the trappings of the White House.
On a deeper level, it was impossible for Barack not to notice that the household staff was disproportionately Black and Latino, and many of them had served since as far back as the Nixon administration. As Barack came to see, the staff treated his family with an extra level of service and care and took exceptional pride in their work. Later, one Black member of the staff told him that having the Obama family in the White House was a tremendously meaningful event in their lives. Their commitment to Barack and his family was born of a desire to ensure that the Obamas received the care and service that every other First Family had.
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, and the nation’s first African-American head of state. The enthusiasm was palpable that day, as a record crowd on the National Mall withstood freezing January temperatures to witness a historic inauguration.
After Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office at noon, it was official. In his inaugural address, Obama acknowledged the celebratory mood that much of the nation felt at seeing a Black man ascend to the highest office in the land. But he also knew he needed to tamp down some of the overheated enthusiasm, especially among his core supporters.
The country was in crisis, with a once-in-a-generation economic calamity sapping the household wealth of millions of American families, two overseas wars that had steadily devolved into violent quagmires, and rising global temperatures that threatened the very future of life on the planet.
This was not a time for celebration—it was a time for hard work, sober reality, and determination. The seriousness of the moment was underscored when Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts collapsed during the inaugural festivities. Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer and his health was rapidly deteriorating. Kennedy’s fading health would soon have major political ramifications for Obama’s first-term agenda.
Still, it was impossible for Barack and Michelle not to be caught up in the rapturous mood. They danced through the night at a whirlwind of inaugural balls. To Barack, Michelle looked as lovely, radiant, and poised as she had when they met 20 years before.
Obama’s first few weeks in office were a blizzard of activity. His administration was riding high in the early days, with the new president enjoying a near-70% approval rating.
But Obama knew that this goodwill from the voters wouldn’t last long. As the economy continued to deteriorate, it was only a matter of time before his political capital began eroding and the public held him responsible for the nation’s woes.
Therefore, there was great urgency to act on the administration’s priorities. There was a flurry of executive orders within the first few days of Obama taking office. He banned torture and started a process for closing the infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (where enemy combatants had been held for years without trial and subjected to torture by the U.S. government), lifted the Bush administration’s ban on stem-cell research, and signed into law a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
He also signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for employees to file pay-discrimination suits against their employers. This legislation was personal for Obama, as he thought about the women in his life, like his mother Ann and his grandmother Toot, who had had to endure being paid less than men for doing the same work for their entire careers. The Ledbetter Act was an important step on the road toward ending this injustice.
As important as these executive orders and early bills were, they were overshadowed by the one issue on the minds of every voter and politician: the collapsing state of the U.S. economy.
The Wall Street financial crisis had spilled over into the “real” economy. As the financial system crumbled, credit dried up and businesses across the country began canceling big investment projects and laying off employees. It was a classic collapse in aggregate demand. As more people were laid off or saw their wages and hours cut, they began to pull back their own spending. This, in turn, led to the economy shedding more jobs as businesses could no longer stay afloat with all of their customers simultaneously curbing their spending. This wave of job losses would trigger further reductions in consumer spending in a vicious cycle.
To anyone familiar with the thinking of economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the solution was clear. The government needed to use its fiscal resources to step in and act as the “spender of last resort.” With its ability to finance hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending, only the federal government had the resources to break this vicious cycle of private sector austerity, put money into the hands of consumers and business, and restart the economy.
This was the economic theory behind what was to become the Obama administration’s first major piece of legislation: the stimulus bill, officially known as the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
(Shortform note: For a critique of the kind of Keynesian fiscal policy advocated by the Obama administration, explore our summary of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.)
The economic team in the Obama White House believed that, given the scale of the crisis, a stimulus bill on the order of $1 trillion would be necessary to restore the economy to full health. But chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and other political advisers balked at the high price tag of such a bill.
Emanuel, in his characteristically brusque style, warned Obama that there was, “no fucking way” that even a Democratic Congress would agree to that level of spending, especially after the public outrage at the extraordinary cost of TARP the previous fall. Democratic lawmakers in swing states and districts would be especially loath to be on the hook for voting for that large a spending bill.
Instead, Emanuel estimated that $700-800 billion was all the White House could expect to cajole out of the House and Senate—and even that would be a stretch. It was an important reminder for Obama and his supporters of how even what appeared to be the most urgent priorities for the nation still had to bend the knee to political reality.
Obama himself wanted to use the opportunity of the stimulus bill to make crucial long-term investments in key elements of the country’s infrastructure, such as improving the increasingly antiquated electrical and air-traffic control systems. But here, too, economic policy advisers like Larry Summers (director of the National Economic Council) had to shoot down that idea as well. Those sorts of projects, while important, would take time to identify, plan, and bring to fruition. And the one thing the administration didn’t have in those crucial early days was time. They needed projects that were shovel-ready and could begin pumping money into the economy immediately.
Obama accepted this argument and recognized that much of the stimulus would provide additional funding for well-established, existing programs that would be able to quickly put money in people’s pockets—unemployment insurance, food stamps, business and individual tax cuts, and aid to state and local governments.
Despite objections from Democrats in Congress and in the administration, Obama’s unity message during the campaign had been genuine; he fully believed that big problems like the ones the country was facing required input from all parts of the political system.
Therefore, the president made it clear early in the process that he wanted Republican votes for the stimulus. He further believed that the bill would be more popular (and make it easier for wavering Democrats to support) if it had some measure of support from GOP lawmakers.
But these hopes of bipartisan support were dashed early on—a dynamic that would become a recurring feature of the Obama presidency. Republican leaders were not interested in cooperating with Obama; they were interested in breaking him. They recognized that in a highly polarized political system, their best path back to power was to make Obama and the Democrats as unpopular as possible by refusing to work with them on any major legislation—thereby handing Democrats the sole responsibility of taking tough votes.
They believed that any gestures toward bipartisanship would only benefit the Democrats. Thus, by withholding their support, the Republicans believed they could make Obama and his party “own” the economic crisis and sluggish recovery, providing fertile ground for a GOP comeback in the 2010 midterm elections.
The stimulus was the first test of this new Republican strategy. House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both exerted heavy pressure on their caucuses to refuse to cooperate with or even speak to members of the administration on crafting the stimulus. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was outraged by what he saw as the sheer hypocrisy and audacity of the approach, as Republicans refused to work to help solve a crisis that had originally happened on their watch.
In the end, the ARRA passed the House on a strict party-line vote: zero Republicans voted for the bill. Although House Democrats enjoyed a healthy majority, it still took the skillful legislative and consensus-building skills of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to guide the bill to passage.
In the Senate, the math was a bit more complicated. Thanks to their strategy of no cooperation, the Republicans abused the power of the filibuster (an arcane Senate rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass legislation) to grind all legislation to a halt.
Despite securing landslide victories in both the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, the Democrats had “only” 58 votes in the Senate—to break a filibuster, they would need Republican votes. As a practical matter, they would need three Republicans to get to 61 votes and get the bill through the Senate—providing a buffer so that no Republicans could be accused by the party’s fired-up base of having been the deciding vote for the stimulus.
The three Republicans the Obama team targeted were relative moderates: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. In addition, Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska (the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus) was seen as lukewarm to the stimulus and needed to be persuaded to vote for it.
Of course, this dynamic gave this gang of four enormous leverage over the final legislation, as they had the power to determine whether it would pass at all. For political reasons, they insisted that it be kept at under $800 billion. Despite the utter lack of economic logic to this demand, the administration had little choice but to accept it, and the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the Senate (by a 61-39 vote) and was signed into law by President Obama in February 2009.
Despite the necessary political compromises, the ARRA was still a significant piece of legislation and the final product aligned closely with what Obama wanted.
Beyond economic stimulus, the law contained funding for the digitization of medical records and seed money for clean energy companies—farsighted investments that would pay major dividends for the country.
Yet, the ARRA almost immediately came under withering attacks from the right. Republicans and their allies in conservative media lambasted the bill as bloated, excessive, and wasteful. They framed every supposedly frivolous spending item as an example of out-of-control Washington liberals squandering taxpayer money during a recession. These (generally incorrect, dishonest, and bad faith) criticisms were repeated and amplified by the mainstream press as well.
Perhaps even more troubling, liberal commentators began to criticize Obama himself for not showing enough “spine” in his dealings with the Republicans. As the president and his team were to discover, this liberal frustration would be a recurring theme of his administration. No matter how often he explained it, many of his core supporters did not understand that the GOP still existed, still had power to block and obstruct—and was willing to use that power to its fullest extent. Without more Democratic votes in Congress, Obama had no choice but to play ball.
One of the most important things for President Obama was reading constituent mail from working Americans. He believed it was imperative for him to hear from the people and learn as much as possible about what they were thinking and how they believed his administration was addressing problems in their day-to-day lives.
Especially in the darkest days of the recession, these letters made for difficult reading. While many writers expressed support for the new president and enthusiasm for his historic election, it was impossible not to see the dismay bubbling just under the surface. The letters told of jobs lost, homes foreclosed upon, children gone hungry, and dreams crushed
For Obama, this window into the lives of the people he served was key. It helped him take his attention away from the drama of Washington and focus on what really mattered—fighting to make the lives of ordinary Americans better.
Of course, maintaining focus on that fight could be difficult when Obama was still responsible for managing the day-to-day affairs of the federal government and its millions of employees.
Given the sheer size of the government, this in and of itself was a monumental task. While many functions of the sprawling machine ran more or less automatically (like the disbursement of Social Security payments, the collection of taxes, or the delivery of mail), other agencies and departments required continual direction and guidance from the White House on policy priorities, staffing decisions, and public relations management.
In addition to meetings with his cabinet, Obama’s days were packed with meetings with lobbying and interest groups; foreign dignitaries; members of Congress; as well as media interviews, public speeches, policy announcements, domestic and international summits, and the endless parade of ceremonial and honorary duties that a president is expected to perform.
In the midst of the daily thrum of activity, Obama maintained a furious pace of work in these crucial early months of his presidency. In particular, his eyes were continually glued to the economic news and the key economic data points—the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, long- and short-term interest rates, and the stock market index, to name just a few. The president knew that his administration would sink or swim with those numbers and how Americans judged his performance in managing the worst economic crisis in a generation.
One of Barack’s deepest joys in these early days of his presidency was seeing how Michelle grew into the role of first lady. In addition to being a superb mother to Malia and Sasha, Michelle now had a very public position.
Although first ladies might not be caught up in the day-to-day scrum of Washington politics, they still could be lightning rods for controversy. In her role, Michelle was expected to be the face of modern American womanhood. In the 21st century, this meant that she faced pressure to break down gender barriers and speak out against the traditional forms of exclusion and marginalization faced by women in social, economic, and political life. At the same time, she had to raise her daughters and be careful not to be seen as “overstepping her bounds” or intruding too directly into politics (as Hillary Clinton had been vilified for doing).
The demands of the role were nearly impossible and Michelle initially chafed at being first lady, feeling that it did not make adequate use of her talents. But she managed to find a way to put her unique stamp on the office, making childhood obesity her signature issue. She started initiatives to make school lunches more healthy and to make physical exercise more central to the K-5 curriculum.
Perhaps her most famous and beloved initiative was to start a homemade White House vegetable garden as a way of promoting healthy lifestyles for American families. To Barack and Michelle’s joy, the vegetable garden became a highly popular stop on White House tours, especially for children.
Beyond watching Michelle grow into a highly respected and popular first lady, Barack found joy in the new rhythms of family life.
Although he was the most famous and powerful person in the world, his schedule as president in many ways left more time for family intimacy than was the case when he was a senator. With the whole family now in Washington, Barack found himself generally able to be home for dinner with Michelle and the girls by 6:30 and to participate in domestic life—attending dance recitals, discussing school projects with his daughters, and reading them bedtime stories. Although his new life as president was unimaginably strange in so many ways, he found his evenings at home with the family to be a much-needed and comforting oasis of normalcy.
With the nation’s intense focus on the state of the economy, the next priority for the administration after the passage of the stimulus package was to stabilize the country’s teetering financial system.
Overriding the suggestions of some of his more left-wing advisors, Obama rejected plans to have the federal government nationalize ailing banks and directly purchase the toxic mortgage-backed securities from them to take them off their balance sheets.
Such an approach would have been far too expensive, involved the federal government in the daily management of private financial institutions, and quite possibly made investors even more fearful of putting their money into the financial system (for fear that their assets would be next to be nationalized). It was politically infeasible, economically unworkable, and he quickly rejected it.
Instead, Treasury Secretary Geithner proposed an alternative plan: the stress test. The stress test consisted of a thorough financial audit of the major banks’ assets and liabilities, conducted by the Federal Reserve.
Under the terms of the stress test, banks were required to hold larger stocks of capital in reserve. They could only receive further bailouts (from the unspent money that Congress had already appropriated through TARP) if the stress test found that they could not remain solvent without such an infusion of cash.
The theory behind this plan was that the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market in the fall had destroyed public and investor confidence in the financial system. Investors were fearful of investing in bank stocks, afraid that financial institutions’ balance sheets were laden with now-worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities.
Geithner believed that this investor fear was probably unjustified and irrational. Despite the enormous destruction that subprime lending had wrought on the financial system, most mortgages did not fail, even when the housing bubble burst. Banks were probably a lot safer than the investor community believed. What they needed was something that could conclusively demonstrate the fundamental soundness of the banking system.
The stress test was a way of reassuring financial markets that the banks could stand on their own, while potentially freeing the administration from the potentially disastrous consequences of nationalization or politically unpalatable bailouts.
Obama approved Geithner’s plan, seeing it as the least bad of all potential options. Moreover, the consensus-building and cerebral president was pleased with the process by which the policy had come about. The issue had been well-studied, all sides had been heard, and all viable alternatives had been fairly considered. Not everyone on the Obama economic team had fully agreed with Geithner’s stress test plan, but they committed to it once the decision was made.
(Shortform note: For a further discussion of the benefits of such a “disagree and commit” approach to decision-making and the importance of constructive conflict, read our summary of Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.)
This was to be a template for policy making in the Obama White House. Decisions would not be made by gut instinct or emotion. Instead, there would be a rational and transparent process. It stemmed from Obama’s core belief that while a good process might not always lead to a good outcome, a bad process was almost certain to lead to a bad outcome.
The stress testing would take several months to complete, however, during which time the administration would hear howls from its critics on the left. They believed that Obama was letting the banks off too easy. Despite this criticism, however, there was one group that didn’t think that Obama was going easy on Wall Street at all—the Wall Street bankers themselves.
In the spring of 2009, the media reported that executives whose firms, like AIG, had received billions of dollars in taxpayer money through TARP had rewarded themselves with big bonuses and corporate jets. Unsurprisingly, massive public outrage followed, with demands from congressional Democrats that the administration do something to severely punish what they saw as wealthy bankers living off the public largesse—mere months after their greed and incompetence had crashed the global economy.
Geithner warned Obama that, as tone-deaf and arrogant as Wall Street’s behavior was, there were no real legal mechanisms for clawing back the bonus money. Moreover, any attempts to do so might frighten investors away from re-capitalizing the banks, thus jeopardizing the stress tests and risking sending the financial markets into an even worse tailspin.
Despite what appeared to Obama to be clearly egregious and shameless behavior on their part, he was taken aback by the attitudes expressed by Wall Street CEOs during a White House summit in the spring of 2009. He found that they were genuinely hurt and dismayed at the public anger that had been directed toward them. They saw the outrage as being ill-informed, misdirected, and fundamentally unfair.
Obama was astounded by their expressed belief that he had been the driving force behind much of this populist rage toward the bankers. Their sheer lack of self-awareness blindsided him. He thought of his grandmother Toot. She had also been a banker, but one whose professional conduct was guided by restraint and probity. Their arrogance and taste for extravagance drew a sharp contrast with his humble and circumspect grandmother—and reminded him just how powerful and arrogant the big banks had become.
Obama firmly reminded the CEOs that while he was not a fiery left-wing populist, he was not in sympathy with their position either—and that his moderate, left-of-center administration was the only thing standing between them and the more extreme elements of the left.
Regardless of Wall Street’s misplaced resentments, the Obama administration was working hard to restore confidence in the financial system and get the banks back on a stable, secure, and profitable footing as soon as possible.
In April 2009, the results of Geithner’s stress test came back. To his and Obama’s delight, they were better than expected. The audit showed that, for the most part, the major banks did indeed have sufficient capital to make future bailouts unnecessary. Any shortfalls that they did have could be made up through the private sector or, if necessary, from left over, unspent TARP money. There would be no need to take the political hit of asking Congress to appropriate more funds.
This was a crucial step toward the stabilization of the financial system. The bill of good health offered by the stress tests gave investors the confidence to recapitalize the banks. Eventually, this led to the resumption of lending and easing of credit. This marked the beginning of what would become the longest stretch of economic growth in U.S. history—running through the rest of Obama’s two terms in office and beyond.
Moreover, as stimulus money began to make its way into the pockets of the American people, rising consumer demand began to fuel a growth in GDP, leading the economy out of recession.
Despite these early successes, organized opposition to the Obama administration was mounting in the spring of 2009. Although it was not politically or economically feasible to enact a “Main Street bailout” for hard-hit small businesses and individuals (as many critics on the left urged the administration to do), Obama’s team still recognized that it was important to provide targeted relief to struggling Americans.
This was a particularly grim time for U.S. homeowners, who’d seen 20 percent of the value of their homes wiped out in the housing market crash. The American landscape, especially in the Sun Belt States of Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, glittered with abandoned homes and ghost-town subdivisions, whose owners had simply walked away from mortgages worth more than the value of their homes.
Accordingly, the Obama Treasury Department introduced initiatives like the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) designed to help distressed borrowers refinance their homes, reduce monthly payments, and avoid foreclosure. While these programs could not make those with underwater mortgages completely whole, they could help reduce a great deal of financial stress for working families. Moreover, they would benefit those homeowners whose mortgages weren’t in trouble—after all, everyone’s property values suffer when a neighbor defaults on her mortgage.
Still, there was concern from political operatives like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel that even mild, ameliorative programs like HAMP could spark a conservative backlash. Those homeowners who deemed themselves to be “responsible” might blanch at the idea of their taxpayer dollars being used to “bail out” the distressed mortgages of their “irresponsible” neighbors.
These sentiments were given voice on February 19, 2009 on the financial news network CNBC, on-air commentator Rick Santelli delivered a blistering criticism of the administration’s relief programs for distressed homeowners.
In his remarks, Santelli said that the federal government was encouraging irresponsible behavior by providing relief to those who’d taken on risky mortgages. In his view, this would only encourage more recklessness by unqualified borrowers—whom Santelli characterized as “losers.” Perhaps most importantly for the future, Santelli called for a “tea party” of aggravated taxpayers to protest against what he saw as the government’s wrongheaded spending priorities.
It was a similar phenomenon to Obama’s experience with the Wall Street CEOs: wealthy, powerful (and predominantly white) conservatives who believed themselves to be the victims in a crisis that was largely of their own making.
Obama and his political team recognized that this form of resentment was a powerful and effective staple of right-wing politics going all the way back to the anti-welfare politics of figures like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s. Underneath the demagoguery about “undeserving” recipients of government programs and “welfare queens” was an implicit message: White taxpayers were being robbed of their property in order to give unearned handouts to African-Americans.
Obama knew that this racially infused “beggar-thy-neighbor” style of politics had always posed a threat to American liberalism—and that such attacks could have a renewed salience because of his race.
While contending with the precarious state of the financial system, the Obama administration also had to confront another disaster-in-waiting right at the outset: the impending collapse of the once-mighty U.S. auto industry.
The 2008 financial crisis had laid bare long-festering problems with the Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. For decades, the industry had been uncompetitive, producing poor-quality, inefficient cars (relative to their Japanese and European counterparts) that consumers were uninterested in buying. Moreover, the Big Three were on the hook for the rising health care and pension costs of their heavily unionized workforce.
By spring 2009, they were on the verge of collapse, with an urgent need for a top-to-bottom restructuring and overhaul of their core business model. While a rescue of the auto industry was unpopular, the administration felt that there was little alternative. If the Big Three collapsed, it would jeopardize millions of jobs (both at the companies themselves and within the network of suppliers and partmakers who served them) and destroy the communities where they were based.
Although Ford was in relatively decent shape, GM and Chrysler were in serious jeopardy, with their management largely delusional about the scale of the problem and the need for change. Although the two firms had received billions of dollars in TARP money (thanks to some creative interpretation of the law by the outgoing Bush administration), they were still in dire straits in early 2009.
The administration convened a White House Auto Task Force to manage the rescue of the industry. The task force’s findings showed that the industry would need more infusions of TARP money. But the bailout was to be conditional on structural changes at both companies. GM CEO Rick Wagoner and the entire board of directors were forced out, with the U.S. government taking a significant temporary ownership stake in the company. The administration also brokered a merger between Fiat and Chrysler, as part of a structured bankruptcy process.
Think about the costs and benefits of compromise.
Have you ever been in a professional situation where you were forced to accept a compromise on a project or initiative you spearheaded? Describe what happened.
Do you feel that making this compromise was worthwhile and achieved most of your goals, or do you feel that you sacrificed truly important principles? Explain your answer.
In thinking about this experience, which approach do you think is better: compromising to achieve some of your goals, or steadfastly sticking to your principles in the hopes of achieving all your goals? Explain your answer.
So far, we’ve explored the early Obama administration’s domestic policies. But there were also pressing foreign policy needs. Obama inherited a muddled and chaotic national security situation. There was the ongoing threat of international terrorism, two overseas wars, and the urgent moral necessity of winding down America’s torture program being conducted at CIA-run sites around the world. The War on Terror, meanwhile, had already imposed enormous costs: nearly 3,000 U.S. troops killed and $1 trillion expended.
Obama’s overarching foreign policy goal would be to make the nation truly fulfill its highest ideals.
As we saw, ever since he was a young man at Columbia in New York City, Obama had rejected the cynical worldview of many of his contemporaries on the left. While the United States had certainly perpetrated misdeeds and human rights abuses internationally—misdeeds that ultimately undermined America’s global credibility and its own national security—Obama did not believe that the U.S. was responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world.
In fact, he saw that America’s ideals of democracy, the rule of law, and free enterprise represented a beacon of hope for people around the world living in oppression and poverty. If America was guilty of anything, it was failing to live up to those standards.
His nuanced and balanced perspective, however, made Obama a figure of suspicion among the Washington, D.C. foreign policy and national security establishment. This establishment was an informal, but tightly knit network of military officials, State Department officials, congressional staffers, intelligence agents, journalists, and think tank analysts who had been guiding American foreign policy for both major political parties since the end of World War II.
Members of this clique defended their record by saying that they provided U.S. foreign policy with a consistency and stability that had enabled the nation to successfully navigate and win the Cold War and emerge as the world’s preeminent superpower in the 21st century.
Critics—like Obama—believed on the other hand that the foreign policy community had devolved into a consensus-driven, conformist, and groupthink mentality, while exercising a complete lack of moral judgment. Its failures could be seen in the ill-fated rush to war in Iraq, the establishment of extrajudicial detention centers at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the documented use of torture by U.S. interrogators. All of this undermined America’s moral standing in the world and hindered the achievement of long-term strategic foreign policy goals.
Throughout Obama's term in office, these tensions would play out between the foreign policy establishment and its critics, with the conflict even taking place within the administration itself. More seasoned figures like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton would clash with younger, more iconoclastic administration officials like Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivan, the latter of whom questioned many of the guiding assumptions of U.S. foreign policy and sought to move away from the consensus.
In Iraq, Obama, Defense Secretary Gates, and the generals agreed upon a plan that would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq’s main population centers (where most of the sectarian violence was taking place) by the summer of 2009, and have all troops out of the country by the end of 2011.
This plan would largely take Americans out of harm’s way, while giving U.S. forces time to train the Iraqi Army and security forces so that they could better support the fledgling al-Maliki government.
Obama’s attitude toward the war in Afghanistan was different. There, the ruling Taliban had harbored Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that had attacked the United States on 9/11. Unlike in Iraq, the U.S. had legitimate and direct national security concerns in Afghanistan. Although the Bush administration had succeeded in toppling the Taliban and installing a nominal government in the capital of Kabul, Taliban fighters remained at large and in control in much of the country. Moreover, Al Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden had not been captured by U.S. forces and was believed to still be hiding in the remote and mountainous border lands between Afghanistan and its neighbor to the east, Pakistan.
Pakistan had proven to be an unreliable partner in the war effort. The Pakistani military had been unable to keep Taliban insurgents from escaping into the border region. Even worse, some elements within the Pakistani security and intelligence services were actively protecting and collaborating with the Taliban, seeing them as a useful means of keeping Afghanistan weak and divided—and therefore, unable to cooperate with Pakistan’s archrival, India.
This chaotic and fraught state of affairs left the nascent Afghan Army unable to effectively combat Taliban fighters, while the government headed by Hamid Karzai remained weak, ineffective, and corrupt.
Obama wanted to recommit the United States to the fight in Afghanistan, from which he believed the war in Iraq had diverted resources and focus.
Early in his administration, he began reviewing plans for a troop surge in Afghanistan. But while Obama recognized the necessity of a renewed military commitment, he also wanted to avoid further embroiling the U.S. even further in a long, drawn-out exercise in nation-building. Instead, he wanted clear, defined objectives for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan that related directly to America’s national security interests.
Thus, he reviewed the plans offered to him by the Pentagon with some trepidation. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, initially presented a plan for a surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops—doubling the U.S. military commitment.
Obama was skeptical of such a heavy surge. Why, after five years of U.S. presence in Afghanistan with no clear objective, would a sudden doubling of the troop commitment now suddenly turn things around? To Obama, what was needed was a clearer definition of strategic objectives, not mindlessly committing more troops (and inevitably, more casualties) to a war that the public had soured on.
Key figures within the administration, however, were on board with the Pentagon’s hawkish recommendation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director Leon Panetta, for example, encouraged Obama to commit to this course of action.
Other than the president himself, the most skeptical official was Vice President Joe Biden. Having seen the pitfalls of unflinchingly signing on to recommendations from the Pentagon (and having been haunted by his own vote for the war in Iraq), Biden saw the potential for the U.S. to get bogged down in a long, messy war with no clear way out. He urged caution and patience—and warned Obama not to let the generals outmaneuver him or pressure him into a course of action against his will. Obama was the president, Biden reminded him, and it was his decision about where and when to deploy troops.
Biden’s warning was wise. While men like Gates, Mullen, and McKiernan were smart, capable, and possessed of a nuanced understanding of the limits of America’s military might, they were also products of Pentagon groupthink. When assigned a “mission” with a vague and undefined purpose, people who came out of the Pentagon system tended to become tunnel-visioned and narrowly focused on achieving that mission—at any cost. This mission-oriented thinking could cause them to lose focus on America’s broader strategic interests as they narrowly focused on “victory” (however poorly defined that might be).
Thus, the military and their civilian counterparts in the Department of Defense tended to always want more troops and more money regardless of the circumstances—and were often willing to lean on their allies in Congress and the national media to help them pressure presidents into giving them what they wanted. It was the duty of the president to take these recommendations seriously, but to also take a broader and more holistic view of the situation, tempering the generals’ recommendations with a knowledge of their ingrained biases.
Obama wanted to redefine the purpose of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and define clear measures of what constituted success. In March 2009, the new strategy was announced. The goal in Afghanistan was to disrupt, dislodge, and defeat Al Qaeda.
Bringing the country to a true state of internal security would require a massive investment in civil society and infrastructure—police, hospitals, schools, roads—as well as a renewed military commitment. But there was simply no appetite within the Obama administration for that kind of sustained mission, when American troops had already been on the ground in Afghanistan for nearly eight years. Accordingly the administration authorized the deployment of 17,000 additional troops for this more limited, security-focused mission.
Unfortunately, Obama’s surge in Afghanistan failed to produce the desired stability in the country. The security situation continued to deteriorate into the autumn of 2009 as the Karzai government proved largely ineffective in suppressing violence and maintaining order. The Taliban was gaining strength throughout the country and winning the loyalty of much of the rural population. Worse, elements of the Pakistani military were still harboring Taliban fighters and facilitating the escape of Qaeda fighters across the border.
In response, General Stanley McChrystal (whom Obama had appointed to replace General David McKiernan as commander in Afghanistan) proposed a counterinsurgency (commonly known as COIN) strategy. This was more than just another surge. It was a comprehensive exercise in nation-building, with massive U.S. investments in infrastructure and education. The immediate goal was to alleviate the poverty and despair that had made the country such a fertile breeding ground for religious extremism. The long-term goal was to build Afghan civil society from the ground up.
But Obama was extremely skeptical of the COIN strategy. As with the plans he’d rejected earlier in his term, they would come at an enormous cost both in manpower (an additional 40,000 troops) and money (at least another $40 billion). He saw the possibility of getting mired in a war with no exit strategy that would carry on for the rest of his time in office and years afterward.
To his anger and dismay, McChrystal and Mullen launched a full-court press campaign to pressure Obama behind the scenes into giving them the green light. They gave public speeches and interviews to reporters in which they darkly warned that failure to deploy more troops to Afghanistan would result in a total failure of the U.S. mission.
The administration was outraged by the Pentagon’s attempt to pressure the president and by what they saw as its brazen interference in civilian politics. Vice President Biden—who had always been the most skeptical of the Pentagon—was particularly incensed.
In response, Obama summoned Secretary Gates, General McChrystal, and CJCS Mullen to the White House. There, he admonished the generals and their allies at Defense for attempting to force his hand. He asked them if their actions were motivated by contempt for him, his politics, and his administration. The men apologized to the president and insisted that they held him and his White House in high regard. The episode revealed just how powerful and arrogant many senior figures in the military establishment had become.
(Shortform note: For a personal account of General Stanley McChrystal’s experience as commander of the Joint Operations Task Force in Iraq, read our summary of his memoir, Team of Teams.)
It was true that members of the military gave the highest level of service to their country and were prepared to literally sacrifice their lives for the nation. Obama did not question that they deserved respect. But he also did not think that they deserved unconditional deference, even on matters of military strategy. In a democratic country like the United States, the military obeyed the orders of the civilian leadership, not the other way around. He noticed a disturbing contempt that many officers seemed to have for civilian politicians—especially politicians on the left or center-left like himself. They tended to believe that they shouldn’t have to answer or explain themselves to elected officials who’d never worn a uniform themselves.
It was clear that the military had developed a sense of entitlement due to the automatic deference it had been accustomed to receiving from large swathes of the public, the media, and politicians, especially after 9/11. But Obama reminded them that, though he may never have given military service, he was the commander in chief—and his orders would be obeyed.
In the end, Obama compromised with the Pentagon. Although he was incensed by their attempts to force his hand, he also recognized that they could not allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to regain control in Afghanistan. In November, he agreed to a 30,000 troop surge (on top of what he’d already authorized in February). But in exchange, there would be an 18-month timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. The mission of the troops would be limited to helping the Karzai government achieve a basic level of security and conducting raids on Taliban strongholds.
(Yet about six months later, in an explosive Rolling Stone interview, McChrystal disparaged senior members of the Obama administration and questioned their competence to handle military affairs. Obama ultimately relieved McChrystal of his command in response to the general’s insubordination.)
While Obama had successfully pushed back against the Pentagon’s more lavish plans and successfully asserted the principle of civilian control of the military, he despaired of the fact that he had deployed more troops than he’d recalled.
When he visited cadets at West Point, sat with wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, or called the families of U.S. troops killed in action, Obama understood the true cost of war, its sheer brutality and inhumanity.
While it could seem abstract and distant when discussing troop levels in the White House Situation Room, seeing young men and women with amputated limbs or hearing the wails of anguish from bereaved family members was a grim reminder that the cost of war was human lives—the lives of people with hopes and dreams who had made the ultimate sacrifice in service of their country.
Unlike politicians wearing a flag pin, or gaudy military displays at NFL games, the service of these brave young men and women was the epitome of real patriotism—and Obama vowed to never let himself forget it.
The supreme irony came in the midst of this planned military surge in Afghanistan, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on October 9, 2009 that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The award had been conferred upon him for his efforts to improve international relations and his commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. Humbled (and surprised) at the news, Obama did not believe that he had yet achieved enough to merit such an honor. Still, he had little choice but to travel to Oslo in December 2009 to accept it.
In his acceptance speech, Obama noted the irony of a sitting U.S. president—an office with control over the most powerful military the world had ever known—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Nevertheless, he observed that war was sometimes necessary for the preservation of the greater peace. The task before leaders was to evolve higher standards for the conduct of war and stronger justifications for it.
That night, back at his Oslo hotel, he watched from his window as thousands of people gathered in the streets below, each holding aloft a candle. It was the city’s traditional torchlight parade to honor that year’s winner of the prize. In these citizens—ordinary men, women, and children—Obama saw the innate and universal human desire for peace and progress. Although the often-grim realities of the real world seldom matched humankind’s highest hopes, demonstrations like this spurred him on. No matter what, he had to work, to try for a more just and peaceful world.
In that quest to build a more peaceful and stable world for future generations, one of the most important tasks before the Obama administration was repairing America’s badly damaged international relations.
The Bush administration’s aggressive military posture and clear disdain for international institutions like the United Nations had seriously undermined American moral authority on the world stage. This was a serious problem that threatened to make it difficult for the United States to secure international cooperation on urgent economic, environmental, and national security matters.
Despite America’s diminished reputation, Obama found that when he traveled internationally, there was still a great deal of enthusiasm among both foreign leaders and the general public for the United States. The idea and symbol of America still meant a great deal to people around the world, even if the reality had fallen short. After all, the U.S. was the world’s only remaining superpower, one that had spearheaded the generally peaceful and prosperous postwar order through its role in creating lasting institutions like the UN, NATO, World Bank, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund.
Despite many mistakes and miscalculations, the U.S. had been a relatively generous and benevolent world power by historical standards. Even with the damage of the Bush years, there was still an enormous reserve of goodwill and hope for the United States. This would be vital, as the world desperately needed international cooperation and American leadership to tackle the ongoing global recession and avoid a slide into mutually destructive protectionism. Such a course threatened to bring global trade to a standstill—potentially turning a recession into a full-blown depression.
One of the earliest opportunities for the Obama administration to present the renewed American commitment to internationalism was the G20 Summit in London in April 2009. The G20 was an annual meeting of leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies.
The goal of the 2009 summit was to discuss the financial and economic crisis and agree on a framework for rebuilding the global economy. It was clear that the U.S. alone could not power a recovery. With a badly depressed housing market and record levels of household debt, U.S. consumers were not in a position to rejuvenate global demand on their own. Individual countries (and international institutions like the European Union) would have to use their own fiscal and monetary policies to dig themselves out.
As Obama saw it, the United States could not simply force other countries to bend to its will, but it could still build international coalitions and exercise moral leadership in tackling the world’s most pressing issues.
At the London summit, Obama had his first opportunity to meet the key international leaders whose support he would need. European heads of state like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, however, were reluctant to undertake the kind of deficit spending policies that Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner felt were necessary, unless they could also secure the cooperation of the BRIC countries.
The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) were a group of large countries with rapidly growing economies that, because of their size, would inevitably come to play a leading role in shaping the international order. Although collectively they represented 40 percent of the global population, they still only controlled a far smaller share of global GDP. But their demands for international power could not be ignored forever. They would no longer be content existing on the margins of history—and decisions made by international bodies like the G20 would increasingly lack legitimacy if the BRIC countries did not play a significant role in crafting them. Still, Obama was skeptical of the ability of these countries to assume the mantle of global leadership.
Despite its economic growth, Brazil’s government was still mired in corruption. After some progress toward democracy in the 1990s, Russia had backslidden into authoritarianism under Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (who was widely known to be the real power in Russia, not the nominal leader, President Dmitry Medvedev). Putin’s Russia was a haven of crony capitalism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy.
Although Obama admired Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and believed him to be honest and capable, the country was still far from a paragon of enlightened 21st-century values. India remained a nation riven by caste and religious divisions (which could still erupt in episodes of spectacular violence in the smaller cities and countryside), with large pockets of extreme poverty and illiteracy.
China posed the most interesting challenge. Clearly, it was a rising superpower. Modern cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou dazzled foreign visitors with their rapid growth, high-rise skyscrapers, and sophisticated core of white-collar tech workers. Since emerging from the shadow of Maoism in the 1970s, the country had undertaken sweeping economic reforms that unleashed the power of capitalism and helped move hundreds of millions of people out of deep poverty—achieving the most rapid economic growth in human history.
With its military might and a rising middle class that increasingly demanded the same standard of living that they saw in the West, China was clearly poised to throw its weight around on a global scale. Yet in surveying their delegation at the G20, Obama saw that leaders like President Hu Jintao seemed little interested in playing a leading role in shaping the global order.
In observing the shortcomings of these so-called “rising powers,” Obama knew one thing was clear— the world still needed the U.S. to lead the way and maintain the postwar liberal, free-market global order into the 21st century.
With the Obama team largely leading the charge, the G20 nations were able to reach consensus on some meaningful steps to combat the global recession.
The summit ended with an agreement by the signatory nations to commit to free-trade policies (avoiding a mutually destructive trade war marked by tariffs and quotas), a $1.1 trillion fiscal stimulus, a crackdown on international tax havens, and new financial regulations to limit the excessive risk-taking and lax lending practices that had spurred the financial crisis.
Separately, and to Barack’s great delight, Michelle dazzled on the world stage, wowing international audiences when she spoke to the students at an all-girls school in central London.
Many of these girls were of South Asian or West Indian descent, and powerfully related to Michelle’s story of needing to overcome the barriers she’d faced as a Black woman in the white-dominated law profession. It was the beginning of the powerful bond that Michelle would go on to form with young women around the world, as she became a figure of inspiration and empowerment.
Despite the successes in London, however, Obama saw some troubling trends bubbling up on the fringes of world politics. On a global level, the recession had clearly shaken the public’s faith in democracy, the rule of law, and free markets—especially in young democracies.
The dark forces of nationalism and populist authoritarianism were clearly on the rise in countries such as Turkey, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In these places, far-right parties and political movements had made stunning electoral inroads. Obama was still inspired by the throngs of young people that came out to see him whenever he traveled abroad—he saw in them the same enthusiasm for democracy and justice that had driven him as a young man, But he also felt the tremendous weight on his shoulders as he saw democracy under assault.
He knew that he needed to lead by example and use his power to show that change was possible, that his own youthful idealism could lead to a safer, more prosperous, and more equitable world.
The dominant foreign policy issue at the start of the Obama administration was the fight against international terrorism. While there was broad agreement in the administration that the U.S. needed to dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda’s overseas networks, there was also agreement that the Bush administration’s approach had been ill-conceived, ineffective, and contrary to American values.
Obama wanted to prosecute the War on Terror in line with American values, rejecting Bush-era policies of unilateral war, torture, and disregard for the Constitution. He believed that this would not only be more just, but also more effective in the long run, by restoring American moral authority and making it easier to secure the much-needed cooperation of partners in the Muslim world.
To mark this shift in America’s approach to counterterrorism, Obama installed John Brennan, a former CIA analyst with over 25 years of experience, as Homeland Security Advisor.
Brennan’s mandate was to serve as Obama’s conduit to the counterterrorism and intelligence communities in Washington and abroad. He was tasked with ensuring that Obama’s reforms were implemented across the patchwork of agencies and departments that comprised America’s intelligence-gathering operations.
Most importantly, Brennan was charged with winding down the Bush-era torture program and codifying counterterrosim practices under a legal framework in line with the Constitution.
As Obama was to discover, however, bringing the battle against terrorism in line with proper legal and constitutional procedure would be an intense partisan battle. The struggle to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp showed how the best intentions of the administration had to give way to the demands of domestic politics.
Guantanamo was the site where prisoners of war captured in Iraq and Afghanistan had been detained for years and denied the due process they were entitled to under the Geneva Conventions. As revelations of torture at Guantanamo became public during the Bush administration, the camp became a notorious symbol of America’s misdeeds and moral failings in the prosecution of the so-called War on Terror.
Obama made it an early priority of his administration to close Guantanamo, repatriate those detainees who had no proven links to Al Qaeda, and put the truly dangerous terrorist suspects (known as HPVs or high-value prisoners) like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh-Mohammed on trial in U.S. civilian criminal courts. He believed that making those who’d targeted American lives stand trial for their crimes in open court would show the nation and the world that America could hold its enemies accountable while still remaining true to its constitutional principles.
Politically, however, this proved to be impossible. The decision to transfer suspected terrorists to American soil (where they would be held in federal and state prisons) met with fear and outrage, eagerly stoked by right-wing media. The GOP (former Vice President Dick Cheney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in particular) whipped their supporters into a frenzy with rhetoric about the Obama administration “moving terrorists into your neighborhood.” Seeing that they were at a political disadvantage, even congressional Democrats demanded that the administration back off this plan. The heavily Democratic Congress eventually blocked any federal funds from being used for transfers of Guantanamo detainees.
The administration had tried to bring the War on Terror out of the darkness and into the light of constitutional procedure—and, on this issue, they lost the battle to the politics of fear.
Despite Obama’s desire to prosecute the War on Terror in conformity with the United States’ constitutional values, the business of protecting Americans and going after terrorists was still a violent and bloody affair.
One of the first occasions in which Obama was compelled to use American force came in April 2009, when a group of Somali pirates hijacked the U.S. cargo ship Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia. Obama gave the order to U.S. Navy SEALs to retake the ship, rescue the American captain—and kill the pirates if necessary. After a four-day standoff, the SEAL snipers killed the three pirates with long-range shots to the head, freeing the American captain and crew.
While pleased that the incident resolved with no American casualties, Obama couldn’t see the whole situation as anything but a tragedy. The pirates, violent criminals though they were, were all young men in their teens. Their decision to resort to piracy spoke to the failures of economic development and the general lack of hope for so many young people in impoverished and chaotic parts of the world like Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
Although he recognized its necessity, Obama hated the parts of the presidency that required him to authorize the use of state violence. He had gotten into politics to lead and inspire young people—not order their execution from the Oval Office.
Part of the broader reset on counterterrorism involved renewed outreach to the Muslim world. The centerpiece of this outreach was a speech, titled “A New Beginning,” delivered by Obama on June 4, 2009 at Cairo University. Obama tasked speechwriter Ben Rhodes, a young and idealistic foreign policy staffer (who frequently clashed with more conservative, establishment figures in the foreign policy community) with drafting the historic address.
The speech addressed long-simmering tensions between the West (and the U.S. in particular) and the Muslim world—from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As Obama told it in his speech, both sides bore responsibility for the mutual distrust, with the Muslim general public largely believing the U.S. to be a hostile imperial power and Americans remaining largely ignorant of Islam. In the speech, Obama spoke harsh truths to both sides, chiding Muslim leaders for their continued aggression toward Israel, while acknowledging the problematic legacy of America’s interference in Middle East politics and its support for repressive, dictatorial regimes.
He spoke of the need for a greater embrace of human rights, religious tolerance, and democracy in the Middle East and a rejection of the politics of extremism. The choice of venue in Egypt embodied the contradictions and tensions that defined the modern Middle East. On the one hand, Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak was a corrupt, authoritarian, and economically stagnant state—albeit one that was an ally of the United States. Moreover, the lack of economic opportunities and repressive nature of the regime made young Egyptian men vulnerable to the recruiting efforts of jihadist groups (one of the 9/11 hijackers was an Egyptian national).
But the enthusiastic audience at Cairo University showed the other side of the country—young, progressive, educated. They were eager to share Obama’s vision of the world as it could be and ought to be, even if reality seldom matched that vision.
After the speech, Obama indulged his passion for history, when he and his staff were treated to a private, guided tour of the pyramids at Giza. Exploring the nearly 5,000-year-old marvel of the ancient world, Obama mused to himself on the fleeting nature of human affairs. The leaders and ordinary people who’d built the pyramids had had hopes, dreams, fears, and ambitions that were just as important to them as ours are to us. Yet nearly everything about them had been washed away in the tides of history, leaving only the pyramids as a mark of their achievements.
Even though he was the most powerful man on Earth, Obama accepted that he, too, was but a brief note in the grand sweep of history. Like all others who’d come before him and those who would come after him, most of his achievements would ultimately be erased and forgotten.
As a leader and as a human, Obama realized, your duty was to use the brief time you were given to do your part in healing the world.
So far, we’ve explored the Obama administration’s efforts to rescue the domestic and global economy, refocus America’s commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and set a new course in U.S. foreign policy.
But while all of these developments were taking place, the administration was also gearing up for the battle to pass what would become its signature domestic policy achievement—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
The push to bring universal health care to the United States was the great unfinished work of American liberalism. Every Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had tried and failed to enact some version of universal health care, with the most high-profile defeat being President Bill Clinton’s health care proposal in 1994 (derisively labeled “Hillarycare”).
Particularly galling to progressives like Obama was the fact that every other industrialized country had long since achieved some version of universal coverage. In the U.S., however, conservatives and their allies in the medical industry had always succeeded in blocking it, usually by stoking fear about a “government takeover” of health care and inveighing against the perils of “socialized medicine.”
Instead, the U.S. had developed a private, employer-based model of coverage, in which health insurance was provided to workers and their families by employers. Programs like Medicare (a federal program providing single-payer coverage for seniors) and Medicaid (a joint state-federal program providing coverage for people with low incomes) filled in some of the gaps left by the employer-based system, but fell far short of providing universal coverage—with 43 million Americans uninsured by the time Obama took office.
By 2009, there was widespread agreement that the American health care system was in dire need of reform. Medical specialization, breakthroughs, and innovation could deliver great health benefits, but also dramatically drove up the cost of treatment.
Because of the complex nature of health care and the vast knowledge disparity between the average patient and the medical providers, patients increasingly found themselves at the mercy of pharmaceutical companies, insurance carriers, device makers, and hospital networks, with no effective way to make informed health care spending decisions.
Worse, America’s vast uninsured population drove up health care costs even for those who did have insurance. This was because the uninsured were more likely to wait until they were extremely ill (and thus, more expensive to treat) before seeking treatment at hospital emergency rooms—with for-profit hospitals making up the loss by overcharging their insured patients.
But perhaps the most morally indefensible features of the system were the practices of the big insurance companies to deny coverage to their customers—because actually paying for treatment cut into their bottom lines. Thus, insurers forced upon their customers high-deductible plans, expensive co-pays, and lifetime caps on coverage, while totally denying coverage to those with “pre-existing conditions,” all in an effort to contain costs and maximize profits.
Despite the consensus on the failures of the health care system, there was great political risk for the Obama administration in attempting to reform it. Although tens of millions remained uninsured, most people did have insurance, liked their insurance and their doctor, distrusted anything that came out of Washington, feared losing what they already had, and didn’t want their tax dollars going to pay others’ coverage.
Furthermore, reform would be opposed tooth-and-nail by the GOP, as well as the many wealthy and powerful interests that benefited from the system as it was. Rahm Emanuel and other veterans of the failed 1994 Clinton health care fight grimly recalled the steep political price the Democratic Party had paid in the midterm elections that year—losing 54 House seats and losing both the House and Senate. They warned Obama that a failed bill could kill his presidency entirely.
While Obama was obviously concerned about the politics, health care was a deeply moral—and profoundly personal—issue for him. On the campaign trail, he’d spoken with countless Americans who told him horror stories about paying astronomical hospital bills and suffering medical-related bankruptcies. Many told him that they had even chosen to forgo urgently needed care altogether because they couldn’t afford it.
Hearing these stories, he shuddered to think about what might have happened to Malia and Sasha if they hadn’t had regular access to a pediatrician. He also recalled how his own mother had delayed her cancer treatments many times during the course of her illness, for fear of leaving her survivors with high medical debt.
As president, Obama believed he had a moral obligation to put an end to the needless, wasteful suffering Americans had been forced to endure under a failing health care system.
As the Obama team began studying different health care reform proposals, they saw that a landmark piece of state legislation from Massachusetts provided a sustainable, successful, and politically viable model. There, Republican Governor Mitt Romney had worked with the Democratic state legislature to pass a centrist health care reform law that dramatically expanded coverage.
There were three essential components to the system.
The Massachusetts law would become the framework for the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
As with the stimulus and the bank stress test, Obama showed his pragmatic streak on the health care issue. He wasn’t looking to blow up the system as it was. He wanted to make it work better and deliver real results for people. As ever, he was a reformer—not a revolutionary.
The Massachusetts model wasn’t perfect—the state subsidies were often too stingy, and the system still preserved a crucial role for the for-profit insurance industry. Nonetheless, it was the best model available with a genuine track record of real-world success.
As Obama told his team, if they’d been designing the U.S. health care system from scratch, they wouldn’t have chosen to replicate the Massachusetts model. But they weren’t starting from scratch. They were trying to reform an existing system with which most people were already familiar and highly resistant to changing. If they wanted to get something done to improve the lives of Americans, they needed to work within the framework of that existing system.
Fortunately, political conditions had become somewhat more favorable for the passage of a major health care bill by the spring of 2009. By the end of April, Senate Democrats had a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority, thanks to the long-delayed certification of Democrat Al Franken’s victory in his race in Minnesota and the decision of Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter to switch parties and join the Democratic caucus.
This meant that Democrats could pass the bill and overcome a filibuster without needing any Republican votes. But, as Obama would learn, the 60-seat majority was more of a mirage than it was a concrete reality. With Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaling early in the process that he was unwilling to yield any Republican votes on health care, Democrats would have to pass the measure entirely on their own—and would need all 60 members to vote “yes,” with no defections, in order to defeat a near-certain GOP filibuster.
This meant that the most conservative members of the Senate Democratic caucus—figures like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana—would have effective veto power over the bill, giving them enormous leverage to make demands and extract concessions. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that badly ailing Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd would be healthy enough to be present for a floor vote when it came time to pass the bill.
Given their substantial leverage over the entire process, congressional Democrats would naturally play a decisive and leading role in crafting the legislation. The Democrats’ point person for drafting the bill in the Senate was Max Baucus, a conservative Democrat from Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Obama had some early reservations about Baucus’s ability to draft an acceptable bill and shepherd it through his committee for a full floor vote. Although he was an able and hardworking legislator, Baucus was also significantly to Obama’s right politically and was more friendly with corporate interests than the president would have preferred.
But Baucus was confident that he could secure bipartisan support for the bill, which would give his fellow red-state Democrats political cover to vote for it. In particular, he believed that he could get his Republican colleague on the Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, to support the bill, thanks to their longtime personal friendship.
Based on the hyper-partisanship Republicans had already exhibited during the fight over the stimulus the previous winter, Obama was skeptical about Baucus’s belief that a personal friendship would trump ideological concerns and political strategy for a figure like Grassley. Obama warned Baucus not to let Grassley or any other Republicans string him along and waste valuable time in getting the bill to the president’s desk. Baucus assured the president that the legislation would be ready for him to sign into law by the end of the summer.
Baucus’s committee (and that of his counterpart in the House, Henry Waxman of California) got to work in crafting the bill. In striving for a bipartisan bill, Baucus sought input on the legislation from a wide variety of stakeholders, including big pharmaceutical companies. He refused to consider tax increases as a financing mechanism for the expanded coverage, fearing political attacks from Republicans. Baucus also made some major concessions to the pharmaceutical industry, such as stripping out of the bill language that would have allowed the reimportation of cheaper drugs from Canada.
Although Obama disliked what he saw as giveaways to Big Pharma, he understood that the major industry players needed to be on board if the bill was to garner 60 Democratic votes in the Senate. And Baucus did manage to negotiate some major concessions from the big insurance carriers, drug companies, and hospital networks, including hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare reimbursement reductions that would help finance the coverage expansion.
Still, some on the left (especially among House Democrats) were less than pleased with what Baucus was doing. They disliked the often-secretive, closed-door nature of his committee’s work and felt that he had made unwise and needless concessions to industry, whose only effect would be to water down the legislation without actually getting any Republican votes. They feared that Baucus was negotiating with himself and wasting precious time.
As the summer of 2009 wound on, the difficulty of passing the legislation became clear. House and Senate Democrats began sniping at one another in the press, with each side blaming the other for the slow, tortuous pace of progress on the bill. The Democratic infighting diminished public support for health care reform and weakened the party’s political position.
By August, it was obvious that Baucus’s original summer deadline had been hopelessly optimistic. Obama and his team were also growing less patient with the senator’s pursuit of GOP votes from Grassley and Olympia Snowe of Maine.
Although these and other relatively moderate Republicans would occasionally make some vague public or private gesture of support for the bill, they always seemed to find some objection that prohibited them from fully committing. They would then withdraw their support and claim that they needed more time to “study” the issue.
To seemingly everyone except Baucus, it was obvious that Republicans were never going to vote for any Democratic-sponsored health care legislation—and were simply stringing Baucus and the Democrats along in the hopes of “running out the clock” and letting the legislation grow more and more unpopular with time.
Even if GOP senators had wanted to vote for the bill, they could hardly afford the political price of doing so now. The party had shifted into full-blown opposition mode, with Republican politicians and their allies in right-wing media outlets like Fox News labeling the bill a socialist-inspired government takeover of the health care system.
Back home in their districts during the summer, Democratic members of Congress were shocked by the virulent (and sometimes violent) right-wing protests that interrupted their speaking events and town halls. Demonstrators voiced their fierce opposition to the emerging health care bill, falsely claiming that it would provide coverage to illegal immigrants, use taxpayer dollars to fund abortion procedures, and give government bureaucrats the power to put terminally ill patients to death.
These health care protests were one of the earliest manifestations of the rising Tea Party movement, a right-wing populist coalition focused on opposition to progressive taxation and the welfare state. A core message of the movement was that the lazy and undeserving “takers” were draining the resources of the hardworking “makers” through overly generous redistributive public programs.
As had always been the case with anti-welfare politics, the definition of who was a “taker” (urban Blacks) and who was a “maker” (suburban and rural whites) was strongly implied. The Tea Party movement frequently highlighted this component of their message by waving Confederate flags at their rallies and displaying signs and placards that depicted the nation’s first Black president as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.
Despite its extremism, as the Tea Party gained steam, Republican politicians began to enthusiastically echo its rhetoric and eagerly apply the Tea Party label to themselves. In one dramatic example of just how far the GOP had steeped itself in Tea Party radicalism, an obscure Republican member of Congress from South Carolina named Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at Obama during a September 2009 televised joint session of Congress as the president discussed his health care proposal.
The shocking breach of decorum stunned the president, vice president, and Speaker Pelosi as they sat on the dais. But, in yet another sign of just how hostile the Republican base had become to Obama, Wilson politically benefited from his outburst—indeed, he received a significant surge in online contributions from supporters who cheered on his display of hostility to the president.
(Shortform note: For a deeper analysis of the resentments that fueled the rise of the Tea Party, read our summary of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.)
The push for health care reform suffered a major blow when Senator Ted Kennedy passed away on August 25, 2009. The leader of the liberal wing of the Senate Democratic majority had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008 and had been in a state of rapid decline since he collapsed at President Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009.
The loss of Kennedy had both practical and symbolic meaning. The longtime senator and only surviving brother of the slain JFK and RFK had made universal health care his life’s work, and he had come tantalizingly close to seeing it passed at several points in his storied legislative career. His death lent a tragic air to the health care battle—Kennedy’s dream could now only be fulfilled posthumously.
On a more practical level, it meant that the Democrats were in danger of losing their 60-seat majority in the Senate. Although the Democratic Governor of Massachusetts quickly appointed a Democrat to temporarily fill Kennedy’s seat, a special election was scheduled for January 19 to fill the seat for the remainder of Kennedy’s term. Although Massachusetts was usually a reliably liberal, Democratic state, Obama knew well that off-year special elections could sometimes yield unlikely results and unpredictable electoral upsets. He was uneasy about his administration’s signature domestic policy initiative hanging on such a thin thread.
By autumn 2009, the prospects for passage of health care reform were looking increasingly grim. Democrats up for reelection in the 2010 midterms in swing states and congressional districts were running scared, fearful of the political albatross that the unfinished bill had become.
Obama’s own poll numbers were in a state of rapid decline and he knew that his growing unpopularity threatened to bring Democrats in the House and Senate down with him in the upcoming 2010 midterms. The president was working the phones and meeting with wavering Democrats in both chambers of Congress, urging them to stay strong and support a bill that would represent the most significant piece of progressive reform in half a century.
Obama threw himself into the work, consulting with his health care brain trust and learning the nuances of the incredibly complex policy. If there was anything worth fighting for, it was the health care bill, as Obama knew that his entire presidency might very well hinge on its passage.
Despite the setbacks and opposition, Baucus and Waxman completed their bill-drafting work by fall 2009. Baucus had finally been forced to concede that there was no way Republican Chuck Grassley would ever vote for the bill. They each passed the bill out of their respective committees, and the House passed its version of the bill in November—albeit on a strict party-line vote.
But the Senate was where the real battle for passage would be. There, Majority Leader Harry Reid would have to adroitly maneuver the bill through his chamber, with all 60 Democratic senators having to vote “yes” to break the wall of Republican obstruction. There was zero margin for error.
Because each Democratic senator had effective veto power, the most conservative members of the caucus had unlimited leverage to demand special concessions. Reid had no choice but to grant various favors to wavering conservative Democrats, like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Mollifying Lieberman was particularly painful for the left. Lieberman had been the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee but many in the party felt betrayed when he endorsed and campaigned for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. The Connecticut senator demanded that the public option—a government-run insurance plan designed to compete with the private plans in the marketplace—be stripped out of the bill as the price for his support, a huge blow to health care activists on the left.
These backroom deals and secret negotiations only served to further weaken public support for the bill, as the press coverage of the legislative process became more cynical and negative.
Critics to Obama’s left grew more and more frustrated at his administration’s inability to get a more progressive bill through Congress. In what we’ve seen was a recurring theme throughout his tenure in office, Obama’s left-wing critics failed to understand that even an office as mighty as the presidency had limits to its power. The president could not simply snap his fingers and conjure up a single-payer, universal health care system. He had to work with his Democratic allies in Congress, many of whom were significantly to his right and over whom he had little real leverage to pressure them into voting his way.
As Obama reminded his supporters, the Affordable Care Act did not represent the complete realization of the progressive movement’s goals. He compared it to a starter home, one that he hoped would be improved upon by subsequent generations. He reminded his critics that foundational pieces of the American social safety net like Medicare and Social Security had also started out as fairly small programs that excluded many Americans. It took the efforts of later reformers to make these programs the broad-based social safety nets that they later became.
Through Harry Reid’s combination of dealing, negotiating, and arm-twisting, the Senate passed its version of the Affordable Care Act on Christmas Eve, 2009, on a 60-39 party-line vote with zero Republicans voting in the affirmative.
The next step in the process was for the bill to go to a conference committee between the House and Senate, where the two chambers could hash out their differences between their respective bills. This threatened to be contentious, as there were significant differences between the two bills, with the Senate version generally being more conservative, market-based, and less generous than the more liberal bill passed by the House. Obama feared the intraparty enmity spilling out into the press, creating more political headaches for the party. But, before the conference committee could take place, fate once again intervened.
On January 19, 2010, the Republican candidate Scott Brown defeated Democratic nominee Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. This represented a major political upset in typically liberal Massachusetts—and a grave setback for the health care bill. In a flash, Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof majority.
Political advisors like White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel were now warning the president that the hopes of passing a comprehensive health care reform bill were now all but dead. He recommended that the administration cut a deal with Republicans on a much more limited piece of legislation, call it a victory, and move on. This demonstrated one of Obama’s reservations about Emanuel. While he was an able political advisor, he was also known for caring more about achieving anything he could label as a “win” rather than the substantive merits of a particular policy,
This was not how Obama thought about politics, however—his job was to help the American people, not “put points on the board” as Emanuel put it. At this pivotal juncture, the president urged his administration and his allies in Congress to move ahead with the bill. They hadn’t come this far and he hadn’t run for president to do small things or retreat when the going got tough.
After Obama’s declaration that defeat was not an option, the administration settled on a new strategy. Since there was now no chance of breaking a GOP filibuster in the Senate, the only way any bill could make it to Obama’s desk would be if the House agreed to pass the Senate bill as it was, without any changes.
House Democrats were unsurprisingly upset by this plan. They had worked for months on their own bill, at great political cost. Now, they were being told that they had no choice but to simply scrap their work and roll over for their counterparts in the Senate, whose bill they considered to be far inferior to their own.
But, pragmatically, they also recognized that they had no alternative. Because of the Senate’s arcane and complex rules like the filibuster, the bill that had already passed that chamber was the only one that could realistically be signed into law. With grim determination, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi vowed to Obama that she would use every ounce of her considerable legislative skills to get the Affordable Care Act over the finish line.
She faced considerable opposition from both the moderate and left flanks of the party’s House majority. Moderate members from Republican-leaning districts feared angering conservative voters with a bill that the right had labeled as “socialist” and a “government takeover” of health care. Liberal members, meanwhile, believed that a once-in-a-generation political opportunity to pass truly universal health care legislation had been frittered away by Senate Democrats.
There was, however, one factor that helped all factions of the party come together in support of the bill—the shamelessness, hypocrisy, and dishonesty of the Republican attacks on the legislation. At one televised meeting between President Obama and Congressional Republican leaders, the GOP politicians demonstrated to Obama and the Democrats their total ignorance of health care, as they repeated tired right-wing talking points that were totally at odds with the actual content of the legislation under discussion.
It was clear to the Democrats that the Republican Party had no ideas on health care and had refused to engage in the process seriously from the beginning. Their bad faith became a rallying point for wavering Democrats in the House, who were determined not to let the cynical Republican campaign against the Affordable Care Act succeed.
Many House Democrats showed great political courage in committing to vote for the bill. Running in conservative districts and facing grueling reelection fights in the fall, many members surely knew that they might be signing their own political death warrants by voting “yes.” They were motivated by a desire to be a part of passing truly historic legislation and to do something that would meaningfully improve the lives of millions of Americans.
One House Democrat, Tom Perriello of Virgina, told President Obama that he was voting yes because some things were simply more important than getting reelected.
On March 21, 2010, the House passed the Affordable Care Act by a razor-thin 219-212 margin, with President Obama signing it into law two days later. It was the most significant expansion of the social safety net since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare Act in 1965.
The Obama team celebrated its historic and unlikely victory, while Obama made a pledge that day to invest in his own health by quitting smoking—ending a habit he’d indulged since he was a teenager.
For Obama, it was a vindication of his theory of change. He had worked within the system, waged elections, and won power. And although he’d had to compromise and make concessions, in the end he was able to deliver a piece of legislation that would bring health insurance to tens of millions of previously uninsured people—making the country as a whole healthier and more prosperous.
As Obama learned throughout his first year in office, a president must deal with multiple events all at once. While leading his administration through a new strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was also shepherding the landmark Affordable Care Act through the tortuous legislative process.
And in the midst of that political battle, Obama would be forced to confront several others. In this chapter, we’ll explore the Obama administration’s fight to:
In May 2009, shortly after the results of Treasury Secretary Geithner’s bank stress test came back and just as the health care legislation was beginning to take shape, Justice David Souter announced his intention to retire from the Supreme Court.
Souter was a member of the Court’s liberal wing, albeit one appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush (1924-2018), and had strategically timed his retirement for when a Democratic president and Senate would be able to replace him.
In nominating Souter’s replacement, President Obama was mindful of just how consequential his decision would be. The Supreme Court is the nation’s highest court, having final say over all matters of constitutional and statutory interpretation, including the power to strike down laws and regulations they hold to be unconstitutional. This means that their rulings have enormous implications for all matters of public policy.
Under the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court justices serve for life —meaning that they continue to shape American policy and jurisprudence long after the presidents who nominated them have left office.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the rationale for the Supreme Court’s lifetime appointments and for a deeper exploration of the U.S. Constitution, read our summary of The Federalist Papers.)
Presidents had historically been given great deference by the Senate in their choice of nominees to the Court, with most nominees being confirmed by large bipartisan majorities. But the ongoing process of political polarization that began in the mid-20th century had eroded this norm, with Supreme Court confirmations devolving into closely contested political and ideological flashpoints. Obama knew that whomever he picked would come under partisan scrutiny.
On May 26, 2009, President Obama officially nominated Sonia Sotomayor, then a sitting judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to replace Souter on the Supreme Court. She was a historic pick as the first Latina and first person of Puerto Rican descent to be nominated to the nation’s highest court.
Having grown up the child of working immigrant parents in the New York City borough of the Bronx, Sotomayor had learned empathy and grit as she worked her way up from her humble origins to launch a brilliant legal career.
She was eminently qualified, widely respected, and had already secured confirmation votes from many sitting Republican senators when she’d been confirmed to the Court of Appeals. Senate Republicans unsurprisingly attempted to discredit Sotomayor by digging up some of her old rulings in an attempt to portray her as a wild-eyed leftist radical. Their efforts, however, were by and large half-hearted, unconvincing, and undermined by the warm praise many of them had given her when they’d voted to confirm her to her current position on the Court of Appeals.
Obama saw much of himself in Sotomayor. As a young Black man from Hawaii when he’d entered Harvard Law, he had been a fish-out-of-water and outsider in Ivy league circles, constantly having to prove to others (and himself) that he deserved to be there. He knew that Sotomayor’s years at Princeton and then Yale Law School must have presented her with similar experiences. He admired the determination and grit that someone of her background must have had in order to reach the heights she’d reached.
On July 28, 2009, Sonia Sotomayor made history when the Senate confirmed her nomination to the Court on a bipartisan 68-31 vote, with nine Republicans voting in her favor.
Despite the successes of health care reform and the Sotomayor nomination, Obama had to focus much of his attention as president on a dangerous and unpredictable world.
Iran, in particular, posed a unique challenge to the U.S. There had long been tensions between the two nations dating back to the CIA-backed overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Following that, the U.S. had supported the oppressive and unpopular rule of the Shah until his overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which saw hardline Shia clerics take control of the country and establish an Islamic republic. In the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. had backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in his long and brutal war against Iran, further deteriorating U.S.-Iran relations.
Obama knew that these historical tensions contributed to a dangerous security situation in contemporary Middle East politics. Iran was one of the region’s main patrons of state-sponsored terrorism, supporting violent extremist groups that had conducted attacks against American targets in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The failed war in Iraq had only made matters worse. By toppling Saddam’s government, the Bush administration had neutralized the one power in the region that was capable of checking Iranian aggression. With Iraq now a weakened state run by a Shi’ite-dominated government susceptible to Iranian influence, Iran was in its strongest position in decades.
What made this situation all the more urgent in 2009 was the fact that Iran was well known to be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon—making the already-dangerous regime far more powerful and capable of far more destruction.
The international community had good reason to be concerned. Over the past decade, Iran had greatly expanded its reserve of uranium-enrichment centrifuges, which could be used to convert low-enriched uranium (used for peaceful civilian purposes) into high-enriched uranium (weapons-grade material).
From 2003 to 2009, experts judged that Iran’s centrifuges skyrocketed from 100 to roughly 5,000. This meant that Iran’s “breakout time”—the amount of time the country would need in order to produce sufficient material for one nuclear weapon—may have been reduced to little more than a few months. The goal for the U.S. and the international community was clear: Obama needed to build a coalition to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to force Iran to the negotiating table and cease its nuclear program. If Obama failed, he risked allowing a nuclear Iran to set off an arms race in the most volatile region in the world.
There was one international partner that could play a pivotal role in pressuring Iran—Russia. Although Russia was a major buyer of Iranian oil, it was also a major supplier of military hardware to Iran. In theory, this gave Russia an important degree of leverage over the Iranian that could be used to compel them to halt their nuclear program. But Russia had thus far been reluctant to do so, using its veto power (along with China) on the UN Security Council to block any proposed sanctions against Iran.
To make progress on the Iran issue and as part of his broader mission reasserting U.S. leadership, Obama was keen to “reset” the nation’s complicated relationship with Russia. Russia’s 2008 invasion of neighboring Georgia—a flagrant and dangerous violation of international law—had marked the lowest point in U.S.-Russia relations since the fall of the Soviet Union and earned Russia widespread international condemnation.
Generally, Russia under Vladimir Putin had reversed many of the steps made toward democracy during the 1990s, slipping back into authoritarianism. Although life was undoubtedly better for most ordinary Russians, with a stronger economy (albeit one heavily dependent on oil and gas and marked by high income inequality), the country had also become more of a police state. The Putin regime was known to jail political opponents on trumped-up charges, while much of the nation’s economic power rested in the hands of Putin-connected crony capitalists.
Putin’s political style was anathema to Obama. He presented himself as a ruthless strongman, restoring Russia to its former glory. Central to his political pageantry were over-the-top masculine displays (such as photos of a musclebound Putin riding a horse shirtless through the Russian steppes), blatant homophobia, and chauvinistic gestures toward Russia’s ethnic and religious minorities.
Yet, for all Putin’s posturing, Russia was in reality a greatly diminished power, with its economy highly vulnerable to changes in world oil prices. Moreover, despite its considerable military strength, Russia was not a cultural power or source of inspiration for billions around the world, as the United States was.
Given this context, President Obama didn’t know what to expect when he journeyed to Moscow to meet with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in July 2009. Although he’d met President Dmitriy Medvedev at the G20 summit in London back in April, it was widely known within the international community that Putin was the real power in Russian politics.
When Obama met Putin at his mansion on the outskirts of Moscow, he’d been warned by his senior aides to treat the Russian leader deferentially. Although Obama was obviously more powerful, Putin was on his home turf and believed himself to be the senior partner in the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Despite the foreign setting, Obama found Putin to be a character not altogether unfamiliar. In his insular, transactional, and unsentimental style, Putin reminded him of a Chicago political machine boss (albeit one with nuclear weapons). It was a type he had encountered many times during his early political career.
Someone like Putin could never be considered a statesman; he would seek only to secure advantage for himself and the people he represented, all else be damned. For Putin and political actors like him, it was all about power, not principles.
Sure enough, Putin attempted to assert his dominance in the meeting almost immediately, treating Obama and his team to a half-hour long diatribe about all the ways the U.S. had done harm to Russia since the end of the Cold War. Putin cited the destabilizing invasion of Iraq, the placement of American missile defense systems on Russia’s borders, and American support for pro-democratic governments in the neighboring states of Georgia and Ukraine—which had left Russia feeling encircled and threatened.
Obama listened patiently, and responded with his own set of American policy disagreements with Russia—their sale of arms to an increasingly hostile Iran chief among them. Although substantial policy disagreements remained, the meeting between the two men had been cordial. Perhaps there would be opportunities for cooperation on key issues after all.
Later that evening, President Obama attended a summit of Russian and American civil society leaders (including business figures, academics, and community organizers) who were attempting to bring some measure of democratic reform to Putin’s Russia.
Obama, of course, could not help but admire their idealism. In their striving for a freer, more equitable, and just future for their country and people, Obama saw echoes of his own youthful activism as a community organizer in Chicago.
But at the same time, Obama was now immersed in the world of global power politics. While sympathetic to the goals of those assembled at the summit, he knew that Putin was implacably hostile to them and everything they stood for. And he also knew, unfortunately, that the United States would not and could not risk its strategic partnership with Russia on nuclear nonproliferation for the sake of these democracy advocates.
The simple truth was that if Putin went after any of these brave men and women, there was little Obama could to do to protect them.
Having established the beginnings of a relationship with Vladimir Putin, the next task before Obama was to visit the other country with the power to bring Iran to heel—China. In November 2009, Obama began his first Asian trip in Beijing.
China, a rising superpower since its move toward free markets in the 1970s, had experienced the most rapid industrialization and economic modernization in world history. Now, it wanted increased access to U.S. markets for its manufactured goods.
The American government, however, had long complained of distortive economic practices by the Chinese that harmed U.S. interests. China’s massive growth in exports was partially due to its abundance of cheap labor, which enabled it to sell its goods at lower prices abroad.
But China was also a well-known violator of international trade rules. It engaged in a host of anti-competitive practices, from subsidizing its domestic manufactures to selling goods in foreign markets at a loss in order to increase market share (a practice known as “dumping”) to devaluing their currency to sell their goods more cheaply abroad.
Moreover, China’s state-controlled firms routinely engaged in theft of American corporate intellectual property—indeed, they often demanded that western companies surrender intellectual property as the price of doing business in China and accessing the country’s vast market.
To Obama’s dismay, far too many in the U.S. economic and foreign policy communities had allowed these abuses to go on. The arrangement simply benefited too many powerful constituencies for anyone to feel compelled to do anything about it. U.S. farmers enjoyed being able to sell their crops to China, American companies liked having access to cheap Chinese labor, and Wall Street liked selling American financial securities to Chinese investors.
Given how intertwined the U.S. and China had become, Obama knew that he had to tread carefully. So many goods sold in the United States now included either Chinese labor or Chinese components. With China so central to the supply chains of the American economy, political missteps could spark a ruinous trade war and bring the global economy to depression.
When the Obama team visited Beijing, it was clear just how seriously the Chinese took security and espionage. The entire team was under surveillance immediately upon arrival. The brazenness of the surveillance shocked the Americans. One evening during the trip, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke returned to his Beijing hotel room to find two Chinese intelligence operatives wordlessly leafing through some papers he’d left on his desk.
Obama’s meeting with President Hu Jintao reminded him of his experiences with the Chinese leader at the G20 in London. Jintao was stiff and formal, rarely deviating from his prepared notes and remarks. Obama made his priorities clear. He wanted to resolve maritime disputes in the South China Sea between China and its neighbors; secure Chinese cooperation for the ongoing economic recovery; get a commitment from them to curtail their worst trade policy abuses; have China use its regional influence to rein in the North Korean nuclear program; and, most importantly, allow the West to impose sanctions on Iran.
Pointedly, Obama reminded Hu that the U.S. would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. If it was forced to take military action against Iran (which Obama greatly wished to avoid) it would pose a great threat to Chinese oil supplies.
Slowly, Obama’s diplomatic entreaties to the Russians and the Chinese began to bear fruit. At the United Nations General Assembly, the Obama administration’s arms control team engineered a proposal by which Iran would ship its low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be converted to high-enriched, but not weapons-grade uranium.
Although the proposal would not have done anything to reduce Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or capacity to enrich future uranium, it would deplete its existing stockpile, setting back Iran’s breakout time. The proposal also brought Russia into the denuclearization process in a serious and constructive way (was even named the “Russia proposal,” perhaps to cater to Putin’s ego).
The Iranians, however, rejected the offer out of hand. After the General Assembly summit, Obama spoke to President Medvedev, who expressed his anger and disappointment at the Iranian regime’s unreliability and unwillingness to compromise. Iran had—perhaps—erred in spurning Russia, one of its few remaining defenders.
Also, the Chinese government slowly began to revalue its currency. This was an important economic policy victory for the United States, making the American exports more competitive and bringing China more closely in line with international trading rules.
But the ultimate breakthrough came in June 2010, when the UN Security Council (including Russia and China) voted to impose sweeping new financial sanctions on the Iranian regime, including a ban on weapons sales. Sure enough, the Russian government soon followed up with a cancellation of a planned $800 million weapons sale to Iran.
It was a vindication of Obama’s belief in negotiation, compromise, and international outreach and a major diplomatic victory for his administration. They had made a persuasive case and overcome Russian and Chinese short-term interests to secure a sanctions regime that had the potential to take the world one step toward a safer future.
Growing up, Barack was raised by his mother Ann to believe that humans had a responsibility to safeguard the natural environment and protect the planet that they all shared. Growing up in Hawaii, where he could freely surf the waves and explore the islands in all their natural beauty, young Barack recognized that the Earth was humanity’s birthright, belonging to no one and available to everyone.
As he launched his political career, his outlook continued to be generally pro-environment. Environmentalism, however, was not central to his politics in the way that other issues were. That would change, however, once he became president and had to deal with environmental concerns on a truly global scale.
In this chapter, we’ll examine:
The issue of global warming changed the way Obama viewed environmentalism. It was not just about protecting scenic views or saving endangered species—it was a matter of existential concern for humanity.
The alarming rise in average temperatures carried the prospect of frequent and catastrophic extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts. The extreme weather brought about by global warming would also devastate much of the planet’s food supply; lead to mass economic, political, and social upheaval; and create a more violent and chaotic world as governments fought over increasingly scarce resources.
It was a terrifying vision of a not-too-distant future—one that Obama was determined not to leave for future generations.
Despite the terrifying consequences of inaction on global warming, Obama knew that the politics of passing a major climate change bill were exceedingly difficult. Global warming entails the rise in average temperatures of a degree or two over a century. Even such seemingly minor rises in temperature, however, would have catastrophic consequences for life on the planet.
But because the temperature changes are so slow, most people would never notice them, even in the course of a lifetime. Thus, global warming seemed abstract or unreal to many people. The general public was unwilling to make sacrifices now that would only benefit future generations, all in service of a problem they couldn’t see or directly experience.
Even among Democrats, there was lukewarm enthusiasm for tackling the issue. Key constituencies like labor unions were fearful of the economic impact of climate legislation, and rank-and-file Democratic voters generally unmotivated by the issue.
But things were far worse on the Republican side. The GOP was outright hostile to the very idea of climate legislation, with prominent voices within the party denying that global warming even existed. This was a mix of knee-jerk partisanship, spite toward Obama, a commitment to extreme free-market ideology (which would oppose any meaningful regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions), and a disturbing rise of anti-intellectualism within the party that led many GOP politicians to be suspicious of science when it ran counter to their ideology.
Despite the difficult politics, Obama recognized that tackling climate change was crucial. That’s why his administration established the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, headed by environmental attorney and former EPA Administrator Carol Browner. The Obama administration was the first to put in place a White House team to seriously address climate change.
The administration saw that U.S. public policy was massively tilted toward fossil-fuel interests, with special tax breaks for oil companies; public highway subsidies; and government-funded oil pipelines and ports all contributing to America’s disproportionate share of global emissions.
Early on, the Obama administration tried to reverse this policy course by embedding $90 billion in clean energy investments into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus bill”). Among other things, these investments planted the seeds of what would become a green energy revolution throughout the 2010s, providing funding for wind turbines, clean-energy battery storage systems, and the retrofitting of existing buildings to make them more energy efficient. The stimulus also provided loans to clean-energy technology companies. These loans were crucial to the success of companies like Tesla.
In addition to the investments made in the stimulus, the administration sought early on to use the regulatory authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases and set emissions standards for automobiles. One obvious benefit of this regulatory approach was that it could be done entirely through the executive branch and wouldn’t require the passage of new legislation by Congress.
In May 2009, the administration announced its emissions standards plan and secured crucial pledges of cooperation from the United Auto Workers (UAW) as well as the nation’s major automakers.
The plan was ambitious and far-reaching, designed to reduce emissions by over 900 million metric tons (the equivalent of taking 177 million cars off the road). The automakers liked it because it provided a national standard for emissions—instead of a patchwork of state and local standards, which would have been expensive and inefficient to comply with.
Obama knew, of course, that the emissions standards plan would be subject to withering political attacks and legal challenges from the right. It was all part of the right’s general opposition to what they termed the “regulatory state”—the promulgation of rules and regulations by executive agencies and boards.
Obama saw Republicans’ attacks on the executive branch for taking action as hypocritical, self-serving, and reflective of a deeply unrealistic worldview. In a large and complex modern society, it was simply impossible to expect legislators to pass legislation that would be able to effectively regulate every emerging industry and technology. Moreover, the legislative process was too slow to respond to fast-moving changes.
This is why Obama and other progressives believed that modern nations needed regulatory agencies staffed by experts, who could quickly promulgate rules in real-time. Nevertheless, well-funded groups on the right (many of them funded by the arch-conservative billionaire industrialists, brothers Charles and David Koch) had a well-oiled lobbying and influence-peddling machine that they could use to delay, challenge, and overturn actions of federal regulators.
Despite the significance of the new EPA rules, Obama knew that they couldn’t be the sum total of the administration’s actions on climate change. For one thing, the next Republican president would be able to reverse the rules on day one, with the simple stroke of a pen.
This was why the administration began to push hard for a comprehensive climate-change bill in Congress in its early months. Legislation passed by Congress would be more difficult to reverse, would reach all sectors of the economy and society, and give the U.S. much-needed leverage in international climate agreements by setting a moral example on the issue.
As ever, the politics were difficult. Any climate bill would need to get through the Senate, where it would face lockstep GOP opposition, as well as the opposition of Democrats representing oil-producing states.
Because of these political limitations, the bill’s sponsors in the House decided on a more market-friendly approach by writing a cap-and-trade bill. Cap-and-trade is an alternative to a more harsh and economically disruptive carbon tax. Under a cap-and-trade system, the government sets a cap on permissible emissions. If a company emits more than the amount allowed under the cap, they pay a tax. If a company emits less than this amount, however, they earn unused emission credits that they can then sell or trade to other companies. Over time, the amount of the cap is lowered, giving companies time to invest in clean energy research. The credits, meanwhile, provide an incentive for them to cut their emissions.
Cap-and-trade had already been successfully implemented in the early 1990s by Republican President George H.W. Bush to combat acid rain, so advocates believed that such a bill had a chance of securing some bipartisan support. The Obama team was thrilled when the House passed the bill in June 2009, even garnering some Republican votes along the way.
But they knew the real obstacle lay in the Senate. Thanks to the filibuster and the likely opposition of Democrats from coal and gas states like West Virginia and Louisiana, they would need to win the support of some Republican senators. With some trepidation, Obama agreed to partner with Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Although Graham was known to occasionally critique his party, Obama viewed him as a largely unscrupulous and untrustworthy figure.
The few criticisms that Graham sometimes lobbed at fellow Republicans seemed more calculated to garner media attention for himself than to spark real change within the party. Moreover, when it actually came time to vote on legislation, Graham usually proved himself to be a consistent partisan. In short, he was not someone whom Obama trusted with such a landmark piece of legislation. But given the limitations of the U.S. Senate, Graham was the best he could hope for. As we’ll see later in the summary, Obama’s suspicions about Graham proved to be well-founded.
While working to pass a climate change bill through Congress, Obama was also preparing to make a trip to Copenhagen to attend the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. The purpose of the conference was to bring the international community together to reach a comprehensive climate change agreement, including global emissions targets.
Obama hadn’t initially wanted to make the trip, seeing it as having little likelihood of succeeding or of any substantial agreement being reached at the summit. There would be near-certain Republican opposition to any treaty that might be drafted at Copenhagen, as treaties required two-thirds of the Senate to ratify, effectively giving the GOP veto power. On top of that, rapidly developing countries like India and China were unenthusiastic about curbing their emissions without reciprocal action from the West.
Nevertheless, Obama was persuaded to attend by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who believed that Obama’s presence and moral leadership could make a meaningful difference. He recognized that global warming could not be tackled without massive international coordination, and reluctantly agreed to make the trip to Denmark.
Upon arrival, Obama found his deepest concerns quickly confirmed. The conference was disorganized and chaotic, unlike any other international summit he’d ever attended before. Little preparatory work seemed to have been done, and the leaders in attendance could not find a consensus on anything.
Obama and the American delegation made it clear that any agreement needed to have firm emissions commitments from developing economies like China and India. With their growing wealth, rising living standards, and emerging middle classes, these nations’ share of total global emissions was sure to rise in the coming decades. Any emissions targets needed to take account of that fact.
Given the existing political constraints, he would not be able to sell an agreement that imposed stringent requirements on the U.S. while letting foreign emitters off the hook—especially during a recession.
It became clear to the Americans and Europeans that the Chinese delegation, in particular, was a problem. They refused to meet or discuss the issue in any substantive way. Unenthusiastic about putting the brakes on their rapid industrialization—which had made the once-impoverished nation a rising superpower and brought hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty—the Chinese saw political benefit in letting the Copenhagen conference fail and blaming it on the U.S.
The aloofness of the Chinese delegation, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, took on a comic aspect when they literally dodged Obama to hide in a conference room. There, they rallied other developing nations like India and South Africa to oppose any deal.
Obama believed that, to some extent, their opposition to a climate change agreement was understandable. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century, the vast majority of pollution had been done by Western nations like Great Britain and the U.S. It seemed unfair that just at the moment when China was emerging as an industrial power that they should suddenly be asked to sacrifice their economic development to help solve a problem that they hadn’t created.
Obama understood these arguments, but he also understood that the risk of global warming to human civilization was simply too great to indulge them. Accordingly, he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up unannounced at the Chinese conference room (having to unceremoniously squeeze past security) to speak to Wen and the other leaders, just hours before the president had to get on a plane back to the U.S.
There, they explained that the political limitations in the U.S. would simply not permit a climate change agreement that didn’t impose restrictions on emissions in the developing world. Moreover, Obama and Clinton made it clear that the European Union would not go along with any such agreement either. Convinced by Obama and Clinton’s personal appeals, the Chinese, Europeans, and Americans were able to hammer out an interim agreement in a matter of a few hours.
The resulting Copenhagen Accord consisted of mostly voluntary emissions targets for 2020 from the signatory countries. It was a non-binding treaty, and thus would not have to be submitted to the U.S. Senate for approval (where it would almost certainly have fallen short).
Obama was pleased that it put the U.S. and the world on a path to action on climate change. But he also knew that as a non-binding agreement, it could easily be torn up by the next Republican administration. It was, at best, a stopgap measure for what was truly an existential problem. And Obama was troubled by the fact that even this mild measure had required such enormous political effort.
Think about the role of sacrifice and trade-offs in achieving mutual goals.
Have you ever been in a professional situation in which you had to convince another person to sacrifice their short-term interests toward the achievement of a larger goal? Describe the situation.
Was the other person open to the idea of giving something up, or did you encounter resistance? If they were resistant, what strategies did you employ to try to persuade them?
In reflecting on this experience, do you believe that it’s more effective to encourage others to make short-term sacrifices by a) appealing to their long-term self interests or b) trying to persuade them of the merits of the long-term goal you’re trying to achieve? Explain your answer.
Despite victories like the signing of the historic Affordable Care Act and the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Obama administration was experiencing sinking political fortunes in 2010. Gone were the heady early days of the administration when the nation and the political press teemed with optimism at the new, young, African-American president.
Now, the president’s approval ratings were in steady decline and the tenor of media coverage surrounding the administration had a new tone of cynicism and negativity. Events over the next year would only add to the administration’s troubles as the president and his team struggled to find their footing. In this chapter, we’ll look at:
The weak economy was a main driver of the rough political headwinds Obama and his fellow Democrats were sailing against in 2010. Although TARP, the stimulus, the auto industry bailout, and Treasury Secretary Geithner’s stress tests of the financial system had succeeded in preventing a global depression, the economic recovery was painfully slow, with unemployment at an alarming 10 percent. The slow recovery and growing public anger made the Obama administration bear the full brunt of the backlash—with Republicans all too eager to take advantage of the political opportunity.
This contributed to a period of sliding morale at the White House. Obama was beyond proud of the incredibly talented, passionate, and committed staff in the executive branch, not to mention the fact that they were the most diverse White House staff in American history. But the continued bad press, sliding poll numbers, and fatigue of intense media scrutiny inevitably took their toll.
While it could be thrilling and deeply rewarding, working for the president was also a grueling ordeal. Staffers were exhausted, overworked, and rarely had the opportunity to see their families.
In such an environment, staff resentments and squabbles began to bubble to the surface. Cabinet members and high-level staff jockeyed for precious time on the president’s schedule, while mid-level staffers engaged in turf wars over matters of policy.
Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett even reported to the president that a number of women on the White House staff had come forward with accounts of having been disrespected by male colleagues. Obama took these claims seriously and invited a group of women on the staff to dinner with him to discuss it. While no one reported any egregious misconduct, female staff members nevertheless reported a consistent pattern of being shouted down, condescended to, and interrupted by their male coworkers—including senior staff members like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.
Hearing these accounts, Obama looked inward and questioned how his own machismo and jocular demeanor with male staff members may have inadvertently contributed a “boys club” atmosphere that made women feel less welcome and included. He vowed to the female staffers that he would do better and demand better from the men at the White House.
During this turbulent time, Barack could derive comfort from the love and warmth of his family. In the intense fishbowl of the presidency, it was important to find some oasis of routine and normalcy.
When he was in Washington, Barack made a point of reading to Malia and Sasha before bed (until they told him, to his sadness, that they were getting too old for it). When he could, he poured himself into the girls’ activities, even coaching Sasha’s basketball team for a game.
Michelle, meanwhile, came into her own and began to thrive in her role as first lady. She was committed to using her platform to celebrate the rich tapestry of American life and culture. The Obama White House saw a diverse and impressive array of concerts, lectures, poetry reading, and other cultural programming.
The Obamas welcomed to the White House former Beatle Paul McCartney (where he sang his 1965 “Michelle” to a blushing first lady), the famously elusive and enigmatic Bob Dylan (who, true to form, exchanged a quick handshake with the president before wordlessly disappearing), and Lin-Manuel Miranda—who debuted some early numbers from what would become the groundbreaking Broadway musical Hamilton.
Despite the thrills of being at the center of public life, Michelle still missed the quieter, simpler life she’d known before. She knew that the family’s time in Washington might be brief and that so much of her life—where she lived, where she worked, where her daughters went to school—was subject to the will of voters, the state of the economy, and other impersonal forces beyond her control.
Barack, too, thought about the life of relative anonymity and privacy he’d chosen to leave behind—and, with a touch of guilt he realized, that he’d chosen to take away from his family. Returning to bed with Michelle in the White House late at night, he knew that the bygone days of just being a normal couple and a normal family were lost forever.
Despite the worsening political climate for Obama and the Democratic Party, there were still some bright spots in 2010. One major achievement was the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The administration (and its predecessor) had saved the U.S. financial system from total collapse. Still, Wall Street’s short-term thinking, obsession with quarterly profits at the expense of long-term growth, and perverse incentives for excessive risk-taking remained. The country could not afford to let an out-of-control finance sector drive the economy off a cliff again. If the American economy was to truly be put on solid footing once again, there would have to be significant reform.
Despite his administration having gone to extraordinary lengths (and incurred significant political blowback) to rescue the big banks and shore up public confidence in the nation’s financial system, Wall Street elites were hostile toward Obama. They were outraged at even the idea of legislation curbing some of their industry’s worst excesses.
Still, Obama and the Democrats knew that on this particular issue, the politics were in their favor. There was still righteous anger toward the big banks and mortgage companies that had inflated the housing bubble.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would be sure to oppose any Wall Street reform bill. However, he also knew that widespread public antipathy toward the banks would make it impossible for him to prevent a few members of the GOP caucus from voting with the Democrats on this issue.
As with health care, the Wall Street reform bill brought out Obama’s reformist and incrementalist political tendencies—and put him on the other side of some critics on the left, who wanted the administration to push for more radical and sweeping measures.
The centrist Obama wanted to limit excess risk-taking; curb the worst malpractices and abuses that had led to the 2008 crisis; and make the overall financial system more stable, so that the failure of one bank didn’t lead to cascading, systemic collapse. More left-wing activists, however, wanted to radically restructure the nation’s financial system. They proposed breaking up the big banks and bringing back the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented financial institutions from engaging in both commercial and investment banking.
But Obama believed such radical reforms could frighten investors and derail an already-fragile recovery. Moreover, breaking up the banks and bringing back Great Depression-era financial legislation wouldn’t have prevented the 2008 crisis and would be ineffective in regulating the 21st-century finance sector. There was no evidence that smaller banks were less likely to engage in excessive risk-taking—in fact there was compelling evidence to suggest that the opposite was true.
Furthermore, much of the explosion in subprime lending had been carried out by non-bank financial institutions (known as “shadow banks”) that were not even regulated by old laws like Glass-Steagall. The present crisis demanded a new approach, not a rehash of old legislation.
Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and U.S. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts led the effort in their respective chambers. Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, was widely seen as an effective dealmaker. He had good relationships with the GOP senators and conservative Democrats he would need to build a coalition and guide the bill to passage.
Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, was a colorful figure, known for his sharp wit and biting humor. He was also a trailblazer as one of the first (and few) openly gay members of Congress. Frank possessed an impressive command of the complex subjects tackled in the legislation, and, like Dodd, had the right mix of relationships and legislative skill to keep the important bill on track.
The core of the legislation designated certain big banks as being of “systemic” importance, and, therefore, subject to extra regulation. Such banks would face higher capital requirements, limiting their ability to place risky bets and making the overall system more durable. The bill also gave the Federal Reserve stronger authority to manage bank failures under the aegis of a newly created Orderly Liquidation Authority. To prevent the spread of systemic risk to unwitting investors, the legislation also created more transparent rules regarding the trade of risky and complex financial products like derivatives and credit-default swaps, so that investors could have a clearer picture of precisely what they were buying and selling.
Perhaps most notably, the bill created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The bureau was the brainchild of Harvard professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren (a future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate). Warren argued that much of the 2008 crisis had stemmed from “predatory lending”—the sale of dubious financial products like subprime mortgages, reverse mortgages, and payday loans to disproportionately Black and Latino lenders. The CFPB would be responsible for the regulation of such products and have authority to bring legal action against lenders who could be shown to have exploited or defrauded their customers.
In December 2009, the bill passed the House on a mostly party-line vote. As with every major piece of legislation during the Obama era, the real fight was in the Senate. Even here, however, there was far less of the tooth-and-nail obstruction and opposition than had been the case for the Affordable Care Act.
Senator Dodd succeeded in getting the bill through his chamber in July 2010. He even secured three Republican votes on the route to passage. Obama signed the bill into law on July 21, 2010, representing one of the most significant pieces of domestic legislation of his presidency.
Just as the fight for the Dodd-Frank bill was heating up and the dust was settling from the battle for the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration would face one of its gravest political crises. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon deep-sea oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana after the engineers ignored the results of a safety test. The fiery explosion injured 17 members of the crew, killed 11, and set off the largest oil spill in maritime history.
For years, energy companies like British Petroleum (BP)—the company on whose behalf Deepwater Horizon was operating—had been conducting deep-sea drilling for petroleum. This involved drilling beneath the ocean’s floor, sometimes as much as 35,000 feet. Such operations were highly risky and expensive, but could also be enormously profitable for the oil companies.
The humanitarian and environmental horror of the explosion captured the world’s attention and suddenly made it the No. 1 issue for the administration. The event had the effect of shining a spotlight on just how great a humanitarian and environmental price society paid for its dependence on fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, the situation in the Gulf was also the death knell for the administration’s climate change bill. As a “sweetener” to get Republicans and wavering Democrats from oil- and coal-producing states on board with the bill, Obama had authorized more offshore drilling. Environmental groups had grumbled, but agreed to go along if it was the necessary price for a comprehensive bill.
The Deepwater Horizon spill completely changed the political calculus. In the wake of the catastrophe, there was little public appetite for more drilling and environmental groups would no longer support any deal that included it. And indeed, after the spill, the administration had little choice but to impose a six-month moratorium on all deepwater offshore drilling.
The moratorium, however, gave Republican Lindsey Graham (who was already lukewarm about the bill to begin with) the perfect excuse to walk away from the bipartisan climate change bill he’d been working on with the administration. Legislative action on climate change was dead.
The Obama administration wanted to ensure that the response to the crisis was timely and effective in delivering relief to the millions of affected individuals and businesses in the Gulf. Under current law, BP was obliged to pay for the cleanup of the spill itself. However, they had limited liability when it came to compensating affected businesses like commercial fisheries and resorts that relied on a tourism sector that would no doubt be devastated.
Obama instructed his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, that he wanted a firm commitment from BP that they would bear the costs of making whole those whose livelihoods they’d ruined through their neglect and incompetence. The president then tasked Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett with coordinating the interagency federal response between the EPA, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and other agencies and departments. Crucially, she was also in charge of liaising with leaders and officials in the impacted states—all of which had Republican governors.
Initially, BP executives told the public that the explosion had not resulted in any significant dispersal of oil. However, these claims were proven false within days. Engineers discovered major breaks in the underwater pipelines. Initial estimates calculated that approximately 5,000 barrels of oil per day were gushing out, with the company having no idea how to repair the pipelines and stop the leak.
The world watched in abject horror and disgust as a massive surface oil slick spread across the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately spanning over 600 square miles. The administration’s top scientists and engineers feared that 19 million gallons could be dumped into the Gulf—an ecological death sentence for the region.
Watching the crisis unfold, Obama saw how reckless commercial activity had wrought a devastating impact on the region, with Louisiana alone losing 10,000 acres of land annually due to climate change and erosion. Despite humankind’s hubris, Obama solemnly observed, we were still largely at the mercy of nature.
As the crisis wore in through the spring and summer, the political mood turned sour for the president and his party. The situation in the Gulf exacerbated the administration’s existing problems with a polarized and ineffective Congress and a stubbornly slow economic recovery that still featured sky-high unemployment.
Although the public had initially (and in Obama’s view, correctly) blamed BP for the spill, that began to change the longer the leak continued with no clear end in sight. Now, the public was directing its ire at the administration that had failed to prevent the leak and seemed unable to fix it.
The public relations situation got worse when BP installed a camera at the site of the leak, enabling billions of people around the world to see live images of dark, viscous oil being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico, complete with a digital timer showing precisely how long the leak had been going on. Nightly news images of vast oil slicks on beaches and tar-drenched pelicans and fish shocked and outraged the nation, with political commentators labeling the oil spill “Obama’s Katrina.”
The administration’s reputation was further damaged when revelations came to light about misconduct at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior that was responsible for regulating the nation’s oil and gas.
Reports showed that the MMS had enjoyed a far too friendly relationship with the industry that it was meant to be overseeing, with a revolving door between the agency and the oil and gas companies. There were even revelations of sexual relationships between regulators and executives at these companies. Clearly, MMS was more of a lapdog than a watchdog.
While the coverage was undoubtedly embarrassing and cast a stain on his administration’s handling of the crisis, Obama believed that the issues at MMS had deeper roots and spoke to larger issues in American politics. Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the conservative movement had convinced large numbers of Americans that government was the root of all the nation’s problems. If we could just “get government off our backs,” we would be a more free, prosperous, and happy society.
Obama believed that this had let voters into a self-destructive feedback loop in which:
He found it especially galling to be attacked by anti-regulatory, anti-environmental Republican politicians like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose entire approach to public policy made it near-impossible to solve problems like the oil spill.
In the end, however, the administration managed to lead an effective and competent response to the spill. The federal government had an open communication strategy that kept the public informed as to the latest developments in the Gulf. The president even took the time to address the nation from the Oval Office on the severity of the situation.
And the administration proved serious about its commitment to holding BP accountable. After White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel applied intense political pressure on the company, they agreed to set up a $20 billion relief fund for the fishing, tourism, and recreation businesses decimated by the spill.
Finally, engineers from the U.S. Department of Energy managed to cap the well on July 15. Although this was a great relief and finally brought the national nightmare to an end, the damage done was catastrophic. The undersea well had leaked an astonishing four million barrels of oil into the Gulf over a period of 87 days.
The crisis in the Gulf of Mexico compounded the already-grave political situation for the Obama team in 2010. The midterm elections were set for 2010, and all the polling and anecdotal evidence suggested that it would be a bloodbath for Democrats.
As a general rule, midterm elections tended to go poorly for the party that controlled the presidency. David Axelrod warned the president that this year was likely to be particularly bad, with Democrats having little chance of retaining their House majority and a good chance that they might lose the Senate as well.
The weak economy, the relentless campaign of GOP sabotage, the continuation of seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now, the oil spill all combined to create an extremely difficult political climate for incumbent Democrats. Obama recognized that maintaining Democratic control of Congress was crucial if he was to pass the rest of his agenda in his first term.
Coming back to Washington, Obama felt newly energized and ready for the fall midterm campaign. He was proud of everything his administration had achieved in its first two years, and he wanted to take the case directly to voters, believing that hearing directly from the president would cut through the negative partisanship.
Obama vigorously campaigned for Democratic House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative candidates across the country throughout September and October 2010. Although he could still draw big crowds and make auditoriums ring with the cheers of “Yes we can!” it was clear that there wasn’t the same sense of passion and urgency among his supporters as there had been two years before.
It was something he’d worried about throughout his presidential campaign—that the enthusiasm his candidacy generated would dissipate once it met the often-dispiriting reality of governing. Although his administration had made major strides, unemployment remained alarmingly high and partisan rancor was worse than ever. To many voters, it felt like Obama hadn’t delivered on what he’d promised.
In what President Obama later termed a “shellacking,” the Democratic Party suffered a major defeat in the elections on November 2, 2010. The party lost a whopping 63 House seats (costing them their majority), seven Senate seats (retaining their majority, but losing the seats they needed to overcome GOP filibusters), six governorships, and 20 state legislative chambers. It was the party’s worst performance in a midterm election since 1938, and it would have significant ramifications for the rest of Obama’s presidency.
Despite the loss, Obama was proud of what his administration had been able to deliver for the American people in such a short period—a rescue of the global economy, restoration of confidence in the nation’s banking system, a serious step toward universal health insurance, and major reform of the finance industry.
Still, the midterm debacle hurt Obama deeply. For all his oratorical and communications skills, he felt he’d failed to rally the nation behind a shared vision and had paid a steep political price for it.
In the wake of the loss, it was clear that the administration needed a message, policy and personnel reboot. Key economic advisers like Larry Summers and Christina Romer made their exits in late 2010, as did other members of the senior staff like Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
The most significant departure was Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. After two years as arguably the most powerful person in Washington (other than the president himself) Emanuel was tired and burned out in Washington. Also, with the Democrats’ loss of the majority in the House of Representatives, his relationships with congressional Democrats were less valuable than they had been before.
Besides, Emanuel was preparing for a new challenge—running for Mayor of Chicago in 2011, which had long been his dream job. Despite his tough-guy bravado, Emanuel was emotional when he said his final goodbye to President Obama. He had done much to shape the early years of the Obama administration and played a crucial role in steering key legislation through Congress.
Obama’s choice to replace Emanuel was Bill Daley. Brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, he was known for his relatively non-ideological approach to politics and for his strong relationships with both labor and business. Obama felt that Daley had the right temperament and focus to deal with the new Republican majority in the House.
In November and December 2010, Obama and the Democrats would enjoy one of the most productive lame-duck sessions on record. Although Democrats had been beaten in the 2010 midterm elections, the new Republican House majority wouldn’t be seated until early January (the period between an election and the seating of new members is known as the lame-duck period).
This meant that there would still be two more months of a Democratic-controlled Congress—and President Obama intended to use this time to push through some important reforms.
In this chapter, we’ll look at:
The Bush tax cuts had been passed in 2001 and 2003 during George W. Bush’s first term. Obama had long been opposed to the tax cuts, whose benefits had gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans. The top 2 percent of U.S. taxpayers received a staggering $130 billion from the tax cuts, while their overall $1.3 trillion price tag had led to ballooning federal deficits—with unimpressive economic growth and a recession to show for it.
The tax cuts were all set to expire automatically at the end of 2010, an outcome that the entire GOP was determined to avoid—and that gave Obama important leverage in his negotiations with them. Obama didn’t want all the tax cuts to expire. His economic team warned him that raising taxes could derail the already weak recovery and would be politically costly. But he did want to end the tax cuts for those earning over $250,000. This would reduce the deficit and provide nearly $700 billion in revenue that could be used for more progressive policy initiatives.
Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were unwilling to take this deal, however. They wanted a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, period. But Obama knew that this was not a position the Republicans could maintain—McConnell would have to deal with the administration, because if Obama simply did nothing and ran out the clock, all the tax cuts would expire and the Republicans would get nothing.
Ultimately, Obama sent Vice President Biden to handle the negotiations, believing that cutting a deal with Biden would be less politically risky for McConnell than dealing with the president directly. Biden and McConnell agreed on a two-year extension of all the tax cuts, in exchange for an extension of unemployment benefits and an extension of the administration’s $212 billion worth working- and middle-class tax reforms.
Although he hadn’t wanted to extend the full schedule of Bush tax cuts, Obama was pleased that he’d been able to deliver meaningful tax relief for ordinary Americans. It also provided a crucial opening salvo for the 2012 presidential election. If Obama won in two years, he’d be in a position to end the tax cuts; if he lost, Republicans would be in a position to make them permanent.
Obama also wanted to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy. This was a policy dating back to the Clinton administration that prohibited LGBTQ Americans from serving openly in the armed forces. LGBTQ troops had to hide their sexuality from their peers and superior officers and faced dishonorable discharge if they were outed—as more than 13,000 had been since the policy’s rollout in 1994. Obama considered this to be a gross injustice, particularly since it was directed against those who’d made the choice to serve their country.
In moving to end DADT, however, Obama couldn’t help but come to terms with how he had personally participated in homophobic culture, particularly as a young man. Regretfully, he recalled how he and his male peers casually used homophobic slurs and generally held LGBTQ people to be somehow alien or “other.”
But, now, as commander in chief, he recognized that he had a moral duty to end discrimination. The issue was especially poignant for him as the nation’s first African-American president. Until President Harry Truman had desegregated the military in 1947, Black troops had been forced to serve in separate units under white commanding officers. He would not perpetuate the same legacy of discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.
Fortunately, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were supportive of DADT repeal, giving the administration important and credible allies. Mullen further helped the administration’s efforts by voicing his support to Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Although Obama could have simply issued an executive order ending DADT (and was chastised by LGBTQ activists for not immediately doing so in the wake of Mullen’s statement), he wanted to end the policy through congressional action. He feared that if he issued an executive order, it would just be overturned by the next Republican president.
Secretary Gates commissioned a study across all branches of the armed services to gauge how active duty military personnel felt about serving alongside openly gay colleagues. The results of the survey came in in late September, showing overwhelming support for ending DADT within the military.
This gave the administration enough political cover to make a concerted and successful push for repeal. On December 18, 2010 Congress passed a repeal of DADT, with a 65-31 vote in the Senate, with six Republicans voting for repeal.
The final priority for President Obama during the lame-duck session was the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. This was a proposal to establish permanent legal residence and provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who’d been brought to the United States by their parents as children.
The immigration situation had been a slow-rolling crisis for decades, with 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. by 2010, primarily from Central America, drawn north by economic opportunity. Their presence in the U.S. had become an intense political issue, provoking nativist and xenophobic sentiment on the right, as well as economic concern among labor unions on the left, who feared that undocumented immigrants would lower wages and take jobs away from native-born Americans.
Because of their immigration status, undocumented people were frequently exploited by unscrupulous employers who knew that they had little legal recourse to fight back. For Obama, helping undocumented workers—and especially their non-citizen children—was a simple matter of justice.
The children of undocumented workers were young men and women (known as “Dreamers”) had come to the United States as children through no choice of their own. Growing up in America, the U.S. was the only country they’d known and it was the place where they’d made contributions to their communities, participated in the economy, served in the military, and started families of their own.
In talking with Dreamers, Obama learned that many of them hadn’t even known about their immigration status until they’d tried to apply for mortgages or college loans and were asked to provide proof of citizenship. Because of their undocumented status, they were legally at risk of deportation. For Obama, such a fate was monstrously unjust—these young people had no roots in their countries of origin, did not speak the language, and might possibly be exposed to physical danger if they were forced to return.
Unfortunately, for Obama and the Dreamers, this bill would be defeated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate. The legislation came tantalizingly close, but ultimately fell five votes short of breaking a filibuster.
This was one of the bitterest defeats of Obama’s presidency. After the bill’s death, all he could do was meet with a group of Dreamers, hug and comfort them, tell them that America was their home too—and that he would never stop fighting for them.
Through managing two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Barack Obama had learned what all other modern U.S. presidents had learned—that the Middle East was a highly unstable region of the world. With a few exceptions, much of the region was economically underdeveloped, highly dependent on oil exports, and governed by oppressive regimes with poor human rights records. Unfortunately, many of these regimes had also been supported by the United States financially and militarily.
Within this broader context of sectarian strife, political repression, and economic stagnation, the administration worried that populist uprisings were inevitable. The region’s dictators would only be able to keep the lid on the region’s tensions for so long. Eventually, the powder keg would blow—and the consequences could be destabilizing, violent, and even deadly.
Given this situation, foreign policy experts in the administration like National Security Council advisor Samantha Power believed that easing repressive Middle East regimes toward democracy and human rights would be a humanitarian triumph—and, ultimately, be in the long-term security interests of the U.S. and the world.
In this chapter, we’ll look at:
In January 2011, the Middle Eastern powder keg finally exploded. Spontaneous street protests in Tunisia toppled the government in that country, with the unrest spilling over to Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, and Egypt.
The myopic and long-entrenched leaders of these countries were slow to react to waves of young people taking to the streets, aided in their organizing and communications power by the nascent technology of social media.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, young people protested to demand the end of the country’s “emergency law,” which had been in effect since 1981 and had severely curtailed civil liberties and the free press. The demonstrators wanted pro-democracy reforms and for longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (1928-2020) to step down after 30 years in office.
Although Obama couldn’t help but sympathize with the young demonstrators battling a corrupt and authoritarian political establishment, he had deep concerns about the impact that the movement—which quickly became known as the Arab Spring—would have on U.S. interests in the region.
Analysts in the administration worried that Egypt did not yet have the necessary conditions to make a transition to a healthy democracy: a democratic tradition, experienced and well-established political parties, and an independent judiciary. As a result, the idealistic young demonstrators likely wouldn’t be the ones to step into the political void if Mubarak was ousted. Instead, that vacuum would be filled either by the military or by the Muslim Brotherhood—a Sunni organization that aimed to govern the country according to Sharia law.
Although Mubarak had been a loyal U.S. ally, the Obama team recognized that his political position was no longer tenable. Above all, they wanted as seamless and orderly a transition for the longtime president as possible. This was how the administration reached a consensus that they would apply pressure on Mubarak behind the scenes to compel him not to run for another term and work to ensure a transition to a new democratic government.
They warned Mubarak that the protests would spin out of control if he refused to step down. Although he agreed not to run for reelection, he refused to step down in a timely fashion. Worse, he began to use the military and pro-government counter-protesters to violently crack down on the Tahrir Square movement.
The national security establishment was uneasy about moving more aggressively against Mubarak. He was a stable political force that the U.S. was used to dealing with, and they feared the power vacuum that would form in his absence. But the use of force against the protesters was too much for Obama. The administration made the decision to publicly call on Mubarak to step down immediately. On February 3, 2011, he resigned his office with the military temporarily overseeing new elections. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 was complete—but what would follow in its wake remained an open question.
As the protests and unrest spread throughout the Middle East, regimes began to take more repressive, violent approaches toward them. In Libya, leader Muammar Gaddafi ordered his security forces to launch brutal actions against civilian protesters.
Gaddafi had long been an international pariah, infamous for violent repression domestically and state sponsorship of terrorism abroad. In a short matter of weeks in early 2011, much of Libya had descended into open civil war, with pro- and anti-government forces battling for control of the streets.
Gaddafi launched a campaign of unrestrained terror against his own civilian population, as anti-government forces took control in the city of Benghazi. Pro-Gaddafi forces began to converge on the city in March 2011, with Gadaffi promising to slaughter the inhabitants once they arrived. It was a humanitarian disaster in the making—and the international community began to press the Obama administration to intervene militarily.
Despite his clear sympathies with the forces resisting Gadaffi and his horror at the grisly fate that was surely awaiting Benghazi, Obama had strong reservations about committing U.S. troops.
The U.S. was already embroiled in two wars that had been going on for nearly a decade. Throwing the country into a third conflict was politically risky, would endanger American lives, and potentially put the U.S. on the hook for more military interventions around the world. After all, if the U.S. committed troops to stop a massacre in Libya, how could it decline to do so anywhere else in the world? Obama knew he could not sign off on an open-ended commitment by the United States to protect people around the world from their own governments. Moreover, war was a messy and ugly solution to any problem. Military conflicts, he’d learned, did not solve problems—they only created new ones, usually with unforeseeable consequences.
Still, international pressure continued to grow for military action. Top voices in the administration were split on the question. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice favored intervention, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, Vice President Joe Biden, and White House Chief of Staff Bill Daly were opposed.
It was one of the most difficult decisions of Obama’s presidency. He knew the risks of intervention—but also knew that tens of thousands of people could be slaughtered if he did nothing.
The president made the decision that the United States would intervene to prevent Gaddafi’s destruction of Benghazi. But, in a break from the unilateral militarism of the Bush administration, Obama sought to build an international coalition to topple the Libyan dictator. In working with UK Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarközy (both of whom had already publicly voiced support for military action in Libya) as well as representatives from the Arab League, Obama crafted a strategy to defeat Gaddafi, rescue Benghazi, and keep direct American involvement at a minimum.
The U.S. would destroy the Libyan air defenses, enabling British and French fighter jets to strike at Gaddafi’s ground forces, while the Arab League would provide logistical support. The British and French would also bear the cost of rebuilding after the end of hostilities. This plan of action promised to limit U.S. involvement in direct conflict and insulate the administration against political attacks that it was embroiling the country in yet another foreign conflict.
On March 17, 2011 the UN Security Council approved the use of military force to protect Libyan civilians.
The mission proved to be a success. By the end of March, Gaddafi’s forces were largely defeated. Obama’s commitment to internationalism had paid off: There were no American casualties, the intervention had come at a minimal financial cost to the U.S., and tens of thousands of Libyan civilians had been saved from certain death.
Despite the clear success of the mission, however, Obama was astonished to find congressional Republicans still hurling partisan attacks at his administration’s handling of Libya. They argued that Obama had done too much; that he had done too little; that he had been too hasty; that he’d waited too long; and that he hadn’t sought congressional approval under the War Powers Act (a legal procedure they'd happily ignored during the Bush years).
The hypocritical and bad-faith attacks were another confirmation to the president that politics no longer stopped at the water’s edge—everything was fair game in partisan warfare.
In previous chapters, we’ve explored Obama’s national security strategy and his desire to bring the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” more in line with America’s constitutional principles. We’ve also seen how his status as the nation’s first African-American president opened him up to racialized forms of political attack that no previous president had ever had to deal with.
In the spring of 2011, both these themes of his presidency would come to a head as he had to deal with two very different, but very important figures whom Obama considered to be dangerous threats to his vision of America. In this chapter, we’ll examine:
Shortly after taking office, President Obama set down one of his top national security priorities: capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader and the man primarily responsible for the 9/11 attack that had resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. Obama told National Security Advisor Tom Donilon that getting bin Laden was central to his administration’s counterterrorism strategy. The president wanted regular updates on the status of the hunt to bring the terrorist leader to justice.
For Obama, capturing or killing bin Laden was not simply a matter of vengeance. It was about bringing justice to his victims and their families. It was also about restoring pride in and respect for America and sending a signal to adversaries all over the world—that no matter the cost or sacrifice, the United States would never waver in its pursuit of justice.
It was also important to Obama’s broader goal of refocusing and redefining the nation’s counterterrorism strategy. Obama believed that Bush’s embrace of the “War on Terror” framing was counterproductive. In his view, this framing elevated Al Qaeda and validated its self-delusions that it was engaged in a titanic, cosmic struggle with the United States. This “War on Terror” mindset had justified the failed invasion and occupation of Iraq, alienated potential allies in the Muslim world, and ultimately failed to make the country safer from the threat of Islamist terrorism.
Eliminating bin Laden would be a powerful way to show the world that groups like Al Qaeda were not all-powerful conspirators capable of bringing the world to its knees—instead, they were simply deranged and deluded killers.
But locating bin Laden was easier said than done. U.S. forces were believed to have been very close to capturing him in December 2001. Unfortunately, he managed to slip away from his hideout in the caves of the remote Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. Since then, his trail had gone cold—though he still periodically emerged to release videos taunting the U.S. and mocking its failure to capture him.
In September 2010, after painstaking intelligence-gathering, the administration got its first crack in the case. CIA Director Leon Panetta shared with the president that he believed they had pinpointed the whereabouts of a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. al-Kuwaiti was a courier for Al Qaeda and was believed to have close links to bin Laden. After surveilling al-Kuwaiti, intelligence analysts managed to trace his movements to a large compound on the suburban outskirts of the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
Based on the size and high-security nature of the compound, as well as the frequency of al-Kuwaiti’s visits, analysts in the CIA and Pentagon believed there was a strong possibility that a high-ranking Al Qaeda leader was harbored there.
Most promisingly, aerial surveillance footage in December 2010 showed a tall, thin figure (whom analysts dubbed “the Pacer”) who routinely left the inside of the compound to wander around the adjoining courtyard. Crucially, the Pacer never appeared to leave the compound itself. The Pacer’s apparent height, weight, and age also matched bin Laden’s. Other circumstantial evidence further bolstered the case. Surveillance showed that there were a number of children living in the compound, who seemed to match the age and number of bin Laden’s known children.
Although much of the evidence was still circumstantial, Obama was convinced enough to order plans for a raid on the compound to be put into motion. Plans for the raid needed to be highly covert, with only a handful of high-ranking figures across the government having any knowledge of it. Obama knew that if even the slightest hint got out, bin Laden could flee and the U.S. would lose its best chance of apprehending him.
Because the Abbottabad compound was in Pakistan, it was also crucial that the Pakistani government and military be kept in the dark. Although Pakistan was a putative U.S. ally, it was well-known that elements of the Pakistani military and security services routinely colluded and shared information with Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives. Moreover, an unauthorized raid on Pakistani territory carried the risk of dangerous diplomatic and political fallout. Any raiding party would need to be in and out before the Pakistani military and police could arrive on the scene.
After ruling out an airstrike on the compound, Obama decided on a ground operation to land a helicopter with a team of Navy SEALs who would overtake the facility, kill the inhabitants, and depart before the arrival of Pakistani forces. Under Obama’s order, the team was assembled and began training for its mission at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under the direction of Admiral William McRaven.
There was real division in the administration over the planned Abbottabad raid. Robert Gates and Joe Biden were opposed to taking action. Gates cited the tentative nature of the evidence, which suggested that there was only a 50 percent chance that the Pacer was, in fact, bin Laden. He also feared that, if something went wrong, the SEAL team could end up in a standoff with the Pakistani military on the grounds of the compound.
Biden echoed these concerns, and also reminded the president that a failed raid could be politically disastrous for the administration. The vice president cited the example of Operation Eagle Claw, President Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980. That botched mission resulted in two crashed helicopters, the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen, and the collapse of Carter’s domestic political support (he would lose to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide that November). Biden warned Obama that he risked a similar fate if he approved a failed raid, which might spell the end of his presidency.
While he was mindful of these concerns and aware of the risks, Obama also had to think about the risks of inaction. Doing nothing meant squandering the best lead the U.S. had had on bin Laden in a decade—and they might never get another chance. Plus, if they dithered and waited too long, the secret would get out and they would have to abort the mission anyway. If they were to act, they had to act now.
For Obama, the decision to authorize or not authorize the strike was a difficult one. But in some respects, it was not all that different from other choices he’d had to make as president. Every decision, he realized, came down to weighing the odds and calculating risks. He felt confident that he was prepared to make his decision.
Sitting in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House on April 29, 2011 (while Malia and Sasha played in the halls outside) President Obama officially gave the order for the raid, dubbed Operation Neptune Spear. It would take place on May 1, when a moonless night in Pakistan would give the SEALs maximum cover of darkness.
While Obama was managing the volatile situation in the Middle East that arose out of the Arab Spring and planning the raid on Osama bin Laden, a new political figure was on the rise in the winter and spring of 2011—Donald Trump.
Trump was a New York-based real estate tycoon who rose to prominence in the 1980s and was known for his lavish and ostentatious displays of wealth, his thirst for media attention, and his well-publicized debauched personal life. In his public image, Trump presented himself as the living embodiment of both capitalist excess and entrepreneurial success.
While Obama was certainly aware of Trump, what he’d heard suggested that he was more of a self-promoter than an actual businessman. Obama’s contacts in the New York real estate development community told him that Trump was not a respected figure, hadn’t developed property in decades, and was probably not nearly as wealthy as he presented himself to be. By 2011, Trump’s business mostly consisted of licensing his name to a line of questionable third-party products; and hosting his reality television show, The Apprentice.
In early 2011, Trump launched himself back into the national conversation by publicly and loudly embracing the cause of birtherism. Birtherism was the term for a conspiracy theory on the far right that held that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and, thus, was not eligible to be president.
The claim was blatantly false, but because of Obama’s foreign-sounding last name and his race, it gained currency among Americans who felt threatened by the nation’s first African-American president. Although Trump did not invent birtherism, he helped propel it into mainstream political conversation. When he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), he publicly called on the president to “release” his birth certificate and questioned whether Obama had legitimately gotten into Harvard.
To the Obamas’ dismay (especially Michelle’s), the mainstream media continued to give Trump free airtime to spread misinformation, treating him more as an amusing spectacle than as a potentially dangerous demagogue.
Despite Barack and Michelle’s disgust with Trump’s antics, however, he was undoubtedly making his mark on the Republican Party. Polls showed that a growing number of Republican voters accepted birtherism as a fact—and named Donald Trump as their preferred nominee for the 2012 presidential election.
On April 27, 2011, the state of Hawaii released Obama’s long-form birth certificate at the president’s request, “proving” that he was a native born citizen. Although Obama did not wish to give the appearance of responding to the ludicrous and offensive birtherism slander, he hoped that the release of the birth certificate would put an end to the “controversy” and allow the nation to move onto more important matters. Besides, Obama knew he would have the opportunity to exact some revenge on Trump at the upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner on April 30—the night before the planned raid on the Abbottabad compound.
The dinner was an annual get-together of Washington politicians and the journalists who covered them, usually featuring a performance by a comedian and a roast of the seated press delivered by the president. Obama generally found the event distasteful. To him, it was a self-indulgent spectacle that sent a terrible message to ordinary Americans and advertised Washington’s insider culture. In short, it was the epitome of what so many Americans (including Obama himself) disliked about Washington.
But this year, Obama was eager to go. He knew Trump would be there and wanted to have the opportunity to embarrass him in front of the celebrities and politicians whose approval and validation he so clearly craved. The timing was also fortuitous. Given the secrecy of the mission, Obama’s attendance and comedic performance at the dinner would distract any potential media attention away from the operation—as would Trump’s presence.
When he took the dais, Obama roundly mocked Trump, as the real estate mogul sat red-faced and silent in the audience. Obama needled Trump over the low ratings for Celebrity Apprentice, his decadent and tacky aesthetic choices, and his penchant for wild conspiracy theories.
Although Obama knew he’d mocked and humiliated Trump, he also knew to take him seriously as a political threat. Obama understood that spectacle and outlandishness could command media attention—and that made Trump powerful. The dark forces of demagoguery and right-wing populism that Trump was stirring up had a long history in American politics. Trump may have been a con man and carnival barker, but he still represented something very dangerous for American democracy.
The night after his humiliation of Trump, Obama was going after a very different enemy—Osama bin Laden.
May 1 was the night that Obama had authorized for the execution of operation Neptune Spear, the raid to kill the man who had engineered the worst mass slaughter on U.S. soil since the Civil War. The Navy SEAL team consisted of 23 commandos, a translator, and a military working dog named Cairo.
The plan was for the team to be dispatched from its base at Jalalabad, Afghanistan in two Black Hawk helicopters. After a 90-minute journey, they would arrive at the compound, where they would land, storm the barricades, execute all combatants, destroy the landing Black Hawk helicopters and leave via a second set of Chinook helicopters that would be hovering nearby.
The entire mission—landing, execution, and departure from Pakistani airspace—had to be completed before the Pakistani security forces got wind of the operation.
The SEAL team had set up a live video feed of the compound for top administration officials to watch the operation as it unfolded in real time. In an iconic moment, President Obama, Bill Daley, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blinken, Denis McDonough, Robert Gates, and Joe Biden squeezed into a small conference room to watch the operation as Admiral McRaven narrated events on the ground.
As the Black Hawks approached the compound, Obama watched in horror as one of the helicopters appeared to lurch. For a second, Obama worried that it would crash, sending members of the team to fiery death, alerting the Pakistanis, and dooming his presidency in one fell swoop.
McRaven, however, assured the president that all was well and that the helicopter had merely been caught in a vortex caused by slightly higher-than-anticipated air temperatures. Sure enough, the pilot improvised the maneuver and safely landed the helicopter and the SEALs on the ground of the compound. The raid was set to begin.
The team watched in the conference room as McRaven narrated the events. Obama was barely able to make out what was happening, as the Navy SEAL team executed a room-to-room search of the compound in near-total darkness.
For 20 agonizing minutes, Obama watched the footage, unsure of what he was looking at or how the mission was going. Suddenly, out of the silence, he heard McRaven’s voice proclaim over the feed, “Geronimo EKIA, Geronimo EKIA!” Instantly, the president and everyone assembled knew what that meant. “Geronimo”—the operation’s codename for Osama bin Laden—had been killed in action.
Obama and the administration figures assembled in the conference room knew that they could not celebrate yet. The SEAL team had to spend the next 20 minutes bagging bin Laden’s body, attaching explosives to the landing helicopters, questioning the survivors in the compound (mostly women and children), and boarding the departing Chinook helicopters to get out of Pakistani airspace.
The SEALs boarded the helicopters at approximately 4:10 pm, Eastern Standard Time. The entire raid operation, from landing to departure, had taken place in 40 minutes. The team had executed its mission flawlessly.
At 6 p.m., Obama received confirmation that the SEALs had safely departed Pakistani airspace. On board the helicopter, Admiral McRaven confirmed that the body was indeed Osama bin Laden’s, killed by a shot above the left eye. In accordance with the mission’s instructions, bin Laden was given a traditional Islamic burial at sea, to avoid the possibility of his grave becoming a pilgrimage site for future jihadists.
Nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, their perpetrator had finally been brought to justice.
Within hours, tentative news about the raid began leaking out. The administration knew it would not be able to keep a lid on the story for much longer, so they began to make moves to announce it publicly. After informing the Pakistani government and army, Obama placed calls to former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as to foreign leaders.
Obama worked with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to draft a speech announcing the successful raid to the American people. As he worked on drafting the speech, Obama recalled his own memories of 9/11. It had been Malia’s first day of preschool that morning as news of the unfolding horror in New York and Washington broke. He remembered calling Michelle from downtown Chicago and assuring her that they would be ok.
He looked back on the strange journey his life had taken since that awful September day 10 years before—how little he could have known that it would be him who would play the leading role in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.
As the news of the raid began to break in the media before Obama’s scheduled announcement, celebratory crowds thronged the streets of Washington, D.C., exuberantly chanting, “USA, USA!” It was a cathartic moment for America, a restoration of wounded pride, and an unequivocal victory for the Obama administration. The country had experienced tremendous turmoil on 9/11 and in the years that followed. Killing bin Laden could not undo all the damage, nor could it bring back those who had been lost, but it served as a powerful demonstration of the country’s strength and resolve.
In the days ahead, Obama would meet with families of 9/11 victims, the police and firefighters who’d been present in Lower Manhattan on that day, and the SEAL team that executed the raid. In keeping with their solemn sense of mission and duty, none of the SEALs mentioned to Obama who among them had been the one to fire the fatal shot at bin Laden—and the president never asked.
By May 2011, Obama could take stock of all that he and his administration had achieved. He’d gone from being a brooding biracial kid from Honolulu with middling high school grades to the nation’s first African-American president.
His campaign and his presidency had been a source of inspiration for billions of young people both in the United States and around the world, showcasing the power and efficacy of democracy. As president, his administration has rescued the world economy from a depression, saved the American auto industry, taken a crucial step toward guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans, laid plans for a withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought the nation’s main public enemy to justice.
All told, it was an impressive record of achievement. But Obama knew that there remained so much work to be done. Depending on the fate of his 2012 reelection bid, he would still have another six years as president to make change and guide America toward a safer, more prosperous, and more democratic future.
Seeing the exuberant celebrations across the nation at the news of bin Laden’s death, Obama wondered if the country could muster the same patriotism and unity of purpose toward building a better society as it could for war and killing terrorists. Could he rally Americans to unite behind a spirit of national purpose when it came to educating children, providing health care to their fellow citizens, expanding access to voting, or protecting the natural environment they all shared?
Obama wasn’t sure he could answer this question. But it would be the work of the rest of his time in office to push the nation toward these goals.
Think about your main takeaways from A Promised Land.
Do you think that America has fundamentally lived up to its principles, has consistently fallen short of them, or landed somewhere in between? Explain your answer.
Do you believe that elected officials should seek common ground with those who disagree with them, or should they stick to their principles? Explain your answer.
In reflecting on recent American history, do you think Barack Obama’s election represented a major shift in race relations, or was the first African-American president more of a brief aberration? Explain your answer.