President Obama listens while the oath of allegiance is administered during a naturalization ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 25, 2013, in Washington, D.C.Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
For years, Barack Obama was able to keep his poll numbers high because the American public saw him as above the fray. But now that his poll numbers are dipping, he lacks the personal relationships to fall back on when the worm turns?in part because he's stayed so above the fray. Here's how it happened, in an excerpt from Jonathan Alter's The Center Holds: Obama and his Enemies, out now from Simon & Schuster.
Suffering fools had always been part of the presidency. George Washington held weekly dinners with legislators?senators one week, congressmen the next. Franklin Roosevelt filled part of many workdays with 15-minute meetings with individual members of Congress, some of whom got to stay for cocktails that FDR mixed himself. Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O?Neill traded barbs in public but made time for plenty of jokes in private.
By contrast, the Obamas, with the help of Valerie Jarrett, adopted an informal code in the White House. Obama would bring members of Congress into the White House for large meetings and maybe even give them a ride on Air Force One when he went to their state, but the socializing they craved, the invitations to dinner or a movie, were not often part of the package.
His excuse for not having the GOP leadership over more often was that he had repeatedly invited them and they usually said no. And he had unpleasant memories of intensely courting Republican senators in 2009 to no avail. After passage of the Recovery Act, which won the support of three moderate Republican senators, he received no Republican support at all on his other major legislative victories of 2009 and 2010. He spent many hours with Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, whose objections to Obamacare (including some from the left) he was sure he addressed. But under pressure from her leader, Mitch McConnell, she too voted no.
Obama believed that the days of politicians in Washington settling everything over bourbon and branch water (or, in the case of Reagan and O?Neill, a couple of beers) were over. It used to be that if a president leaned on a member to change his vote, most of his constituents wouldn?t find out. But in the age of instant access to voting records and 24-hour cable, the threat of being ?primaried? trumped any influence that might come from a ride on Air Force One or a trip to Camp David.
Besides, Obama liked to think of himself as nontransactional, above the petty deals, ?donor maintenance,? and phony friendships of Washington. Here his self-awareness again failed him. In truth, he was all transactional in his work life. He reserved real relationships for family, friends from before he was president, and a few staff. Everything else was business. The senators and billionaires who longed to brag about their private advice to the president were consistently disappointed. Defensive on this point, Obama didn?t believe that listening to powerful blowhards was generally worth his time. But that is the thing about relationships: They?re investments that don?t necessarily pay off right away. His failure to use the trappings of the presidency more often left him with one less tool in his toolbox, one less way to leverage his authority.
It was a sign of his talent that he was quite good at a part of the job that he didn?t much enjoy. At fundraisers he was lithe and charming and, most of the time, seemed fully present in the moment. Flashing that thousand-watt smile and exchanging pleasantries were enough for some, but others yearned for at least the impression of friendship, or what passes for it in Washington.
Obama wasn?t a loner, just a relatively normal person?warm with his friends?who preferred not to hang out too much with people he barely knew. This was a fine quality in an individual but problematic for a president. Part of the explanation lay in his upbringing. He hadn?t spent his early life planning how to become important, as Johnson and Clinton had. Nor was he a legacy, soaked in politics from an early age. No one had to instruct the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes (and Romneys) on how to build lists and get credit for their gratitude. Bargaining was in the background of most of Obama?s predecessors. Eisenhower learned to negotiate with balky allies during the World War II, and Reagan gained bargaining experience as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Unlike Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, Obama had never been a governor herding state legislators, and his experience closing deals with Republicans in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate was minimal. (It was no coincidence that the last two presidents before Obama who went directly from the Senate to the White House were John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Warren G. Harding in 1921, and neither got much done with Congress.) In Democratic Chicago he rarely had to talk to people who fundamentally disagreed with him. His self-image was that of a bridge-builder, but he came up so fast that he?d never built a big one.
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