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

acknowledged that he knew the bloom was off the rose.
    “I hope you will be as enthusiastic as many of you were back in 2008,” Obama said. “I’ve got to tell you that, partly because of the gray hair, I know that it’s not going to be exactly the same as when I was young and vibrant and new. And there were posters everywhere: HOPE . The logo was really fresh. And let’s face it, it was cool to support me back then. At cocktail parties you could sort of say, ‘Yeah, this Obama guy, you haven’t heard of him? Let me tell you about him.’”
    Most of the Wall Streeters who had been in the Blue Room were at Daniel, too. They sat there smiling, chuckling, nodding—and wondering if it was all for naught. Lasry, a billionaire and close pal of Clinton’s who often lent the former president his jet, was an admirer of Obama’s. But he was well aware that this made him an outlier in his circle. The antipathy for Obama had become an emotional thing on Wall Street. Over at Goldman, Lasry had heard, an edict had come down that there would be no giving to the president. And when Lasry asked around among his friends who had raised money for Obama in 2008, three-quarters said they wouldn’t vote for him again, let alone bundle or donate.
    When Obama finished his Daniel remarks, he made a loop around the room, stopping at each table, asking the same question he’d posed in the Blue Room: How do you think we’re doing?
    Three months earlier, Lasry had sugarcoated his reply, offered some suggestions. This time he thought, What the hell, tell the truth. He said, It’s not going well. Nobody here trusts you.
    Obama flew back to Washington more convinced than ever that he needed to make the grand bargain work. It was the only plausible way, he thought, to reduce the dyspepsia of the plutocrats. On the surface, his fund-raising looked healthy. In the three months since the reelect got up and running, he had raked in $86 million. But Obama sensed the fragility undergirding that big number. He knew it had required him to crank through thirty-one events, a pace he couldn’t hope to maintain. And, indeed, as June turned to July and Obama became engrossed on a daily basis in negotiating with Boehner, he found himself having to cancel fund-raisers left and right.
    That was the bad news. The good news was that he and Boehner seemed to be making progress. Oh, and another thing: in the president’s absence from the fund-raising trail, his campaign had discovered a new star to take his place, one who happened also to be named Obama.
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    F OR ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH the first lady, her emergence as a top-drawer buck-raker would have once seemed as likely as Biden moonlighting as a mime. Michelle had long cast a jaundiced eye on politics, and, in truth, she still did. In her husband’s first presidential campaign, she was initially a conscientious objector, then a reluctant conscript plagued by missteps that fed a caricature of her as an unpatriotic, aggrieved, and resentful black woman. But after her knockout speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and two years in the White House radiating warmth, humanity, and devotion to her daughters, her public image was pure platinum. Working mothers saw her as one of them, but with a bit more glamour. Independents loved her efforts to help military families and combat childhood obesity. Her approval ratings were in the high sixties, well above her husband’s.
    She enjoyed her celestial popularity and did much to protect and enhance it. She also enjoyed the perks of the White House, much as the admission pained her. But she chafed at the constraints of the bubble and the glare of nonstop scrutiny—“I have to put my makeup on to walk my dog in the backyard,” she complained—and at times made it sound as if she considered being first lady a burden. She never wanted this position, never asked for this position, and it irritated her when people couldn’t grasp the