Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin, John Heilemann Read Free Book Online

office. But when Soros sought a meeting in the White House, he was repeatedly rebuffed for more than a year. Soros wasn’t trying to have legislation tweaked or a regulatory rule revised. All he wanted, he insisted, was to discuss the economy.
    Finally, in September 2010, a secret summit was set up at the Waldorf Astoria in New York by Patrick Gaspard, in the hope that Soros could be induced into serious check-writing on behalf of the Democrats ahead of the midterms. Soros held forth for forty-five minutes, lecturing Obama not about the economy but about how the president should talk about the economy—the financial savant as self-appointed message guru. In the room, Obama was annoyed and bored. Afterwards, he fumed, “If we don’t get anything out of him, I’m never fucking sitting with that guy again.”
    Soros apparently felt no better about the meeting: no big checks were forthcoming. And the Democrats could have used them. In the first election cycle of the post– Citizens United era, Republican outside groups poured nearly $200 million into House and Senate races, more than double the total on the Democratic side. The flashiest new players were American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, both set up by Bush ur-strategist Karl Rove, and Americans for Prosperity, backed by right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. But equally dramatic was the shift in Wall Street’s contributions: from 70 percent to Democrats in 2008 to 68 percent to Republicans in 2010.
    In a way, the spending figures were more of wake-up call for Obama than the midterm results; they signaled that the ground was shifting ominously beneath his feet. In 2008, the magical elixir of hope, change, Clinton fatigue, and Bush ennui had carried Obama a long way toward victory, but the fact that he had outspent John McCain by more than two to one hadn’t exactly hurt. Now Obama faced the likelihood of spending parity or worse—a bracing reality brought home in early 2011, when Rove announced that Crossroads planned to raise $120 million for 2012, followed quickly by the Koch brothers pledging to kick in another $88 million.
    Obama was hardly confronting a hanging at dawn, but the threat of a barrage of negative TV ads even before the GOP nominee was chosen did concentrate his mind. As Messina prepared to decamp from Washington for Chicago, Obama pulled him into the Oval Office. Plouffe had suggested the president might refrain from fund-raising until the summer so he could focus on governing. The president disagreed. We need to get going, get this money together, he told Messina. I don’t want to wait.
    In a political meeting before the midterms, Obama had observed that he saw no need to curry favor with business and finance then, because if Democrats lost the House, “we’re gonna have to kiss their asses anyway.” The appointment of Daley was, in effect, a big smooch on the backside of Wall Street. His presidential puckering up continued in March, when Obama invited two dozen bankers, hedgies, and private equitizers who had supported him in the past—Lasry, Kramer, Wolf, et al—for a meeting in the Blue Room of the White House.
    “I know you guys take a lot of flak in your community for supporting me,” the president said. Teasingly, he referred to some of their colleagues as “babies.” Solicitously, he asked, “How do you think we’re doing?” Then Obama questioned them about how he could do better. Some were cynical about the outreach: He’s only doing this because he’s worried. Others were heartened: Hey, at least he’s trying.
    Obama let the Wall Streeters know he planned to be in New York a lot in the months ahead. And by the time he turned up at the Daniel dinner, it was, in fact, his seventh event in the city in three months. The condensed stump speech he delivered amid the clink of crystal stemware was crisp and free of either pandering or apologies; he mentioned Wall Street only once.But he deftly and charmingly