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Six days later, the classified McChrystal memo was leaked. The front page of the Washington Post screamed, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” Whether it intended to or not, the Pentagon had jammed the commander in chief. Even the slow-to-boil Obama was furious. He called in Gates and Mullen and, according to Rahm, was very blunt about his feelings: “McChrystal’s report is leaked and published. We meet for two and a half hours on Sunday and have a good discussion on the way to go, and then you go out and run way out in front of where you know I am? I can only conclude one of two
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“You won the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said. “Are you kidding me?” “I promise you, sir, that I wouldn’t wake you up to play a joke,” Gibbs replied. “You’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.” “Gee,” Obama said, absorbing the unlikely news. “All I want to do is pass health care.”
“I want to stress my role as commander in chief,” he told us, thinking ahead. “I don’t want to give our friends on the other side a chance to run this One World stuff against us.”
“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence,” he said. “But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [those] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to
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We had been trying, through the Recovery Act, to encourage high-speed rail between ours, but as with so many worthy endeavors, it was running into political resistance over spending.
At midnight, after reading the coverage, he sent me a succinct e-mail: “Brutal.”
The only thing that consoled me was history, the knowledge that the sainted FDR did even worse in the 1938 midterms, when Democrats lost seventy-one seats. Two years later, he was reelected by a wide margin.
“I think the seeds of your reelection may have been planted yesterday,”
said. “He was doing the Lord’s work in there.”
“I know we’re probably underdogs,” the president said in kicking off the meeting. “But I intend to win this race. There’s too much at stake here.”
said, referring to the earlier Obama, passionate and purposeful.
about the letters he received from anxious Americans, about his life path, and about his disdain for those who mistook their own vast and growing fortunes for the nation’s progress.
railing against the excesses of the Gilded Age and calling for bold new steps to restore fairness and broad opportunity to the American economy.
Now we were living in a new Gilded Age, in which rapid technological advances had generated fantastic wealth and concentrations of power, but also vast disparities in opportunity.
They’re American values. And we
have to reclaim them!”
polemical
“It didn’t look like a very good expenditure of your time.”
“I saw him over there, all full of swagger,” Obama said, after watching an account of Romney’s speech. “A homecoming of the plutocrats!”
replaying Romney’s priceless counsel to America’s youth to “borrow money if you have to from your parents” to pay for an education.
‘Nothing is as exhilarating as the sound of bullets whizzing past your head.’
“When your opponent is blowing himself up, just get out of the way.”
“Motherfucker’s never happy,”
“Just give me the ball!”
“So I guess the view is that we didn’t have a very good night,” he said. “Yes,” I replied. “I think that’s pretty much the consensus.”
“Don’t worry, I always make my marks,”
“I’m doubting myself,”
“And I have to get past that.”
“You don’t get to be president of the United States by accident,” I said. “You get there because when you’re tested, because in those really hard moments, you come up big. Either he will or he won’t. But he always
MY MOTHER DIED IN January 2014 at the age of ninety-three.
Those last days also were a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of time, something that seems infinite when you’re young and in such a hurry to get somewhere that you’re incapable of appreciating life’s sublime gifts.
“I’m not young enough to know everything.”
I felt the prevailing political machine was corrupt and racist and run for the benefit of the insiders and I pretty much wrote from that righteous but limited perspective.
The machine was greased by patronage jobs and “sweetheart” contracts and by elected officials (even judges) often slated more for their loyalties than their abilities. It was a feudal structure dominated by white ethnic ward bosses, and it left the burgeoning black and Hispanic communities on the outside looking in. Yet when JFK needed votes for the Civil Rights Act, he could count on Mayor Richard J. Daley to deliver them—and the mayor, in turn, could count on largesse from Washington with which to build his city.
raised during an era when Americans served side by side to save the world from fascism, an experience that bound this big, diverse nation as one.
in which Americans increasingly seek “news” from sources that affirm, rather than inform, their views;
“E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one,” he liked to say, invoking the national motto.
Still, the truth is undeniable. No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than willing to exploit
“I honestly was more excited last night than I was the night I was elected. Elections are like winning the semifinals. They just give you the opportunity to make a difference. What we did last night? That’s what really matters.” That attitude and approach is what I admire most about Obama, the thing that makes him stand apart. For him, politics and elections are only vehicles, not destinations. They give you the chance to serve.
who he is and the life he’s led, no one I know believes more strongly in an America where everyone gets a chance, and where anyone who works hard can get ahead.
Yet, without the persistent, passionate, and almost singular focus of the campaign, few Americans would identify the daunting economic issues they face as the president’s driving concern.
There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years.
It’s a bitter irony that the election of a president on a mandate for that change touched off such a ferocious counterreaction that it wound up only exacerbating the problem.
Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don’t turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don’t like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a nonprofit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you’re going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.
A lot has happened to our country and the world since I heard JFK’s call to a New Generation of Leadership. It’s noisier, messier, and thus harder today to make this case to the newest generation, but it has to be made because it has never been more important. I can say this without reservation because, a half century later, I’m still a believer.
