Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

In what amounted to a two-hour monologue, Biden talked about the world, the middle class, the challenges and opportunities America faced, and how he might be helpful to Obama as a running mate. I was so transfixed that we were halfway back to the airport in Biden’s truck before I realized I had left my briefcase sitting by the poolside table where we’d met.

He presented himself more like an MBA interviewing for a senior management position at Whirlpool.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld

“I’ve learned quickly, these last few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,”

“I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening. No, we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”

Henry Paulson. Paulson had informed him of major events that would unfold that very night, bringing with them severe negative impacts on the markets and the economy. “I can’t share the details with you, but it is going to be a big story and will require the government to intervene in some way,” Obama said. “I told Hank we would be as supportive as possible as they try and contain this. And I’m telling all of you, there are times when—what’s the old expression?—‘good government is good politics.’ Well, this is one of those times. In any case, it’s the right thing to do. So I want all of you to abide by that.”

Our economy, I think—still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

“How do you feel?” I asked the man who momentarily would have to stand and deliver in front of fifty-three million Americans? “Just give me the ball,” Barack said, taking an imaginary shot at a basket.

“We also have to recognize that this is a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by George Bush, supported by Senator McCain, a theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down. It hasn’t worked. And I think that the fundamentals of the economy have to be measured by whether or not the middle class is getting a fair shake.”

We didn’t realize it then, but those edgy supporters were a portent of the future. Some chanted vile epithets about Obama, and they all seemed to share an enmity toward a government they viewed as overweening, wasteful, and corrupt.

While I had been traveling around the country, Susan and a rotating corps of friends had spent the entire fall at our vacation house in southwest Michigan, working precincts for Obama.

Over the years, so many had given up on Benton Harbor, an overwhelmingly black community divided by a narrow river and a shameful class chasm from St. Joseph, the white, solidly middle-class town next door.

Benton Harbor cast as many votes by noon as they did the whole election four years ago!”

I was with Susan, who had raced home from Michigan, when I got word that the Associated Press was calling Ohio in our favor. Ohio was the ball game. Without it, McCain couldn’t win.

Now my friend, this extraordinary black man from the South Side of Chicago, would be the forty-fourth! When we teamed up six years earlier, Barack was a little-known state legislator, one loss away from leaving politics and, quite probably, living a productive life in relative obscurity.

I saw Reverend Jesse Jackson, flag in hand and tears streaming down his cheeks. He could be a shameless hustler and relentless self-promoter, but the reverend also was a trailblazer who had devoted his life to civil rights. He had been there with Dr. King the night he was slain and had, himself, run two symbolic races for the White House. Now the image of the new First Family—a splendid, black family—introducing themselves to the nation, had the reverend genuinely overcome.

Afterward, he returned to Harvard, where his rise and fall as university president had been a major national story. After five productive but controversial years, Summers was forced to resign after a speech in which he cited research on gender differences that, he believed, helped explain the lack of diversity in science and engineering programs.

“We need growth, but the growth we’ve been getting isn’t producing the kind of gains for people in the middle it once did. It seems to me that this is a problem and we ought to be addressing that.”

the war, the tax cuts, the derogation of policy making to industry lobbyists—were epically wrong,

a vast expansion of college aid for needy students; new consumer protections for credit card holders; a long-sought law tightening regulation of tobacco; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, strengthening the tools for women to fight for equal pay; and the abolition of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military. Obama would

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, explained as much in a newspaper interview a year later. “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan,

The auto boom would be a factor in Obama’s capture of that pivotal state, where one in eight workers is engaged in some way in the auto industry, and folks remembered the bet he had placed on them.

Another “hard thing” Obama undertook in 2009 was a landmark financial reform law. Even before the crash of 2008, Obama had called for new rules adequate for the twenty-first century to prevent the bilking of consumers and the gaming of financial markets. Yet the crash made the need for such reforms painfully and unavoidably clear.

Obama was enthusiastic. The crisis had laid bare the vulnerability of financial consumers, some of whom had shared their experiences with him on the campaign trail or in the letters he read at night. However, he didn’t need their testimony. He had his own. When I gave the president a copy of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s riveting book about how mortgage scams had led to the financial crisis, Obama thumbed through it with a knowing smile. “I lived this story,” he said. “I remember very well. Because of our student loans, Michelle and I could never catch up. So, some months, we paid our bills with credit cards. I went to refinance our condo and I was kind of surprised when they said, ‘You can get cash, too.’ So all of a sudden, my condo is worth fifty thousand dollars more and I can take forty thousand dollars in cash as a loan? I did it, but it seemed too good to be true. It was a racket.”

The idea of a consumer financial protection agency was first proposed by Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert. Warren’s writings on the economic struggles of the squeezed middle class and the abuses of the financial industry had made her a hero to the Left, and a burden to Wall Street. Their antipathy only grew when Warren was named by Democrats in Congress to lead an oversight panel on the bank bailout program. From that perch, Warren had asked tough and sometimes embarrassing questions both of bankers and of government officials, including Geithner. Neither he nor Summers, who knew Warren from Harvard, were big fans. Meanwhile, I thought her background and sensibilities made Warren a splendid candidate to lead the new consumer agency, if Congress created one, and I told the president so.

The episode was a parable about Obama and his approach to politics, dating back to his years in the Illinois legislature. He is both idealistic and pragmatic, progressive in his goals but practical in pursuing them. He liked Warren and valued her leadership for the consumer protection bureau, but he wasn’t going to sacrifice its creation or the larger financial reform law, or invite rearguard actions to undermine it after its passage, by surfacing her name too early or keeping her in place for too long. The Left was eager for the fight. Obama was playing for meaningful gains. Ironically, Summers fell victim to that same sense of pragmatism. Despite his yeoman service, and Obama’s deep respect, Larry was twice passed over for the Fed chairmanship he had been promised when he agreed to serve in the White House. The first time, in the spring of 2009, Obama yielded to Geithner’s recommendation that he reappoint Bernanke in order to reassure the jittery markets. Four years later, when Bernanke retired, the president passed over Summers again, concerned that opposition from the Left, including Senator Warren, would make the nomination too heavy a lift, jeopardizing other priorities. Obama had shown a willingness to make such sacrifices and strike hard bargains in order to achieve his larger goals, but he drew bright lines when he felt such concessions would undermine fundamental principles. As the financial reform bill was winding its way through Congress, Obama instructed his t...

I often wondered, as I sat in emergency rooms, how folks who didn’t have coverage dealt with these pressures.

Obama had his own searing story. When his mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age fifty-three, she was denied the disability pay she needed for her medical and living expenses. “She spent the last months of her life worrying as much about the medical bills as she did about trying to get well,” he recalled with sadness and anger.

By the time Obama took office, the number of people without coverage was nearing fifty million.

Given my own family’s experience, I desperately wanted to see the system reformed.

“I understand the risks,” he told me later. “But what are we going to do? Are we going to put our approval ratings on the shelf and admire them for eight years? Or are we going to spend down on them and try to get some important things done for the future? If we don’t take this up in the first two years, there’s a good chance we won’t get it done at all. We’ll end up kicking the can down the road, and millions more people will go without insurance and the whole thing will implode.”

This was exactly why I loved Obama, who saw the winning of elections as the gateway to do meaningful things, not as a final destination.

“Whenever I leave here, in four years or eight, I just want to leave knowing I did everything I could,” he said. “We may not solve all these problems, but I want to know that we tried.”

If I was concerned, Rahm was despondent.

“They’re going to add these numbers up,” said an exasperated Rahm. “Seven hundred billion for the banks and auto companies, eight hundred billion for a stimulus they still don’t believe in, and now another trillion to buy someone else health care.”

Fear too often trumps reason. There was plenty of support for a law that would ban the worst practices of the insurance industry and bring down costs. Yet given widespread public disdain for Washington, our promises of relief were not considered as credible as the scary warnings against the intrusion of a meddling, incompetent government. Moreover, all the news coverage focused on the plight of the uninsured. Many came to see health reform as something that would help others, but at a cost to them. By June, we were losing momentum. Democrats on Capitol Hill grew increasingly wary of the politics, and there were signs that the president’s own standing was beginning to take a hit.

“But I just came back from Green Bay, Wisconsin. I met a woman there who was thirty-five years old, had a job, a husband, and two children, and health insurance. But she also has stage-three breast cancer, and now she’s hit her lifetime caps, so her insurance company is refusing to pay her bills, and she’s terrified that she’s going to die and leave her family bankrupt.” By then, I felt Obama’s hand in the small of my back, gently ushering me to the door of his office. As he opened it, he paused for a moment. “That’s not the country we believe in,” he said. “So let’s just keep on fighting.”

Still, Obama was frustrated by the traction that his opponents were getting. It drove him up a wall when a group from the consulting firm McKinsey and Company came in and outlined the unconscionable waste, fraud, and market manipulation that had made health care in America the most expensive in the world. Why didn’t people understand that his reform package could save enough to help millions obtain coverage and, in the long run, cut health care spending? “We haven’t communicated this well,” he told me. “They think it will raise their costs and the deficits.”

“Despite our best efforts to explain, many Americans are simply finding it too hard to square adding a trillion dollars as part of a strategy to cut costs,” I wrote to the president in an August memo. “They suspect that this is about spending and taxing more to take care of someone else. And even if they see universal coverage as a laudable goal, they think it’s irresponsible to undertake it now—a liberal indulgence we can’t afford. To them, our determination to plow forward on an expedited timetable in the midst of a fiscal crisis is not sensible. It aligns us with the Washington they disdain—the dogmatic politics they thought we were going to change.”

The town is one big echo chamber, and if you’re the target—as the White House often is—the din becomes deafening and deflating.

fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the President of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler . . . those kinds of things are beyond the bounds,” he said during a speech at Emory University. “I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American.”

Even so, as if to affirm Carter’s analysis, the speech was marred by a stunning moment, when the president refuted yet another pernicious piece of fiction—that the law would cover illegal immigrants—and one of the Republican House members, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, shouted back at him, “You lie!”

“They’re scared because these are the best jobs they’ve ever had and they want to keep them,” I said. He looked at me. “But what good is it to be up here for thirty years and never get anything meaningful done? I don’t get it.”

“McConnell warned everyone that he’d pull the chairmanships of anyone who votes for cloture,” he told us. “They’re whipping the vote. It’s over, that’s it.”

“Congratulations! Your determination—not your luck—made this possible,” I wrote. “We’re all very proud. But before you type it, I know we just have to finish the job.” When I wrote those words, I had no idea how hard finishing the job would be.

So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection.

On bipartisanship, people want it, but the question is, how much are we willing to compromise before what we do in the name of bipartisanship becomes meaningless?”

“I decided I am going to resign,” Rahm told Gibbs and me. “This isn’t working for the president. I can’t go out for him and can’t function inside. Our friendship has changed. I’m going to see health care through and then I’m leaving.”

“I tried to resign, but he wouldn’t let me,” he reported, groaning. “He said, ‘Oh no. You’re not resigning. Your punishment is that you have to pass health care!’”

Coakley’s defeat had widely been read as the death knell for health reform. Paradoxically, it might have saved it by breaking the deadlock between House and Senate Democrats. The House would have to accept the Senate bill they hated—without a public plan or some of the more generous emoluments—or there would be no health reform law at all.