Chapter 8
Dysfunctional Government
Although Barack Obama became the “comeback president” in 2012 by being the first president since Ronald Reagan to be reelected with more than 50 percent of the vote, his victory did not translate into a new chapter in his relations with Congress. Government remained dysfunctional as right-wing Republicans tightened their grip on both houses of Congress. Despite their opposition, Obama was able to win several legislative victories on Capitol Hill, but they caused a further poisoning of the relationship between Democrats and Republicans that forced, in one instance, a two-week government shutdown. As a result, by the midterm elections of 2014, voters had lost faith in either of the two major parties to govern.1
Another problem the president had to deal with even before his second term began was a series of tragic developments at home and abroad. Throughout his meteoric rise from his election to the Illinois state senate in 1996 to his reelection in 2012, good fortune had followed his political career. After he was returned to office, that changed when events, mostly beyond his control, shocked the nation and the world and forced him to reshape his agenda for the next two years. At home he had to deal with the killing in December of twenty children, ages six and seven, and six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut and, a few months later, with the setting off of two bombs among spectators watching the Boston Marathon. Abroad, he had to respond to the takeover of much of Iraq and part of Syria by the small, radical Sunni Islamic terrorist group known as ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) or ISIL (the Islamic State of the Levant) and the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, in the civil war against his regime.
In both cases, Obama responded with executive actions. He did so only when he became convinced that he could not work with Capitol Hill. The agenda he presented to the 113th Congress was much the same as the one on which he campaigned against his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in 2012. As in his first administration, his purpose was to expand and strengthen the nation’s middle class through a program of progressive reforms, fundamental to which were a core set of conservative principles.
Legislation, Division, and Domestic Terrorism
At the top of the president’s legislative list was eliminating the tax break approved during the Bush administration on earned income over $250,000; this meant that most Americans and small businesses would keep the Bush tax cut, while much of it would be eliminated for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Having won reelection by a comfortable margin and aware of the political cost to the Republicans if they allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire for all Americans, he adopted a hard bargaining position with the Republican leadership over extending the tax cuts to the richest Americans.2
While he was not able to get Republicans to agree to eliminate the tax cuts on household incomes over $250,000, he was able to reach an agreement eliminating the cuts for incomes over $450,000. Although progressive Democrats criticized him for giving away too much to the Republicans, by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he put the issue to rest before his second term began. He also won other concessions from the Republicans including increases in estate and capital gains taxes, renewal of tax credits for childcare, college tuition, and the working poor, and extension of unemployment benefits for two million jobless Americans. After the House passed the legislation, the president put down a marker for the next fiscal year. “The one thing that I think, hopefully, the next year will focus on,” he commented, “is seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinkmanship, and not scare the heck out of folks quite as much.”3
At his press conference the day after his reelection, he proposed comprehensive immigration reform. It had not been a high priority during his first administration, but he made reform of the nation’s complex and controversial immigration system one of his highest priorities during the 113th Congress. In particular, he sought to put into law the DREAM Act, which he had instituted by an executive order (DACA) and which provided a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who had been brought into the United States by their parents and either had a record of military service or were seeking a college education.4
The president also sought a comprehensive budget deal, something he also carried over from his first administration. He addressed the nation’s mounting debt through new sources of revenues other than closing loopholes and deductions, and budget cuts that preserved the nation’s social network and allowed investments in research, education, and infrastructure. He hoped to work with the Republicans, but he reminded them at his press conference that he had nothing to lose since he would never again run for office and warned that if there was no cooperation, he was prepared to act on his own. “I’ve got a mandate to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class,” he remarked. The American people want compromise, and they want action. “But they want to make sure that middle-class folks aren’t bearing the entire burden and sacrifice when it comes to some of these big challenges… . And that’s going to be my guiding principle during these negotiations.”5
Republican leaders responded to Obama’s remarks quickly. A few days after the press conference, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations and a candidate to replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said on a Sunday news show that the recent Benghazi attack appeared to have developed spontaneously from public demonstrations spreading throughout the Middle East over a video disparaging the prophet Muhammed. The comments came from talking points approved by the White House before evidence mounted that the attack was planned and carried out by members of Al-Qaeda. Republican Senators Lindsay Graham (SC) and John McCain (AZ), who said earlier that they wanted to have Watergate-style hearings on the Benghazi attack, remarked that Rice was unqualified to head the State Department because of her allegedly misleading account. The response of the Republicans to Rice’s statement infuriated the president and signaled their obstructionist intentions when the 113th Congress began in January.6
Before the new House and Senate convened, the nation was rocked by the mass killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. A mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, five months earlier had left twelve people killed and seventy others injured. It had the highest number of casualties at the time and led to calls for new gun control measures, including more extensive background checks of purchasers of guns and the prohibition of assault weapons. But the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) helped defeat these efforts at gun control, just as they had defeated earlier proposals following the shootings at Columbine High School in nearby Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, which left twelve students and one teacher dead, and at Virginia Tech in 2007, which left thirty-two dead.7
Because of the age and innocence of the children killed at Sandy Hook and the fact that the shootings occurred so soon after those in Aurora, news of what took place at the presumably safe town of twenty-seven thousand, about seventy-five miles by car from New York City, shocked the nation as no earlier act of domestic terrorism had done.
President Obama was so upset by the news of Sandy Hook that he told his deputy director of speechwriting, Cody Keenan, that he did not know if he would “be able to get through this.” In short remarks he made to the nation after learning of the shootings, he found himself having to stop several times to collect his emotions. “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” he said. “And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would—as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.”8
Four days later, the president spoke again at a prayer vigil for victims of the Sandy Hook shootings. Once more, he had difficulty controlling his emotions. “You must know that whatever measure of comfort we can provide, we will provide,” he told the families of the victims. “Newtown you are not alone.”9
When Congress reconvened on January 3, there was a widespread sense that the House and the Senate would finally adopt meaningful gun control legislation. The president had already decided to use his political capital to do something about guns. He assigned Vice President Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano the task of coming up with gun safety proposals that he could submit to Congress.10
In his second inaugural address on January 20 and in his State of the Union address on February 13, which White House Press Secretary Jay Carney characterized as “two acts of the same play,” he made clear his commitment to gun control, including requiring stronger background checks for purchasers of guns and prohibiting the sale of assault weapons. While his emphasis in both speeches was Washington’s responsibility to give every American the opportunity to enter the middle class, he closed both of them by turning to the shootings in Newtown and elsewhere. “Our journey is not complete,” he said in his inaugural, “until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”11
Unfortunately for the White House, passage of gun control measures still proved too hard. On April 17, a bipartisan measure offered by Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) that would have required expanded background checks for private sales of guns and gun show sales and banned the sale of some military-type semiautomatic weapons was defeated in the Democratic-controlled Senate by a vote of 54 to 46 with four Democrats from conservative states joining with Republicans to prevent the Senate from getting the sixty votes needed for approval. One by one other gun control measures also went down to defeat by even larger margins.12
The failure to pass gun control legislation was a resounding defeat for Obama, who had delivered major addresses on the need for gun control legislation in Colorado and Connecticut two weeks earlier and had made final appeals to Republicans to vote with the majority in favor of what he argued were modest first steps to prevent massacres like the one at Newtown.
As if to underscore the president’s message, on April 15, just two days before the Senate votes on gun legislation, two powerful bombs exploded killing three spectators and wounding 260 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. One of the two brothers responsible for the bombings was killed in a shootout with police, while the other was apprehended in a Boston suburb later that night. The bombings reverberated beyond Boston. Officials in New York and Washington stepped up security in important locations throughout the two cities. The Secret Service shut down Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.13
That the Senate could still block legislation that might prevent future acts of domestic terrorism, especially when parents of the victims of the Newtown shooting had come to Washington to lobby the senators and were seated in the Senate gallery watching the votes on gun control, infuriated the usually unflappable president. As David Plouffe explained: “When gun control failed, that was a very personal issue for the president. He had gotten close to many of the victims’ families.” “This is a pretty shameful day for Washington,” the president stated shortly after the Senate vote at a media event outside the Oval Office. He was accompanied by Gabby Gifford, the congresswoman who had been nearly killed at an earlier shooting outside a Tucson supermarket, and parents of the Sandy Hook victims, one of whom introduced him. Most of the senators who voted against the gun control legislation, the president remarked, “could not offer any good reason why we wouldn’t want to make it harder for criminals and those with severe mental illnesses to buy a gun… . It came down to politics… . They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti–Second Amendment.”14
Despair at the White House
Even before the Senate’s failure to pass gun control legislation, friends of Obama and Michelle began to notice subtle changes in their personalities. While Michelle grew more comfortable in her role as First Lady, she felt more isolated than in the past. She regretted that she could not see her beloved cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin in the spring without having to wear a hat and sunglasses. She stopped taking girls into a mentorship program she started because she worried that other teenagers would feel left out. At the same time, she and her staff began to consider ways she could take advantage of her popularity and take on other causes beyond child obesity and caring for military families.15
Obama also became more comfortable in his role as president, and more accustomed to some of the rituals of his office he had previously disdained, such as the annual pardoning of a turkey during the Thanksgiving holiday. Yet he had also become more cynical about Washington and more bloody-minded when it came to confronting the Republicans.16
In the winter and spring of 2013, the White House was rocked by a series of disclosures, including one by the Justice Department that it had taken possession of the records of AP reporters as part of an investigation into leaks of national security information and another that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was targeting conservative nonprofit groups seeking tax-exempt status. The first revelation seemed to belie Obama’s frequent statements on the importance of a free and independent media, while the second appeared to prove that the IRS had become a political arm of the White House. The disclosures led to calls by conservative groups for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder and eventually forced the resignation of Lois Lerner, director of the IRS Exempt Organization Division. Only after congressional scrutiny into IRS activity did the agency approve dozens of conservative groups for tax-exempt status, a sharp break from the previous two years when only a handful of such applications had been approved.17
Coming on top of the administration’s failure to gain gun control legislation, these scandals left Obama exasperated about his ability to shape events. Privately, he spoke about “going Bulworth,” a movie about a senator running for president who risked everything by saying publicly what he felt like saying regardless of the political consequences. He bristled at a column by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who wrote that while he had “searing moments” of connecting with the American public, he had not learned how to govern. Blaming the president for not getting Congress to approve gun control legislation, Dowd compared him unfavorably to the Michael Douglas character in the film The American President. At the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, which Douglas was attending, Obama turned to the actor and commented sarcastically, “Michael, what’s your secret, man.” He was determined to free himself of what he regarded as hypocritical power-seeking legislators, greedy money-making lobbyists, and even a shallow and sensational press, all of whom seemed to put their own self-interest ahead of the public good.18
In May, the president traveled to Mexico to discuss immigration, energy, and security matters with President Enrique Peña Nieto followed by a courtesy call to Costa Rica, where he met briefly with President Laura Chinchilla. In June he went overseas, visiting Belfast, Berlin, and Cape Town. In each of these places, he spoke to groups of young people. In each, he reminded them of the hardships that their forefathers had to bear—the first to end a bloody civil war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the second, to tear down the wall that divided Germany, and the third to end apartheid in South Africa—before they could have the freedom and prosperity they now enjoyed. A common theme in these addresses was that just as young people needed to be aware of the past sacrifices earlier generations made in their behalf, they needed to realize that authoritarianism, sectarianism, racial injustice, poverty, and terrorism were still widespread and that they had to carry on the struggle begun by their parents and grandparents. Speaking from the east side of the Brandenburg Gate that once divided East from West Berlin, he told his audience that what he wanted was “peace with justice.” “Peace with justice,” he went on to say, meant “free enterprise that unleashes the talents and creativity that reside in each of us,” the elimination of intolerance that “breeds injustice,” assurances that “our wives and daughters [have] the same opportunities as our husbands and sons,” “a world without nuclear weapons,” and the fulfillment of our moral obligations, including taking “a profound interest in the impoverished corners of the world.”19
The president’s most important visit, however, had occurred two months earlier, in March, when he made a fifty-hour trip to Israel, his first since taking office. His visit there left him doubting his role as a world leader. While in the Jewish state, he met with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and held a press conference before traveling to Ramallah in the West Bank where he held a joint news conference with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and later that day delivered a speech before a large group of Israeli students at a convention center in Jerusalem. He concluded his trip by briefly visiting Jordan where he held talks in Amman with its leader, King Abdullah II.20
His visit was more symbolic than policy-driven, but it had two main purposes. The first was to repair the president’s frayed relations with Netanyahu and the Israeli people as a result of a series of diplomatic slights on his part, including his failure to meet with the Israeli leader during his visit to the United States in 2010, and a statement he had made in Cairo in 2009 to the effect that the establishment of Israel was a result of the Holocaust. In an effort to take back that comment, he laid a wreath at the grave of Theodore Herzl, widely considered the father of the modern Zionist movement. Later, he went to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, where he remarked that Israel did not exist because of the Holocaust: Israel’s existence assured the Holocaust would never happen again.21
Israelis were also concerned about Syria’s development of chemical weapons that might be used against them and about the administration’s ongoing blunder, in their view, of not doing more to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, something they considered an existential threat to their survival. In response, Obama tried to reassure Israel (and King Abdullah) that he would not tolerate Syria’s use of chemical weapons or allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capacity.22
His other purpose in going to Israel was to rekindle the stalled effort to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian agreement based on a separate state for the Palestinian people on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip; this meant ending Jewish settlements on the West Bank. In his meetings with Israeli leaders and in his talks with President Abbas and King Abdullah II, with whom he also discussed Abdullah’s concern about the flow of Syrian refugees into Jordan as a result of the ongoing civil war in Syria, he raised the issue of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his address to one thousand Israeli students in Jerusalem, and a worldwide television audience of millions just before leaving for home, the president made a forceful case for a separate Palestinian state. Afterward, he told the students that peace was possible. “I’m not saying it’s guaranteed… . But it is possible.”23
Israel’s response to the president’s visit was favorable. Calling Obama’s address in Jerusalem “a corker of a speech,” D. L. of the Economist blog Pomegranate reported that the president “scored with the Israeli public.” Referencing his Jerusalem speech, Robert Taite of the Telegraph added: “With soaring rhetoric, he resembled the Barack Obama that a majority of the American public and much of the world beyond once loved—and had almost forgotten.” Even Prime Minister Netanyahu proved surprisingly courteous to the president. In the joint news conference he and Peres had with Obama after he arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, the prime minister expressed solidarity with Washington and remarked about a Mideast peace that his government sought a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 24
Yet little resulted from Obama’s visit to Israel. As David Remnick of the New Yorker pointed out, “for anyone looking for a real diplomatic initiative, this trip was … a real disappointment. Obama was all embrace: no pressure, no initiative, no insistence.” Outside Israel, the US remained as unpopular as ever. The Palestinians were deeply disappointed that during a press conference with Abbas, the president failed to repeat a previous demand for an end to further Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They were also disturbed that he failed to make any mention of a long-standing Palestinian insistence that, before agreeing to any peace settlement, Israel had to agree to the establishment of East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and to the right of return of Palestinian refugees to the new state of Palestine.25
Obama’s troubles in the Middle East were not limited to his failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. He also came under increasing criticism, even from his own supporters, for his use of drones in the Middle East. Almost from the time he took office, his advisers were fascinated by President Bush’s effective use of drones in killing many of the Al-Qaeda leaders in the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The president had doubts about Bush’s delegation of power in ordering drone attacks. As a former law professor, he was also concerned about the legality of detaining captured terrorists indefinitely and using drones to kill terrorist leaders. He drew sophisticated distinctions between what was legally permissible (targeting specific terrorist leaders) and what was not (torturing terrorists or being indiscriminate in using drone strikes). For that reason, he was deeply troubled by the use of drones to attack meetings of senior leaders instead of surgical attacks against single individuals. He was also rattled by growing criticism of the drone program on Capitol Hill and from civil and human rights groups. He increased the role of the White House in managing drone attacks, and he insisted on a complete review by the intelligence services of the reasons justifying a drone attack on a terrorist target, including any collateral damage it might cause nontargeted civilians.26
On May 23, 2013, Obama delivered a major address on US drone and counterterrorist policy at the National Defense University. Point by point, he outlined his reasons for employing targeted drone attacks on individual terrorist leaders. He also remarked on the expansion of Al-Qaeda from the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where, he claimed, its leadership had been largely decimated, to Yemen and Somalia. Together, the two countries controlled the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, a vital waterway for Persian Gulf oil.27
The United States was “at a crossroads,” in the war against terrorism, the president said. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us.” Despite Obama’s ending the war in Iraq and making Afghanistan more responsible for its own defense, and despite the killing of Osama bin Laden and most of his top lieutenants, terrorists remained a threat to the United States in the Arabian Peninsula as well as in countries like Libya and Syria and in the United States itself. “We have to take these threats seriously,” the president continued, “and do all that we can to confront them.”28
Because these threats were scattered and unified only by a common extremist belief that the United States and the West posed a threat to Islam, the war against terrorism could not rely “on military and law enforcement alone.” Instead, the US had to define its effort, “not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” He wanted a strategy that was “proportionate and smart.” His administration’s preference was to detain and prosecute terrorists. He had already signed a set of guidelines meant to rein in the indiscriminate use of drones, including working with other countries to capture known terrorists. This was not always possible. In these cases the use of drones was justified, recognizing the need for a complete review of the planned attacks he had described earlier. “We were attacked on 9/11,” the president stated. “Under domestic law and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associate forces… . So this is a just war—a war waged proportionately, in last resort, and in self-defense.”29
Obama’s address was widely criticized by foreign policy experts who took him to task for lacking specifics in his speech and by civil libertarians and the progressive wing of his party, who maintained that the indiscriminate use of drones violated international law and laid the foundation for the expansion of drone attacks. The administration appears “to be broadening the potential target threat,” said Christopher Swift, an expert on international law. “I don’t think anyone should feel reassured by anything that President Obama said about the use of lethal force,” added Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International.30
As spring gave way to the summer and fall, problems mounted for the White House. Even more controversial than the president’s decision to use drones against terrorist targets was his opting out of a statement he made in August 2012 that he would not allow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to use chemical weapons in the ongoing civil war in Syria, remarking that “a red line for us is [when] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized” and adding, “that would change my calculations significantly.”31
The president later denied he ever made such a unilateral statement, remarking that it was the world, not he alone, who drew the “red line.” He was being sincere in his denial. In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) a month earlier, he remarked with respect to Syria, “we will continue to make it clear to [President] Assad and those around him that the world is watching, and that they will be held accountable by the international community and the United States (my italics), should they make the tragic mistake of using those weapons.”32
Furthermore, when he made his unilateral “red line” statement he was responding at length to a reporter’s question at the end of a thirty-minute press conference. Unlike his earlier, prepared remarks at the VFW convention, his comments were delivered off-the-cuff, and he may not have expected them to be taken as literally as remarks that normally went through a long, interagency, vetting process.33
Regardless, when in August 2013, Assad actually used sarin gas—a nerve agent that paralyzes the lungs causing death from suffocation—against a rebel-held suburb of Damascus killing fourteen hundred men, women, and children, the president failed to respond militarily against the Syrian leader even though he ordered the Pentagon to prepare to attack. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later commented.34
Despite his orders to the Pentagon, the president began to have second thoughts about a military response. Having withdrawn troops from Iraq, aware that the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya had resulted in an ongoing civil war, and seeking to exit from Afghanistan, he became reluctant to make any long-term military engagement in Syria. During his visit to Germany in June, German chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Obama greatly admired, cautioned against a unilateral military strike, preferring he go to the UN for its approval of an attack.35
Seeking a way out of the dilemma he had created for himself and aware that Congress was also weary of further military commitments abroad, Obama decided to ask its authorization for an air strike. He described his request as seeking strong political support for a decisive military action against Syria, even though he acknowledged that he had the right to strike Syria without congressional approval. “He had all the rhetoric of action,” David Ignatius of the Washington Post later stated. “But in truth, [the administration] was stepping back from the imminent attack that it was heading toward … and at the last minute, the president blinked.”36
The president was still faced with the issue of what to do when, as seemed likely, Congress failed to approve the authorization legislation he requested. Under those circumstances, he might still have to launch some kind of military response against Syria. Otherwise, he would look like a toothless tiger, and there would be little to stop Assad from continuing to use chemical weapons against his enemies, opening the way for Iran or another country in the Middle East to do the same against their enemies.37
Fortunately for Obama, he was saved from military action by President Vladimir Putin of Russia. At a gathering of the G20 in St. Petersburg in September, Obama and Putin held an unscheduled meeting. The Soviet leader asked the president if a decision by Syria to turn over its stockpiles of chemical weapons to an international group would be a way of avoiding military action. Answering the question cautiously, the president suggested they have their top diplomats discuss the matter. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State John Kerry, who had replaced Hillary Clinton following her decision to resign after Obama completed his first term, was asked whether there was anything Assad could do to avoid an attack. Certainly, Kerry responded. He could acknowledge that he had chemical weapons and then give them up peacefully.38
A few days later, the secretary of state received a call from his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, asking about Kerry’s “initiative.” Undoubtedly under Russian pressure, the Syrians acknowledged the next day that they had chemical arms and agreed to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention banning such weapons. Not only were they pledging to come clean, they committed to getting rid of their chemical weapons altogether. At least for the moment, the Russians appeared to have saved Obama for resorting to the military action.39
On September 9, the president began a media blitz in which he gave interviews to six television networks. The next day, he elaborated on what he said in these interviews delivering a tough-sounding address to the nation in which he emphasized Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people and suggested strongly that his administration was on the precipice of taking military action against the Syrian government with or without congressional approval. In response to comments that a US response would amount to little more than a “pinprick,” the president said: “Let me make something clear, the United States military does not do pin-pricks… . If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons… . Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver.”40
About halfway through his speech, his rhetoric changed. It might not be necessary, he continued, to take any military action against the Assad government. He asked for a postponement of a vote in Congress supporting military intervention while Secretary of State Kerry met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow to work out the details of the Russian proposal to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control. “It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed,” the president stated. “But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad’s strongest allies.”41
Eventually, an agreement was reached with Syria, which began in October, to destroy its chemical weapons under the supervision of an international body committed to destroying such weapons (although Syria continued to develop its chemical weapons stockpile and to use them against the rebels in its ongoing civil war). As a result, the immediate crisis caused by the president’s “red line” statement in 2012 ended.42
Yet the whole incident caused Obama serious damage both from the right and the left, and from military hawks and military doves, who accused him of fecklessness in drawing a red line and then backing down from it just as it seemed he was about to intervene militarily in Syria. The hawkish former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, referred to the line as an unforced error that put America in a red-line box. If the president allowed the “red line” to be crossed without retaliation, Bolton said, his inaction will provide “further proof to Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, whether states or terrorists, that he is not a force to be reckoned with.” Barry Pavel, a former defense policy adviser to Obama who had moved to the Atlantic Council, commented, “I am not convinced [the ‘red line’ statement] was thought through. I am worried about the broader damage to U.S. credibility, if we make a statement and then come back with lawyerly language to get around it.” Journalists and commentators even called the “red line” statement the worst foreign policy blunder of the Obama administration.43
Obama Battles Congress
By the spring of 2013, the despair already evident at the beginning of the year was beginning to envelop the entire White House. Obama’s problems were not limited to developments abroad. Most of his attention was, in fact, taken up by domestic matters as he continued to speak out about the need to implement change at home in order to expand the nation’s middle class. As in earlier comments, he emphasized both government’s responsibility to provide opportunity for change but also the importance of self-help and individual responsibility. Speaking in February at a charter school in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, not far from the South Side where Michelle grew up and where he worked as a community organizer, the president spoke about how he wished he had had a father to help raise him. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “as the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay… . But I wish I had had a father who was around and involved… . Unconditional love for your child—that makes a difference.”44
In February the president was able to claim a victory on Capitol Hill when, after a long legislative battle, Congress voted to reauthorize the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. Renewed in 2000 and 2005, the original measure provided funding for the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, imposed mandatory restitution on those convicted, and established an Office on Violence against Women in the Department of Justice. In 2011, when the measure was scheduled to be reauthorized a third time, conservative Republicans objected to a new provision extending the measure’s protections to LGBT Americans, Native Americans, and undocumented immigrant victims of violence. Because of their objections, efforts to renew VAWA stalled in the 112th Congress.45
Beginning with the Ledbetter Act of 2009, Obama had supported policies important to women. Two months after taking office, he established the White House Council on Women and Girls to develop and coordinate priorities across government agencies. In his State of the Union address in 2013, he urged Congress to renew the VAWA. “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, our mothers, our daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence,” he said.46
In February, the Senate passed overwhelmingly the measure that was similar to last year’s bill except that it excluded visas for immigrant victims of violence. “This important step shows what we can do when we come together across party lines to take up a just cause,” the president remarked following the Senate vote. In the House, Speaker John Boehner still confronted significant opposition to the measure including from his own majority leader, Eric Cantor. Even though a majority of Republicans opposed the legislation, a smaller group of moderate Republicans supported it. In February, Boehner agreed to bring the legislation up for a vote. On February 28, 87 Republicans joined all the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 286 to 138.47
A week later, Obama held a signing ceremony during which he spoke about the White House’s commitment to enlarging the scope of the VAWA to include Native American women, who had been victimized by their often unemployed and drunken companions. But what the president emphasized as much as the achievements of the measure, was the bipartisan support it garnered. “And this victory shows that when the American people make their voices heard, Washington listens.”48
His overtures to the Republicans fell on deaf ears. Overshadowing his success in getting renewal of the VAWA for another five years was his failure to get Congress to stop the mandatory sequestering of spending as provided in the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). According to the legislation, mandatory sequestering was to begin in 2013 unless the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, a congressional committee established by the measure, was able to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion through any combination of revenue enhancements and budget reductions. The cuts were to be evenly divided between defense and domestic spending. Although sequestering was supposed to have begun after December 31, the deal reached by the president and the House Speaker delayed it until March 1, 2013.49
Because Democrats and Republicans failed to resolve their difference over the budget, sequestering took effect on March 1. At a press conference following its implementation, Obama made clear his position on sequestering. While he recognized the need to cut the federal deficit and agreed to the sequestering provision of the BCA, he opposed its mandatory feature and strongly objected to the budget reductions Republicans demanded. Instead, he proposed a combination of cuts even for such entitlement programs as Medicare and Social Security, which were exempted from sequestering, and additional tax enhancements, including additional taxes for the nation’s super-rich.50
Above all, he was determined to protect the rising middle class from the ravages of sequestering. Even though not everyone will feel the pain of budget cuts immediately, the president stated, the pain will be real for the middle class. “Communities near military bases will take a serious blow. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who serve their country—Border Patrol agents, FBI agents, civilians who work at the Pentagon—all will suffer significant pay cuts and furloughs. This will have a ripple effect throughout the economy “cost[ing] about 750,000 jobs at a time when we should be growing more quickly.”51
In both the House and the Senate, Republicans made various proposals to deal with the budget deficit, but they rallied around the proposal by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (WI), who had been Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. Long a proponent of major budget cuts to deal with the federal deficit, Ryan called for maintaining the cuts mandated by the sequestering provision of the BCA. In addition, he proposed repealing Obamacare, replacing Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance, and making significant cuts to Medicaid.52
On April 10, Obama submitted to Congress his budget plan for fiscal 2014. As the Washington Post reported, his purpose was to find an end to the debt standoff. The ten-year budget request provided for $300 billion in new spending on jobs and public works. In an effort to reach a budget agreement with Republicans, the president also called for trimming Social Security benefits by changing the way cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) were calculated, reducing Medicare benefits, and increasing Medicare premiums for couples making more than $170,000 a year.53
Over the next six months, the White House and Congress remained deadlocked over the budget for fiscal 2014. Significantly, the issues of sequestering and reducing the budget deficit took a back seat to the demands, especially among those who had Tea Party affiliations, to revoke the ACA. Efforts to repeal were fought more along ideological than fiscal lines. Encouraged by Senators Mike Lee (R-KS) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), both of whom had been elected to the Senate with the strong backing of the Tea Party, the Republican-controlled House adopted a series of resolutions for funding fiscal 2014 but with language that called for defunding the ACA. In August Majority Leader Cantor sent a memo to House Republicans stating that his caucus would “continue at full throttle” its opposition to the administration’s agenda when Congress returned from its summer recess.54
On September 20, 2013, the House approved a Continuing Resolution (CR) that kept the government funded for the first eleven weeks of fiscal 2014. The measure also defunded Obamacare. The president made it clear that he would veto any legislation that did so. In what seemed like a giant game of ping-pong, the Senate and House then went back and forth, the Senate rejecting the House’s efforts to defund Obamacare and the House proceeding once more to restore the defunding provisions. Even though the House and Senate remained in session late into the night of September 30, they were unable to solve the budgetary impasse. On October 1, the government was shut down.55
Obama did not escape unscathed from the battle over defunding the ACA and the shutdown of the government. Even some of his supporters wondered whether he could have done more to keep it open. The rollout of the ACA on the very day the government was being shut down was also a disaster. The contractors who had been hired to build and launch a website with little government oversight were not up to the job. They were not prepared for the complexity of connecting in one easily usable website the various government agencies involved in establishing an insurance marketplace. The website they developed was also not ready for the high volume of traffic that tried to access the portal. Technical problems made logging in and signing up for the insurance marketplace nearly impossible. Error messages plagued the system. Although fourteen sites established by states and the District of Columbia performed better, they did not always work smoothly. Hawaii’s marketplace did not fully open until October 15.56
Critics of the president used the failures of the rollout to criticize the ACA for being ill conceived, poorly developed, and hastily instituted. They accused the president of lying to the American people when he said that if they were happy with their present policies, they could keep them; in reality, there were thousands of policies that did not meet the minimum standards for coverage required by the ACA and had to be replaced by more expensive policies. They also complained that the effect of Obamacare was to have the middle class pay the expense of providing health care for the forty million Americans not already having insurance (mostly minorities) through higher premiums for their insurance.57
Speaking in the Rose Garden the day after the shutdown, the president blamed it on the Republicans. “They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans,” he remarked. “In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job.” He was willing to reopen negotiations, he said. “But as long as I am president, I will not give in to reckless demands by some in the Republican Party to deny affordable health insurance to millions of hardworking Americans.”58
For the next two weeks, the government remained closed. Most government employees and contractors were furloughed and went unpaid, causing severe hardship to the thousands of workers, especially those in unskilled and low-skilled jobs, who lived from paycheck to paycheck. Callers jammed the phone lines of their senators and representatives demanding that they reopen the government. As Boehner feared, public opinion turned decidedly against the Republicans, who were blamed for causing the shutdown.59
At a lengthy press conference one week into the shutdown, Obama reaffirmed his willingness to negotiate with the Republicans on a CR that would reopen the government. He even broke with the more progressive wing of his party by accepting sequestering and current levels of funding as part of any compromise agreement with the Republicans. Acknowledging that sequestering would hurt some of the programs he most cherished, like Head Start, he took the pragmatic position that, by not being willing to compromise, he would be hurting these programs even more, adding thousands more families to those already not able to enroll their children in Head Start because of the lack of funding. He made clear, however, that he would not budge from his position of vetoing any measure that included defunding his landmark achievement. “We’re not going to pay a ransom for America paying its bills,” he said. 60
Looking ahead to January when the debt ceiling needed to be raised, and borrowing from former president Bill Clinton’s playbook in explaining complex issues through easily understood examples, he also spoke of the dangers of not raising the ceiling. “Imagine in your private life, if you decided that I’m not going to pay my mortgage for a month or two. First of all, you’re not saving money by not paying your mortgage. You’re just a deadbeat. And you can anticipate that will hurt your credit, which means that in addition to the debt collectors calling, you’re going to have trouble borrowing in the future.”61
After the Treasury Department warned that it could run out of money to pay national obligations, the Republicans threw in the towel. On October 16, the Senate voted overwhelmingly, 81 to 18, to approve a measure worked out by Democratic and Republican leaders to continue funding of the government through January 15 and to raise the debt ceiling through February 7 without defunding the ACA. There were also some minor changes to the health law to make certain that those who received federal subsidies to buy health insurance were eligible to receive them. The major difference between this resolution and earlier CRs, however, was that this time a majority of Republicans voted with the Democrats to pass it. Among those who voted against the resolution were Senators Lee and Cruz, the libertarian Ron Paul (R-Ky), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) who was weighing running for president in 2016.62
With the Senate having approved the funding measure, it went to the House. This time the legislative logjam broke. Aware of how damaging the government shutdown was to Republicans, moderate House members split with the conservatives by voting for the Senate resolution. Speaker Boehner, a moderate himself who always felt uncomfortable aligning himself with the Tea Party wing of his party, realized that his caucus had boxed itself into an increasingly unpopular position at a time when the nation faced the possibility of defaulting on its debts. He concluded that he had no option other than to agree to a CR without the offending provision.63
Accordingly, on October 17, the day after the Senate sent its CR to the House, it passed the legislation by a vote of 285 to 144. Eighty-seven Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic caucus in approving the legislation, one day before the Treasury Department said it would run out of money. In passing the measure, not a single member of the Republican leadership spoke out in support of the bill. Majority Leader Cantor broke again with the Speaker by voting against it, as did most Republicans. Afterward, Cruz claimed that, by showing Americans the harm the ACA was causing consumers, employers, and the American economy, the fight to defund the measure had been worthwhile.64
Most Republicans knew better. Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA), a moderate Republican, said Congress should have passed legislation funding the government without strings attached weeks ago. “For the party, this is a moment of self-evaluation,” added Senator Graham. “We are going to assess how we got here. If we continue down this path, we are really going to hurt the Republican Party long-term.” “We fought the good fight,” said Speaker Boehner. “We just didn’t win.”65
Speaking shortly after signing the legislation reopening government, the president praised Congress, but urged it not to allow a repeat performance of what he called a “self-inflicted crisis that set our economy back.” As he almost always did, he also held out the prospect of a bright future for the country, provided it did not default on its debt. Looking to February, when the nation would again be unable to pay its obligations unless Congress raised the debt ceiling and aware that conservative legislators were once again preparing to tie defunding of the ACA to raising the ceiling, he made clear that America’s economic standing in the world was tied to defeating this effort. “Now the good news is that we’ll bounce back from this,” he said. “We are the indispensable nation that the rest of the world looks to as the safest and most reliable place to invest.”66
Obama laid out his priorities for the next fiscal year, which included closing tax loopholes in order to fund education, infrastructure, and research. In addition, he sought passage of a farm bill and an immigration reform measure, both of which had already passed the Senate. The farm bill, he maintained, would give “rural communities opportunities to grow and the long-term certainty that they deserve,” while the immigration reform bill would include the nation’s “biggest commitment to border security” in its history, but also a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.67
On each of these measures and others, the president said what he had always said: that he would seek to find common ground with the Republicans. Under no condition, however, would he allow the ACA to be held hostage to a congressional agreement on the debt ceiling. Having been burned by shutting down the government over the defunding of the ACA, the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill was in no mood to risk another shutdown by tying conditions to a bill raising the debt ceiling. Although a majority of Republicans still opposed raising the ceiling without conditions, Boehner stunned his caucus when he dropped a condition that would have provided for cuts to retirement pensions approved in December, allowing instead a vote on a clean debt ceiling measure. He was then able to get enough moderate and retiring Republicans to vote with the 193 Democrats to approve the legislation by the narrow margin of 221 to 201, the first such measure since 2009 that was not attached to other legislation.68
Although Cruz was able to delay final approval of the measure in the Senate by filibustering against it, enough Republicans joined with Democrats, including Minority Leader McConnell and Minority Whip John Cornyn, to have the sixty votes needed to invoke cloture ending debate. The Senate then approved the clean resolution sent over from the House by a vote of 55 to 43, which Obama quickly signed into law.69
With passage of the clean resolution allowing the government to pay its bills, Obama had won another legislative victory over Republicans in Washington. Throughout the struggle over funding the government through fiscal 2014, the president had not wavered in his determination not to allow the ACA to be used as a pawn by the Republicans. And he had won.
The president had done so, however, at the cost of further alienating Republicans. In the House, Speaker Boehner came under withering criticism from Tea Party Republicans and conservative lobbying groups for his decision to allow a vote on a clean debt ceiling measure. In a nearly impossible situation already because of the strength of these Republicans, Boehner’s position as Speaker was weakened even more, and for that he blamed Obama. “He won’t even sit down and discuss these issues,” the Speaker remarked as the vote on raising the debt ceiling was about to be taken. “He’s the one driving up the debt and the question [his caucus is] asking is, why should I deal with his debt limit.”70
Through the Congressional Elections of 2014
As the president began the second year of his second term, his chances of getting any of his legislative priorities through the House were bleak. On January 28, he delivered his fifth State of the Union address. Like his earlier addresses before Congress, it contained a list of these priorities, including immigration reform, an increase in the minimum wage, addressing climate change by shuttering carbon-emitting coal-fired plants, and proposals to address the growing problem of inadequate retirement savings for those who needed help the most. Pointing to the economic strides his administration had made since he took office, the president remarked that more work still needed to be done. What he was offering was “a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class.”71
Two features of this State of the Union made it different from his earlier ones. First was the stern warning he gave to the lawmakers that he was prepared to take action on his own if Congress failed to act first. “Let’s make this a year of action,” he stated. As an example of what he was prepared to do was his announcement that he was issuing an executive order increasing the minimum wage for future federal contracts from $7.50 to $10.10 an hour. He was also taking other measures to lower the burden of student loans in higher education, to reduce unemployment, to create new ways for working Americans without retirement plans to start their own plans, and to try, with or “without Congress,” to stop gun-related tragedies like the one in Sandy Hook. “I am eager to work with all of you” he told the legislators in his sixty-five-minute speech. “But America does not stand still—and neither will I.”72
In his address, Obama also tried to position his administration as a champion of those left behind after a contentious year on Capitol Hill that left the president with approval ratings hovering around 50 percent. Breaking from the past, he offered no sweeping programs of reforms of the nation’s health system, its industrial structure, and its banking system. Instead, he proposed incremental changes. Although he made clear his determination to act unilaterally if necessary, he reiterated his desire to work with the Republicans in achieving his goals.73
Distrustful of the president and having their own conservative agenda, the Republicans rejected his proposals. To respond to his State of the Union message, they chose Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), an ardent conservative, and vocal opponent of same-sex marriage and abortion. Ignoring Obama’s own emphasis throughout his presidency on free markets and a thriving middle class, she spoke of a “more hopeful Republican vision” that “champions free markets and trusts people to make their own decisions.” The stalemate between the White House and Congress that had begun after Obama’s reelection thus continued largely unabated through November.74
Overseas, problems continued to mount for the White House. Through March and into the summer, Obama had to respond to the Russian seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and to the threat Moscow posed to the independence of Ukraine, which was ethnically divided. A narrow peninsula in southern Ukraine surrounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, Crimea had historically been part of Russia. In 1954, Moscow transferred the territory to Ukraine, which had been a republic within the former Soviet Union until 1991, when it became an independent nation. After Putin became president of Russia in 2012, he decided he wanted the Crimea—with its large gas and oil reserves and strategic location—back. He seized the territory by force and then annexed it after a disputed plebiscite voted overwhelmingly in favor of reannexation. The Russian military also moved troops along the Crimea-Ukrainian border that threatened southern and eastern Ukraine.75
For a time, it seemed the entire Ukraine, led by Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt and pro-Russian politician, might fall under Russian control. After Yanukovych backed away from an agreement that would have had Ukraine affiliate with the European Union (EU), demonstrators took to the streets forcing Yanukovych to flee to Russia. In May they elected a pro-Western candidate, Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine. But Russian troops continued to engage Ukrainian forces in Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine.76
In response, Obama joined the United States’ Western allies in imposing sanctions on sixteen Russian officials and wealthy businessmen with close ties to Putin. In numerous calls he had with the Soviet leader, often playing scrabble while he waited for Putin to join the conversation, the US president raised the possibility of more sweeping measures against core parts of the Russian economy, including its oil and natural gas sectors. In addition, he sent Vice President Biden to reassure Poland and the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, that he would uphold its collective security commitment to them as members of NATO. “Going forward, we can calibrate our response based on whether Russia chooses to escalate or to deescalate the situation,” he said in a statement on the White House South Lawn on March 20, 2014.77
On July 17, insurgent forces loyal to Russia in eastern Ukraine shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a civilian jet passing overhead, using an antiaircraft battery supplied to them by Moscow, killing all 298 passengers and crew aboard including 80 children. Although there is no evidence Putin had advance knowledge of the insurgents’ plan, the incident had a major affect on Obama’s relations with the Soviet leader. For most of his administration, the American president had hoped to improve relations with Putin. The shooting down of the Malaysian flight with a weapon supplied by the Russians ended any remaining hope of that happening. Even so, Obama refused to contemplate opening up a new military front in a part of the world he still did not consider crucial to America’s national interest. He remained reluctant even to send military equipment to Ukraine.78
More threatening to American interests than developments in the Ukraine was the rise of ISIS (ISIL). In the spring and summer of 2014, ISIS was able to spread its power from its small base in Syria into large parts of Iraq and Syria, and capture the major cities of Fallujah and Mosul in western Iraq. Thirty thousand Iraqi forces equipped with the latest American weapons laid down their arms and were either captured, killed, or fled the scene rather than engage one thousand members of ISIS being transported on the back of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and light artillery and waving the black flag of the self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate. Through its terrorist tactics, including its threats to export these tactics to Europe and the United States, ISIS sent tremors of fear throughout the West unlike any since 9/11.79
As Ben Rhodes described the situation within the administration, “for a couple of days, a sense of crisis enveloped the White House.” Obama was incensed about what was taking place in Iraq. He could not understand the apparent breakdown in American intelligence about ISIS and the abject failure of the Iraqi military, which he described as “folding like a cheap tent,” to stand up to the outmanned and out-armed terrorist organization. He made his displeasure clear to his entire national security team, including his director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, who was already under fire for embarrassing leaks by Edward Snowden, a whistleblower and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, showing that the NSA was spying on some of America’s closest allies, including German chancellor Merkel, who was infuriated by the revelation. “We didn’t get a warning that the Iraqis were going to melt away,” the president complained. “I’m not happy with the information I’m getting.” “I’m aggravated,” he added.80
After the fall of Fallujah, pressure mounted on the president to launch some kind of major military response against ISIS. It grew even stronger following the public beheadings of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as they kneeled on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs. The world was shocked by the videos that ISIS sent to the media of Foley’s and Sotloff’s beheadings.81
Having withdrawn American troops from Iraq and intending to do the same for most American forces in Afghanistan, the president still refused to be drawn back into another major military commitment in Iraq. Displaying an anger he rarely showed in remarks about the Iraq War, he denounced the beheading of Foley as “appalling.” Promising to be “relentless” and to see that “justice is done” in protecting Americans abroad, he launched fourteen new airstrikes against ISIS, destroying ISIS Humvees and other military equipment and weapons.82
He made clear in a statement the day after Foley was beheaded, however, that he considered it up to the people of the Middle East, not the United States, “to extract this cancer so that it does not spread.” His only concession was to commit a small force to Baghdad to help train Iraqi forces. He blamed much of the rise of ISIS on Iraq’s Shiite leader, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who refused to share power with Iraq’s Sunni minority. His hope was that once al-Maliki was replaced as leader in the next election, a more pro-Sunni government would help undermine support for ISIS and a better trained Iraqi military would overwhelm ISIS forces on the battlefield.83
On the day after Foley’s beheading, the Pentagon acknowledged that a month earlier, on July 4, it had tried to rescue a group of fourteen hostages being held by ISIS in Syria, including Foley and Sotloff and a third hostage, Kayla Mueller, a human rights activist who was beheaded later that year. The mission failed when it was discovered that the hostages had been moved to another site.84
From both the right and the left, the president was attacked for his response to Foley’s and Sotloff’s beheadings and then for the Pentagon’s belated revelations of the failed rescue attempt. Critics took the president to task for allowing ISIS to become a worldwide threat and then for not taking more vigorous military action against the terrorist organization. His national security team was criticized, even by some of those who worked on a rescue mission, for delays in bringing an operational plan to the president. Other critics were troubled by the administration’s long-standing policy of not negotiating with terrorist organizations for the release of hostages. They were angry that the president launched the rescue mission without consulting with the families of the hostages and without trying to negotiate with ISIS for their release.85
The White House tried to defend itself. Although Obama acknowledged that his administration “probably missed [the hostages] by a day or two,” he said it was wrong “to say that the United States government hasn’t done everything we could.” He also made clear that while he should have done a better job of consulting with the families of the hostages, he remained committed to the long-held American policy of not bargaining with terrorists for the release of hostages. “We will do everything we can, short of providing an incentive for future Americans to be caught,” he said in an interview. Senior administration officials also denied there was any delay in approving the hostage rescue effort once the rescue plan reached the White House. “For us, the clock starts when they tell us that they have an operation that they want the president to review and approve… . It can’t happen any faster than that,” Susan Rice commented. 86
Altogether, the events of the first six months of 2014—indeed, of the last year when criticism of the “Red Line” statement is taken into account—left leading figures within the White House exhausted and the administration reeling. Clapper was prepared to resign or be fired from his job, and Rhodes considered resigning. The problems and criticisms he faced also took their toll on the president. He felt trapped in the White House. His hair was grayer, his face more lined. “President Obama’s hair is definitely grayer these days, and no doubt trying to manage foreign policy in a world of increasing disorder accounts for at least half of those gray hairs. (The Tea Party can claim the other),” commented Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.87
Obama tried to shrug off the attacks directed at him. For a few weeks, he fantasized with Rhodes about creating a dome under which he could place ISIS and the Russian special forces in eastern Ukraine. “Put ’em in the terror zone,” he said, but the criticisms continued. Despite his administration’s best efforts to defend itself, he was losing the battle of public opinion going into the 2014 congressional elections. Even some of the administration’s own supporters began to question Obama’s capacity to lead.88
Doubts about the president’s leadership, were reflected in the midterm elections. On November 4, 2014, the Democratic Party suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls. In the House, Republicans gained thirteen seats, giving them the largest majority since the Great Depression. Even more striking, they won nine Senate seats—the largest change of seats since 1980—giving them control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. On the state and local levels, Republicans did equally well, winning twenty-four of the thirty-six governorships being decided that year for a net gain of two and flipping ten legislative chambers.89
Republicans touted their victory as a rejection of the president and his policies. “This race wasn’t about me or my opponent,” said Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who was easily reelected to the Senate and was slated to be its new majority leader. “It was about a government people no longer trusted.” Most analysts agreed with McConnell. Beginning with Obama’s reelection in 2012, when his approval rating hovered slightly above 50 percent, it had begun to drop steadily, reaching a low of around 40 percent a year later and never rising much above that level through 2014.90
Throughout the campaign, Republicans had kept the president on the defensive. They focused on the alleged failures of the administration, including the slow economic recovery from the 2008 recession and the still high unemployment rate at around 6 percent. They also continued to criticize Obamacare, especially its individual mandate and the high deductibles and copayments that policy holders had to pay. So, too, with respect to the White House’s foreign policy, they continued to argue that it was irresolute, and they held the administration responsible for the rise of ISIS.91
“I hear you, I hear you,” Obama commented at a news conference the day after the elections. He also spoke with Speaker Boehner and congratulated McConnell, who, after the election, promised to work with the administration over the next two years, on becoming the next Senate majority leader. The president looked forward to working with him “to deliver for the American people,” he said at his news conference. He also looked forward in two days to hosting the entire Republican and Democratic leadership at the White House “to chart a new course forward.” He refused, however, to interpret the election as a personal rebuke of his leadership. “Obviously, Republicans had a good night,” he remarked. “And they deserve credit for running good campaigns. Beyond that, I’ll leave it to all of you and the professional pundits to pick through yesterday’s results.”92
Rather than appearing contrite about the huge losses the Democrats—many of whom had tried to run away from him during the campaign—had suffered, Obama remained defiant, interpreting the elections as a repudiation, not of himself, but of an ineffectual Congress. He had good reason to feel this way. The turnout for the election was the lowest since 1942 with just 36.4 percent of the electorate voting. The exit polls showed that more voters (79 percent) disapproved of Congress’s performance than the president’s. They suggested that in 2014 the voters were not so much repudiating Obama and the Democrats as they were the whole governing system in Washington.93
As a result, the president took an even harder stand than before in his determination to defy Congress and to take executive action when he felt it necessary. “My presidency is entering the fourth quarter; interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter,” he commented in the Oval Office a few days after the election. “This elicited … a sense that perhaps we were going to spend the last two years of the presidency doing big things, unencumbered by the caution and exhaustion that had crept in at points over the last few years,” Ben Rhodes later wrote.94