CHAPTER 24
by testsuphomeAdminYou are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.
CHAPTER 24
“WHOSE BID IS IT?”
Pete Souza and I sat opposite Marvin and Reggie at the Air Force One conference
room table, all of us a bit bleary-eyed as we sorted through our cards. We were on our
way to Mumbai—the first leg of a nine-day trip to Asia that would include not only
my first visit to India but also a stop in Jakarta, a G20 meeting in Seoul, and an Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Yokohama, Japan. The plane had
been humming with activity earlier in the flight, with staffers working on laptops and
policy advisors huddling over the schedule. After ten hours in the air, with a refueling
stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, almost everybody on board (including
Michelle, in the forward cabin; Valerie, on the couch outside the conference room; and
several senior staffers stretched out at odd angles on the floor) had gone to sleep.
Unable to wind down, I’d enlisted our regular foursome for a game of Spades, and I
was trying to read through my briefing book and signing a stack of correspondence
between plays. My divided attention—along with Reggie’s second gin and tonic—may
have accounted for the fact that Marvin and Pete were up six games to two on us, at
ten dollars a pop.
“It’s your bid, sir,” Marvin said.
“What you got, Reg?” I asked.
“Maybe one,” Reggie said.
“We’ll go board,” I said.
“We’re going eight,” Pete said.
Reggie shook his head in disgust. “We’re switching decks after the next hand,” he
muttered, taking another sip of his drink. “These cards are cursed.”
—
ONLY THREE DAYS had passed since the midterm elections, and I was grateful for the
chance to get out of Washington. The results had left Democrats shell-shocked and
Republicans exuberant, and I’d woken up the next morning with a mix of weariness,
hurt, anger, and shame, the way a boxer must feel after coming out on the wrong end
of a heavyweight bout. The dominant story line in the postelection coverage suggested
that the conventional wisdom had been right all along: that I’d attempted to do too
much and hadn’t stayed focused on the economy; that Obamacare was a fatal error;
that I’d tried to resurrect the kind of big-spending, big-government liberalism that even
Bill Clinton had pronounced dead years ago. The fact that in my press conference the
day after the election I refused to admit as much, that I seemed to cling to the idea that
my administration had pursued the right policies—even if we clearly hadn’t managed
to sell them effectively—struck pundits as arrogant and delusional, the sign of a sinner
who wasn’t contrite.
The truth was, I didn’t regret paving the way for twenty million people to get health
insurance. Nor did I regret the Recovery Act—the hard evidence showed that austerity
in response to a recession would have been disastrous. I didn’t regret how we’d
handled the financial crisis, given the choices we’d faced (although I did regret not
having come up with a better plan to help stem the tide of foreclosures). And I sure as
hell wasn’t sorry I’d proposed a climate change bill and pushed for immigration
reform. I was just mad that I hadn’t yet gotten either item through Congress—mainly
because, on my very first day in office, I hadn’t had the foresight to tell Harry Reid
and the rest of the Senate Democrats to revise the chamber rules and get rid of the
filibuster once and for all.
As far as I was concerned, the election didn’t prove that our agenda had been wrong.
It just proved that—whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm, or good fortune—I’d
failed to rally the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right.
Which to me was just as damning.
Much to the relief of Gibbs and my press shop, I’d ended the press conference
before baring my stubborn, tortured soul. I realized that justifying the past mattered
less than planning what to do next.
I was going to have to find a way to reconnect with the American people—not just
to strengthen my hand in negotiations with Republicans but to get reelected. A better
economy would help, but even that was hardly assured. I needed to get out of the
White House bubble, to engage more frequently with voters. Meanwhile, Axe offered
his own assessment of what had gone wrong, saying that in the rush to get things done,
we’d neglected our promise to change Washington—by sidelining special interests,
and increasing transparency and fiscal responsibility across the federal government. If
we wanted to win back the voters who’d left us, he argued, we had to reclaim those
themes.
But was that right? I wasn’t so sure. Yes, we’d been hurt by the sausage-making
around the ACA, and fairly or not, we’d been tarnished by the bank bailouts. On the
other hand, I could point to scores of “good government” initiatives we’d introduced,
whether it was placing limits on the hiring of former lobbyists, or giving the public
access to data from federal agencies, or scouring agency budgets to eliminate waste.
All these actions were worthy on their merits, and I was glad we’d taken them; it was
one of the reasons we hadn’t had a whiff of scandal around my administration.
Politically, though, no one seemed to care about our work to clean up the
government—any more than they credited us for having bent over backward to solicit
Republican ideas on every single one of our legislative initiatives. One of our biggest
promises had been to end partisan bickering and focus on practical efforts to address
citizen demands. Our problem, as Mitch McConnell had calculated from the start, was
that so long as Republicans uniformly resisted our overtures and raised hell over even
the most moderate of proposals, anything we did could be portrayed as partisan,
controversial, radical—even illegitimate. In fact, many of our progressive allies
believed that we hadn’t been partisan enough. In their view, we’d compromised too
much, and by continually chasing the false promise of bipartisanship, we’d not only
empowered McConnell and squandered big Democratic majorities; we’d thrown a
giant wet blanket over our base—as evidenced by the decision of so many Democrats
to not bother to vote in the midterms.
Along with having to figure out a message and policy reboot, I was now facing
significant turnover in White House personnel. On the foreign policy team, Jim Jones
—who, despite his many strengths, had never felt fully comfortable in a staff role after
years of command—had resigned in October. Luckily, Tom Donilon was proving to be
a real workhorse and had ably assumed the national security advisor role, with Denis
McDonough moving up to deputy national security advisor and Ben Rhodes assuming
many of Denis’s old duties. On economic policy, Peter Orszag and Christy Romer had
returned to the private sector, replaced by Jack Lew, a seasoned budget expert who’d
managed OMB under Bill Clinton, and Austan Goolsbee, who’d been working with us
on the recovery. Then there was Larry Summers, who had stopped by the Oval one day
in September to tell me that with the financial crisis behind us, it was time for him to
exit. He’d be leaving at year’s end.
“What am I going to do without you around to explain why I’m wrong?” I asked,
only half-joking. Larry smiled.
“Mr. President,” he said, “you were actually less wrong than most.”
I’d grown genuinely fond of those who were leaving. Not only had they served me
well, but despite their various idiosyncrasies, they’d each brought a seriousness of
purpose—a commitment to policy making based on reason and evidence—that was
born of a desire to do right by the American people. It was, however, the impending
loss of my two closest political advisors, as well as the need to find a new chief of
staff, that unsettled me most.
Axe had always planned to leave after the midterms. Having lived apart from his
family for two years, he badly needed a break before joining my reelection campaign.
Gibbs, who’d been in the foxhole with me continuously since I’d won my Senate
primary race, was just as worn down. Although he remained as well prepared and
fearless a press secretary as ever, the strain of standing at a podium day after day,
taking all the hits that had been coming our way, had made his relationship with the
White House press corps combative enough that the rest of the team worried that it
was negatively affecting our coverage.
I was still getting used to the prospect of fighting the political battles ahead without
Axe and Gibbs at my side, though I took heart in the continuity provided by our young
and skillful communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, who had worked closely with them
on messaging since the start of our 2007 campaign. As for Rahm, I considered it a
minor miracle that he’d lasted as long as he had without either killing somebody or
dropping dead from a stroke. We’d made a habit of conducting our end-of-day
meetings outside when the weather allowed, strolling two or three times around the
driveway that encircled the South Lawn as we tried to figure out what to do about the
latest crisis or controversy. More than once we’d asked ourselves why we’d chosen
such stressful lives.
“After we’re finished, we should try something simpler,” I said to him one day. “We
could move our families to Hawaii and open a smoothie stand on the beach.”
“Smoothies are too complicated,” Rahm said. “We’ll sell T‑shirts. But just white T-
shirts. In medium. That’s it—no other colors or patterns or sizes. We don’t want to
have to make any decisions. If customers want something different, they can go
someplace else.”
I had recognized the signs that Rahm was close to burnout, but I’d assumed he’d
wait for the new year to leave. Instead, he’d used one of our evening walks in early
September to tell me that longtime Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley had just
announced that he wouldn’t be seeking a seventh consecutive term. Rahm wanted to
run—it was a job he’d dreamed of since entering politics—and with the election
happening in February, he needed to leave the White House by the first of October if
he hoped to have a go at it.
He looked genuinely distraught. “I know I’m putting you in a bind,” he said, “but
with only five and a half months to run a race—”
I stopped him before he could finish and said he’d have my full support.
A week or so later, at a private farewell ceremony in the residence, I presented him
with a framed copy of a to-do list that I’d handwritten on a legal pad and passed to him
during my first week in office. Almost every item had been checked off, I told the
assembled staff, a measure of how effective he’d been. Rahm teared up—a blemish on
his tough-guy image for which he later cursed me.
None of this turnover was unusual for an administration, and I saw the potential
benefits to shaking things up. More than once we’d been accused of being too insular
and tightly controlled, in need of fresh perspectives. Rahm’s skill set would be less
relevant without a Democratic House to help advance legislation. With Pete Rouse
serving as interim chief of staff, I was leaning toward hiring Bill Daley, who’d been
commerce secretary in the Clinton administration and was the brother of Chicago’s
outgoing mayor, to replace Rahm. Balding and about a decade older than me, with a
distinctive South Side accent that evoked his Irish working-class roots, Bill had a
reputation as an effective, pragmatic dealmaker with strong relationships with both
labor and the business community; and while I didn’t know him the way I knew Rahm,
I thought his affable, nonideological style might be well suited for what I expected to
be a less frantic phase of my administration. And along with some new faces, I was
thrilled that I’d be getting one back starting in January when David Plouffe, fresh from
a two-year sabbatical with his family, would return as a senior advisor and provide our
White House operation with the same strategic thinking, intense focus, and lack of ego
that had benefited us so much during the campaign.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little melancholy over the changes the new year would
bring: I’d be surrounded by even fewer people who’d known me before I was
president, and by fewer colleagues who were also friends, who’d seen me tired,
confused, angry, or defeated and yet had never stopped having my back. It was a
lonely thought at a lonely time. Which probably explains why I was still playing cards
with Marvin, Reggie, and Pete when I had a full day of meetings and appearances
scheduled to start in less than seven hours.
“Did you guys just win again?” I asked Pete after we finished the hand.
Pete nodded, prompting Reggie to gather up all the cards, rise from his chair, and
toss them into the trash bin.
“Hey, Reg, that’s still a good deck!” Pete said, not bothering to disguise his pleasure
at the beatdown he and Marvin had just administered. “Everybody loses sometimes.”
Reggie flashed a hard look at Pete. “Show me someone who’s okay with losing,” he
said, “and I’ll show you a loser.”
—
I’D NEVER BEEN to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my
imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an
estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages
spoken. Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening
to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my
interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college
friends who’d taught to me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood
movies.
More than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma
Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced
my thinking. As a young man, I’d studied his writings and found him giving voice to
some of my deepest instincts. His notion of satyagraha, or devotion to truth, and the
power of nonviolent resistance to stir the conscience; his insistence on our common
humanity and the essential oneness of all religions; and his belief in every society’s
obligation, through its political, economic, and social arrangements, to recognize the
equal worth and dignity of all people—each of these ideas resonated with me.
Gandhi’s actions had stirred me even more than his words; he’d put his beliefs to the
test by risking his life, going to prison, and throwing himself fully into the struggles of
his people. His nonviolent campaign for Indian independence from Britain, which
began in 1915 and continued for more than thirty years, hadn’t just helped overcome
an empire and liberate much of the subcontinent, it had set off a moral charge that
pulsed around the globe. It became a beacon for other dispossessed, marginalized
groups—including Black Americans in the Jim Crow South—intent on securing their
freedom.
Michelle and I had a chance early in the trip to visit Mani Bhavan, the modest two-
story building tucked into a quiet Mumbai neighborhood that had been Gandhi’s home
base for many years. Before the start of our tour, our guide, a gracious woman in a
blue sari, showed us the guestbook Dr. King had signed in 1959, when he’d traveled to
India to draw international attention to the struggle for racial justice in the United
States and pay homage to the man whose teachings had inspired him.
The guide then invited us upstairs to see Gandhi’s private quarters. Taking off our
shoes, we entered a simple room with a floor of smooth, patterned tile, its terrace doors
open to admit a slight breeze and a pale, hazy light. I stared at the spartan floor bed
and pillow, the collection of spinning wheels, the old-fashioned phone and low
wooden writing desk, trying to imagine Gandhi present in the room, a slight, brown-
skinned man in a plain cotton dhoti, his legs folded under him, composing a letter to
the British viceroy or charting the next phase of the Salt March. And in that moment, I
had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he’d found the
strength and imagination to do so much with so very little. To ask how he’d recovered
from disappointment.
He’d had more than his share. For all his extraordinary gifts, Gandhi hadn’t been
able to heal the subcontinent’s deep religious schisms or prevent its partitioning into a
predominantly Hindu India and an overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan, a seismic event
in which untold numbers died in sectarian violence and millions of families were
forced to pack up what they could carry and migrate across newly established borders.
Despite his labors, he hadn’t undone India’s stifling caste system. Somehow, though,
he’d marched, fasted, and preached well into his seventies—until that final day in
1948, when on his way to prayer, he was shot at point-blank range by a young Hindu
extremist who viewed his ecumenism as a betrayal of the faith.
—
IN MANY RESPECTS, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived
repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various
armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals. The transition to a
more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary
entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people—leading to soaring growth rates, a
thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class. As a chief architect of
India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a
fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious
minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat
who’d won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about
higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt.
Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be
cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy
that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my
initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my
visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S.
cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.
What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of
India’s democracy or merely an aberration. Our first evening in Delhi, he and his wife,
Gursharan Kaur, hosted a dinner party for me and Michelle at their residence, and
before joining the other guests in a candlelit courtyard, Singh and I had a few minutes
to chat alone. Without the usual flock of minders and notetakers hovering over our
shoulders, the prime minister spoke more openly about the clouds he saw on the
horizon. The economy worried him, he said. Although India had fared better than
many other countries in the wake of the financial crisis, the global slowdown would
inevitably make it harder to generate jobs for India’s young and rapidly growing
population. Then there was the problem of Pakistan: Its continuing failure to work
with India to investigate the 2008 terrorist attacks on hotels and other sites in Mumbai
had significantly increased tensions between the two countries, in part because
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the terrorist organization responsible, was believed to have links to
Pakistan’s intelligence service. Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan
after the attacks, but his restraint had cost him politically. He feared that rising anti-
Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“In uncertain times, Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “the call of religious
and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit
that, in India or anywhere else.”
I nodded, recalling the conversation I’d had with Václav Havel during my visit to
Prague and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe. If globalization
and a historic economic crisis were fueling these trends in relatively wealthy nations—
if I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party—how could India be
immune? For the truth was that despite the resilience of its democracy and its
impressive recent economic performance, India still bore little resemblance to the
egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable society Gandhi had envisioned. Across the
country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or
labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas
and moguls of old would have envied. Violence, both public and private, remained an
all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the
quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge
that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s,
untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional
annihilation.
Most of all, India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste. In that
sense, Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the
country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving. He
hadn’t originally become prime minister as a result of his own popularity. In fact, he
owed his position to Sonia Gandhi—the Italian-born widow of former prime minister
Rajiv Gandhi and the head of the Congress Party, who’d declined to take the job
herself after leading her party coalition to victory and had instead anointed Singh.
More than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as
an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old
son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party.
Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi sat at our dinner table that night. She was a striking
woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet,
regal presence. That she—a former stay-at-home mother of European descent—had
emerged from her grief after her husband was killed by a Sri Lankan separatist’s
suicide bomb in 1991 to become a leading national politician testified to the enduring
power of the family dynasty. Rajiv was the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first
prime minister and an icon in the independence movement. His mother, Nehru’s
daughter, Indira Gandhi, had spent a total of sixteen years as prime minister herself,
relying on a more ruthless brand of politics than her father had practiced, until 1984
when she, too, was assassinated.
At dinner that night, Sonia Gandhi listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to
Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her
son. It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and
forceful intelligence. As for Rahul, he seemed smart and earnest, his good looks
resembling his mother’s. He offered up his thoughts on the future of progressive
politics, occasionally pausing to probe me on the details of my 2008 campaign. But
there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done
the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the
aptitude or the passion to master the subject.
As it was getting late, I noticed Singh fighting off sleep, lifting his glass every so
often to wake himself up with a sip of water. I signaled to Michelle that it was time to
say our goodbyes. The prime minister and his wife walked us to our car. In the dim
light, he looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I
wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully
passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the
Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?
Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following
the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the
constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the
GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this
was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic,
multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or
major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for
those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that
allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that
raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser
impulses.
Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed,
corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to
beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by
subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For
they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates
stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of
people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there
was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses
back.
—
HISTORICALLY, CONGRESSIONAL ambitions tend to be low during the six- or seven-week
stretch between Election Day and the Christmas recess, especially with a shift in party
control about to happen. The dispirited losers just want to go home; the winners want
to run out the clock until the new Congress gets sworn in. On January 5, 2011, we’d be
seating the most Republican House of Representatives since 1947, which meant I’d be
unable to get any legislation called for a vote, much less passed, without the assent of
the incoming Speaker of the House, John Boehner. And if there was any question
about his agenda, Boehner had already announced that the first bill he’d be calling to a
vote was a total repeal of the ACA.
We did, however, have a window of opportunity during the coming lame-duck
session. Having returned from my visit to Asia, I was intent on getting several key
initiatives across the finish line before Congress adjourned for the holidays:
ratification of the New START on nuclear nonproliferation that we’d negotiated with
the Russians; repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law that barred gays, lesbians, and
bisexuals from openly serving in the military; and passage of the DREAM Act, which
would establish a path to citizenship for a large swath of children of undocumented
immigrants. Pete Rouse and Phil Schiliro, who between them had nearly seventy years
of Capitol Hill experience, looked dubious when I ran through my lame-duck to-do
list. Axe actually chortled.
“Is that it?” he asked sarcastically.
Actually, it wasn’t. I’d forgotten to mention that we needed to pass a child nutrition
bill that Michelle had made a central plank in her fight against childhood obesity. “It’s
good policy,” I said, “and Michelle’s team’s done a great job lining up support from
children’s health advocates. Plus, if we don’t get it passed, I won’t be able to go
home.”
I understood some of my staff’s skepticism about trying to move such an ambitious
agenda. Even if we could muster the sixty votes needed for each of those controversial
bills, it wasn’t clear that Harry Reid could get enough cooperation from Mitch
McConnell to schedule so many votes in such a short time. Still, I didn’t think I was
being entirely delusional. Almost every item on my list already had some legislative
traction and had either cleared or seemed likely to clear the House. And while we
hadn’t had much luck overcoming GOP-led Senate filibusters previously, I knew that
McConnell had a big-ticket item of his own that he desperately wanted to get done:
passing a law to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts, which would otherwise
automatically expire at the end of the year.
This gave us leverage.
I’d long opposed my predecessor’s signature domestic legislation, laws passed in
2001 and 2003 that changed the U.S. tax code in ways that disproportionately
benefited high-net-worth individuals while accelerating the trend of wealth and income
inequality. Warren Buffett liked to point out that the law enabled him to pay taxes at a
significantly lower rate—proportionate to his income, which came almost entirely
from capital gains and dividends—than his secretary did on her salary. The laws’
changes to the estate tax alone had reduced the tax burden for the top 2 percent of
America’s richest families by more than $130 billion. Not only that, but by taking
roughly $1.3 trillion in projected revenue out of the U.S. Treasury, the laws had helped
turn a federal budget surplus under Bill Clinton into a burgeoning deficit—a deficit
that many Republicans were now using to justify their calls for cuts to Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of America’s social safety net.
The Bush tax cuts might have been bad policy, but they had also modestly lowered
the tax bill of most Americans, which made rolling them back politically tricky. Polls
consistently showed a strong majority of Americans favoring higher taxes on the rich.
But even well-to-do lawyers and doctors didn’t consider themselves rich, especially if
they lived in high-cost areas; and after a decade in which the bottom 90 percent of
earners had seen stagnant wages, very few people thought their own taxes should go
up. During the campaign, my team and I had settled on what we considered a policy
sweet spot, proposing that the Bush tax cuts be repealed selectively, affecting only
those families with income greater than $250,000 a year (or individuals earning more
than $200,000). This approach had almost universal support from congressional
Democrats, would affect only the richest 2 percent of Americans, and would still yield
roughly $680 billion over the next decade, funds we could use to expand childcare,
healthcare, job training, and education programs for the less well-off.
I hadn’t changed my mind on any of this—getting the rich to pay more in taxes was
not only a matter of fairness but also the only way to fund new initiatives. But as had
been true with so many of my campaign proposals, the financial crisis had forced me
to rethink when we should try to do it. Early in my term, when it looked like the
country might careen into a depression, my economic team had persuasively argued
that any increase in taxes—even those targeting rich people and Fortune 500
companies—would be counterproductive, since it would take money out of the
economy precisely at a time when we wanted individuals and businesses to get out
there and spend. With the economy barely on the mend, the prospect of tax hikes still
made the team nervous.
And as it was, Mitch McConnell had threatened to block anything less than a full
extension of the Bush tax cuts. Which meant that our only option for getting rid of
them right away—an option many progressive commentators urged us to take—
involved doing nothing and simply letting everybody’s tax rates automatically revert to
higher, Clinton-era levels on the first of January. Democrats could then return in the
new year and propose replacement legislation that would reduce tax rates for
Americans making less than $250,000 a year, essentially daring Republicans to vote
no.
It was a strategy we strongly considered. But Joe Biden and our legislative team
worried that given how badly we’d lost in the midterms, centrist Democrats might
break ranks on the issue and then Republicans would use those defections to marshal a
vote that made the tax cuts permanent. Politics aside, the problem with playing
chicken with the GOP, I decided, was the immediate impact it would have on a still-
fragile economy. Even if we could hold our Democrats in line and Republicans
ultimately buckled under the pressure, it still could take months to get any tax
legislation through a divided Congress. In the meantime, middle- and working-class
Americans would have smaller paychecks, businesses would rein in their investments
even further, the stock market would tank again, and the economy would almost
certainly end up back in a recession.
After gaming out various scenarios, I sent Joe up to Capitol Hill to negotiate with
McConnell. We would support a two-year extension of all the Bush tax cuts—but only
if Republicans agreed to extend emergency unemployment benefits, the Recovery
Act’s lower- to middle-class tax credit (Making Work Pay), and another package of
refundable tax credits benefiting the working poor for an equivalent period.
McConnell immediately balked. Having previously declared that “the single most
important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term
president,” he was apparently loath to let me claim that I’d cut taxes for the majority of
Americans without Republicans having forced me to do it. I couldn’t say I was
surprised; one of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary—in addition to
his Senate experience and legislative acumen—was my awareness that in McConnell’s
mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite
the same way that any appearance of cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist)
Obama was bound to do.
After a lot of back-and-forth, and after we’d agreed to swap the Making Work Pay
tax credit for a payroll tax cut, McConnell finally relented and, on December 6, 2010, I
was able to announce that a comprehensive agreement had been reached.
From a policy perspective, we were pleased with the outcome. While it was painful
to keep the tax cuts for the wealthy in place for another two years, we’d managed to
extend tax relief for middle-class families while leveraging an additional $212 billion
worth of economic stimulus specifically targeted at those Americans most in need—
the kind of package we’d have no chance of passing through a Republican-controlled
House as a stand-alone bill. As for the politics behind the deal, I explained to Valerie
that the two-year time frame represented a high-stakes wager between the Republicans
and me. I was betting that in November 2012, I’d be coming off a successful reelection
campaign, allowing me to end the tax cuts for the wealthy from a position of strength.
They were betting that they’d beat me—and that a new Republican president would
help them make the Bush tax cuts permanent.
The fact that the deal left so much riding on the next presidential election might
explain why it immediately provoked outrage from left-leaning commentators. They
accused me of caving to McConnell and Boehner and of being compromised by my
buddies on Wall Street and advisors like Larry and Tim. They warned that the payroll
tax cut would weaken the Social Security Trust Funds; that the refundable tax credits
benefiting the working poor would prove ephemeral; and that in two years’ time, the
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would be made permanent, just like the Republicans had
always wanted.
In other words, they, too, expected me to lose.
As it so happened, the same mid-December week we announced the deal with
McConnell, Bill Clinton joined me in the Oval Office dining room for a visit.
Whatever tensions had existed between us during the campaign had largely dissipated
by then, and I found it useful to hear the lessons he’d learned after suffering a similar
midterm shellacking at the hands of Newt Gingrich in 1994. At some point, we got
into the nitty-gritty of the tax agreement I’d just made, and Clinton couldn’t have been
more enthusiastic.
“You need to tell that to some of our friends,” I said, noting the blowback we were
getting from certain Democratic circles.
“If I have the chance, I will,” Clinton said.
That gave me an idea. “How about you get the chance right now?” Before he could
answer, I walked over to Katie’s desk and asked her to have the press team rustle up
any correspondents who were in the building. Fifteen minutes later, Bill Clinton and I
stepped into the White House briefing room.
Explaining to the startled reporters that they might like to get some perspective on
our tax deal from the person who’d overseen just about the best U.S. economy we’d
experienced in recent history, I turned the podium over to Clinton. It didn’t take long
for the former president to own the room, mustering all of his raspy-voiced, lip-biting
Arkansas charm to make the case for our deal with McConnell. In fact, shortly after
the impromptu press conference began, I realized I had another commitment to get to,
but Clinton was clearly enjoying himself so much that I didn’t want to cut him off.
Instead, I leaned into the microphone to say that I had to leave but that President
Clinton could stick around. Later, I asked Gibbs how the whole thing had played.
“The coverage was great,” Gibbs said. “Though a few of the talking heads said that
you diminished yourself by giving Clinton the platform.”
I wasn’t too worried about that. I knew that Clinton’s poll numbers were a whole lot
higher than mine at the time, partly because the conservative press that had once
vilified him now found it useful to offer him up as a contrast to me, the kind of
reasonable, centrist Democrat, they said, that Republicans could work with. His
endorsement would help us sell the deal to the broader public and tamp down any
potential rebellion among congressional Democrats. It was an irony that I—like many
modern leaders—eventually learned to live with: You never looked as smart as the ex-
president did on the sidelines.
Our temporary détente with McConnell on taxes allowed us to focus on the rest of
my lame-duck to-do list. Michelle’s child nutrition bill had already received enough
Republican support to pass in early December with relatively little fuss, despite
accusations from Sarah Palin (now a Fox News commentator) that Michelle was intent
on taking away the freedom of American parents to feed their children as they saw fit.
Meanwhile, the House was working through the details of a food safety bill that would
pass later in the month.
Ratifying New START in the Senate proved more challenging—not only because,
as a treaty, it required 67 rather than 60 votes but because domestically there was no
strong constituency clamoring to get it done. I had to nag Harry Reid to prioritize the
issue during the lame-duck sessions, explaining that U.S. credibility—not to mention
my own standing with other world leaders—was at stake, and that a failure to ratify the
treaty would undermine our efforts to enforce sanctions against Iran and get other
countries to tighten up their own nuclear security. Once I got Harry’s grudging
commitment to bring the treaty up for a vote (“I don’t know how I’ll find the floor
time, Mr. President,” he grumbled over the phone, “but if you tell me it’s important I’ll
do my best, okay?”), we went to work lining up Republican votes. The Joint Chiefs’
endorsement of the treaty helped; so did strong support from my old friend Dick
Lugar, who remained the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and rightly viewed New START as an extension of his earlier work on
nuclear nonproliferation.
Even so, closing the deal required me to commit to a multiyear, multibillion-dollar
modernization of the infrastructure around the United States’ nuclear stockpile, at the
insistence of conservative Arizona senator Jon Kyl. Given my long-term goal of
eliminating nuclear weapons, not to mention all the better ways I could think of to use
billions of federal dollars, this concession felt like a devil’s bargain, though our in-
house experts, many of whom were dedicated to nuclear disarmament, assured me that
our aging nuclear weapons systems did need upgrades in order to reduce the risk of a
catastrophic miscalculation or accident. And when New START finally cleared the
Senate by a 71–26 vote, I breathed a big sigh of relief.
—
THE WHITE HOUSE never looked more beautiful than during the holiday season. Huge
pine wreaths with red velvet bows lined the walls along the colonnade and the main
corridor of the East Wing, and the oaks and magnolias in the Rose Garden were strewn
with lights. The official White House Christmas tree, a majestic fir delivered by horse-
drawn carriage, occupied most of the Blue Room, but trees almost as spectacular filled
nearly every public space in the residence. Over the course of three days, an army of
volunteers organized by the Social Office decorated the trees, halls, and Grand Foyer
with a dazzling array of ornaments, while the White House pastry chefs prepared an
elaborate gingerbread replica of the residence, complete with furniture, curtains, and—
during my presidency—a miniature version of Bo.
The holiday season also meant we hosted parties practically every afternoon and
evening for three and a half weeks straight. These were big, festive affairs, with three
to four hundred guests at a time, laughing and chomping on lamb chops and crab cakes
and drinking eggnog and wine while members of the United States Marine Band,
spiffy in their red coats, played all the holiday standards. For me and Michelle, the
afternoon parties were easy—we just dropped by for a few minutes to wish everyone
well from behind a rope line. But the evening events called for us to position ourselves
in the Diplomatic Reception Room for two hours or more, posing for photos with
nearly every guest. Michelle didn’t mind doing this at the parties we hosted for the
families of Secret Service personnel and the residence staff, despite what standing in
heels for that long did to her feet. Her holiday spirits dimmed, however, when it came
to feting members of Congress and the political media. Maybe it was because they
demanded more attention (“Stop making so much small talk!” she’d whisper to me
during momentary breaks in the action); or because some of the same people who
regularly appeared on TV calling for her husband’s head on a spike somehow had the
nerve to put their arms around her and smile for the camera as if they were her best
high school chums.
Back in the West Wing, much of my team’s energy in the weeks before Christmas
went toward pushing through the two most controversial bills left on my docket:
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) and the DREAM Act. Alongside abortion, guns, and
just about anything to do with race, the issues of LGBTQ rights and immigration had
occupied center stage in America’s culture wars for decades, in part because they
raised the most basic question in our democracy—namely, who do we consider a true
member of the American family, deserving of the same rights, respect, and concern
that we expect for ourselves? I believed in defining that family broadly—it included
gay people as well as straight, and it included immigrant families that had put down
roots and raised kids here, even if they hadn’t come through the front door. How could
I believe otherwise, when some of the same arguments for their exclusion had so often
been used to exclude those who looked like me?
That’s not to say that I dismissed those with different views on LGBTQ and
immigration rights as heartless bigots. For one thing, I had enough self-awareness—or
at least a good enough memory—to know that my own attitudes toward gays, lesbians,
and transgender people hadn’t always been particularly enlightened. I grew up in the
1970s, a time when LGBTQ life was far less visible to those outside the community,
so that Toot’s sister (and one of my favorite relatives), Aunt Arlene, felt obliged to
introduce her partner of twenty years as “my close friend Marge” whenever she visited
us in Hawaii.
And like many teenage boys in those years, my friends and I sometimes threw
around words like “fag” or “gay” at each other as casual put-downs—callow attempts
to fortify our masculinity and hide our insecurities. Once I got to college and became
friends with fellow students and professors who were openly gay, though, I realized
the overt discrimination and hate they were subject to, as well as the loneliness and
self-doubt that the dominant culture imposed on them. I felt ashamed of my past
behavior—and learned to do better.
As for immigration, during my youth I’d given the issue little thought beyond the
vague mythology of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty transmitted through popular
culture. The progression of my thinking came later, when my organizing work in
Chicago introduced me to the predominantly Mexican communities of Pilsen and
Little Village—neighborhoods where the usual categories of native-born Americans,
naturalized citizens, green-card holders, and undocumented immigrants all but
dissolved, since many, if not most, families included all four. Over time, people shared
with me what it was like to have to hide your background, always afraid that the life
you’d worked so hard to build might be upended in an instant. They talked about the
sheer exhaustion and expense of dealing with an often heartless or arbitrary
immigration system, the sense of helplessness that came with having to work for
employers who took advantage of your immigration status to pay you subminimum
wages. The friendships I made and the stories I heard in those Chicago neighborhoods,
and from LGBTQ people during college and my early career, had opened my heart to
the human dimensions of issues that I’d once thought of in mainly abstract terms.
For me, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” situation was straightforward: I considered a
policy that prevented LGBTQ persons from openly serving in our military to be both
offensive to American ideals and corrosive to the armed forces. DADT was the result
of a flawed compromise between Bill Clinton—who’d campaigned on the idea of
ending the outright ban on LGBTQ people serving in the military—and his Joint
Chiefs, who’d insisted that such a change would damage morale and retention. Since
going into effect in 1994, DADT had done little to protect or dignify anyone and, in
fact, had led to the discharge of more than thirteen thousand service members solely
due to their sexual orientation. Those who remained had to hide who they were and
who they loved, unable to safely put up family pictures in their work spaces or attend
social functions on base with their partners. As the first African American commander
in chief, I felt a special responsibility to end the policy, mindful that Blacks in the
military had traditionally faced institutional prejudice and been barred from leadership
roles and for decades had been forced to serve in segregated units—a policy Harry
Truman had finally ended with an executive order in 1948.
The question was how best to accomplish the change. From the outset, LGBTQ
advocates urged me to follow Truman’s example and simply issue an order to reverse
the policy—particularly since I’d already used executive orders and memoranda to
address other regulations adversely affecting LGBTQ people, including the granting of
hospital visitation rights and the extension of benefits to domestic partners of federal
employees. But in short-circuiting the consensus building involved in passing
legislation, an executive order increased the likelihood of resistance to the new policy
inside the military, and foot-dragging in its implementation. And, of course, a future
president could always reverse an executive order with the mere stroke of a pen.
I’d concluded that the optimal solution was to get Congress to act. To do that, I
needed the military’s top leaders as active and willing partners—which, in the middle
of two wars, I knew wouldn’t be easy. Previous Joint Chiefs had opposed repealing
DADT, reasoning that the integration of openly gay service members might adversely
impact unit cohesion and discipline. (Congressional opponents of repeal, including
John McCain, claimed that introducing such a disruptive new policy during wartime
amounted to a betrayal of our troops.) To their credit, though, Bob Gates and Mike
Mullen didn’t flinch when I told them, early in my term, that I intended to reverse
DADT. Gates said that he’d already asked his staff to quietly begin internal planning
on the issue, less out of any personal enthusiasm for the policy change than out of a
practical concern that federal courts might ultimately find DADT unconstitutional and
force a change on the military overnight. Rather than try to talk me out of my position,
he and Mullen asked that I let them set up a task force to evaluate the implications of
the proposed change on military operations—which would ultimately conduct a
comprehensive survey of troops’ attitudes toward having openly gay members in their
ranks. The objective, Gates said, was to minimize disruption and division.
“If you’re going to do this, Mr. President,” Gates added, “we should at least be able
to tell you how to do it right.”
I warned Gates and Mullen that I didn’t consider discrimination against LGBTQ
people to be an issue subject to plebiscite. Nevertheless, I agreed to their request,
partly because I trusted them to set up an honest evaluation process but mainly because
I suspected that the survey would show our troops—most of whom were decades
younger than the high-ranking generals—to be more open-minded toward gays and
lesbians than people expected. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services
Committee on February 2, 2010, Gates further validated my trust when he said, “I
fully support the president’s decision” to reexamine DADT. But it was Mike Mullen’s
testimony before the committee that same day that really made news, as he became the
first sitting senior U.S. military leader in history to publicly argue that LGBTQ
persons should be allowed to openly serve: “Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and
myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly
would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape
being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and
women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me
personally, it comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”
Nobody in the White House had coordinated with Mullen on the statement; I’m not
even sure that Gates had known ahead of time what Mullen planned to say. But his
unequivocal statement immediately shifted the public debate and created important
political cover for fence-sitting senators, who could then feel justified in embracing the
repeal.
Mullen’s testimony came months before the evaluation process he and Gates had
requested was completed, which caused some political headaches. Proponents of
repeal started coming hard at us, both privately and in the press, unable to understand
why I wouldn’t simply issue an executive order when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
supported a policy change—especially because, while we took our sweet time with a
survey, LGBTQ service members were still being discharged. Valerie and her team
bore the brunt of the friendly fire, particularly Brian Bond, a highly regarded gay
activist who served as our principal liaison to the community. For months, Brian had to
defend my decision-making, as skeptical friends, former colleagues, and members of
the press suggested that he’d been co-opted, questioning his commitment to the cause.
I can only imagine the toll this took on him personally.
The criticism grew louder in September 2010 when, as Gates had predicted, a
federal district court in California ruled that DADT was unconstitutional. I asked
Gates to formally suspend all discharges while the case was appealed. But no matter
how hard I pressed, he repeatedly refused my request, arguing that as long as DADT
was in place, he was obligated to enforce it; and I knew that ordering him to do
something he considered inappropriate might force me to have to find a new defense
secretary. It was perhaps the only time I came close to yelling at Gates, and not just
because I considered his legal analysis faulty. He seemed to consider the frustrations
we were hearing from LGBTQ advocates—not to mention the anguished stories of gay
and lesbian service members who were under his charge—as one more bit of “politics”
from which I should shield him and the Pentagon, rather than a central consideration in
his own decision-making. (Ultimately he did at least modify DADT’s administrative
procedures in such a way that nearly all actual discharges were halted while we
awaited resolution on the issue.)
Mercifully, toward the end of that same month, the results from the troop study
finally came in. They confirmed what I’d suspected: Two-thirds of those surveyed
thought that allowing those gay, lesbian, and bisexual colleagues to serve openly
would have little or no impact on—or might actually improve—the military’s ability to
execute its missions. In fact, most troops believed that they were either already
working or had worked with LGBTQ service members and had experienced no
difference in their ability to perform their duties.
Get exposed to other people’s truths, I thought, and attitudes change.
With the survey in hand, Gates and Mullen officially endorsed the repeal of DADT.
Meeting with me in the Oval Office, the other Joint Chiefs pledged to implement the
policy without undue delay. In fact, General James Amos, the Marine commandant
and a firm opponent of repeal, drew smiles when he said, “I can promise you, Mr.
President, that none of these other branches are going to do it faster or better than the
U.S. Marine Corps.” And on December 18, the Senate passed the bill 65–31, with
eight Republican votes.
A few days later, former and current LGBTQ service members filled an auditorium
at the Department of the Interior as I signed the bill. Many were in dress uniform, their
faces expressing a medley of joy, pride, relief, and tears. As I addressed the crowd, I
saw a number of the advocates who’d been some of our fiercest critics just a few
weeks earlier now smiling in appreciation. Spotting Brian Bond, I gave him a nod. But
the biggest applause that day was reserved for Mike Mullen—a long, heartfelt standing
ovation. As I watched the admiral standing on the stage, visibly moved despite the
awkward grin on his face, I couldn’t have been happier for him. It wasn’t often, I
thought, that a true act of conscience is recognized that way.
—
WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The
process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often
depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.
Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds
of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year,
searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border,
with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border
patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry
of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric
and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and
Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the
press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports
or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.
By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the
United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life. Many
were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of
having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an
early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire
sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were
often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and
vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing
dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American
consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were
taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the
nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack
down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican
constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the
politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union
rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on
construction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business
groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of
Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-
immigration positions.
Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick
Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive
reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while
more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had
failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes,
indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the
campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former
Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security
—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and
U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border
issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that
was both compassionate and tough.
My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and
Americans losing jobs, few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue
like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right
flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up
the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers
at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it
stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and
increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an
effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I
had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d
inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who
claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a
perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill.
But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of
progress, much the same way LGBTQ activists had gone after us on DADT. And
although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic
path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.
Enter the DREAM Act. The idea that young, undocumented immigrants who’d been
brought to the United States as children could be given some sort of relief had been
floating around for years, and at least ten versions of the DREAM Act had been
introduced in Congress since 2001, each time failing to garner the needed votes.
Advocates often presented it as a partial but meaningful step on the road to wider
reform. The act would grant “Dreamers”—as these young people had come to be
called—temporary legal residence and a pathway to citizenship, so long as they met
certain criteria. According to the most recent bill, they had to have entered the United
States before the age of sixteen, lived here for five continuous years, graduated from
high school or obtained a GED, and attended college for two years or joined the
military—and they could have no serious criminal record. Individual states could make
Dreamers legally eligible for reduced tuition rates at public colleges and universities—
the only realistic way many of them could afford higher education.
Dreamers had grown up going to American schools, playing American sports,
watching American TV, and hanging out at American malls. In some cases, their
parents had never even told them they weren’t citizens; they learned of their
undocumented status only when they tried to get a driver’s license or submitted an
application for college financial aid. I’d had a chance to meet many Dreamers, both
before and after I entered the White House. They were smart, poised, and resilient—as
full of potential as my own daughters. If anything, I found the Dreamers to be less
cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries—precisely
because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.
The case for allowing such young people to stay in the United States, the only
country many of them had ever known, was so morally compelling that Kennedy and
McCain had incorporated the DREAM Act into their 2007 immigration bill. And
without the prospect of passing a more comprehensive rewrite of U.S. immigration
laws in the immediate future, Harry Reid—who, in the months leading up to the
midterms, had been locked in a tight reelection contest in his home state of Nevada
and needed a strong Hispanic turnout to put him over the top—had promised to call
the DREAM Act for a vote during the lame-duck session.
Unfortunately, Harry made this last-minute announcement on the campaign trail
without giving us, his Senate colleagues, or immigration reform groups any notice.
Though not thrilled with Harry’s lack of coordination with her (“You’d think he could
have picked up the phone”), Nancy Pelosi did her part, quickly pushing the legislation
through the House. But in the Senate, McCain and Graham denounced Harry’s
decision as a campaign stunt and said they wouldn’t vote for the DREAM Act as a
stand-alone bill since it was no longer linked to increased enforcement. The five
Republican senators who’d voted for the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill and were still in
office were less declarative about their intentions, but all sounded wobbly. And since
we couldn’t count on every Democrat to support the bill—especially after the
disastrous midterms—all of us in the White House found ourselves scrambling to
drum up the sixty votes needed to overcome a filibuster during the waning days before
the Senate wrapped up business for the year.
Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs, was our point
person on the effort. When I was a senator, she’d been the senior vice president of
policy and legislative affairs at the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest
Latino advocacy organization, and ever since she’d advised me on immigration and
other issues. Born and raised in Michigan and the daughter of Bolivian immigrants,
Cecilia was measured, modest, and—as I used to joke with her—“just plain nice,”
bringing to mind everyone’s favorite young elementary or middle school teacher. She
was also tough and tenacious (and a fanatical Michigan football fan). Within a matter
of weeks, she and her team had launched an all-out media blitz in support of the
DREAM Act, pitching stories, marshaling statistics, and enlisting practically every
cabinet member and agency (including the Defense Department) to host some kind of
event. Most important, Cecilia helped bring together a crew of young Dreamers who
were willing to disclose their undocumented status in order to share their personal
stories with undecided senators and media outlets. Several times, Cecilia and I talked
about the courage of these young people, agreeing that at their age we could never
have managed such pressure.
“I just want to win so bad for them,” she told me.
And yet, despite the countless hours we spent in meetings and on the phone, the
likelihood of getting sixty votes for the DREAM Act began to look increasingly bleak.
One of our best prospects was Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from
Missouri. Claire was one of my early supporters and best friends in the Senate, a gifted
politician with a razor-sharp wit, a big heart, and not an ounce of hypocrisy or
pretension. But she also came from a conservative, Republican-leaning state and was a
juicy target for the GOP in its effort to wrest back control of the Senate.
“You know I want to help those kids, Mr. President,” Claire said when I reached her
by phone, “but the polling in Missouri is just terrible on anything related to
immigration. If I vote for this, there’s a good chance I lose my seat.”
I knew she wasn’t wrong. And if she lost, we might lose the Senate, along with any
possibility of ever getting the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform or
anything else passed. How was I to weigh that risk against the urgent fates of the
young people I’d met—the uncertainty and fear they were forced to live with every
single day, the possibility that with no notice any one of them might be rounded up in
an ICE raid, detained in a cell, and shipped off to a land that was as foreign to them as
it would be to me?
Before hanging up, Claire and I made a deal to help square the circle. “If your vote’s
the one that gets us to sixty,” I said, “then those kids are going to need you, Claire. But
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