Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (20 page)

As Clinton had feared, Obama sleepwalked through the first debate and lost it to a pumped-up Mitt Romney. Obama won the second debate on October 16 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, but by then Clinton could no longer contain his resentment. Three days later, during a campaign event with Bruce Springsteen in Parma, Ohio, Clinton went completely off message, à la his notorious Harvey Weinstein interview, and said that Romney was correct that the American economy was “not fixed.”

Speaking off the cuff, Clinton reminded his Ohio audience of an incident that had occurred during the Hofstra debate. An undecided voter who had been chosen to ask Obama a question stood up, looked the president in the eye, and told him, “I had so much hope four years ago and I don’t now.” Then Clinton added this wicked kicker: “I thought [Obama] was going to cry because he knows that [the economy is] not fixed.”

When they heard about Clinton’s demeaning remark, which was tantamount to calling the president a failure and a wimp, David Plouffe and the other members of Obama’s campaign team gritted their teeth but refrained from saying anything in public.

There was a consensus among political observers that Obama won the third and final debate, which focused on foreign policy. Though Romney turned in a creditable performance, it wasn’t enough to overcome Obama’s decisive advantage in demographics (Hispanics, blacks, young people, and single women all went for Obama by huge margins) and Obama’s brilliant analytics-driven campaign. On election day, Obama won virtually all the
hotly contested states—New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Florida, and Michigan—and piled up a hundred-vote margin in the electoral college.

As far as Bill Clinton was concerned, the victory was as much his as it was Barack Obama’s. “Obama would never have won if it hadn’t been for my convention speech,” Clinton told friends. After the votes were tallied, Obama phoned Clinton and thanked him. However, when Obama gave a victory speech at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, Bill Clinton’s name was conspicuously missing among the people he thanked. The Obamans clearly hadn’t forgotten Clinton’s many slights.

Clinton was stunned by the omission.

“Obama believes he pulled off this whole damn thing by himself,” he complained to Hillary. “He sounds like he’s already suffering from a case of second-term-itis.”

Bill Clinton wasn’t the only one who thought Obama was predisposed to “second-term-itis.” On the day after the election, the author John Steele Gordon wrote an op-ed piece for the
Wall Street Journal
titled “The Peril of Second Terms.”

“Barack Obama brings to 16 the number of presidents elected to a second term,” Gordon wrote. “Mr. Obama would be well advised to consider the history of these second terms. Its message is to beware of interpreting re-election as an invitation to overreach. The considerable majority of second terms were far less successful than the first. Some were disastrous.”

As Gordon pointed out, history teaches a sobering lesson: most second-term presidents become mired in war, scandal, or strife with Capitol Hill. But Barack Obama wasn’t a serious student of history; his reading ran to popular fiction and detective novels. And given his rampant narcissism—during a eulogy he delivered at the funeral of Senator Daniel Inouye, Obama said “I” thirty times, “my” twenty-one times, and “me” twelve times—it was hardly surprising that he failed to heed John Steele Gordon’s warning about overreach.

Obama often cited Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela as the historic figures he most admired, but he did not follow their example of tolerance and magnanimity. Rather, Obama resembled Woodrow Wilson, whose conception of himself was described by the historian Forrest McDonald as “little short of messianic.”

McDonald wrote of Wilson that “the day after his election, the Democratic national chairman called on him to confer about appointments, only to be rebuffed by Wilson’s statement, ‘Before we proceed, I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States.’”

Like Wilson, Obama believed that God had ordained that he should be president. Perhaps the most flagrant example of his belief in a divine calling occurred in the fall of 2005, when Obama met for breakfast with Father Mike Pfleger, the radical left-wing pastor of Saint Sabina, a Catholic church in Chicago’s far South Side. Along with Obama’s controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger was Obama’s closest political adviser
among the clergy. Over pancakes, Obama—who had been a U.S. senator for less than eight months—told the priest that he had a burning desire to run for president.

“I told Barack that I really believed that people were hungry for change,” Pfleger said during an interview with the author of this book. “I said, ‘Barack, if you really believe that God’s calling you to do this now, forget all the norms and don’t look back.’ And Barack said, ‘Yes, Father, I really believe that my plan in life is to be president of the United States, and that God has called me to go now.’”

Not surprisingly, Obama chose to interpret his 2012 reelection victory as a mandate, even though it was essentially a status quo election. Despite his electoral college margin, he had won the popular vote by one of the slimmest margins of any incumbent president in nearly a century—and by half his winning margin in 2008. What’s more, the election had left the House of Representatives in the hands of a rock-solid Republican majority, which included a defiant bloc of Tea Party conservatives who were in no mood to compromise with the Democratic president.

Obama was encouraged to ignore these facts by Valerie Jarrett, the keeper of the ideological flame and one of the chief architects of Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth.” Jarrett pointed to two recent events—the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and Obama’s successful effort to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans—as proof that Obama was on a roll and politically invincible. She and Michelle believed there was a deeper, almost mystical meaning to his reelection victory.

“It means you can be the kind of president you promised yourself and Michelle that you’d be,” Jarrett said, according to a friend with whom she discussed her conversation with the president. “It means that you can do something about income inequality in this country. You can raise taxes to pay for more spending on government programs to help the poor and middle class. You can be a truly transformative president.”

Thus, both by personal inclination and in response to the importuning of Valerie Jarrett and Michelle, the post-election Obama was more defiant and arrogant than ever before. When Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain threatened to block the nomination of Susan Rice as secretary of state because of her controversial performance on the five Sunday talk shows, Obama assumed a macho tone and, in effect, said he was ready to go a few rounds with them. Said a glowering Obama: “If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me.”

Clearly, Obama was ready to tell the Republicans to go to hell—apparently forgetting Lyndon Johnson’s famous dictum: “You never tell somebody in politics to go to hell unless you can send them there.”

“Obama dismissed concerns about the national debt during his inaugural address in a few throw-away lines,” wrote Joe Scarborough. “If Obama’s address was any indication of where he wants to take this country over the next four years, the former
community organizer is on a mission to insure that the United States of America is the most socially correct, well-adjusted, happily progressive and hopelessly bankrupt country in the history of mankind.”

To ram his left-wing agenda through Congress, Obama came up with a three-pronged strategy.

First, he planned to go over the heads of his Republican opponents, barnstorm the country during his second term, and use election-style tactics to put pressure on Republican members of Congress to vote for his bills, whether they liked it or not.

Instead of disbanding his campaign apparatus after the election, as other presidents had done in the past, he set out to transform his Chicago-based Organizing for Obama into a political pressure group called Organizing for Action, which would raise $50 million for attack ads against Republicans. In an interview with the
New Republic
, he spoke of his plan to spend his second term “in a conversation with the American people as opposed to just playing an insider game here in Washington.” He would use hot-button social issues—guns, immigration, gay marriage, and the environment—to generate support in the Democratic base for his activist agenda.

Second, Obama planned to demonize his Republican adversaries to such an extent that voters would turn against them in utter disgust. White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer likened Republicans to suicide bombers, kidnappers, and arsonists. At a press conference, Obama charged that “the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have healthcare.” And he dismissed the
House Republicans as “absolutists” who were without “principles.”

Obama’s objective was to break the back of the GOP and return Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker in the 2014 midterm elections. There would be no room for honest disagreement between the rival parties. Anyone who opposed his plans to vastly expand the reach of Washington into the everyday lives of American citizens would be portrayed as wicked, venal, and morally corrupt.

In his negotiations with House Republicans on a “grand bargain” to reduce the national debt, Obama threatened to destroy them if he didn’t get what he wanted. According to contemporaneous notes taken by Speaker of the House Boehner at a December 13 Oval Office meeting with Obama:

          
The president suggests that if he does not get an agreement to his liking, he will spend the next four years campaigning against House Republicans, making them the scapegoat for what he predicts will be a global recession. He says this will begin in his inauguration speech and continue into his first State of the Union. The president says that if Republicans do not give in now, he will never allow them to cut spending again his entire second term.

Third, Obama planned to use the powers of the “imperial presidency” to circumvent Congress. He’d create his own laws outside the congressional process, acting without statutory
authority and overturning decades of regulatory precedent. He’d make recess appointments to fill vacancies without the Senate’s confirmation when that body was not in session—and even at times when it was. (For instance, he’d seat the members of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the advice and consent of the Senate.) And he’d use executive orders to waive work requirements under welfare, force religious institutions to provide contraceptive services, refuse to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and suspend the deportation of young illegal immigrants. In short, he’d decide which of the laws passed by Congress he’d enforce and which ones he’d ignore—and the Constitution be damned.

As the
Wall Street Journal
put it: “When Congress won’t do what [Obama] wants, he ignores it and acts anyway.”