The Amateur (12 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
Jarrett was on the wrong side of several other consequential issues, not the least of which was her stand on Solyndra, the California solar company that went belly up and cost American taxpayers half a billion dollars. Shortly before Obama paid a visit to Solyndra, which had received a $535 million taxpayer-funded loan guarantee, Steve Westly, a prominent venture capitalist and member of Obama’s 2008 national finance committee, wrote Jarrett: “A number of us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra. There is an increasing concern about the company because their auditors ... have issued a [warning] letter.... Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term.”
Westly wasn’t alone in warning Jarrett about Solyndra. Lawrence Summers, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, opposed the administration’s loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that “the government is a crappy venture capitalist.” Nonetheless, Jarrett gave her stamp of approval to Obama’s visit to the Bay area solar company, where he used words that would come back to haunt him: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” Five months later, the company filed for bankruptcy, making it the third U.S. solar manufacturer to fail in a month. As of this writing, Solyndra was under FBI investigation for accounting fraud.
Why did Jarrett ignore the warnings from Steve Westly and Larry Summers? “The process for this particular loan guarantee began under President Bush,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz, ignoring the fact that the Bush administration ultimately rejected the loan. A more honest answer to the question could be found in Valerie Jarrett’s Chicago connections, especially her close ties to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which controlled 35.7 percent of Solyndra. The foundation had made a sizable donation to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett once served as chairwoman and where one of Obama’s best friends, Eric Whitaker, is currently executive vice president. Billionaire George Kaiser, one of Obama’s top 2008 campaign fundraising bundlers, visited the White House no fewer than sixteen times, and Jarrett herself met at least three times with Solyndra lobbyists, who pushed for government assistance.
Jarrett’s dubious judgment on Solyndra had one unintended consequence: it focused renewed attention on Obama’s wrongheaded and naïve approach to government stimulus spending on green energy projects. Even Brad Jones of Redpoint Ventures, an investment firm with financial connections to Solyndra, saw the error of Obama’s ways. “The allocation of spending to clean energy is haphazard; the government is just not well equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much,” Jones wrote Larry Summers. “One of our solar companies [Solyndra] with revenues of less than $100 million (and not yet profitable) received a government loan of $580 million; while that is good for us, I can’t imagine it’s a good way for the government to use taxpayer money.”
Jarrett’s lack of judgment in domestic affairs was matched by her inexperience in international and military affairs. She was out of her depth during the Obama administration’s nearly yearlong internal debate over how to deal with CIA intelligence that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Pakistan.
The Defense Department calculated there was a 40 to 60 percent chance that Osama bin Laden was living in a compound in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy. The way the compound was built plus the human intelligence the United States had on the ground led the intelligence community to conclude that the compound was at the very least a high-value target. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to drop bombs on it and obliterate it.
The CIA argued that, whatever the risks, if the target was as valuable as the intelligence apparatus said it was, then there was no sense in wiping it out. The CIA didn’t want to lose the valuable intelligence the compound might contain.
Though Jarrett did not attend meetings in the Situation Room, she privately urged the president not to send in a Navy SEAL team. She told Obama that the raid could turn out to be a replay of 1980’s Desert One, when President Jimmy Carter’s effort to rescue American hostages in Iran backfired so badly that it helped doom the Carter presidency.
In this case, Obama didn’t listen to Jarrett. He believed strongly in what the CIA told him, and decided to send in the Navy SEAL team to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. It was a brave act, but Obama had at least one other motive: he was worried about what voters might think if they became aware he had had a chance to get Osama bin Laden and hadn’t taken it.
Neither the president nor his closest advisers came to Washington with experience managing a large staff, and they failed to hire a team of experienced people who knew how to run things in the nation’s capital. As a result, many of the Chicagoans who staff the West Wing, including Valerie Jarrett, are strangers in a strange land. In this atmosphere of callowness and insularity, the Obama White House has assumed the trappings of a royal court.
“There is a tremendous amount of jockeying in the White House under Barack Obama, people hoping to push other people out of their positions, fighting over stupid stuff,” a former high-ranking member of the staff told me. “This fighting is not built around flattering the king and queen. It’s about arousing suspicion in their minds. If the king and queen feel that they need someone to look out for them, it makes them more dependent. They want to know who is really behind them? Who’s really their friend? What is the Washington community saying? What is the black community saying?
“In all of this, Valerie Jarrett is both the arsonist and the firefighter,” this person continued. “She has been able to spread her tentacles into every nook and cranny of the executive branch of government. She creates problems so she can say to the president and first lady, ‘I would do anything for you; I would put everything at risk to show you how trustworthy I am.’ The president and to a lesser degree the first lady are worried about big stuff, which means that they must depend more and more on the people around them.
“Valerie creates fear. She keeps the Obamas off-balance and keeps them coming back to her. She makes sure that a lot of other people don’t have access. She keeps old friends and supporters away. If she can’t control you—what you’re going to say to the president and the first lady, the issues you’re going to push—then you’re not going to get in. Only the people she feels she can control can get in. The people who are given access are beholden to Valerie. Every one of the current crop of people in the East Wing are her friends. They think they owe their lives to her.
“Fear is the operative word. When people on the staff hear that Valerie’s in the Family Quarters, it scares them. ‘What is she saying to the president and first lady about me? Is she giving me credit for what I’ve done? Is she distorting what I’ve said?’ Valerie tells everyone that she’s going up to the Family Quarters, even if she’s only delivering a letter.”
CHAPTER 11
THE WRATH OF MICHELLE
My staff worries a lot more about what the First Lady thinks than they worry about what I think, on a full range of issues.
O
f all the ways the mainstream media have kowtowed to the Obamas, none has been more disgraceful than their coverage of Barack’s marriage to Michelle. Typically, he is portrayed as the contented husband who is in total sync with his wife. She’s depicted as an advocate for military families, a crusader against childhood obesity, the devoted mom to Sasha and Malia, and a creature of serene domesticity.
f all the ways the mainstream media have kowtowed to the Obamas, none has been more disgraceful than their coverage of Barack’s marriage to Michelle. Typically, he is portrayed as the contented husband who is in total sync with his wife. She’s depicted as an advocate for military families, a crusader against childhood obesity, the devoted mom to Sasha and Malia, and a creature of serene domesticity.
In this storybook rendering of the Obamas’ marriage, Barack runs the country while Michelle keeps him grounded and takes care of the home. When they lay their heads down on their pillows at night, she might turn to him and offer a few household hints on how things could be managed a little better in the White House. But other than that—at least according to this version—Michelle is no Hillary Clinton. She’s a traditional, hands-off first lady.
Recently, this insipid portrait of Michelle Obama has undergone some sorely needed revision. In
The Obamas,
by
New York Times
Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor, a mainstream journalist acknowledges for the first time that Michelle is in fact an unrecognized force in her husband’s administration. As Kantor writes: “She was sometimes harder on her husband’s team than he was, eventually urging him to replace them, and the tensions grew so severe that one top adviser erupted in a meeting in 2010, cursing the absent first lady.”
The Obamas,
by
New York Times
Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor, a mainstream journalist acknowledges for the first time that Michelle is in fact an unrecognized force in her husband’s administration. As Kantor writes: “She was sometimes harder on her husband’s team than he was, eventually urging him to replace them, and the tensions grew so severe that one top adviser erupted in a meeting in 2010, cursing the absent first lady.”
In reaction to Kantor’s book, the White House PR machine mounted a swift and vigorous campaign to re-sanitize Michelle’s image. The first lady herself went on TV and, in an interview with Gayle King of CBS
This Morning,
declared: “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced—that I’m some angry black woman.”
This Morning,
declared: “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced—that I’m some angry black woman.”
Jodi Kantor’s journalistic amour propre was deeply wounded by the charge of racism. She defended her portrayal of Michelle, pointing out that she hadn’t cast the first lady as an angry black woman. “Those words aren’t in the book,” said Kantor. “There’s nothing that implies she is. She is portrayed as a very strong woman.... [Barack Obama] came to Washington on top of the Earth and has kind of been descending to Earth ever since, and Mrs. Obama came here with low expectations and exceeded them.”
Michelle exceeded expectations
. Indeed, a close reading of the book makes it abundantly clear that Kantor admires the first lady and thinks she has done a terrific job in a difficult role. The book may expose some of the first lady’s sharper edges and hint at her true role in the White House, but the author hardly lands a punch.
. Indeed, a close reading of the book makes it abundantly clear that Kantor admires the first lady and thinks she has done a terrific job in a difficult role. The book may expose some of the first lady’s sharper edges and hint at her true role in the White House, but the author hardly lands a punch.
So, what is the truth about Michelle?
Not since Bill and Hillary Clinton burst upon the political scene more than twenty years ago, promising two for the price of one, have we seen anything like Barack and Michelle’s partnership of power in the White House. There is, however, a crucial difference between the Clintons and the Obamas. Whereas the Clintons were open and aboveboard about their co-presidency—boasting that Hillary was an equal partner with Bill—the Obamas have been careful to hide the fact that Michelle is the president’s most important political adviser and the one he listens to above all others before he makes major decisions.
Their stealth co-presidency has obscured a vital fact—namely, that the Obamas share a sense of entitlement, an attitude that they know best, a contempt for the political process, and a callow understanding of the way the world works. Their common worldview drives the president’s agenda and has brought the United States ever closer to a European-style socialist welfare state.
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