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

sacrifices she was making—any semblance of a normal life, for instance. When she planned to take Sasha and Malia on a swanky trip to Spain in the summer of 2010, she was warned it would cause a royal ruckus, as it did. (“A modern-day Marie Antoinette,” scolded the New York Daily News. ) But didn’t she have a right to take her girls on holiday? Didn’t they have a right to see the world? Forget it, she thought. We’re going.
    There were tensions, too, with the West Wing staff—with Rahm, Gibbs, Axe, and even Jarrett now and then. Michelle was exacting, lawyerly, precise; she thought them sloppy, disorganized, and presumptuous. (Mostlythey were scared to death of her.) In the run-up to the midterms, they had begged her to campaign actively for Democratic candidates. She resisted for months, then demanded to see a detailed plan. At a meeting in the Oval Office in mid-September, they laid it all out for her, complete with reams of data and even a PowerPoint. Michelle said she was impressed with the level of preparation—but agreed to do only eight events, a sliver of what her husband’s political team wanted. But here was another good-news/bad-news story: at the events she did, she sparkled.
    In truth, Michelle didn’t care about congresspeople. Her opinion of them was even lower than the president’s. What she cared about was Barack. She worried that campaigning in a partisan way in the midterms would erode the pile of political capital she’d painstakingly amassed. My husband’s going to need every bit of it, she thought. That’s what I want to use it for—I want to campaign for MY GUY.
    Messina prayed those sentiments applied equally to fund-raising. In March, he sat down with Michelle in her East Wing office to make his pitch. Like his colleagues in September, he put together a granular presentation. Her events would entail her stump speech only, no questions. She would just do day trips that yielded at least $1 million. (Biden’s floor was $250,000.) She would never be away from the girls when her husband was traveling. She would lend her signature to e-mail and direct-mail solicitations, which she hadn’t done in 2010. Messina expected her to push back at least on some elements of the plan—this was Michelle. Instead she changed nothing, approved it all without hesitation.
    And then she killed, pulling in $10 million in that first fund-raising quarter. As the summer rolled on, her mail and online pleas for money outperformed her husband’s. And while she couldn’t say she was having a ball, she was surprisingly game. When Messina sat down with her again to discuss her schedule for the fall, Michelle studied his cautiously culled requests and said, “That’s all?”
    From the moment the first couple arrived in the White House, Michelle had confided to friends that she could live with her husband being a one-term president. But the accumulation of the attacks from the right, the repudiation embodied by the midterms, and what she saw as the know-nothing ingratitude of the middle—“Look at all these great things he’sdoing, and nobody knows,” she would say to Jarrett—had changed her tune. She was “absolutely determined,” she said, that her husband be reelected, for that was the only source of vindication for what he—and they—had accomplished.
    “We’re in it to win—we’re gonna win,” Michelle told one donor. “We’re gonna show everyone.”
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    H AD OBAMA’S DEALMAKING BEEN going as well as FLOTUS’s rainmaking, the summer of 2011 might have been a day at the beach. Instead, it was a season of misery.
    On July 22, after weeks of dark nights and false dawns, the president’s talks with the speaker faded to black. Looking wan in a televised press briefing, Obama grouched that, for a while, he “couldn’t get a phone call returned” by Boehner and that he’d been “left at the altar.” With the debt-ceiling deadline fast approaching, Geithner briefed