POLITICO e-book: Obama campaign roiled by conflict
By: Glenn Thrush
August 20, 2012 04:23 AM EDT President Barack Obama’s campaign team, celebrated four years ago for its exceptional cohesion and eyes-on-the-prize strategic focus, has been shadowed this time by a succession of political disagreements and personal rivalries that haunted the effort at the outset.
Second-guessing about personnel, strategy and tactics has been a dominant theme of the reelection effort, according to numerous current and former Obama advisers who were interviewed for “Obama’s Last Stand,” an e-book out Monday published in a collaboration between POLITICO and Random House.
The discord, these sources said, has on occasion flowed from Obama himself, who at repeated turns has made vocal his dissatisfaction with decisions made by his campaign team, with its messaging, with Vice President Joe Biden and with what Obama feared was clumsy coordination between his West Wing and reelection headquarters in Chicago.
The effort in Chicago, meanwhile, has been bedeviled by some of the drama Obama so deftly dodged in 2008 — including, at a critical point earlier this year, a spat that left senior operatives David Axelrod and Stephanie Cutter barely on speaking terms — and growing doubts about the effectiveness of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
(Also on POLITICO: Axelrod: Romney speaks 'pious nonsense')
The e-book, produced as part of a two-month reporting project that included interviews with two dozen current and former members of Obama’s team, illuminates how the mood and character of the 2012 reelection effort is flowing from the top — with Obama’s own personality and values shaping his campaign just as powerfully as he did four years ago.
This has produced a campaign being animated by one thing above all. It is not exclusively about hope and change anymore, words that seem like distant echoes even to Obama’s original loyalists — and to the president himself. It is not the solidarity of a hard-fought cause, often absent in this mostly joyless campaign. It is Obama’s own burning competitiveness, with his remorseless focus on beating Mitt Romney — an opponent he genuinely views with contempt and fears will be unfit to run the country.
Obama is sometimes portrayed as a reluctant warrior, sorry to see 2012 marked by so much partisan warfare but forced by circumstance to go along. But this perception is by most evidence untrue. In the interviews with current and former Obama aides, not one said he expressed any reservations about the negativity. He views it as a necessary part of campaigning, as a natural — if unpleasant — rotation of the cyclical political wheel.
Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.
“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”
Other passages of the book reveal:
• Obama personally dispatched senior West Wing aides to Chicago — led by David Plouffe and Pete Rouse — to better coordinate operations between the White House and Chicago. He was especially irritated by what he viewed as self-promotion by subordinates — and fumed that ad consultant Jim Margolis had appeared in a New York Times profile on Obama’s negative ad operation. Margolis sent a mea culpa to Obama and the staff, but Obama remained miffed.
The president’s less-than-stellar appraisal of his own team’s efforts has been a recurring motif of 2012.
In late May, what was intended as a clever campaign stunt — dispatching Axelrod to Boston to personally make the case against Romney on the steps of the State House — went awry.
As Axelrod was greeted by pro-Romney hecklers chanting “Axel-Fraud,” Obama was in the West Wing watching with growing disgust as the event unfolded on cable news. The scene, he scoffed to a nearby aide, was an ill-conceived “spectacle.”
“We aren’t going to do that kind of thing again, are we?” he asked peevishly, not a question but an order. Obama has no qualms about throwing a punch, his close intimates say, but can’t stand looking foolish when he does.
• Biden’s misstep, also in May, in announcing his approval of gay marriage — which forced Obama to do the same before he intended — caused greater disharmony in the White House than was reported at the time.
Biden blamed Campaign Manager Jim Messina for “throwing him under the bus” with the media during the gay-marriage flap — a charge that turned out to be untrue. In an emotional one-on-one meeting with Obama, Biden apologized profusely and said he’d been betrayed by Obama’s aides.
The president tried to calm him down, saying, “Look, Joe, there are people who want to divide us. You and I have to be on the same page from now on. You and I have to make sure that we don’t get divided.”
Plouffe and other West Wingers were even angrier that Biden had screwed up his boss’s carefully laid plans to announce his position before next month’s Charlotte convention — even as Biden previously had counseled against weighing in on the issue for fear of alienating battleground-state independents.
• As Team Obama was gearing up to face Romney after the GOP primaries, Axelrod and Cutter — close friends who oversee the campaign’s massive messaging and communications operations — clashed over a minor incident that left them barely on speaking terms during a critical early part of the campaign.
The spark, according to people close to the situation: Axelrod suspected Cutter of taking a network TV appearance he had been asked to do. The conflict, well-known inside Obamaland but not outside the inner circle — was really the reflection of a grinding campaign, Cutter’s propensity for stepping on toes, and Axelrod’s elliptical and disorganized management style.
But to many on the inside it reflected a dangerous divergence from the 2008 all-for-one ethos. The pair patched up their differences and coordinated an effective attack against Romney’s Bain Capital connections and his refusal to release a dozen years of tax returns — but subordinates found the tension unnerving.
• Many of Obama’s advisers have quietly begun questioning whether they should have picked Wasserman Schultz, an outspoken Florida congresswoman, as his DNC chairwoman. She has clashed with Chicago over her choice of staff and air-time on national TV shows — and they think she comes across as too partisan over the airwaves.
Obama’s brain trust secretly commissioned pollster David Binder to conduct an internal focus study of the popularity of top Obama campaign surrogates. Number one was former press secretary Robert Gibbs, followed by Cutter. Traveling press secretary Jen Psaki, who was added to a second study, was third. Axelrod, Plouffe and current White House press secretary Jay Carney were bunched in the middle. Wasserman Schultz ranked at the bottom.
Amid the challenges, Obama maintains confidence and is his campaign’s biggest cheerleader, exhorting downcast aides to buck up — he always knew they would “go into a barrel” at some point, he’d tell them. Still, he was concerned enough to privately order his top advisers to “tighten” things up, and fast.
It is Romney himself who provides a rallying point for both the candidate and his team.
Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”
Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.
The two things Obama fears most about a Romney victory: A 7-to-2 conservative Supreme Court within a few years. And the equally unbearable possibility, in his mind, that Romney will get to take a victory lap on an economic rebound Obama sees as just around the corner. “I’m not going to let him win … so that he can take credit when the economy turns around,” Obama said, according to an aide.
Obama has himself to blame for what has, arguably, been the greatest unforced error of his political career: his team’s failure to adequately form a strategy to deal with the avalanche of unregulated cash crashing down on him from GOP and Romney-allied super PACs.
Many on his team now regret not dispatching an aide of Plouffe’s stature to the cause in 2011, someone better equipped to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Karl Rove. People around Obama originally floated the idea of tapping Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker to run the effort, but Obama personally waved off aides who pestered him about it.
Obama still believes Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed the super PACs, poses a huge threat to representative democracy by equating the largesse of self-serving billionaires with free speech.
Axelrod agreed, but also saw a political benefit to the high-mindedness. He believed trashing the super PACs was a messaging winner for Obama — a stance vehemently opposed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Messina. “We’re going to lose this [f-ing] thing. Why don’t they get it?” Messina said of Axelrod and Obama.
By early 2012, the GOP super PAC floodgates had opened, and Obama reluctantly agreed to endorse a group friendly to his cause, Priorities USA Action.
But when Priorities’ founders — former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney — struggled to fund that group, Democrats close to Obama considered tapping Gibbs for the job. They quickly realized it could raise legal problems stemming from Gibbs’s paid work for the campaign. Gibbs would have said no anyway.
Even in the slog of a reelection, Obama’s aides tried to inject some of the 2008 spirit of innovation into the campaign, with varied success.
Bored with the traditional one-city format for national conventions, they briefly considered a groundbreaking plan to stage four nights of events in four cities in 2010. The plan turned out to be a logistical nightmare, and would have cost the party and networks millions more. It was quickly scrapped.
During secret Sunday Roosevelt Room meetings with his top political and White House advisers, Obama has expressed concerns that the enthusiasm gap between his 2008 and 2012 support could cost him the election. He often peppers participants with pointed questions about campaign metrics — he’s especially interested in gauges of base enthusiasm, including the latest reports on volunteer enrollment in swing states and college campuses.
Obama remains frustrated with the bickering by Hill Democrats. During a closed-door meeting in June, he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that Republicans were trying “to delegitimize me,” and implored them to put his own reelection over competing political priorities.
“Look, guys. I plan on winning this race,” he said, according to a person briefed on the interaction. “If I don’t win, then anything we say now doesn’t matter. I plan on winning this race. So let’s figure out how to win this race.”
Despite Obama’s all-in commitment to the campaign, there have been signs of strain. And people close to him detect, from time to time, a yearning for the high ground. It is most often reflected during his drafting of speeches — a therapeutic, clarifying exercise for a politician with a writer’s impulse to reconciling contradiction through narrative.
To give Obama a break from the relentless negativity of the campaign, friend and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett quietly set up a salon/dinner for Obama over the summer — which lasted more than two hours, a huge block of presidential time.
On hand were Jarrett’s friend and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Facebook billionaire and new New Republic Publisher Chris Hughes, and Apple executive Scott Forstall, who led the team that developed the iPhone.
One of the topics?
Civility and political discourse.
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