Divider-in-Chief (5 page)

Campaigning in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Romney responded to a shouted question about the bin Laden raid by saying, “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”
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(I'm not so sure.)

A serving SEAL Team member said: “Obama wasn't in the field, at risk, carrying a gun. As president, at every turn he should be thanking the guys who put their lives on the line to do this. He does so in his official speeches because his speechwriters are smart. But the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, ‘Come on, man!' It really didn't matter who was president. At the end of the day, they were going to go.”
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Chris Kyle, a former SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed and another 95 unconfirmed kills to his credit, told the
Daily Mail
, “Taking [bin Laden] out didn't really change anything as far as the war on terror is concerned and using it as a political attack is a cheap shot.”
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The bin Laden raid was not the only instance of Obama politicizing foreign policy. In fact, in the Obama administration, intelligence has routinely been placed in the service of politics; America's national security has been the main casualty. Daniel Klaidman reports in his book
Kill or Capture
that Rahm Emanuel “pushed the CIA to publicize its kinetic successes” to portray the administration in a good light.
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In late May, Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, obtained documents revealing that national secrets were provided for a film on the mission to get bin Laden. The filmmakers got access to high-ranking officials involved in the commando operation that killed the terrorist.

Judicial Watch also discovered that the filmmakers had access to top White House officials, including White House National Security Council official Denis McDonough and chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan. They were also given the identity of a SEAL team member involved in the raid and taken to the top-secret “vault” where the raid was planned.

Soon after the raid, Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly complained that the White House had breached an agreement not to disclose details about the mission. “[W]e all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden,” he said. “That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”
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It soon became clear why the filmmakers got such unprecedented access: the film's initial release date was October 12, 2012—perfectly timed to bolster Obama's foreign policy credentials ahead of the election.

Also, in the spring of 2012, news stories began to appear that included classified national security information. The
New York Times
ran a piece about the United States' involvement in a disrupted bomb plot in Yemen. It involved a Saudi double agent who had infiltrated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and prevented an attack on an American jetliner. The agent provided information that made possible a U.S. drone strike in Yemen that took out a key AQAP commander.

The White House subsequently held a conference call about the thwarted attack that included former counterterrorism officials who are now paid commentators on cable TV news shows. That call involved Brennan, and it angered some on Capitol Hill because the administration had failed to inform key committees, including the Senate's intelligence panel, about the bomb plot until after it had been reported in the news media.

In May, the
New York Times
ran a story detailing Obama's weekly “kill list” meetings.
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The story made it clear that White House officials routinely gave reporters classified information on drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, usually on the condition of anonymity.

All of these stories placed Obama in a positive, tough guy light in the lead-up to his crucial re-election bid. As the
Washington Post
's Richard Cohen wrote: “What is remarkable about the recent leaks is the
coincidence—it can only be that—that they all made the president look good, heroic, decisive, strong, and even a touch cruel—born, as the birthers long suspected, not in Hawaii but possibly on the lost planet Krypton.”
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Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, “I don't think you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what is going on here. You've had three leaks of intelligence that paint the president as a strong leader.”
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Arizona Republican senator John McCain told CBS, “This is the most highly classified information and it's now been leaked by the administration at the highest levels at the White House and that's not acceptable.”
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Republican representative Peter King of New York said about the leaks, “It has to be for [Obama's] reelection. They can deny it all they want. But it would require a suspension of disbelief to believe it's not being done for political purposes.”
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The administration strongly denied that politics had anything to do with the leaks. “Any suggestion that this administration has authorized intentional leaks of classified information for political gain is grossly irresponsible,” White House Spokesman Jay Carney said.
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Obama himself pushed back in a June 8, 2012, press conference. “The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive,” he said. “It's wrong.”
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But it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the information was leaked intentionally given the access reporters had. The
New York Times
' drone kill list article, for instance, included interviews with “three dozen of [Obama's] current and former advisors.”
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Cohen wrote that this “suggests the sort of mass law-breaking not seen since Richard Nixon took out after commies, liberals, conservationists, anti-war protesters, Jews and, of course, leakers.”
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McCain said all the leaked information “makes the president look very decisive ... [it] enhances President Obama's image as a tough guy for the elections.”
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One thing is for sure: it makes the president look far more
concerned about his re-election than about America's national security secrets and military personnel. After news of the leaks began to dominate the headlines, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed two prosecutors to lead an investigation into how the classified information was leaked. Don't hold your breath for any findings, much less any prosecutions, before the election.

P
resident Obama is strikingly out of touch with the middle class, a group of Americans he likes to invoke as a political prop—pitting them against the “rich”—but seems unwilling to get to know.

In actuality, Obama's governing coalition is made up of the very rich and those dependent on the government in some way. For the less well-off, Obama promises to “spread the wealth around.” For America's elite, he offers aggressive secularism, worldly sophistication, and a smug satisfaction that they know best.

But for the middle class, he offers only economic incompetence, a foreign policy of apology and retreat that offends against middle class patriotism, and a not-too-well-hidden contempt for middle class mores, culture, and aspirations.

The first major indication that Obama was out of touch with the middle class occurred on the 2008 primary campaign trail. At a high-dollar fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama tried to explain the trouble he was having winning over voters in middle America by claiming that they “get
bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
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It tells us everything we need to know about how out of touch Obama is with the middle class that in the 2008 Democratic nominating campaign, Hillary Clinton was seen as the middle class candidate. At $31 million, Clinton's net worth was more than four times as high as Obama's $7.3 million.
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But Clinton's policy platform was regarded as more friendly to middle income Americans, including her support for Walmart. She constantly stressed that she was the “candidate of, from, and for the middle class.”
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But Obama was unable to speak the language of working or middle class voters. Whereas Hillary would throw back a shot of whiskey at a bar in rural Indiana,
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Obama would ask perplexed Iowans, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”
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Obama's inability to win over middle class voters was the primary reason Clinton was able to compete until June. And part of the reason for selecting Senator Joe Biden as his running mate was that Middle Class Joe would help Obama to attract the voters who eluded him during the primaries.

It didn't work. The only income group Obama lost in the general election was those with household incomes between $50,000 and $75,000—the middle class.

Part of the reason Obama cannot connect with middle class Americans is that he has spent very little time around them. He was formed by elite schools in urban centers: Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, Occidental College in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York City, Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of Chicago Law School.

One would expect Obama to try to compensate for his lack of connectedness to middle class Americans by reaching out to them. But that's not his personality; condescension is.

Obama has been compared to the Star Trek character Mr. Spock because he appears distant, aloof, unemotional, and very different from the average person.
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Even some of his top aides concede, as Jonathan Alter relates in
The Promise
, that there is “a hardness beneath” the surface of Obama.
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“Not cold, but serious and often impatient. One aide described him as ‘the most unsentimental man I've ever met.'”
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Alter quotes Obama's close friend and senior political adviser Valerie Jarrett making the positive case for his standoffishness. “He has an ability to emotionally detach in order to think clearly.”
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Senior adviser Pete Rouse referred to him as “a step removed from most people.”
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A longtime White House staffer told the
Atlantic
's James Fallows, “Surprisingly for someone who led such an inspirational campaign, [Obama] does not seem to have the ability to connect with people.”
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In his book
Obama's War
, Bob Woodward quotes Obama aide John Podesta saying that he “was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas.”
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This lack of empathy, Podesta claimed, was Obama's “Achilles' heel.”
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Granted, the bar for presidential empathy and connectedness was set high by Obama's predecessors. Bill Clinton thrived around other people and had a natural ability to convince people he could feel their pain. George W. Bush seemed to enjoy spending time with ordinary Americans. He was often named as the politician voters would most want to sit down and have a beer with.

Barack Obama is viewed differently by the public. Dee Dee Myers, a White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, captured it perfectly when she wrote that while people would enjoy having a beer with Obama, “they're just not sure he wants to have a beer with them.”
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In March 2010, Myers wrote an “open letter” to Obama, encouraging him to “get back in touch” with Americans. She argued that, unlike Clinton,
who “never tired” of interacting with the American people and demonstrating that he could “feel their pain,” Obama projected too much self-reliance. “If people believe you're on their side, they will trust your decision,” she wrote, arguing that “too often” Obama sends the signal “that he stands alone—and likes it that way.”
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Obama seems to have gotten more out of touch over time. At least when he was younger, Obama spent time with people at political events, shaking every hand and answering every question. But Obama's approachability changed quickly as he gained national prominence.

“Now fame and demand drew him deeper within himself,” Jodi Kantor writes in
The Obamas
about Obama during his time in the U.S. Senate.
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“His time and patience were shrinking, his desire for self-protection and privacy increasing. Some staffers had a word to describe the moments when he seemed unable or unwilling to connect: Barackward, a combination of ‘Barack' and ‘awkward.'”
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In
The Operators
, Michael Hastings portrays Obama as unhappy about having to pose for photos with American troops in Iraq. “He didn't want to take pictures with any more soldiers,” a State Department official told Hastings. “He was complaining about it.”
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Jonathan Alters tells a story about Obama meeting in the West Wing with dozens of veterans' groups, including several amputees: “The vets didn't appreciate it when the president told them, ‘No one in Washington ever tells you guys no.' They had just been through plenty of no under Bush. Then, speaking of their sacrifice, Obama said, ‘Nobody feels this more than I do.' The veterans looked at one another in amazement. ‘Our jaws dropped,' remembered one. ‘
Nobody feels this more than I do?
How about us?'”
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