The Promise: President Obama, Year One
By Jonathan Alter
(Simon & Schuster, 458 pages, $28)
“A mile above sea level,” reads the first awful sentence by
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter in his prologue to this book,
“the thin Denver air refreshed the throngs as they waited in the
summer darkness for their man to ascend. It was an electric evening
for a nation yearning to believe in something or someone again.
Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president on
August 28, 2008, the forty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther
King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial.”
As far as we know, no loaves and fishes to feed the hungry
multitudes, no water changed to wine. But otherwise, the symbols
are all there — the adoring throngs, the mountaintop, the
ascension — and the tone is set. And there’s much more. Several
months later, Election Day, “A new generation of elites felt no
embarrassment over displays of love for their country. In Harvard
Square, students stopped traffic and sang ‘God Bless America’ and
‘America the Beautiful.’”
Wow! Harvard Square! Elites! The first time! We’ll take his word
for it, just as we’ll take his word that on LaSalle Street in
Chicago, an unnamed “working-class African American” stopped an
unnamed “white reporter” to offer congratulations. “Congratulations
to you,” the reporter responded. “‘No, it’s you folks, the
Caucasians, who did this, who should get the credit. We knew we’d
vote for Barack today, but we just weren’t sure y’all would.’”
That “y’all” lends an air of authenticity, doesn’t it? And lucky
he picked the right Caucasian to stop. But with such a precise and
harmless quote, why are “the white reporter” and “the working-class
African American” unnamed, just as so many of the 200 people the
author says he interviewed are unnamed? In some cases, of course,
it’s a matter of job security or fear of retaliation. In others,
there’s no point at all. Poetic license? But no matter. Alter is a
good reporter and writer, and his book picks up once he comes down
from the mountain and off the street and settles into the White
House, where he enjoys unusual access and is among friends —
perhaps, at times, in-appropriately so.
A significant amount of space is given to Rahm Emanuel, former
Illinois congressman, erstwhile booster of Rod Blagojevich, and
Obama’s chief of staff; and David Axelrod, longtime consultant who
has worked for nearly every Chicago Democratic politico and now
serves as Obama’s political adviser. In a somewhat off-putting way,
Alter always refers to Axelrod as “Ax” and Emanuel as “Rahm” or
even “Rahmbo,” as one chapter is titled. (Wonder if they call him
“Alt”?)
“I’m going to kill that f***ing dog,” Alter has Emanuel saying
of the White House pet. “I told the president, ‘You can have your
Portuguese water dog, but you’ve also got a pit bull and his name
is Rahm.’ ” In his office, writes Alter, Emanuel keeps a name plate
reading “Undersecretary for Go F**** Yourself.” A real Chicago
tough guy, a hard man. “When an aide came to his office and
stammered nervously on a difficult topic, Rahm barked at him, ‘Take
your f***ing tampon out and tell me what you have to say.’ ”
Some say you can tell a great deal about the character of an
executive by the way he treats his staff. But no matter. He’s a
tough guy, and proud of it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have allowed his
friend Alter to use the direct quotes. But you can’t help but
wonder. Elsewhere, Alter tells us that Emanuel is “only
five-foot-eight and 150 pounds,” who, “as a young man was such a
good ballet dancer that he was invited to join the Joffrey Ballet,”
and attended Sarah Lawrence, where, back in the day, only smart
girls used to go.
As a top adviser, Alter tells us, Emanuel was also expected to
send a tough-guy foreign policy message to Israel: “The message was
unmistakable: President Barack Hussein had a chief of staff named
Rahm Israel Emanuel and he would use his knowledge and credibility
for a new level of candor in U.S.-Israel relations no matter how
much the Israeli press screamed about it or Netanyahu himself
called Rahm and Ax ‘self-hating Jews.’ ”
Has the message been effective? Writes Alter: “The two
fundamental foreign policy issues of Year One were restraining
nukes — the most immediate threat to everyone’s security — and
improving relations with the Muslim world.” On restraining nukes,
aside from the one Soviet-era-style signing ceremony between the
U.S. and Russia that accomplished nothing, there’s little to point
to. In fact, at the same time we’ve lost respect in the Arab world,
we’re perceived as having turned our back on Israel, whose security
is immediately threatened by Iranian nuclear development. As a
result, the Israelis, increasingly isolated, may feel they’re being
forced to take matters into their own hands.
In the other important areas of concern — Pakistan and
Afghanistan — “Chaosistan” is the chapter heading — Alter
attempts to make sense of the administration’s efforts to fashion a
coherent policy. Thus far, Obama has taken two shots at
articulating it — one in a speech at West Point, the other in his
Nobel acceptance speech. Although George Bush’s successful surge
was ultimately responsible for stabilizing Iraq, neither the name
“Bush” nor the word “surge” was mentioned in either speech or in
any White House or Pentagon pronouncements.
But in the end, after great procrastination (what Dick Cheney
called “waffling”), Obama proposed a surge — a limited, modified
surge, to be sure, and not called that — but a surge,
nevertheless, and a surge with the odd codicil that while we surged
we’d be getting ready to leave. Alter quotes David Gergen: “The
cavalry is coming — but not for long.”
Incidentally, although Alter skirts the point, the president’s
Nobel speech, initially celebrated in the major media as a
brilliant statement of a new “Obama Doctrine,” with its emphasis on
national strength and just wars, and minus the obligatory
Niebuhrian felicities, could just as well have been read by George
W. Bush.
And finally, before leaving “Chaos-istan,” it would be well to
take note of the germ of an idea planted with Alter by his White
House friends, involving General David Petraeus. The president,
worried about Pentagon and military buy-in to his confused — and
confusing — surge, suspected that Robert Gates, Admiral Mullen,
and Petraeus had been conspiring to torpedo his plan, using General
McChrystal as their front man. The upshot was “a cold and bracing
meeting” at which Obama (some might say Queeg-like) accused his
defense chairman and military leaders of plotting against him, and
demanded they swear their fealty. They did, of course, and Alter
reports that Admiral Mullen was “chagrined,” denying that anyone
had ever tried to limit the president’s policy choices.
As Alter puts it, apparently swallowing the White House spin
whole, “The commander-in-chief…undertook the most direct
assertion of presidential authority over the U.S. military since
President Truman fired General MacArthur in 1951.” And although
Alter doesn’t mention it, by so doing, he also set the military up
to take the fall, should his confusing and contradictory policy in
Afghanistan fail, as seems likely. And then there’s this: “Some
aides worried…that Petraeus was politically ambitious and was
making an implied threat: Decide Afghanistan my way or I just might
resign my command and run for president in 2012.” And so, in
approved Chicago fashion, you hit your perceived opponent first, in
this case sending a message through a sympathetic journalist.
ALTER IS TOO CLOSE to his sources and too sympathetic to the
party line. Nevertheless, there are good things here. There’s a
chapter titled “Larry and Tim,” with sketches of Tim Geithner and
Larry Summers (“In the early days, Geithner often looked like a
piñata,” and “On good days Summers was nearly as brilliant as he
thought he was.”); a description of a shouting match about sexism
between Summers and Christina Romer, who gave better than she got;
references to an ongoing feud between White House economists and
columnist Paul Krugman; the First Lady of France (where else?)
wanting to talk to an obviously embarrassed Michelle Obama about
sex; Obama having to break up a potential fistfight between Henry
Paulson and Barney Frank (and who would you root for in that
one?).
But Alter’s primary purpose, he tells us, is to answer three
questions: What happened during the administration’s first year in
office? What’s the president like? How well did he do? To a great
extent, the first and last questions are answered by one phrase:
health care. Against the advice of his top advisers, Alter tells us
(“I begged him not to do this,” said Rahm Emanuel), Obama pressed
on, devoting most of a legislative year to the passage of an
extraordinarily complex bill that no one has read (not even Nancy
Pelosi, who gets paid to read such things), full of contradictory
and unenforceable provisions, and doing nothing at all to reduce
the cost of health care.
Because the health care struggle consumed so much time and was
covered to exhaustion by the national media, there’s nothing at all
new for Alter, who gives it a great deal of space, to add to the
story. As for other accomplishments, Alter gives us a list that
reads very much like a White House communications office info dump
and an end-of-year set of talking points. And what does Alter think
the president is like? Three chapter headings pretty much tell the
story: “Obama Takes Charge,” “Zen Temperament,” and
“Professor-in-Chief.”
As the headings indicate, there’s little beyond the stylized and
trite here, but that’s understandable. As a Newsweek
editor, under the direction of Jon Meacham, Alter has necessarily
been involved in creating the Obama image. In fact, it may be
because of Meacham’s excessive Obama worship — the president has
graced a record number of Newsweek covers, along with
contributions to the magazine from the idealized Obama family (no
doubt happily shaped by Newsweek staffers working with
White House ghosts) — that Newsweek, once a good weekly
news magazine, albeit excessively liberal and suffering from Luce
envy, has been kicked out of the nest by the Washington
Post and may soon fold, for reasons ably enumerated in
TAS by Jeffrey Lord.
But don’t cry for Jonathan Alter and Jon Meacham. As Patrick
Gavin writes in Politico, Meacham “has the great fortune
of being part of an elite club of journalists who take care of
their own.” He quotes Peter Mirijanian, a Washington crisis
communications expert: “Within the fraternity and sorority that is
the journalist corridor between New York and Washington, I think
he’s fine…” And so is Alter. After Game Change and
The Bridge, his Promise is third in a series of
at least three more Obama books this year by that “elite club” of
journalist/writers, topping off with Bob Woodward, who creates
great fictional characters and will find at least one Deep Throat
in the administration, unnamed of course, to pass him secrets in an
unlit parking garage.
The story will change, the plot thicken, and Alter will be kept
in book contracts for a few more years — at least up through Year
Four — thus continuing to ensure him a place beside Jon Meacham at
Charley Rose’s table.
