Barack Obama leaves retirement, forced by Trump campaign
The 44th president of the United States longed to get away from politics. Three years later, he is back.
Just after learning that Donald Trump had been elected president, Barack Obama slumped into his Oval Office chair and addressed an aide who was standing near a prominently placed fruit bowl of apples, an emblem of his politics of healthy snacks that, like so many others, was about to disappear.
"I'm done," Obama said of his work, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
But he knew, even then, that a conventional retirement from the White House was not an option. Obama, who was 55 at the time, had been left stranded with the courier he planned to pass to Hillary Clinton still in hand. On top of that he had to deal with a successor who he believed had a fixation against him based on strange personal antipathy and a policy of racial backlash exemplified in the lie about Obama's birthplace.
"There is no model capable of predicting the kind of life I will have after the presidency," Obama told the aide. "Obviously he can't stop thinking about me."
Which is not to say that Obama was willing to forget how he had envisioned his retirement before Trump's triumph: a placid life dedicated to writing, enjoying golf games on sunny days, pushing policies through his foundation, producing documentaries with Netflix and enjoy lots of family time at his new $ 11.7 million farm on Martha's Vineyard.
Either way, more than three years after his departure, the 44th president of the United States is back on the political battlefield that he so wanted to abandon. He is forced to participate in the confrontation by an enemy determined to erase him from history - Trump - and a friend who has shown the same determination to take advantage of his presence, Joe Biden.
It was well known that returning to the battlefield would be very risky. Obama has shown a keen interest in protecting his legacy, especially from Trump's multiple attacks. But after conducting interviews with more than 50 people who surround the former president, the portrait we perceive is that of a troubled fighter who tries to balance the deep anger caused by his successor with the instinct to avoid confrontation for fear that it could damage his popularity. and affect their place in history.
However, the calculus of that balance may have started to change after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. As the first black president of the United States, now the first ex-black president, Obama sees the current social and racial awareness as an opportunity to place more significant value on the 2020 elections, which had been marked by the dirty fighting style. of Trump, and channeling a new youth movement towards a political goal, as happened in 2008.
He acts cautiously, with his characteristic intention to remain calm, be true to his reputation, preserve his political capital, and keep his aspirations for a quiet retirement intact.
“I don't think I have doubts. Rather, I think he's been strategic, ”said Dan Pfeiffer, one of his top advisers for more than a decade. “He has always used his voice strategically; it is your most valuable possession. "
Obama is also on the lookout for a sobering example: In 2008, Bill Clinton's attacks on him failed to such an extent that his wife's campaign staff had to cut back on their appearances.
Many fans are putting increasing pressure on him to be more aggressive.
"For a change, it would be nice if Barack Obama came out of his cave and offered (or rather DEMANDING) a route to move forward," wrote columnist Drew Magary in a Medium post that has been shared a lot since his April appearance with the title Where the hell is Barack Obama ?.
The argument to refute this position is that Obama did his job and deserves to be left alone.
"Obama has been out of office for three and a half years, and he still faces this kind of scrutiny: No one is putting pressure on former white presidents like George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter in the same way," said Monique Judge, editor of news from online magazine The Root and the author of a 2018 article arguing that Obama no longer owed the country anything.
Obama himself seems to position himself somewhere in the middle. He doesn't plan to rule out his summer vacation to the Vineyard and is still worried about the publication date of his long-awaited autobiography. However, last week he redoubled his "indirect" criticism of the Trump administration when he condemned the "chaotic, disorganized and malicious approach to governance" during an online fundraiser for Biden. In addition, he expressed a kind of commitment when he told Biden supporters: “What you have done so far has not been enough. And the same goes for me, for Michelle and for our daughters ”.
On June 25, during an invitation-only Zoom fundraiser, Obama expressed outrage that the president used the phrases "kung flu" and "China virus" to describe the coronavirus. “I don't want a country in which the president of the United States actively promotes discrimination against Asians and finds it funny on top of it. I do not want that. It still gives me the creeps and it infuriates me, ”Obama said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by someone who participated in the event.
Obama speaks frequently with the former vice president and top campaign advisers to give them suggestions on staffing and messages. In May, he bluntly advised Biden to keep his speeches short, do enthusiastic interviews and cut the length of his tweets, as the best thing to do is to make the campaign work as a referendum on Trump and the economy, according to some Democratic officials.
Officials mentioned that one aspect of particular interest to former President Obama is Biden's digital operation, which is in preparation and for which he has sought out powerful allies such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, share your knowledge.
Still, he still takes his time responding to some requests, especially those about spearheading more fundraising activities. Some Obama aides hinted that he does not want to overshadow the candidate, but Biden's supporters are not convinced that is the case.
"Please come and eclipse us," one of them joked.
‘Obama will not be able to rest’
From the moment Trump's triumph was announced, Obama took a minimalist approach: he criticized his public policy decisions, but not the man who made them, a behavior that conforms to the norm of civility observed by his predecessors, especially George W. Bush.
The problem is that for Trump the rules mean nothing. From the beginning he made it very clear that he wanted to eradicate any trace of Obama's presence in the West Wing. "He had the worst taste," Trump told a visitor in early 2017 as he showed off his new curtains (which weren't much different from Obama's, in the opinion of others who walked into the office during that chaotic period).
Those efforts to make it disappear were more emphatic when it came to policy. A former White House official commented that Trump interrupted a presentation to verify that a staff proposal was not "an Obama thing."
During the transition, in what in hindsight looks like a preview of the presidency, a Trump aide came up with printing a detailed list of Obama's campaign pledges from the official White House website and using it as a sort of list. of targets to abate, according to two people with knowledge of the measure.
“It's personal for Trump; it's all about President Obama and ending his legacy. It's his obsession, ”explained Omarosa Manigault Newman, a veteran of the Apprentice program and, until her abrupt departure, one of the few black officials in Trump's West Wing. "President Obama will not be able to rest while Trump breathes."
When the two men met in November 2016 for a forced post-election meeting, the president-elect was courteous, so Obama took the opportunity to advise him not to dismantle Obamacare. “Look, you can take my name off him; I don't care, ”he said, according to the advisers.
Trump nodded noncommittally.
As the transition began to take forever, Obama experienced growing unease at an attitude that seemed to him the cheery indifference of the new president and his team of rookies. Many of them completely ignored the information papers that Obama's staff had so painstakingly prepared, their former aides recall, and instead of focusing on politics or the operation of the West Wing, they asked about the quality of the tacos at the basement dining room or where to find a good apartment.
As for Trump, he has "no idea what he's doing," Obama told an aide after their meeting in the Oval Office.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, made an equally indelible impression. During a tour of the building he asked abruptly, "So how many of these people are staying?"
The answer was none, answered his escort. (West Wing officials serve at the president's pleasure, as Trump would make widely clear in the months to come.)
When Kushner's story was relayed to Obama, advisers recall, he laughed and repeated it to his friends, and even to some journalists, to illustrate what the country was up against.
A White House spokesperson did not deny the account, but suggested that Kushner could have spoken of security and maintenance personnel rather than political appointments.
During other conversations with editors he respected, including David Remnick of The New Yorker and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama was more thoughtful, according to people familiar with the interactions. Sometimes some version of this question floated: Could he have done something to mitigate Trump's backlash?
Barack Obama eventually came to the conclusion that it was a historical inevitability, and told the people around him that the best thing to do was "set a counterexample."
Others thought he needed to do more. During the transition, Paulette Aniskoff, a veteran aide in the West Wing, began forming a political organization with former advisers to help Obama defend his legacy, collaborate with other Democrats, and plan his supporting activities in the 2018 midterm elections.
Although he was open to the approach, what most interested Obama were the exits. "I'll do what they ask of me," he told Aniskoff's team, but asked them to carefully identify and rule out appearances that could be a waste of time or a waste of his political capital.
Then as now, Obama was so determined to avoid mentioning the new president's name that a contributor jokingly suggested that they refer to him as "the one who must not be named," alluding to Harry Potter's arch nemesis, Lord Voldemort.
For his part, Trump had no problem mentioning names. In March 2017, he falsely accused Obama of ordering his campaign headquarters to be watched, as he tweeted: “How low has President Obama fallen, who tapped my phones during the sacred election process ! It's Nixon / Watergate. What an evil (or sick) guy! "
It was something of a turning point. Obama told Aniskoff and his team that he would talk about his successor in the 2018 midterm elections. But not much.
The way Obama spoke of Trump that fall was very revealing: not so much as a person but as a kind of epidemiological disease suffered by the body politic, spread by her Republican henchmen.
“It didn't start with Donald Trump; he is more of a symptom, not the cause, ”he stated during his opening speech at the University of Illinois in September 2018. He added that the American political system was not“ healthy ”enough to form the necessary“ antibodies ”and combat the contagion of "racial nationalism".
The pandemic, if anything, has made him more of a comparison fan.
The virus, he said during his appearance with Biden last week, "is a metaphor" for much more.
Golf is doing 'better than my book'
One of the best ways Obama could safeguard his legacy was to write his book, which he envisioned both as a detailed chronicle of his presidency and as a literary follow-up to his highly-praised 1995 memoir, My Father's Dreams.
In late 2016, Obama's agent, Bob Barnett, began negotiating a global settlement for Obama's memoir and Michelle Obama's autograph. Random House finally won the bidding war with a record $ 65 million proposal.
The process has been a golden punishment. A former White House official who contacted him in mid-2018 was told by Obama that the project "was like doing homework."
Another associate, who ran into the former president at an event last year, commented on how fit he looked. Obama responded, "Let's just say my golf game does much better than my book."
It was not especially easy for the former president to see how his wife's book, My Story, was published in 2018 and quickly became an international best-seller.
"She had a ghostwriter," Obama told a friend who asked him about his wife's speed job. "I'm writing every word myself, and that's why it's taking me longer."
The book release date remains one of the most sensitive issues. Obama, a deliberate writer prone to procrastination - and lengthy digressions - insisted there be no set deadline, according to several people familiar with the process.
In an interview shortly after Obama left office, one of his closest advisers had predicted that the book would come out in mid-2019, before the primary elections began in earnest, a preferred option by many working on the project.
But Obama didn't finish and didn't circulate a 600-800-page draft until around New Year's Eve, too late to publish before the election, according to insiders.
He is now seriously considering splitting the project into two volumes, hoping to get it published quickly, before the election, perhaps in time for the holiday season, according to people close to the process.
Obama's other big creative venture, a 2018 multi-million dollar deal with Netflix to produce documentaries and movies with his wife, has been an exhilarating, and quick work by comparison.
Obama enjoyed reviewing dozens of potential projects and offered specific suggestions - scrawled on the yellow pad he uses to write his book - to directors and writers. His production company, Higher Ground Productions, has a small bungalow in a Hollywood studio that was once home to Charlie Chaplin's company. The former president spent a day meddling with the work of the small staff during a visit in November.
One of the earliest projects was Crip Camp, an award-winning documentary about a summer camp in upstate New York, founded in the early 1970s, that became a focal point of the disability rights movement.
Obama saw the project as a vehicle for his vision of grassroots political change, and provided feedback throughout the 18-month production of the film.
"We saw images that the filmmakers had started editing and sent them to the president for him to see," said Priya Swaminathan, co-director of Higher Ground. “I wanted to know how we could help the filmmakers make this the best story ever and they got involved in the collaboration. We saw many, many cuts together ”.
A 'tailor made' moment
Part of what Obama finds so attractive about film is that it allows him to control the narrative. In that sense, the 2020 campaign has been a disorienting experience: His political career is supposed to be over, but he has a semi-starring role in a production that he has neither written nor directed.
That slight frustration has been most evident in his complicated relationship with Biden, who at the same time covets his support and is firmly determined to win the election on his own.
Obama supported Biden, personally, from the start of the campaign, but promised Senator Bernie Sanders, in one of his early conversations, that his public profession of neutrality was genuine and that he was not secretly working to elect his friend, according to a party official familiar with the exchange.
Additionally, Obama has always been clear about his friend's vulnerabilities, urging Biden's aides to make sure he doesn't "go through an embarrassment" or "damage his legacy," win or lose.
When a Democratic donor raised the question of Biden's age late last year - he's 77 - Obama acknowledged those concerns, saying, "I wasn't even 50 when I was elected, and that job used up every ounce of energy I had." , depending on the person.
Still, he is an avid supporter and played a central role in pressuring Sanders to "hasten the endgame" that led to Biden's earlier-than-expected victory in April. The following weeks were spent fixing some political loose ends, working to improve his relationship with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who annoyed him by criticizing his paid lectures on Wall Street as emblematic of the scourge of money in politics, describing him as a "snake. that slides through Washington. "
His aides insist that he has never viewed the Biden campaign as an indirect war between himself and Trump. However, he's been excited about the competition's lopsided metrics of late.
Obama closely monitors their respective election numbers - he gets private circulation data from the Democratic National Committee - and takes pride in the fact that he has many more millions of Twitter followers than the president who trusts the platform far more than he does, people said. close.
The former president devours the news online, constantly turning to the websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic from his iPad, and preserving the late-night schedule of his days in the White House: he sends texts and links to stories to friends between midnight and two in the morning. Even during the pandemic, he is up early, at least on weekdays, and is often on his Peloton bike at eight in the morning, when he sends another round of text messages, often about the latest Trump scandal.
Obama was already stepping up his criticism of Trump before Floyd's assassination in May. Aniskoff organized an online meeting with 3,000 former government officials whose purpose, in part, was to soften his toughest line. (Democrats close to Obama kindly leaked the recording of his remarks.)
The growing clamor for racial justice has given the 2020 campaign the coherence that Obama needed, a politician who feels more comfortable if he can disguise his criticism of an opponent - be it Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump - with pro-political language. movement.
Obama's first reaction to the demonstrations, according to his close associates, was one of anxiety, fearing that the outbreaks of vandalism would spiral out of control and endorse Trump's narrative of an anarchic left.
Fortunately, the peaceful protesters took over and sparked a national movement that challenged Trump without making the president his focal point.
Shortly thereafter, during a strategic call with political collaborators and policy experts at his foundation, Obama excitedly said that "a tailor-made moment had come."
Obama has lately been in close contact with his first attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., sharing his outrage at the way current attorney general William P. Barr personally inspected the phalanx of federal law enforcement officers who tear gas was fired at protesters to clear the way for Trump's walk to take a photo at a historic church near the White House.
Holder has little qualms about calling Trump a racist in front of the former president. Obama never contradicted him, but avoids the term, even in private, preferring a more indirect accusation of "racial demagoguery," according to several people close to both.
His response to Floyd's murder was not to attack Trump, but to encourage young people to vote, who have not shown much enthusiasm to support Biden. When he decided to speak publicly, it was to headline an online forum highlighting a list of police reforms that failed during his second term.
In that sense, the role you are most comfortable in is the position you got fed up with at one point.
On June 4, about an hour before Floyd's memorial service in Minneapolis, the former president called Floyd's brother, Philonise Floyd, just as he did with bereaved families during his eight years in office.
“I want you to have hope. I want you to know that you are not alone. I want you to know that Michelle and I will do whatever you want me to do, ”Obama said during the emotional 25-minute conversation, according to the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was present. Two other people with knowledge of the call confirmed its content.
"That was the first time, I think, that the Floyd family really experienced comfort since he died," Sharpton said in an interview.
