MICHIKU KAKITANI, NY TIMES
THE CENTER HOLDS
Obama and His Enemies
By Jonathan Alter
Illustrated. 428 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.
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....This book... provides a close analysis of what Mr.
Alter sees as the administration’s missteps, focused around the author’s
conviction that the president’s “detached and self-contained nature had hampered
his presidency.” Mr. Alter contends that what he calls Mr. Obama’s lack of “the
schmooze gene” (“standard equipment for people in politics”) and his reticence
in cultivating relationships with members of Congress and other politicians left
him with “one less way to leverage his authority.”
Many of Mr. Alter’s observations echo complaints
frequently heard within the Beltway. He argues that the Obama White House has
been too insular, that it has often done a poor job of selling its agenda (say,
on health care) and that the president has frequently been slow to go on
offense: he “developed a habit of letting the dialogue deteriorate until he rode
to the rescue like a one-man cavalry, solving all the problems with a big
speech, large chunks of which he wrote himself at the last minute.” ....
In Mr. Alter’s view, the president’s lack of experience
in negotiations hobbled his efforts to cut deals with Republicans, much the way
his paucity of earlier political experience “hampered him on management
questions.” “Relations with Cabinet-level departments were so tangled that it
was often hard to get decisions made,” Mr. Alter writes. “While centralizing the
national security apparatus at the White House worked well enough (unless you
happened to work at the State Department), domestic agencies had to deal with
several competing power sources inside the White House that each got to say,
‘It’s the White House calling.’ ”
Mr. Alter’s thesis is that the 2012 election was
possibly “the most consequential” in recent times and “a hinge of history” — “a
titanic ideological struggle” that put the “social contract established during
the New Deal era” on the line. He readily acknowledges that he thinks the United
States “dodged a bullet in 2012,” and that in re-electing Barack Obama and
rejecting the Republicans’ “extremist” views, America reaffirmed its identity as
an essentially “centrist nation.”
Toward the end of this volume, Mr. Alter quotes Mr. Obama telling an aide that
if he lost, his presidency would be “a footnote” and that “all of the progress
we made in the first four years would be reversed”; if he won, his first-term
achievements would be cemented for a generation and he could move ahead on
promises sidetracked by the recession.
....Mr. Alter says, President Obama was “pretty much the same calm and
self-contained guy inside the bubble as he was in public.” With one exception,
Mr. Alter adds: “the intense racial consciousness that he had nurtured in his
own mind since childhood was more apparent in private. He knew that if he
crossed a certain line in reacting to criticism, he would hand his enemies a
weapon: “ ‘See, he’s like all the rest of them.’ It was better for him to be
perceived as ‘different,’ with all the challenges that brought.” This “stifling
of himself,” this “inability to swing at certain pitches,” made him, according
to one aide, about “5 percent more aloof than he had been before coming to the
presidency.”
A similar sort of dynamic, in Mr. Alter’s opinion,
helps explain the president’s dismal first debate, which jeopardized his
re-election: “Obama didn’t trust himself to tangle with Romney. He thought
Romney was a liar and an empty suit and would reverse everything worthy he had
done as president,” and he had “long worried that his attitude would spill out.
Suppressing that was part of what threw him off his game” in that Denver debate.
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....[Alter] provides some interesting observations on Republican-backed efforts to
implement election “reform” around the country (like requiring state-issued
photo ID’s and cutting back on early in-person voting) that would hold down
“turnout among young people and minorities, who tended to vote Democratic.”
Those efforts failed, says Mr. Alter, instead creating a backlash against
Republicans as a wave of black voters headed to the polls in Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Virginia and Florida, angry at attempts to suppress their votes.
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....Over all, however, the long passages in this book
recounting the 2012 presidential campaign feel like tired television reruns of a
not-too-popular show. The only sections that substantially add to our
understanding of the campaign are those chronicling, in minute detail, the Obama
team’s creation of a sophisticated operation for reaching out to potential
supporters and getting out the vote — an operation that combined impressive
ground troops with the digital analysis of huge amounts of data.
This big data helped the campaign figure out what
worked and what didn’t (for a while, e-mails with yellow backgrounds “generated
10 to 20 percent” more responses than those with white backgrounds) and assess
the ever-shifting metrics of the contest. Some 4,000 to 9,000 phone calls a
night were placed to voters in battleground states, Mr. Alter says, providing
“the campaign high command” with “a 360-degree view of the state of the race.”
Facebook was used for “supporter mobilization” and cable television data was
employed to help micro-target ad buys. A mobile app, “Quick Donate,” Mr. Alter
reports, “raised an extra $75 million by letting supporters give money with one
click instead of filling out a form.”
This state-of-the-art campaign machine would help
insure that Mr. Obama won a second term. After the election, Mr. Alter says, the
Obama for America campaign was reincarnated as a group called Organizing for
Action. With more than 20 million e-mail addresses in its database, Organizing
for Action “would try to make the 2012 Chicago machine a permanent force in
American politics, applying money, analytics, door-knocking, and the rest of the
magic formula to advancing the president’s agenda.”