The Highest Calling, page 42
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): What prompted you to want to write a book about Barack Obama? Did you cover him at the White House when he was president?
PETER BAKER (PB:): I did. I covered all eight years. Obama was a fascinating character, maybe one of the most fascinating presidents we’ve had in modern times. Since then, events have proven to be even more extraordinary. But he was a singular figure in history. He had enormous challenges as a president. He was the third president I covered. I had written books about the other two, but I found Obama particularly gripping as an individual in terms of shaping our history.
DR: What is the main message in your book about President Obama?
PB: I wanted to convey that it was complicated. People tend to oversimplify these historical figures. In Obama’s case, it was either he was the great hero of the left or he was the great villain of the right. But in fact, he was far more complex than people understood. When we elected him, we as a people didn’t really know who he was because he hadn’t had much time on the national stage. A lot of people imputed to him their idea of who he was. He once told us at the New York Times that he was a Rorschach test, people saw in him what they wanted to see. In some cases, they saw him as the great liberal champion of activist government, a new-era version of LBJ. Other people saw him as a bridge builder, somebody who would be bipartisan, work across the aisle. In fact, he was always much more multifaceted than any of those simplistic constructions.
DR: When history is written 10 or 20 years from now, do you think Barack Obama will be remembered most for being the first African American elected to the presidency or for things that he accomplished in office?
PB: The first line in his obituary is always going to be that he was the first African American president. Because of our history, which is marked by slavery, and Jim Crow, and racism, that by itself is just too enormous a moment not to be the focus of that obituary. That doesn’t mean he didn’t also achieve important things. He had to deal with a climactic moment with the economy on the edge of a worldwide meltdown—not just a recession, but a depression. He had a lot of major events take place, including the killing of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Tea Party movement. Toward the end of his presidency there was the disappointment that settled in that we didn’t solve our race issues, even though he had been elected twice; and the rise of Donald Trump reminded us that the country had not suddenly moved into this Kumbaya era that some people imagined or hoped for when Obama was first elected.
DR: Of all of his legislative accomplishments, is anything even close to the Affordable Care Act? Why did he push that so early in his administration when he campaigned on so many other issues, at least in the first campaign?
PB: As a legislative matter it’s clearly his most important legacy. He tried to accomplish something that presidents going back more than a century, all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, had talked about and tried to get, and he’s the only one who came close to getting there. That stands out. I think he decided to go for that because he recognized that in a presidency, your moment of opportunity fades awfully quickly. You have a chance at the very beginning when you have momentum, you have the imprimatur of the electorate, you have relatively high approval ratings, maybe the highest you’re going to get. That’s your moment of maximum impact on Congress to wield your will and to get something big done. If he had waited, for instance, until the second or third year—some people thought maybe he should—if he had tried a more incremental approach, I think his calculation was that it wouldn’t get done. There’s reason to think that perspective is true.
I think he also took the measure of other issues, like immigration or climate change, and decided that health care came first, in part, because it had such a wide effect on so many Americans, especially at time of great economic dislocation, and that he could affect more of the economy. It was more the idea of rebuilding a different kind of economy after the upheaval of the financial crash, not just simply restoring the old version. This would be the way he could have that maximum impact.
DR: Internationally, do you think Obama will be best remembered for having captured and killed Osama bin Laden and ending the war in Iraq? Are there any international accomplishments more significant than those?
PB: Those are up there. Those are the ones he came to office promising to do and that he achieved. The killing of bin Laden especially is a pretty clean accomplishment. Nobody can really question that, nobody disagrees with that. On the withdrawal from Iraq, I think most people were happy he did that; but there’s obviously the follow-up, which is that he had to go back into Iraq to some extent because of the rise of ISIS. It wasn’t as clean as he might have liked, and he never quite got out of Afghanistan, which he wanted to do by the end of his term as well. People will remember the killing of bin Laden. His poll numbers went way back up again, although just temporarily. It stands out because it’s such a moment of catharsis for a country ten years out from 9/11.
DR: From almost the moment Obama was elected president, it seemed as if the Republicans in Congress said, “Anything you propose we’re going to be against. We don’t really care about bipartisanship.” Do you think some of that was racism, or they just wanted to block anything any Democratic president would do?
PB: You can’t rule out racism as at least a factor for some of the opposition to him, but I think it would be wrong to say that’s the entirety of it. We’re in a more polarized moment, a moment where the incentive structure of politics has changed. You are not rewarded for bipartisanship anymore. At least that’s the perception. A lot of people in both parties have taken the lesson from the last decade that you risk political trouble by being bipartisan. If you make a deal with the other side, you’re accused of compromising values or principles or of being soft, whether conservative or liberal. So you don’t have the motivation to move to the middle as much as you might have once had. Obama tried at first to make bipartisan deals; some of his own staff thought he tried too much and for too long, while some Republicans thought he didn’t make a genuine effort. Either way, it didn’t work. Of course, when you have the first Black president, you can’t rule out race as a factor with some people, but there was a larger change in society happening at the same time that we’ve seen play out with the two presidents who followed.
DR: Obama seemed to be perpetually calm and a bit reserved. Was he that way in private as well? What got him excited and angry?
PB: He’s a very reserved guy. He is the antithesis of the common view of what a politician is like. He’s not a backslapper and a baby kisser. It’s just not his nature. He was kind of an introvert, much like Jimmy Carter in some ways. He wasn’t somebody who got energy from other people. With Bill Clinton, you put him in a room with other people and he came out of it all charged up. With Obama, his aides knew to give him a little space after an event in the East Room, for instance, to make sure that there was at least five minutes he could have before his next event, so he could recharge his batteries. He was reserved even with his staff. They found him hard to read at times.
But he did get upset about things, or angry or worked up. I remember the time we were in the briefing room and he came in after the shootings up at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. He was clearly distraught at a very human moment. He had tears on his face, he could hardly speak, he had to pause for, like, nine, ten, fifteen seconds, because he couldn’t get out the words. He was thinking about what happened there as a father. We think of him as a Mr. Spock–like figure because he is reserved and controlled, but there are moments during his presidency when you see the human side.
DR: Do you admire Obama more or less than when you started covering him?
PB: Admiration is not my job as a journalist. I hope I understand him a little bit better. I think he had complicated motives for things. He wanted to do what he thought was the right thing to make the country better, but he came to disdain Washington, he came to disdain the political process, and maybe that hurt his ability to get some things done. What you learn from writing a book about him is that he is different from a lot of other presidents. He wanted to be president, obviously, but it didn’t seem like something that was a life ambition for him. He did it and then when he was done, he was done with it. He was ready to move on.
DR: As somebody who covered him and knows him reasonably well, what would you say were his greatest strengths and weaknesses as a chief executive?
PB: His strengths include his ability to inspire millions of people with a powerful speech. His oratory is clearly among the best of our lifetime. You have to put him up there with John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr. as somebody who can move large numbers of people through the spoken word. You can’t underestimate the importance of that in presidential leadership. His other strengths would be that he had a certain calmness—a Zen-like quality is what his staff would say. He didn’t get too flustered by the ups and downs of everyday politics. He was logical. He was analytical. He examined things intellectually and carefully, mixing politics as well as policy.
But as always, your strengths can also be your weaknesses. What his staff would tell you is that he examined things sometimes too much. There was no problem that another meeting couldn’t be scheduled to address. At times, they would have loved him to just make a decision and move on, but he wanted to keep thinking about things. Sometimes he did what George W. Bush didn’t do, or what Obama felt like Bush didn’t do, and try to think through the second, third, fourth order of implications of a decision: If this, then that, what happens then? You can do that to the point that you paralyze yourself with inaction. You can talk yourself out of doing something by asking all the things that can go wrong. I think a lot of people around him felt, at times, that he wrapped himself up too much in thinking about the consequences.
DR: If you could ask him one question, after everything that’s happened since he left office, what would you like to ask?
PB: I would like to ask him about what role, if any, he thinks his presidency played in the rise of Donald Trump. The country moved so jarringly in the opposite direction by electing a guy after him who was different on every level, not just ideologically and personally, but who literally had questioned Obama’s very birth, had profited off of racial animosity as a political tool. I would like to explore Obama’s own thoughts about what his presidency meant in that regard, or was that always going to be the natural backlash to the eight years he spent in office?
DR: Let’s talk for a moment about his early years. Who really raised Obama, his mother or his grandparents? Did he ever meet his father more than one time?
PB: It sounds like his grandparents were more instrumental in raising him. He spent some time with his mother, particularly in Indonesia, but she then sent him back to Hawaii, where he spent a lot of his childhood with his grandparents. From the stories that came out over the years, his father left home when Barack was about a year old to go to Harvard, and then returned to Kenya when Barack was three years old. After that, the father only returned once. Obama saw him during this period of a few weeks, maybe a month, and that was the only time. It weighed on him. That’s why he ends up traveling to Kenya as a young man and meeting his family there after his father died, and writing the book that he writes, which is so evocative and lyrical. He didn’t know his father, and he was not his father’s son. His father had very little to do with shaping who he became except for the idea of him.
DR: Let me tell you one Obama story. Once, at the Kennedy Center Honors, we honored Dave Brubeck. Obama spoke to the honorees at the White House. He was supposed to read scripted remarks about Brubeck, but he kind of wandered away from those, and he said, “I only met my father once, and when my father came to visit me in Hawaii he said, ‘I’m not going to be around your life very much, but I want you to learn something about music and jazz in particular, so tonight I’m going to take you to see Dave Brubeck.’ Tonight, for the first time, I’m getting a chance to meet this man who my father thought was so important, and who I first saw and heard when I was a boy, in the only concert I ever attended with my father.” It was pretty emotional. I thought it was well done.
PB: If you only know your father for basically a few weeks of your life, everything that happened during those few weeks would stand out and be especially important, right?
DR: Was Obama a particularly good student or athlete? Did people say when he was a young boy, “You’re destined to be president of the United States”?
PB: It doesn’t sound like it, no. Of course, a lot of people would have a hard time imagining in that era a Black man becoming president of United States. He was, when he wanted to be, a good student. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review. That became his first flash of national fame. He gets in the New York Times for becoming the first Black president of the law review at Harvard, and it really begins to mark his emergence as a public figure. Until then, I don’t think he was a standout student. In high school, by his own account, he goofed off with his friends, even did a few recreational things that he wouldn’t encourage his children to do. He did not get into Columbia right away. He had to transfer there; but then he went to Harvard for law school, and so he did better as he got older, as a lot of people do.
DR: He initially went to Occidental College, which is a very good school, but not maybe the school he originally wanted to go to, before transferring to Columbia. At either Occidental or Columbia, is there any evidence that he was a great or average student?
PB: I don’t remember anything that made him stand out one way or the other, and as I recall, they never released the grades. He strikes you as somebody who would do the homework, a diligent kind of guy, but I don’t know that he stood out for his academic brilliance, at least until Harvard Law, when he graduated magna cum laude.
DR: He went to Harvard and became the first African American to be the president of the Harvard Law Review. When he graduated, rather than go get a Supreme Court clerkship or something like that, he returned to Chicago to practice law at a civil rights–oriented law firm, a relatively small firm. Was he seen then as a potential political figure because he’d been the president of the Harvard Law Review?
PB: People at that time assumed that if you were a young, successful Black lawyer, you would go into civil rights law. I think he did that because that’s what you were expected to do. He found that he really wasn’t into practicing law that much. The law just didn’t engage him in the same way that other things did. He believes he can make more of a difference than just working for some big institutional corporate law firm.
DR: He did get elected to the state legislature. Then he decided to run against Bobby Rush, the incumbent African American congressman from his district, and he lost two-to-one. Why did he decide to take on an incumbent congressman and, after losing, thought he had a chance to get elected to the Senate the next time an election was held?
PB: He was a man in a hurry. He was looking for the next opportunity, and the congressional seat where he lived was occupied. He decided to do something about it and run against the incumbent. He didn’t understand that Rush had a real connection to the people in the district. It was a moment of hubris for a young politician. For a lot of presidents, an early defeat becomes important later in life. You learn from defeat as much as you do from victory. I think he learned a little bit there. But you’re right, it is not like he then went back to his state Senate seat and decided to stick it out there for a while. He aims even higher. He sees an open U.S. Senate seat in a mostly Democratic state, and he ends up being very lucky. He had a series of opponents who end up sort of self-destructing.
DR: His biggest Democratic opponent and the Republican in the general election both had sex scandals. As a result Obama won. But he became nationally known earlier that year, 2004, when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention. He gave a speech that got a lot more attention than John Kerry’s speech. What was so great about it?
PB: It was an accumulation of things he had been saying before, but outside of Illinois, nobody would have heard it. It was an electrifying moment. He gave voice to this idea of a greater America and personified it. He personified it both by his look—he was an African American who was up there and incredibly impressive—and by the words that he chose, the words we all remember: this appeal to American unity, the idea that there’s not a red America or a blue America but a United States of America. He says that people in blue states worship an awesome God too just as people in red states also have gay friends. He’s trying to get at this idea that we emphasize differences too much, and that we are one people. It is so appealing that it crosses boundaries. It’s not just the Democrats who are thrilled. A lot of Republicans are impressed by him. That doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for him, necessarily, but they find him very impressive. Suddenly this guy, who at that point was a state senator, who hadn’t even been elected to the United States Senate yet, is a national figure overnight.
DR: So many times in life people want something and when they get it, they’re not sure why they wanted it. When he’s elected to the Senate, did he enjoy being a senator?
PB: Not really, no. First of all, the United States Senate was different than the Illinois State Senate. In the state senate he was able to work with Republicans and get some stuff done. He felt some satisfaction from that. He discovered that the United States Senate wasn’t the same way. He was naïve, perhaps, about how much impact you could have as a senator. He didn’t try it for very long, only for about two years, until he begins running for president of the United States. That’s a pretty full-time job.
