The Highest Calling, page 43
DR: Did people think it was presumptuous for a senator of only two years to run for president?
PB: Hillary Clinton thought so, and so did many others; they thought it was preposterous for a guy who hadn’t gotten anything done yet to run for president. He hadn’t passed a major piece of legislation. He hadn’t done anything on a national stage. Obama’s a fairly self-aware guy. He himself thought it was presumptuous at first to even talk about it. Then he heard from people like Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, who said to him, “In politics, when you have a moment like this, you just have to seize it, because you can’t assume it’s going to be there again in four years. The country is hungry for a person like you.” He was encouraged by people like Daschle, Harry Reid, and eventually Ted Kennedy, some of these old bulls, who would normally be the kind of people who say, “Wait in line.” Instead they said, “Jump the line, get up there, because you’re something different and this moment is different. Don’t pass up this opportunity.” And he agreed to do it.
DR: Did he think “I’ll put my toe in the water, get some experience, then run again in four years”? Or he really thought he had a chance to get the nomination and get elected?
PB: He is a supremely confident guy, to the point where when I asked one of his top people what’s his biggest weakness, the answer was, “Cockiness.” I think Obama believed strongly that he could do it. He had that sort of confidence bordering on cockiness throughout that primary process, even though you would think that Hillary Clinton was the obvious front-runner. He believed all along that he could do it.
DR: Iowa is a reasonably white state, and yet Obama won the caucuses there. How? And then how did Hillary Clinton manage to come back against him in New Hampshire?
PB: The Clintons didn’t have a history in Iowa. Bill Clinton didn’t compete there in 1992, because Tom Harkin was running against him. Harkin was the Iowa senator, so Bill Clinton skipped that. Second, Obama was in the next-door state, and had a bit of a connection as a result. More importantly, he just inspired Democrats there who were looking for change. Even though it’s a pretty homogeneous white electorate, they found him so compelling. He managed to outmaneuver Hillary Clinton partly on the war, because Democrats were very upset about the Iraq War at that time. Obama had been against it, and Hillary Clinton voted for it. She couldn’t give a good answer as to where she was at that moment, at least not an answer that was persuasive to a lot of people. I think that he did a better job of organizing. There was a certain overconfidence on the part of the Clintons that they were going to march to the nomination.
It swings back in New Hampshire, as politics often does. There’s a natural tendency for New Hampshire to say, “We’re not obligated to do what Iowa did.” And the Clintons did have a history in New Hampshire, with a lot of people there from the 1992 race, when Bill Clinton had come in second but spun it as a comeback win given the scandals he was weathering at the time. Likewise, the Clintons managed to turn New Hampshire into a comeback win for Hillary Clinton.
DR: When Obama gets the nomination against Hillary Clinton, does he worry about losing the general election to John McCain, or did he feel fairly confident about winning?
PB: He was pretty confident from the beginning that he had a good shot. He understood the forces at work against being elected the first Black president. That wasn’t something to take lightly. But the issues of the day were working in his favor: first, because of the Iraq War, which was very unpopular at the time, and McCain was as strong a supporter of the war as existed; and second, because of the economic collapse under President Bush, especially in the fall, when McCain seemed out of touch and unable to find a good response. There were one or two weeks where Obama and his team worried maybe they weren’t going to win, but for the most part, they felt optimistic throughout the race.
DR: Do you think there was any overt racism in the general election? The fact that we might have an African American president, do you think that was a big factor?
PB: It’s a good question. Obama has said to people that, in some ways, he feels like whatever benefit he got by being African American outweighed whatever cost there was as a matter of politics. In other words, Obama felt that he gained a lot of support from people who were excited about the idea of a Black president. It’s hard to say. There were certain places he didn’t campaign much and obviously some people would never vote for a person of color. But the idea of a historic breakthrough, the idea that the country could kind of purge its past, was appealing not just to people of color but to a lot of white voters, who saw him as a vehicle for that.
DR: Who came up with the idea after the election of offering the secretary of state position to his opponent, Hillary Clinton? Did he offer it the way John Kennedy offered the vice presidency to Lyndon Johnson, thinking it would be turned down?
PB: I think it was all him. His staff was a little nervous about that. They had just spent all these months competing against the Clinton people, convincing themselves as well as voters that the Clintons were not to be trusted with power anymore. Then Obama comes around and says, “No, let’s give it to her.” It’s part of his ruthless, unsentimental logic. He decided that she had credibility on the world stage from her time as a senator and First Lady that he didn’t have, and that he could use that. She would be the person who would go out to the world and hold people’s hands while he made the decisions in the White House. It wasn’t like he was handing over foreign policy to her. But I think he thought, in a cold, calculated way, that she could be useful to him, and he wasn’t going to let their competition stand in the way of that.
DR: When he became president, we were in the middle of the Great Recession. How did Obama, who didn’t have a big economics background, address that? Did he delegate it to people, or was he intimately involved in the solutions that were developed?
PB: He was intimately involved. Another indication of the way he governed was that he kept some of the key people who had been working on this under George W. Bush—even though he had just run against Bush, in effect, by saying it was time to send the Bush people home. He kept Tim Geithner, who led the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, and made him Treasury secretary. He worked closely with Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. He consulted a lot with Hank Paulson, Bush’s Treasury secretary. He had a lot of respect for Paulson, and vice versa. He brought in people like Larry Summers, who had been a Clinton Treasury secretary, not an Obama person, to help guide him as well. He was willing to reach out to people outside of his circle, looking for any advice he could get on how to handle that crisis.
DR: How did he organize his White House staff? Was he the kind of president who wanted to be isolated from the staff or he wanted people to come to see him all the time?
PB: He believed in a very disciplined way of running a White House. He did not want the sort of free-for-all jam sessions that were the Bill Clinton way of doing things. He wanted to have a meeting, he wanted that meeting to begin at a certain time and end at certain time. He wanted to hear from a lot of people, including those who may not agree with his view. In fact, he made a point at meetings of calling on people who weren’t speaking up, because he assumed they had something to say that he didn’t want to hear. He wanted to hear from the people on the back benches who were keeping quiet. He was not locked in to any particular ideology. He was very pragmatic, which may have disappointed some of his liberal supporters. Why would you pick Rahm Emanuel to be your chief of staff if your whole concept is “I’m an outsider,” given that Rahm was the ultimate insider? You say, “I’m not going to be naïve about this. If you want to get Washington to do things, you have to get somebody who understands Washington, and Rahm is a guy who can do that.” Obama wasn’t going to let what he said in the campaign stop him from doing what he thought in the end was the right way to go.
DR: Many presidents fall in love with foreign policy, because you get criticized a little less by foreign leaders than you do by congressional leaders. Did Obama fall in love with foreign policy and want to make it his signature issue?
PB: I never got the sense that he really loved foreign policy. He was more driven by or interested in domestic policy. That became more frustrating for him after the first two years when the Republicans took the House with a decisive midterm election victory, which Obama called a “shellacking.” His domestic legislative agenda therefore essentially died. He did then focus a bit more on foreign policy, where he could make a difference, and there were things he was really proud of. He was proud of, in his view, showing that diplomacy can work again, with the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear agreement, the opening to Cuba, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was the Asian trade deal that ultimately didn’t go through. He saw them as examples of how, on the international stage, a practical person willing to negotiate could make a difference, whereas in Washington, in his view, the whole process was not on the level and rank partisanship made progress so hard. But his passion was still domestic policy.
DR: He decided to exit Iraq, but he did not decide to exit Afghanistan. In fact, he put more troops in there, a so-called surge. Why did he decide not to get out of Afghanistan?
PB: During the campaign, he had talked about the good war and the bad war. Afghanistan was the good war, mainly as a way of trashing Bush on Iraq, the bad war. We forget today, but back in that era, Afghanistan had more support, because it was seen as a righteous response to 9/11, even though the war wasn’t going great. It didn’t have the same political liability that Iraq had, because there weren’t as many casualties or nightly images of bombs blowing up in Afghanistan. There was room to give it another shot, to see if we could do something there. We talked about his keeping people from the Hillary Clinton and Bush camps: he did the same thing on national defense by keeping Bob Gates, the Bush defense secretary, and some of the other military folks around him. They convinced Obama to give it a shot, arguing that it was worth trying a surge in Afghanistan in the same way that Bush tried a surge in Iraq. But Obama decided that he wasn’t going to do it like Bush, so he had a two-year time limit on the surge. He was saying, “I’m willing to try this, but only for so long.”
DR: Was the capture of Osama bin Laden a real priority for him? How did it come about?
PB: Leon Panetta, who was his CIA director and later defense secretary, says that Obama was regularly pressing them: “What’s the latest on this? Have you gotten any leads?” I don’t know that it was obsessive, but he was rigorously pushing the CIA for progress. That would be something he could show to the American public, if he could do what Bush failed to do and bring to justice the person who had perpetrated 9/11. What Leon Panetta would tell you is he was a regular prod when it came to that.
DR: President Biden was in the Senate for more than 30 years, and obviously enjoyed the Senate. President Obama was in the Senate for just four years. Did he respect members of Congress as much as President Biden seems to, or did he really not like the back-and-forth that congresspeople and senators like to engage in?
PB: President Obama did not like Congress. He didn’t like the people or the process. The phrase he used all the time was “It’s not on the level.” He could sit down and make a deal with them, and then they would retreat from something they had said they wanted, because they decided it was politically in their interest to do so. He became quite jaundiced about them. He also didn’t have the touch. He didn’t see the benefit of schmoozing. Maybe the schmoozing didn’t work as well as it did, say, during LBJ’s time, but he hated the comparison. When people said, “LBJ did it. How come you don’t do it as well?” he’d say, “LBJ had a two-thirds Democratic Congress and I don’t.” Fair. But LBJ also had a lot of Southern Democratic members who were not in favor of what he wanted either, and he still worked the program. Obama thought it was all fake and had little patience for the process.
DR: As the first African American president, did he spend a lot of time on civil rights or was that expected of him?
PB: It certainly was not a high priority, at least in the first term. He wanted to be thought of as a president who happened to be Black, not a Black president. He did not want to be defined by that. Especially in his first term, a lot of his Black supporters were disappointed that he didn’t do more. He would argue that his health care plan would disproportionately help Black Americans. That wasn’t very convincing to a lot of people who thought he was going to be more active on that front. Only in his second term did he begin to take on the issue of race to try to lead the country toward better understanding, after he was safely reelected. When we started having some of these horrific events with police shootings, he spoke out more, most memorably in Charleston after the killing of nine Black parishioners in a church, where he later sang “Amazing Grace” so movingly.
DR: Why did he pick Joe Biden to be his vice president?
PB: Biden was a safe choice. He was somebody who would reassure the public that this freshman senator who didn’t know much about Washington had somebody at his side who knew everything about Washington and had experience with foreign affairs. Biden also could reassure working-class whites who might be nervous about Obama, because that’s Biden’s identity. I don’t think that they necessarily were superclose, at least before taking office. In fact, during a committee meeting, when Obama was listening to Biden, who was the chairman, drone on, he slipped a note to an aide saying, “Shoot me now.” So there were some struggles at the beginning. They are very different personalities and it took a while for Obama to appreciate Biden and vice versa. But they formed a personal bond especially when Biden’s son Beau died. It was a personal moment for Obama. He was the only person outside the family who Biden really confided in at first that Beau was even that sick. Biden said he had to sell his house in order to pay the medical bills, and Obama offered to lend him the money instead. Which is an extraordinary thing, if you think about it. So there was this moment when they became quite close for a while. But there was some souring toward the end when Obama gently nudged Biden not to run for president in 2016 and Biden was disappointed or even a little resentful.
DR: Did President Obama ever doubt that he would get reelected? Why did he not seem to prepare much for his first debate with Mitt Romney?
PB: Incumbent presidents have a disease called overconfidence. Most of them seem to think that they don’t need to prepare for a debate because they’ve been dealing with these issues day in and day out. They know the territory a lot better than a challenger could. But what they forget is that they haven’t been challenged much to their faces. The media is going to ask you some tough questions, but your staff isn’t. Most people who see you in the Oval Office are telling you how great you are. He was overconfident, like a lot of them are.
DR: Most second terms have problems. Experienced people leave. Fatigue sets in. How would you rate Obama’s second term?
PB: There’s not a big differential between his first term and second term except on the issue of race. Most of the diplomatic things we were talking about happened in the second term. He went through staff like other presidents do. People do get exhausted and leave. His second-term team was effective. What is underrated, or not mentioned a lot, is that Obama went through eight years without any real personal scandal, which is not typical of presidents these days. He never had an independent counsel looking at him. He never had anybody accuse him of anything with regard to personal corruption or infidelity or anything like that. He had a strong, clean eight-year record. Critics say, “There was this or that,” but those were relatively small things, and they didn’t involve him personally. Even in a second term where scandals tend to be more prevalent because people get a little too comfortable, he managed to keep that from happening. That’s important for history.
DR: Why do you think that President Obama supported Hillary Clinton as his successor rather than his vice president, Joe Biden?
PB: For one thing, Biden hadn’t indicated that he was going to run or wanted to run until late in the game. If he had said more openly “I’m thinking about it” early on, before Obama began embracing Hillary Clinton, then Obama would have probably stood back more. I think he thought the vice presidency was the peak of Biden’s career because of his age, because of his long history.
Obama thought that Hillary was a strong candidate. He had come to respect her during her time as secretary of state. He thought she could do it. He had spent the 2008 campaign telling us that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president, because the Clintons were done, they were the old Democrats, and we needed to move on to the future. Then he turns around six, seven, eight years later, and says “The person I beat and told you that you shouldn’t consider to be the next president actually should be my successor.” He didn’t groom a next-generation successor. A lot of Democrats criticize him for that, saying he should have looked for somebody else to spend time bringing up, and instead went to the default setting.
DR: Do you think he encouraged Donald Trump to run for president by making fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?
PB: It didn’t discourage him, that’s for sure. It’s probably too simplistic to say that Donald Trump decided on that very night to run, because he had wanted to be president going back to the’80s. But I think there’s a certain personal animus that Trump developed, especially that night, when Obama humiliated him in front of a ballroom full of people and a national television audience. I think Obama just couldn’t conceive that Donald Trump would or could ever be a serious candidate.
DR: When Trump then got the nomination of his party and ran against Hillary Clinton, did Obama ever think that Trump would be his successor?
