"Washington, We Have A Problem" By Todd Purdum
At the hour of dawn, in the same southwest-corner, second-floor bedroom of the White House where Abraham Lincoln once slept, the president awakens. On this spring morning, a Wednesday, Barack Obama is alone; his wife, Michelle, is on her way to Mexico City on her first solo foreign trip. He heads upstairs for 45 minutes of weights and cardio in his personal gym, then puts on a dark suit and navy-blue pin-striped tie. Obama may be surrounded by servants morning till night, but not for him the daily drill of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was dressed by a valet, John Moaney, from inside out—underwear, socks, pants, shirt, tie, shoes, jacket—every morning.
After breakfast and a quick read of the papers, the president sees his daughters, Sasha and Malia, off to school. Then he enters the private, wood-paneled family elevator—installed in the same shaft used by Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin to bring his pet pony upstairs—perhaps taking a moment to straighten his tie in the mirrored back wall of the cab. He descends two stories, alights on the ground floor, just outside the White House kitchen, passes down a short, vaulted corridor and through a greenhouse-like antechamber known as the Palm Room, and walks along the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden and leads to the Oval Office. His 450th day in office has begun.
Keenan Mayo surveys the highs and lows of bipartisanship on the Hill.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They've all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama's presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the "news" by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today's Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
For much of the past half-century, the problems that have brought Washington to its current state have been concealed or made tolerable by other circumstances. The discipline of the Cold War kept certain kinds of debate within bounds. America's artificial "last one standing" postwar economy allowed the country to ignore obvious signs of political and social decay. Wars and other military interventions provided ample distraction from matters of substance at home. Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington's problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades—at a rate barely noticeable while it's happening—produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it's the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat's opinion will keep spinning with the wind.
The evidence that Washington cannot function—that it's "broken," as Vice President Joe Biden has said—is all around. For two years after Wall Street brought the country close to economic collapse, regulatory reform languished in partisan gridlock. A bipartisan commission to take on the federal deficit was scuttled by Republican fears in Congress that it could lead to higher taxes, and by Democratic worries about cuts to social programs. Obama was forced to create a mere advisory panel instead. Four years after Congress nearly passed a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws, the two parties in Washington are farther apart than ever, and hotheaded state legislatures have stepped into the breach. Guantánamo remains an open sore because of fearmongering about the transfer of prisoners to federal prisons on the mainland. What Americans perceive in Washington, as Obama put it in his State of the Union speech, in January, is a "perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side—a belief that if you lose, I win." His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose Friday-afternoon mantra has become "Only two more workdays till Monday!," sums up today's Washington in terms both coarser and more succinct. To him, Washington is just "Fucknutsville."
And so it is. But one can also ask: Even if Washington is broken, is it still partly usable? Is there a way to play the Washington game—on its own ugly terms, and even to play it ferociously, because you have to—and yet transcend the game in some fundamental way? This is the central question of the Obama administration, as its senior officials are well aware—because, in countless ways, their boss has told them so. They all talk candidly about that question, which remains unanswered. But a day in the president's shoes offers a glimpse of the size of the challenge.
Management by Caffeine
In the White House, every day feels like a week. This particular Wednesday is no exception. The West Wing that Obama walks into is an accident of architecture, originally meant to be a temporary office structure that could relieve pressure on the crowded White House residence until something more suitable was arranged. Successive presidents have simply crammed more and more offices into the same crowded footprint. An average corporate law firm has much more space and looks a lot more lush. It was William Howard Taft who first made the president's office oval, in 1909. But it was not until 1934 that Franklin D. Roosevelt added a second story to the West Wing and rebuilt the Oval Office in the sunnier southeast corner, closer to the residence, allowing him to roll comfortably in his wheelchair along the covered colonnade and through a side door into the office. The room has an 18-foot ceiling and is 35 feet long, yet it seems compact, even cozy. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, once described it as the "single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world."
When Obama arrives in the office this morning, just before 9:30, the first item on his agenda, as always, is a meeting with his chief of staff for a quick rundown of the coming day: "three minutes, four minutes, five minutes—whatever it takes, but you've got to make it quick," Rahm Emanuel says. On its face, the imbalance between time and task is absurd: three, four, five minutes, to sum up the world. Emanuel himself has been up since 5:15, and in his office since before 7:30, when he holds his first meeting with the rest of the senior staff, followed by a second one with the "expanded" staff and the legislative liaisons.
Washington is hard to govern, above all, because of the radical growth in the scope of the federal government's responsibilities—it's an obvious fact, but it's where explanations must begin. On the eve of World War II, F.D.R. had six high-level aides who carried the title "administrative assistant to the president." Harry Truman, after the war, had 12 of them: they met every morning in a semicircle around his desk. There are now upwards of 100 people who have some variation on "assistant to the president" in their titles. The sheer number of things the executive branch is responsible for just keeps expanding; the time available to think about any one of them therefore keeps shrinking. This is not just a management issue, it's a stakeholder issue: every special interest in the country is working zealously to keep what it has, or to get something better. Emanuel, who was a top White House aide through most of the Clinton years, thought the pace was bad back then. It's much worse now. "Leon thinks it's a huge problem," he says, referring to Bill Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who is now Obama's C.I.A. director. "He says that this is a highly caffeinated speed."
On this Wednesday, Obama is dealing with the aftermath of a West Virginia coal-mine tragedy, with a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and with the prospect of a new law in Arizona that will give local law-enforcement officers the right to demand identification from anyone they happen to think may be in the country illegally. He is confronting a shortage of disaster-relief funds at the Federal Emergency Management Agency—this, days before the oil-rig catastrophe occurs in the Gulf of Mexico—and later this morning, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. will testify before Congress about the administration's latest plans for trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other alleged 9/11 conspirators. Also today, the president will nominate a federal appeals-court judge, seven United States attorneys, and six federal marshals, and he will present Garth Brooks with a special "Grammys on the Hill" award for promoting the intellectual property rights of musicians. Tomorrow, Thursday, he will announce a new strategy for the space program; express condolences on the passing of the civil-rights leader Dr. Benjamin Hooks; order hospitals that participate in Medicare or Medicaid not to deny visitation rights on the basis of sexual orientation; release joint income-tax returns showing earnings with Michelle of $5.5 million (most of it from his best-selling books); and travel to Florida for two evening fund-raisers on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.
"There's a relentlessness to this that's unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis," says Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod, referring to the threat of terrorist attacks, the Wall Street implosion, and the nationwide recession. "We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person can create an event so quickly from one computer terminal."
Obama's first formal meeting of the day, at 9:30, is the daily intelligence briefing with Vice President Biden and the national-security team. By the time it starts, Obama has already read the overnight binder containing the President's Daily Brief, or "P.D.B.," the highly classified summary of the latest analyses from some 16 intelligence agencies across the government, together with published reports, gossip, and tidbits from the world press. (It was the P.D.B. of August 6, 2001, that ominously warned George W. Bush, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.") Each morning the national-security aides arrive in black S.U.V.'s from around the capital, or on foot from offices in the warrens of the West Wing—among them, the director of national intelligence (at the time, Admiral Dennis Blair); the national-security adviser, General James Jones; and the senior adviser for counterterrorism, John Brennan. (Of course, national security doesn't wait for a 9:30 meeting. "I mean, I've gotten a lot of John Brennan's crap in the middle of—two in the morning," Emanuel says.) Each member of the team has already received his own intelligence briefing, and they say the impact is hard to convey. "It's the constancy of it, the constantly new information coming in, the constant stream of threats," says Denis McDonough, the chief of staff to the N.S.C. and one of Obama's key foreign-policy advisers since the campaign.
Today, the intelligence briefing is followed by an economic briefing. Because of the economic crisis, Obama has scheduled one of these almost every day since taking office. The meeting is led by the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, and the head of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers. This morning, there is new data showing that the number of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages, even after getting cheaper terms through a special government program, nearly doubled in March. Later in the day the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, will tell the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the government has to make "difficult choices" to address the mounting federal deficit. Toyota, meanwhile, has just suspended sales of its 2010 Lexus GX 460 S.U.V. after Consumer Reports discovered a risk of rollovers. But there's some good news, too: the gross domestic product was up 5.6 percent in last year's fourth quarter, and up 3 percent in the quarter just ending, and strong corporate-earnings reports will today help push the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index above 1,200 points for the first time since the beginning of the financial crisis. Larry Summers served as Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary in the last 18 months of his presidency, and like Emanuel he looks back on those days as almost pastoral by comparison. "It used to be there was a kind of rhythm to the day," he says, with the tempo picking up after the markets closed and newspaper deadlines approached, between four and seven p.m. "That's gone."
After the economic briefing, Geithner stays behind at the White House. He's needed at the meeting that comes next.
Just Say No
Shortly before 11 a.m., the congressional leadership from both parties arrives for a session with the president on financial-reform legislation—legislation that has been stalled, thanks in part to a two-year, $600 million lobbying campaign by Wall Street and the banking industry. The meeting is held in the Cabinet Room, where Harry Truman took the oath of office upon the death of F.D.R., 65 years ago this very week. Pelosi and Boehner and Reid and McConnell may be the heirs of historic congressional figures like Longworth and Rayburn, Taft and Dirksen, but they arrive at the White House representing a gravely diminished institution. Its approval rating stands at 23 percent, well below its 34 percent historical average. Congress sometimes seems nearly incapable of deliberative, sentient action. It's more accurate to see the institution simply as a thick membrane that must be negotiated by interest groups of various kinds. Some of those groups' wishes—a crucial comma here, a tiny clause there—will make it all the way through the membrane, protected by special-interest money. Some of the wishes won't.
Despite Obama's campaign pledge to end the partisan gridlock in Washington—and despite his early and dogged efforts to court congressional Republicans over cocktails at the White House—the G.O.P. has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep refusal to give the president votes for any of his major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus bill to health-care reform. This morning's meeting is yet another effort to reach agreement on bringing Wall Street's excesses to heel—setting up a new regulatory regime that could shut down troubled financial institutions in an orderly way, instead of offering them government bailouts because they are considered "too big to fail."
Inside the Cabinet Room the discussion is apparently contentious but civil enough, with both sides expressing willingness to keep talking. The scene at the "stakeout" in the West Wing driveway, moments later, will be altogether different. The Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and the House minority leader, John Boehner, of Ohio, sharply denounce the pending bill, with McConnell characterizing it as certain to "lead to endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks." Oh, they insist that they want bipartisan action. But in the coming weeks McConnell's party will three times vote against even allowing debate on the matter to proceed in the Senate—all part of a deliberate strategy, openly articulated by McConnell, of forcing the G.O.P. to play "team ball" and vote no on everything Obama proposes, regardless of principle or conviction, in hopes of fielding a "bigger team" after this fall's midterm elections. Never mind that taxpayer bailouts are precisely what this bill is intended to avoid. The Republicans know—as one of their party's leading message and polling gurus, Frank Luntz, has advised them—that "big bank bailout" is a catchphrase guaranteed to spark public opposition. Never mind, too, that when Boehner says the bill will "protect the biggest banks in America and harm the smallest banks" he knows that this is untrue, and that in fact the biggest banks are all lobbying fiercely to block it, with Republican help.
It could be argued that the level of congressional discourse has gone steadily downhill since 1789. "My esteemed colleague" has often been polite code for "You son of a bitch." The sometimes cynical rules of engagement are well understood. Nearly 50 years ago, in the movie version of Allen Drury's novel Advise and Consent, one character tells a child to lie to a senator who has called to ask if he was home. "Son, this is a Washington, D.C., kind of lie—that's when the other person knows you're lying, and also knows you know he knows." But the partisan calumny and contempt in Washington are today all-consuming. When the Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill the unexpired Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy, not a single Republican senator bothered to come to the floor to hear the farewell speech of Kennedy's interim successor, Paul Kirk—as if to snub the very idea of friendships and alliances across the aisle that Kennedy himself had nurtured. Democrats and Republicans in Congress now vote against one another more regularly than at any time since Reconstruction.
There are many reasons for the condition of Congress, starting with profound demographic and political shifts since the 1960s that have spelled, for all effective purposes, the death of southern conservative Democrats (who, post—civil rights, were steadily replaced by newly converted Republicans) and the demise of northeastern liberal Republicans (who, post-Watergate and post-Reagan, were steadily replaced by Democrats). Without the internal partisan divisions that forced members to seek allies from the other party, there is no incentive for Republicans and Democrats to work with one another on anything.
Another structural factor is decennial re-districting, which is controlled overwhelmingly by hyper-partisan state legislatures. This incumbent-protection plan, engineered with the help of deft consultants wielding data on voting patterns down to the block level, has done its best to ensure that the 435 House districts get redder and redder or bluer and bluer. In any typical election there are perhaps only 50 House seats truly in play (and deaths and retirements account for some of these). The big worry is not a threat from the other party but a primary challenge from the extreme fringe of your own party—that is, from someone who doesn't think you're red enough or blue enough. As a result, the basic mechanics of the electoral process act to harden ideology and to punish statesmanship. This spring, Senator Robert Bennett, of Utah—as reliable a conservative as ever trod the Capitol's corridors—was denied renomination by his home-state Republicans because he had dared to propose a bipartisan market-based health-insurance reform bill and had voted for the Bush administration's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Rahm Emanuel believes that Ronald Reagan himself would today be denied the Republican presidential nomination, because he raised taxes as governor of California.
And then there is the filibuster. In its original form, the filibuster—whereby a senator takes the floor and just keeps on talking—could prolong debate indefinitely. For many Americans, its most memorable fictional use comes in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, when Jimmy Stewart's idealistic young senator stays on his feet until he passes out, to protest a corrupt land deal; in real life, its most memorable 20th-century use was by southerners who sought to block civil-rights legislation. Woodrow Wilson persuaded the Senate in 1917 to let a two-thirds vote for "cloture" bring debates to an end. In 1975, this was amended to three-fifths, or 60 votes in the current Senate of 100 members. Perversely, as the filibuster has become theoretically easier to break, it has been threatened more and more often, simply because the minority party wants to bring business to a halt. In the years since the Republicans were relegated to minority status in the Senate, in 2007, cloture filings, which are often used in response to filibuster threats, have nearly doubled. Because 60 votes are now needed to pass almost anything of significance, this gives wildly disproportionate power to a small number of senators whose swing vote can make the crucial difference. Hence the administration's desperate—and, ultimately, vain—effort to win the support of Republican senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, in order to give the health-care bill a veneer of bipartisanship, or the initial decision (later rescinded) to grant Nebraska $100 million in Medicaid benefits in exchange for the support of conservative Democratic senator Ben Nelson.
Rahm Emanuel recalls that, as a White House aide early in the Clinton administration, he and others compiled a joke binder, full of real and imagined inducements—battleships, bridges, buildings, whatever—that could be offered to members of Congress in exchange for their support of Clinton's effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. They titled it "1-800-NAFTA ('Cause you hafta)," and when he showed it to Clinton in a meeting one day, the president roared with laughter but ordered it destroyed, lest it fall into unfriendly hands or leak to the press. In the health-care debate, Emanuel notes, everybody was asking for Obama "to become Lyndon Johnson" and twist arms. "If we ever did even attempt to do a third of what Lyndon Johnson did—or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton—we couldn't do it." Indeed, Emanuel says, such efforts would probably have prompted not just unflattering stories but a special prosecutor.
There is a further problem with Congress, a big one. The country's anti-Washington mood is so strong—and the need to constantly raise money and tend fences for the next election so urgent—that hardly anyone in Congress knows anyone else. Fifty years ago, Congress met for only about nine months a year. During those months, though, the spouses and children of most members lived full-time in Washington. Members formed not just a legislature but something very like a club, with bipartisan twilight softball games on the Capitol grounds, weekend cocktail parties in one another's houses, and long end-of-session car-pool trips back to their home states. Now Congress meets year-round, but sometimes for only three days a week. Families and children stay back home. When his Republicans took over Congress, in 1994, Newt Gingrich urged the newly elected members not to move their families to Washington but to keep them at home in their districts and commute, lest they become polluted by the capital's cozy culture. Young Turk members sleep on their office couches and barely know the colleagues in their own caucuses, much less those on the other side of the aisle. I heard a vivid example of the legacy of Gingrich's advice this spring. A fellow parent at our children's school is chief of staff to a Republican congressman from the Sunbelt. The congressman did not move his family here, and sleeps in his office in the Cannon House Office Building. Except for his neighbors on either side of his own office, and the Republican members of his home-state delegation, he doesn't really know or socialize with any other members. He has been in Congress for eight years.
The Scarlet L
Rahm Emanuel tells a story. The time is last December, when the White House was juggling an agenda that included the Afghanistan troop surge, the health-care bill, the climate talks in Copenhagen, and Obama's acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize that threatened to do him more political harm than good—one issue on top of another. It got to the point where Obama and Emanuel would joke that, when it was all over, they were going to open a T-shirt stand on a beach in Hawaii. It would face the ocean and sell only one color and one size. "We didn't want to make another decision, or choice, or judgment," Emanuel told me. They took to beginning staff meetings with Obama smiling at Emanuel and simply saying "White," and Emanuel nodding back and replying "Medium."
Juggling is the nature of the presidency—that's why John McCain endured ridicule when he decided to "suspend" his campaign in order, he said, to pay attention to the economic crisis. The sheer size of government makes juggling a fact of life—and, to some extent, an impossibility. Balls are dropping all the time. But even more debilitating is what size gives rise to. The reach of government may touch every cranny of national life, but those in the crannies can also reach back and touch the government, seeking favor and preferment.
The Federal Register is published every working day and contains the text of new government regulations, presidential decrees, administrative orders, and proposed rules and public notices. The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you'll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items. You can think of the Federal Register as the official record of federal activity in all its range. You can also think of it as the daily report card of the lobbying industry, whose interests and resources underlie nearly every line of type. There is hardly a large private company in the country not dependent on some kind of government contract, and hardly a business of any size that is not subject to some kind of government oversight. And don't forget foreign countries, which have their own dealings with the United States. The press may claim the vestigial title of Fourth Estate, but it is the lobbying industry that is now effectively the fourth branch of government. On this Wednesday, in fact, important representatives of that fourth branch, from the nuclear-power industry, have a meeting in the early afternoon with Vice President Biden.
Lobbyists had their biggest year ever in 2009, with expenditures of $3.5 billion, or $1.3 million for each hour that Congress was in session, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The total number of officially registered lobbyists in Washington is now about 11,000, down from a peak of nearly 15,000 in 2007, due in part to new restrictions. But that number doesn't come close to reflecting reality. Current law requires someone to "register" as a lobbyist only if he or she spends at least 20 percent of the time lobbying. And yet much of the real work of lobbying is not done by registered lobbyists at all but by the rainmaker lawyers and former politicians, like Vernon Jordan and Tom Daschle, who "counsel" private-sector companies on how to thread the needle and achieve their objectives. If you throw in all the people doing "government outreach" and "congressional liaison" at the countless trade associations and advocacy groups, the total number of people in Washington working to influence the government in one way or another actually runs closer to 90,000. There were 2,500 registered lobbyists working on financial-industry reform—mainly against it—or roughly five for each member of Congress. The biggest single lobbying effort last year was mounted by the United States Chamber of Commerce (an opponent of much, if not most, of Obama's agenda), which by itself shelled out $144 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That's more than the total annual payroll for every elected official in Congress. The mismatch in firepower is immense. The lobbyists have so much, and members of Congress can be swayed by so little. Former senator John Breaux, of Louisiana, an unabashed deal-maker, once declared that while his vote could not be bought it could occasionally be rented. He is now a lobbyist.
The profusion of lobbyists in Washington has posed a problem for every president. It has been a particular problem for Obama, both because of his high-minded and only partly successful effort to diminish their influence (having raised expectations, he left himself open to charges of hypocrisy), and because of their success at delaying and watering down his agenda. Upon taking office, Obama imposed what were arguably the toughest lobbying restrictions of any president, issuing an order barring executive-branch employees who had served as registered lobbyists within the past two years from working on issues related to their lobby. But Obama soon found himself forced to grant waivers to this policy, in order to obtain the expertise of people who had once worn the Scarlet L. More than 50 officials in the administration, including three Cabinet members (the attorney general and the secretaries of agriculture and health and human services), have been lobbyists at one time or another.
Lobbying gets results. One example: early in the health-care debate, the administration cut a deal with the pharmaceutical lobby (whose opposition had helped doom the Clinton health-care plan 15 years earlier), working out an agreement to reduce prescription-drug costs and promising not to push for re-importation of cheaper, F.D.A.-approved drugs from other countries, which Obama had supported in his campaign. As part of the deal, the PHRMA lobby spent as much as $150 million on advertising to support health-care reform. Another example: under pressure from union leaders, the administration scaled back efforts to tax so-called "Cadillac" health-insurance plans, which many union members have—a tax that some economists saw as an effective way to help finance the bill and rein in costs by discouraging excessive coverage.
Lobbying is as old as the Republic, but the magnitude of the modern industry—and its effect on practical politics—is without precedent. In his book So Damn Much Money, about lobbying, Robert G. Kaiser tells the story of John C. Stennis, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who in a tough race nearly 30 years ago was advised to raise campaign funds by seeking donations from defense contractors. "Would that be proper?," Stennis asked. The sentiment seems quaint. In the 1974 congressional elections, total spending on Senate and House races came to only $77 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, by 2008 the figure was $1.36 billion, with lobbyists providing a significant amount. Groups such as the National Rifle Association exercise a veto power over many legislators, both because of what they can provide (money) and what they can withhold (approval). Dick Cheney's secret "energy task force," which set the Bush administration's energy and environmental policies, famously met with oil-industry representatives. Organizations you've never heard of wield far more influence in the capillaries of the bureaucracy than any elected official. Federal law prohibits members of Congress from "corruptly" seeking or accepting money or anything of value for any official act. The law does not define "corruptly," but no less qualified an ethicist than Jack Abramoff himself was once heard to say that he had participated in a system of "legalized bribery."
A lobbyist friend of mine—who previously worked on the staffs of two Senate Republicans—recently, and ruefully, summed up how the system now works. My friend represents a Fortune 500 company with employees in a newly elected Democratic senator's state. He had been trying to schedule an office visit through official channels for months with the senator and his client, to no avail. Finally, my friend reached out to the senator's chief fund-raiser, pledging that his client's PAC intended to contribute the legal maximum to the senator's campaign, and requesting to be placed on the senator's fund-raising invitation list. He was stunned the following morning to be interrupted by a call from the senator, expressing a heartfelt wish to get to know his client better.
Talking Heads
At 1:32 p.m. on this Wednesday, in the cramped, blue-carpeted room that is built above what was once F.D.R.'s swimming pool—and, before that, William Howard Taft's laundry room and James Monroe's stables—there begins one of the most perverse rituals of the modern White House: the daily press briefing.
Just 50 years ago, at the dawn of the New Frontier, the face that Washington presented to the world was still black-and-white, and news was dispensed in calibrated daily dollops separated by something called deadlines. White House reporters lounged on a beaten-up suite of leather sofas in a crowded lobby in the West Wing. But 1960 was also the year that everything began to change, the year when a charismatic young senator running for president with a comparatively scant legislative record sounded worse on radio but looked better on television than his rival, and won the White House. John F. Kennedy began allowing live television broadcasts of his presidential news conferences, and nothing was ever the same again.
Now, thanks to cable, the Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, there is no such thing as a "news cycle" in Washington—only one endless, undifferentiated full-color stream of fact, opinion, and attitudinizing, where lies and misinformation flourish equally with truth. It used to be that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day's events. The pace of events has picked up, sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite, and subject to little responsible control. The White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, still has a BlackBerry alert to tell him when The Washington Post and The New York Times have gone live online with their next day's stories, but this is almost an antique holdover, given that any blogger at any moment can generate a story that forces the White House to respond. "What they teach you on the first day of press-secretary school is to worry about blowing something up by giving attention to it," Pfeiffer told me this spring. "'Don't blow something up!'" But today, he says, there's no choice—the story will get blown up anyway, and you simply have to respond.
On this Wednesday afternoon, the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, whose default style is pastel ties and sardonic asides, is briefly joined by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who makes an upbeat pitch for regulatory overhaul of the financial sector. Then Gibbs gets into his latest round of give-and-take with the White House reporters. They want to know about the president's meeting with congressional leaders—and, especially, about the Republicans' complaints afterward. "I've got to tell you," Gibbs says, "the readout you got was several hundred degrees on the oven hotter than what it was in the room." The president, he adds, repeatedly made the point that the Senate banking committee chairman, Chris Dodd, had patiently negotiated with his Republican counterparts—first Richard Shelby, of Alabama, then Bob Corker, of Tennessee—but had been unable to make a deal. "A lot of Republicans get to church; very few of them have made it to the altar," Gibbs concludes. At that, a burst of questions comes at once.
"What did McConnell say in response to that?" one reporter demands.
"What does that mean?" asks another.
"What does that mean—yeah?" asks a third.
"It's a fun little—but what do you mean by that?" wonders a fourth.
Gibbs is unruffled. "The question is whether or not Republicans, quite frankly, are going to be willing to accept some of the strong measures that might put them at odds with some of their campaign contributors." A few minutes later, another reporter wants to know who is on the short list for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens.
"Currently on the list—women? Minorities? Men—I mean, we know men, probably, but women and …? "
Gibbs interrupts, deadpan. "I can say—I can narrow it down to both men and women, yes."
Tensions run high these days between Gibbs and the unruly, easily distracted classroom he seeks to manage. Bill Clinton's press secretary Mike McCurry used to say of the White House press corps, "When one crow flies off the wire, they all do," and Gibbs talks, with hard-won disdain, about the flash of serial news events and reportorial enthusiasms as "a thousand bright shiny objects." For their part, reporters complain about a range of slights, from lack of opportunity for questions at the president's meetings with foreign leaders to too many restrictions on photographers, to the paucity of full-dress East Room news conferences. These complaints are not entirely without merit—Bill Clinton held 252 informal Q&A sessions with reporters in his first year in office and George W. Bush held 147; Obama had just 47, according to a study by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University. But Obama did more than three times as many individual interviews with reporters—161. Clinton and Bush did about 50 each.
It's easy to see why Obama wants to pick his own shots. He faces the most hyperkinetic, souped-up, tricked-out, trivialized, and combative media environment any president has ever experienced. The long-building trend toward coverage of the presidency and politics as pure sport has reached absurd levels. Obama makes fun of this, as he did in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, when he displayed a series of mock headlines, summing up how Politico might have covered great debates of the past, including this one: LINCOLN SAVES UNION, BUT CAN HE SAVE HOUSE MAJORITY? As images flashed on giant screens in the Washington Hilton ballroom, Obama added, "I don't know if you can see, there's a little portion there. 'He's lost the southern white vote.' It's an astute analysis." The nomenclature of the reigning political chatfests and tip sheets says it all: Hardball, Playbook, The Daily Rundown. Forget Congressional Quarterly. It's the Daily Racing Form. "The whole town is kind of in the thrall, in the grips, of A.D.D.," David Axelrod says. "It's hard to keep anyone's attention focused on anything, and everything is judged through the prism of what this means for the election next November."
There are a thousand thumbnail sketches that could sum up the changes that have taken place in Washington journalism in the past 50 years. Some of them have to do with the sheer pace of events. When the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall, in 1961, it was a full 43 hours before the matter was addressed at a White House press conference—nothing out of the ordinary then, but preposterous now. It used to be that news organizations didn't put themselves at the center of the story, as if their own minute-to-minute existence were as significant as anything being reported. Today The New York Times produces a daily Webcast that until recently included video of its morning editors' conference, in which upcoming stories are discussed. Or consider the basic matter of who is doing the reporting. On November 22, 1963, the dean of the White House press corps was Merriman Smith, of United Press International, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of J.F.K.'s assassination. But the motorcade in Dallas was not Smith's first big story; 18 years earlier, he had covered the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Warm Springs, Georgia, and when Harry S. Truman announced the end of World War II in Europe, Smith rushed so quickly for the phone that he slipped, fell, broke his collarbone, and still managed to file a "flash." In 1993, at the start of the Clinton administration, The New York Times's White House team consisted of Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Gwen Ifill, Richard Berke, and the late Michael Kelly, each of whom had covered politics or foreign policy at high levels for years, and each of whom went on to be either an op-ed columnist or top editor at one outlet or another. Today the briefing room is filled with correspondents for whom the White House is their first big assignment. The life experiences—and thus the sense of perspective, history, and balance—of today's Washington reporters are qualitatively different from those of their predecessors. An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart—if not smart-alecky—young thing.
Journalists who should know better ask the damnedest questions, simply to get a rise, as when The New York Times's otherwise estimable Peter Baker last year asked Obama, with a straight face, if he was a socialist—only to get the obvious denial, plus a follow-up phone call from the president, saying he couldn't believe the question was "entirely serious." Or when George Stephanopoulos, who knows more than most journalists about the trivialities and realities of politics, asked Obama to respond to Sarah Palin's critique of his nuclear-policy review as a "Go ahead, punch me in the face!" posture, only to have Obama say, "Last I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues."
Even the once staid Associated Press, still the world's largest newsgathering organization, has gotten into the act. On the day Obama unveiled his $3.6 trillion budget, last year, this was the very first question, after an aside about Obama's St. Patrick's Day plans, at the daily press briefing, from the A.P.'s chief White House correspondent, Jennifer Loven: "I was interested in the language the president used this morning when he talked about the budget. He said, 'There are times when you can afford to redecorate your house, and there are times when you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation.' Quickly, is there any—should there be any pause taken in those words? The Obamas have hired a decorator to redecorate the White House. Do you think that's appropriate?" Robert Gibbs noted that Congress gives each new administration an appropriation for adapting the White House to suit its needs, and added that he could not remember the last time young children had been in residence. (As it happens, the Obamas paid for the remodeling of the private quarters out of their own pockets.)
"You can't get the genie back in the bottle on modern communications," David Axelrod concedes. The world is so constantly with us that the White House press office no longer even tries to hold a daily morning "gaggle," when beat reporters used to ask press secretaries about the expected news of the day, because it will almost certainly be overtaken by events. Similarly, while the press office declares a "full lid," which means that the White House has no more public statements, announcements, nominations, or activities—short of war or civil emergency—it can never be sure it will stick. "We live in a world where there are so many news cycles that there isn't a news cycle anymore," Pfeiffer says. Though the staff says the president is done with public activities for the day, such closure is meaningless. If Sarah Palin updates her Facebook page with an attack on the president, the White House will be deluged with requests for comment.
Perhaps the biggest change that technology has wrought is the ability of almost any rumor to get a foothold in the public discussion and go viral in the broader media. I vividly remember when the mere citation of the Drudge Report by a journalist in a White House briefing was enough to make Mike McCurry ask if the offending reporter was sure—really sure—that he or she wanted to sully the august precincts of the West Wing with a question based on such a source. When I remind Gibbs of this, he just sighs. "No, there's no source of news I could imagine saying that about now." You may not want to react, he adds, "but because everyone chases it and everybody starts sprinting in that direction, you have to." The day after the White House press briefing with Geithner, an idle musing by a low-level Republican aide in the Bush administration, writing on CBS.com, to the effect that Obama's solicitor general (and soon-to-be Supreme Court nominee), Elena Kagan, was gay, exploded into a small firestorm, prompting the White House to issue an unusual denial and to demand that CBS remove the item, which it did.
The viral communities of the Internet make outright falsehoods nearly impossible to extinguish. Was Obama born in Kenya? Of course not, and his campaign put his "certification of live birth," from Hawaii, confirmed as authentic by the state's registrar of vital statistics, up on the Internet for all to see. And yet a recent New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that 20 percent of Americans believe Obama was born in another country, and that another quarter aren't sure he was American-born. The mainstream media have published lengthy reports that, by any objective standard, should have thoroughly refuted the idea that Obama is a Muslim, or was educated in a madrassa, or favors the creation of "death panels" to ration end-of-life care. It doesn't matter. A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is "doing many of the things that Hitler did," and 24 percent believe that Obama actually "may be the anti-Christ"). Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: "Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media," she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of "objectivity," most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is. At least one news organization—Fox News—is waging a fiercely partisan war against the administration. When Obama flew to Prague this spring to sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, continuing a process put in place by Ronald Reagan, the Fox News midday anchor, Megyn Kelly, took note of the trip as she cut to a commercial break, then added, "Now critics are asking, Will the new deal leave the U.S. defenseless until it's too late?" Kelly's face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by grainy black-and-white footage of an exploding nuclear bomb.
Right Rabbits, Wrong Rabbits
Obama's last public meeting of the day, at 4:15 p.m., is with Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has just come over from the State Department—alone, as usual—after meetings with the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and with former senator George Mitchell, Obama's special Middle East envoy. Clinton has been to the West Wing once already today, for a so-called principals' meeting of the National Security Council, in the basement Situation Room. Obama's successful working relationship with his secretary of state may say more than anything else about a determination to press back against the prevailing culture of Fucknutsville. Clinton and Obama were the bitterest of rivals in a long primary campaign. Obama seldom passed up a chance to look askance at Bill Clinton's mastery of the inside game, or his settling for limited policy objectives, in contrast with Ronald Reagan's transformative presidency. Many Obama and Clinton aides still can't stand one another. But Obama admires and respects Hillary Clinton, and there has been not a whiff of public discord or drama in their handling of an extraordinarily complicated set of foreign-policy challenges, from Israel to Iran to North Korea. The meeting this afternoon comes a day after Obama concluded a two-day nuclear summit—the largest gathering of world leaders summoned by an American president since the founding of the United Nations, in San Francisco, in 1945—at which he also met separately with the leaders of Turkey, Georgia, Argentina, the Netherlands, Chile, and Germany. At the White House press briefing a few hours ago, there was only one question about any of this.
The pace of the modern presidency—or, rather, the pace of modern life, as amplified by the media and by the impatience of the public for action of any kind—has the perverse effect of making the most measured of politicians seem out of sync, and the most visionary policies seem incremental and thus unsatisfying. By definition, it will take years for the result of changes in the nation's health-care system, or its energy policies or education policies—or anything else of note—to be fully in place, much less fully understood, much less proven effective. Anyone who risks taking on the toughest problems automatically risks being seen as not having done enough about them to get any credit by the time the next news cycle, or election cycle, rolls around. It's a conundrum that vexes any president: there's no short-term gain for long-term wisdom.
Obama has been faulted for not focusing enough on the economy, for making the stimulus bill too small (by some Democrats) or too big and pork-laden (by most Republicans). He was criticized for taking on health care in the midst of grave economic troubles, and for not taking on immigration in the midst of the same economic crisis. Then he was forced to confront immigration in the midst of debate over financial regulatory reform and the turmoil over the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. His liberal allies complain that he has been too slow to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military; conservatives say he has moved too quickly. On the night he made his State of the Union speech, last winter, the pre-game commentators agreed he should pivot from the prevailing legislative debate of the day—that is, health care, seen as a lost cause—to focus on the economy, then complained when the speech was over that it had taken him more than half an hour to address health care at all. Obama's advisers concede that prioritizing has not been easy. "It's a little bit like the shooting gallery at the arcade," Axelrod says. "It's hard to tell which rabbits are real and which aren't. You have to have the discipline of not shooting at the wrong rabbits."
Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can't wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they're doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them. The president's chief pollster, Joel Benenson, says that news organizations, academic institutions, and think tanks now do so much polling, and so often, that it has actually become hard to track significant changes in public opinion, which take time to develop. Obama's approval rating has hovered around 50 percent for the better part of a year, but every momentary blip becomes a pointless news item. "If I went online to Pollster .com and read off all the approval ratings for the past week, how could I tell you which one was right and which one was wrong?," Benenson asks. "There are too many, with too many disparate methodologies—it's impossible to discern."
As Secretary Clinton leaves the Oval Office this afternoon, Obama's chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, is going in, to talk about the president's upcoming commencement address at the University of Michigan. Favreau's baptism in political life came during the John Kerry presidential campaign, when he witnessed firsthand the "Swift-boating" attacks on Kerry's war record. In his Michigan speech, Obama will urge graduates to keep democracy alive and vital, and to search out, and be open to, viewpoints different from their own—as long as those viewpoints derive from a common base of fact. It is the kind of message many presidents might deliver in a commencement speech. And yet, far more than most politicians, Obama seems not only to believe in the approach but to have acted on it, too. "You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it," he will say at Michigan. "You can question somebody's views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism. Throwing around phrases like 'socialists' and 'Soviet-style takeover' and 'Fascist' and 'right-wing nut' may grab headlines," but it "closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation."
Is Washington Broken?
Each evening, before Obama leaves the West Wing, he has a three- or four-minute "wrap" meeting with Rahm Emanuel. The president returns to the residence by 6 or 6:30 p.m. By 8:30 or so, senior White House aides know they can begin expecting e-mails or telephone calls from the president, who reads and works late into the night in his upstairs office in the Treaty Room, adjacent to the Lincoln Bedroom. The one part of the evening that is sacrosanct, if the president is in town, is dinner with his wife and daughters. Even as the president's travel schedule picks up, in anticipation of the midterm elections, aides told me, he intends to be home for dinner as often as possible. "He had a father who had abandoned him," Valerie Jarrett says, and "he always wanted to be a present and involved father." Every night that he is home, he eats with his family in the upstairs dining room. It's a rare moment of perspective. "When the girls come to the dinner table and they talk about their day," Jarrett says, "it has nothing to do with the START treaty or health care. They're not really that interested in his day, because they're kids. They want him to focus on their day."
Valerie Jarrett's remark touches on something fundamental about this White House, and about the overarching question: Is our government dysfunctional beyond repair? Part of the answer may be that it depends on whom and what you pay attention to—your day or their day, the Washington game or some larger, all-American game. There's little doubt that the Washington game is more complicated, and lethal, than ever, and it's increasingly difficult to play and win only by its conventional rules. Everyone in the White House makes this point in one way or another, and yet on some level everyone has to deal with this conventional reality. They all work punishing hours, because the entire executive branch funnels through the White House. They tolerate, cultivate, and accommodate special interests of all kinds—at once using and being used. They handle congressional prima donnas of every conceivable shade, and make backroom deals they're not proud of. They manage the press—or try to, in the shortsighted way that the press itself demands—and thus contribute to the spiral of triviality. They acknowledge all of this frankly and, by and large, without whining, as if these are simply things that must be done, and, yes, it's all worse than ever, and that's life. Sometimes, too, they get completely caught up in it. Rahm Emanuel—describing how the administration had managed the Afghan surge, which deeply divided Democrats at the very time it was counting solely on Democratic votes to get the health-care bill through the Senate, without either effort derailing the other—works himself into the ultimate insider's amazement that "not one journalist out of 150" in "this entire fucking town" took note of the White House's skill. "Nobody put two and two together," he goes on. "Sometimes I feel like I'm painting by dots around here."
But there's another way of operating. It's Obama's conviction—you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top—that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn't aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. "You can do your job well," as Axelrod puts it. "You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, 'He had a vision that made sense, and he didn't play by the crazy rules of that game.'" In this view it doesn't matter so much whether polls show the public hated the stimulus plan. What matters is that it saved jobs and helped get the economy going again. It doesn't matter so much that the public is skeptical about health-care reform. What matters is that people start getting access to better options.
Obama has suffered for his patience, but he has profited from it, too, and whatever you think of his policies, his conduct of the presidency may be an object lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age. From the day he declared his candidacy, the press—and, by extension, much of the Washington insider culture—has underestimated him, and that trend has continued in office. A New Yorker article, published just one week before the passage of the health-care bill, was titled "Obama's Lost Year." Dan Pfeiffer observes, "You're weak and stupid until the moment you either win or accomplish your goal, and then you're strong and brave. The difference between idiocy and genius is very short in this cycle." And yet, to a remarkable degree, Obama has been consistent in pursuing the agenda he said he would pursue. In a speech at Georgetown University in April 2009, he said that he would address health care, access to education, the rules governing the financial system, and energy. He has won passage of significant legislation on the first three—together with the $787 billion economic-stimulus package and a rescue of two of the three big automakers. Rahm Emanuel took pains to remind me that the health-care overhaul, which seemed to go on forever, in the end was passed in just a year.
As the disaster of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dragged on into the summer, with horrific and incalculable consequences for the environment and, perhaps, Obama's own political fortunes, his very steadiness—his sangfroid and equanimity in the face of the worst crises—became a subject of fevered agitation among the press and some critics in his own party, who accused him of failing to exploit the ultimate power of the presidency, its bully pulpit. But the moment that Obama responded to a suggestion from the Today program's Matt Lauer that he needed to "kick some butt" regarding the oil spill—by allowing that he was, indeed, doing his best to figure out "whose ass to kick"—he was denounced by some of those same critics as demeaning the dignity of the presidency.
"How do I put this?," Valerie Jarrett says, reflecting on a man she has known for nearly 20 years, someone who once said he hoped she'd protect him as a sister would. "He can care deeply about something, but not let it evoke an emotional reaction out of him. So, as much as he cared about getting health care passed, I never once heard him yell in the entire nine months. I have never heard him yell. I've actually never heard him raise his voice. I think when he's most angry he lowers his voice."
Obama goes to bed every night in a house where history has been made for more than 200 years. On the night the health-care bill achieved final passage in the House, Obama gathered more than 100 aides—senior and junior—in the West Wing to watch the vote, and then took them upstairs to the Yellow Oval Room of the residence, and the Truman Balcony off of it, to celebrate, allowing himself a rare martini. For the past 50 years and more, the Yellow Oval Room has functioned as a kind of front parlor for the First Family, the place where visiting heads of state are greeted and served drinks before descending the grand staircase to state dinners on the floor below. Before that, the room was F.D.R.'s study, the place where he mixed nightly cocktails at what he called "the children's hour," and took his dinners on trays with aides and friends. It was in this room that he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it was here that Obama ended what Axelrod called "the legislative Bataan Death March" of health-care reform.
At one point, Adam Frankel, a young speech-writer who has been with Obama since 2007, asked the president's body man, Reggie Love, if he could see the Lincoln Bedroom (which was actually Lincoln's office). "I can make that happen," Love replied, and a few minutes later Obama called out, "Who's up for the Lincoln Bedroom tour?" The president showed his staff the six-by-eight-foot rosewood bed (in which Lincoln almost certainly never slept) and the manuscript copy of the Gettysburg Address, and he ended the evening by warning them all not to get too excited: they were heroes for the moment, but would be dumb again soon enough. (Obama himself was out of sorts the next morning, complaining to Emanuel, "I never drink that late.")
"Near the end of the celebration," Valerie Jarrett recalls, "it must have been, I don't know, 1:30 in the morning—way past my bedtime. I said, 'So what are you ... how do you feel tonight?' I said, 'How does this compare with Election Night?'"
They were outside on the balcony and the temperature was about the same as it had been on Election Night. "And he said, 'Oh, there's no comparison.' He said, 'This is so much more important to me.' He said Election Night was just about—it was all about getting us to this night. We're actually doing something now."
Obama's gamble is that, if you look after the doing of the presidency, the selling of the presidency will look after itself. The short-term price may come in stalled poll numbers, electoral setbacks, and endless contradictory advice from the kibitzers. The payoff, if there is one, lies out on some future horizon. Obama may be right about this strategy, or he may be wrong. But it is the strategy he is following nonetheless.
Share This Article
