The Amateur (15 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
Another example of Michelle’s impulsive, narcissistic nature was her decision to go on a lavish vacation to Spain in the summer of 2010, at the height of the Great Recession, even though practically her entire staff advised against it. She overruled them and flew off on an Air Force 757 along with three shifts of uniformed plainclothes agents and military personnel. Her security entourage numbered seventy people. Her vast army of support personnel checked into the Villa Padierna Palace Hotel in Marbella, a five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol. The trip cost American taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars, and the backlash was harsh and immediate. A column by Andrea Tantaros in the
New York Daily News
was headlined: “Material Girl Michelle Obama Is a Modern-Day Marie Antoinette on a Glitzy Spanish Vacation.”
New York Daily News
was headlined: “Material Girl Michelle Obama Is a Modern-Day Marie Antoinette on a Glitzy Spanish Vacation.”
Though the trip to Spain garnered most of the publicity, it was hardly Michelle’s only foray into expensive vacations. Between August 2010 and August 2011, she spent a total of forty-two days on vacation—or one out of every nine days. (During the same period of time, the number of Americans on food stamps increased from thirty-two to forty-six million.)
In February 2012, just weeks after a seventeen-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, Michelle decided she needed another break. With gas prices at an historic winter high, the government struggling to cut the federal deficit, and many American families forgoing their annual holiday vacations, Michelle thumbed her nose at political convention and jetted off with Sasha and Malia on Presidents’ Day weekend for the upmarket ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado. “Several people have known about the ‘low-key’ vacation, with the Secret Service in town for the past few days scoping out places for the family to relax and enjoy what the resort has to offer,” wrote
Aspen Daily News
columnist Carolyn Sackariason. “Pritkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo confirmed that he has met with the Secret Service and has loaned seven deputies to help protect the first lady and her family.”
Aspen Daily News
columnist Carolyn Sackariason. “Pritkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo confirmed that he has met with the Secret Service and has loaned seven deputies to help protect the first lady and her family.”
The question naturally arises: Why would someone who is as politically savvy as Michelle Obama do such foolish things?
The answer seems to lie in Michelle’s personality, which is acquisitive and materialistic by nature. For her forty-fourth birthday, Obama bought his wife something she had long coveted—a set of diamond stud earrings. He spent $5,000. She promptly returned them in exchange for bigger diamonds that cost $12,000.
“Michelle has expensive tastes,” writes Carol Felsenthal in
chicagomag.com
. “It was she who wanted to trade up from their two-bedroom condominium on the first floor of a three-story walkup, for which they had paid $277,500 in 1993, to the $1.65 million six-bedroom Georgian revival Kenwood mansion that landed them in a deal with the wife of Tony Rezko, the convicted felon and fundraiser/fixer....”
chicagomag.com
. “It was she who wanted to trade up from their two-bedroom condominium on the first floor of a three-story walkup, for which they had paid $277,500 in 1993, to the $1.65 million six-bedroom Georgian revival Kenwood mansion that landed them in a deal with the wife of Tony Rezko, the convicted felon and fundraiser/fixer....”
As a high-maintenance woman, Michelle feels right at home in the White House. “It’s a cool time in her life,” says a journalist who is assigned to follow the first lady full time. “She doesn’t have to work hard; she has more help; she’s treated like a queen; she never has to worry about money again. She has a contract to write a book about a year in the life of the White House garden.
“Nowadays,” continues the journalist, “Michelle doesn’t have much stuff to nag Barack about. After all, he’s home for dinner most nights of the week. Her kids are in a good place. She’s home when the kids come home. She’s shown the girls the world. She has time for tennis lessons and workouts. She spends a good part of the day working out in the gym, picking out her wardrobe, and doing her makeup. She’s living in a dream world. You know that old saying, When mom’s happy, everyone’s happy.”
CHAPTER 12
OUT TO LUNCH
Politics is all about relationships, people. A lot of it’s emotional. It’s not rocket science.
W
hen Barack Obama appointed Bill Daley as his new chief of staff in January 2011, the bald, genial Chicagoan was widely expected to be a welcome change from the ruthlessly aggressive Rahm Emanuel. A world-class schmoozer and political fixer, Daley was weaned on politics: he is the son of the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley and the brother of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Thanks in large part to his family connections, Bill Daley was appointed as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, and later became head of the office of corporate responsibility for JP Morgan Chase, which in practice meant he spent a lot of time wining and dining the bank’s clients. With Daley’s experience in both the public and private sectors, and his genuinely warm personality, it was hoped that he would smooth Obama’s frayed relationships with the business community and Congress, and bring a grownup, centrist sensibility to a White House that was populated by a crew of cloistered leftwing amateurs.
hen Barack Obama appointed Bill Daley as his new chief of staff in January 2011, the bald, genial Chicagoan was widely expected to be a welcome change from the ruthlessly aggressive Rahm Emanuel. A world-class schmoozer and political fixer, Daley was weaned on politics: he is the son of the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley and the brother of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Thanks in large part to his family connections, Bill Daley was appointed as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, and later became head of the office of corporate responsibility for JP Morgan Chase, which in practice meant he spent a lot of time wining and dining the bank’s clients. With Daley’s experience in both the public and private sectors, and his genuinely warm personality, it was hoped that he would smooth Obama’s frayed relationships with the business community and Congress, and bring a grownup, centrist sensibility to a White House that was populated by a crew of cloistered leftwing amateurs.
It didn’t happen.
What everyone in the White House had overlooked was that Daley had little legislative experience. Predictably enough, his honeymoon lasted less than a year—a tumultuous year in which he failed to help Obama reach a bipartisan grand bargain with the House of Representatives on reducing the federal budget deficit, and allowed the president to engage in a degrading mud-wrestle with congressional Republicans over raising the debt ceiling.
These raucous ideological arguments left Obama looking weaker than ever, and Valerie Jarrett—who was expert at enhancing her power by finding fault with others—pointed a finger of blame at Daley for failing to protect the president from the political fallout. After getting an earful of anti-Daley static, Obama lost faith in his chief of staff and transferred most of his management responsibilities to Pete Rouse, a longtime aide and political strategist. The hapless Daley was unceremoniously relegated to the sidelines in the West Wing.
By the fall of 2011, as the White House geared up for what was expected to be a massively expensive and brutally negative presidential campaign, Daley felt that his usefulness to the president had come to an end. But he kept his feelings to himself. He deeply resented the role Jarrett had played in his downfall, and before he left his post, he wanted to engage her in one last battle.
A fierce debate had been rocking the White House over a proposal to require church-run hospitals and universities to give their employees free contraception. Jarrett, along with Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, favored the plan. But Bill Daley and Vice President Biden, both Catholics with intimate ties to the church hierarchy, opposed the mandate, arguing that it breached the separation of church and state and would lose the president Catholic votes.
With Biden’s approval, Daley secretly arranged an Oval Office meeting between Obama and New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who argued that the policy violated the principle of religious freedom. Daley knew he was running a risk by scheduling such a meeting. Obama didn’t like to hear anyone tell him that he was wrong, and White House sources later revealed that the president had felt uncomfortable being put on the spot by Dolan, who would shortly be elevated to cardinal. However, Obama’s discomfort was nothing compared to Valerie Jarrett’s. She hadn’t been informed about the meeting, and when she learned about Daley’s end-run, she went to the president and vented her anger.
Obama faced a major rift among his closest advisers on an immensely sensitive social issue. Who should he back? On one side stood Daley, Biden, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the deputy chief of staff who had coordinated the passage of ObamaCare but opposed the contraceptive mandate because, she argued, it would lose Obama the support of liberal as well as conservative Catholics. On the other side stood Jarrett, Sebelius, and David Plouffe, who had replaced David Axelrod as Obama’s senior in-house political adviser, and argued that since most Catholics flouted the church’s dictates on birth control, they wouldn’t penalize Obama at the ballot box.
Largely lost in the debate was a simple fact: a mandate forcing religious institutions to go against their beliefs and conscience and offer contraception was constitutionally wrong and politically stupid. That, however, didn’t stop Obama from announcing he was going ahead with the mandate, thereby pleasing his Democratic base and adding another victory in his crusade to move America to the Left.
His victory dance was short-lived, however. For within a matter of weeks, he had to revise his original proposal to quiet the political storm that he had unleashed.
In January 2012, a disgusted Bill Daley abruptly resigned, embarrassing the president. Obama called a hasty press conference and, grim-faced, announced his new—and fourth, counting Pete Rouse, who served in an interim role between Emanuel and Daley—chief of staff, Jacob Lew, the obscure White House budget director.
It was a new low, even for Barack Obama.
The Daley debacle underscored a truth universally acknowledged by Obama’s friends and adversaries—namely, that after more than three years in office, his administration was still amateurish and in disarray. The inability of Daley, with all his people skills, to bridge some of the differences between the White House and Congress emphasized just how isolated and out of touch Obama and his team were from the realities of Washington.
“Every modern president, perhaps with the exception of Gerry Ford, entered the White House with a large quotient of self-assurance and arrogance,” a top aide to the Republican House leadership told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But what makes this president unique is that he is so beyond that. Not only is he self-assured, the smartest guy in the room, but in his estimation all he has to do is state something and the scales will fall from your eyes. Despite the storyline people create, that he is a thoughtful, non-ideological compromiser, he has a distinct leftist ideology and can’t make a decision that takes him out of his comfort zone.
“My first experience with him was in January 2010, just after his State of the Union speech, when we went to the White House for a bicameral meeting in the Cabinet room,” the Republican aide continued. “The president said he needed to find common cause on his cap and trade energy policy. He said, ‘I’ve taken on my party by being pro-nuclear, so now you have to give me cap and trade.’ By that, he meant he was willing to lift the ban on the construction of nuclear energy sites. But in fact, he hadn’t taken any substantive position on nuclear power. It was just words.
“Not long after that, there was another meeting in the Cabinet Room. This time the president said, ‘The economy is not doing all that bad. You guys [the Republicans] have to stop being negative.’ And [Speaker of the House] John Boehner said, ‘Mr. President, the problem with the economy is the uncertainty on taxes, cap and trade, and healthcare. Until there is certainty, businesses are not going to invest.’ And the president slapped his hand on the table and said, ‘You’re WRONG! I talk to CEOs all the time and they tell me the problem is Washington doesn’t work.’ Of course, by that he meant that Washington didn’t work the way
he
wanted it to work.
he
wanted it to work.
“He’s got so little appreciation and knowledge of how Congress works—that it’s an equal branch of government. If you challenge him, he’s furious. He gives you the death stare. He has no close relationship with any member of the Senate. And certainly not in the House. John Boehner says that, in his twenty years in Washington, he’s been through four administrations, and that this one is completely opaque. He doesn’t know who makes the decisions and how they make them in the Obama White House.
“All this goes back to the fact that Obama is a leftist. He doesn’t understand that the way to make this town work, both sides have to get up from the table thinking that they’ve won something. This White House is incapable of doing that.”
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