The Amateur Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ALSO BY EDWARD KLEIN

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PROLOGUE

  PART I - CHICAGO, THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN

  CHAPTER 1 - HOLLOW AT THE CORE

  CHAPTER 2 - A GHOSTLY PRESENCE

  CHAPTER 3 - “YOU KEEP OUT OF THIS!”

  CHAPTER 4 - “YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER WHEN POLITICIANS MAKE PROMISES”

  CHAPTER 5 - THE MAN WHO PREPARED OBAMA FOR THE PRESIDENCY

  PART II - AMATEUR HOUR AT THE WHITE HOUSE

  CHAPTER 6 - DRINKING THE OBAMA KOOL-AID

  CHAPTER 7 - BUNGLER-IN-CHIEF

  CHAPTER 8 - CLARK KENT

  CHAPTER 9 - GROUND ZERO

  CHAPTER 10 - VALERIE V. RAHM

  CHAPTER 11 - THE WRATH OF MICHELLE

  CHAPTER 12 - OUT TO LUNCH

  PART III - WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

  CHAPTER 13 - OPRAH’S SACRIFICE

  CHAPTER 14 - SNUBBING CAROLINE

  CHAPTER 15 - THE JEWISH PROBLEM WITH OBAMA

  CHAPTER 16 - ALL IN THE FAMILY

  PART IV - THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

  CHAPTER 17 - THE WAR ON GENERAL JONES

  CHAPTER 18 - MIND-MELD

  CHAPTER 19 - THE RISE OF THE HUMANITARIAN VULCANS

  PART V - A ONE-TERM PROPOSITION?

  CHAPTER 20 - THE “NEW OBAMA”

  CHAPTER 21 - IN SEARCH OF THE REAL OBAMA

  CHAPTER 22 - THE LOW ROAD

  Acknowledgments

  SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY EDWARD KLEIN

  NONFICTION

  All Too Human:

  The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy

  Just Jackie:

  Her Private Years

  The Kennedy Curse

  Farewell, Jackie

  The Truth about Hillary

  Katie:

  The Real Story

  Ted Kennedy:

  The Dream That Never Died

  NOVELS

  If Israel Lost the War

  (With Robert Littell and Richard Z. Chesnoff)

  The Parachutists

  The Obama Identity

  (With John LeBoutillier)

  For Dolores, my courageous companion

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DARK SIDE OF OBAMA

  Every man is a moon and has a [dark] side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.

  —Mark Twain

  This is a reporter’s book.

  During the past year and a half, I have interviewed nearly two hundred people, both inside and outside the White House. Many of these people have known Barack Obama for more than twenty years—from his earliest days in Chicago. Some of them were positive about Obama, others were negative, but the stories they told me had a remarkable consistency.

  Bound in dozens of four-inch-thick three-ring notebooks, my transcribed notes run for almost a thousand pages and tell the story of a man who is at bottom temperamentally unsuited to be the chief executive and commander in chief of the United States of America. Here in these interviews we come face to face with something new in American politics—The Amateur—a president who is inept in the arts of management and governance, who doesn’t learn from his mistakes, and who therefore repeats policies that make our economy less robust and our nation less safe. We discover a man who blames all his problems on those with whom he disagrees (“Washington,” “Republicans,” “the media”), who discards old friends and supporters when they are no longer useful (Democrats, African-Americans, Jews), and who is so thin-skinned that he constantly complains about what people say and write about him. We come to know a strange kind of politician, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of politics, but who clings to the narcissistic life of the presidency.

  This portrait of Obama is radically at odds with the image of a centrist, pragmatic, post-partisan leader that his political handlers have tried to create. And it is a far cry from the Obama most Americans remember from four years ago. Many of the people I interviewed, including Republicans who voted against him, wondered what had happened to that Obama—the young, articulate African-American senator who burst upon the political scene by presenting himself as a new kind of politician, a peacemaker, a mediator, and a conciliator who promised to heal the rift between red and blue America?

  Where did he vanish?

  Did he ever exist?

  Was he a figment of his own imagination, or of our imagination—or of both?

  How did he turn out to be the most divisive president in recent American history?

  Will Americans finally come to recognize the dark side of Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2012?

  These are some of the critical questions I set out to answer in this book. My job as a reporter was complicated by the fact that Obama and his advisers have gone to elaborate lengths to hide his dark side. However, I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable. As you will see in the pages that follow, I chose to launch my investigation in Chicago, where Obama first donned his disguise as an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “Ever since I’ve known him, Obama has had delusions of grandeur and a preoccupation with his place in history,” one of his oldest Chicago acquaintances told me. “He is afflicted with megalomania. How else can you explain the chutzpah of an obscure community organizer who began writing his autobiography before he was thirty years old—and before he had any accomplishments to write about? And how else can you explain the chutzpah of a first-term United States senator, who believed he was qualified for the most difficult job in the world—the presidency—even though he had never held a real job in his life?

  “You can explain it with any number of words: arrogance, conceit, egotism, vanity, hubris,” this person continued. “But whatever word you choose, it spells the same thing—disaster for the country he leads.”

  Obama’s supporters claim that he has been falsely charged with being a leftwing ideologue. But based on my reporting, I concluded that Obama is actually in revolt against the values of the society he was elected to lead. Which is why he has refused to embrace American exceptionalism—the idea that Americans are a special people with a special destiny—and why he has railed at the capitalist system, demonized the wealthy, and embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement.

  Of course, Obama doesn’t see things that way. And therein lies the challenge for conservatives. As Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, points out, “Barack Obama may be a lousy president . . . but he’s a very good campaigner.” He is determined to get reelected and go down in history books as a transformative president who turned America into a European-style democratic-socialist welfare state.

  Shortly after Obama entered the White House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.”

  To which Obama boasted, “That’s not enough for me.”

  It may finally have become too much for the rest of us.

  PROLOGUE

  AS BILL SEES IT

  CHAPPAQUA, NEW YORK, AUGUST 2011

  Bill and Hillary were going at it again, fighting tooth and nail over their favorite subject: themselves.

  It was a warm summer Sunday—a full year away from the 2012 Democratic National Convention—and Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to think the unthinkable. He wanted her to challenge Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination. No American politician had attempted to usurp a sitting president of his own party since Ted Kennedy failed to unseat Jimmy Carter more than thi
rty years before.

  “Why risk everything now?” Hillary demanded to know.

  “Because,” Bill replied, “the country needs you!”

  His voice was several decibels louder than necessary, and his nose was turning shades of red.

  “The country needs us!” he shouted, banging a fist on his desk to drive home his point.

  “The timing’s not right,” Hillary shot back.

  Unlike Bill, she didn’t raise her voice, but her face was flushed and her eyes were bulging, which often happened when Bill tried to force her to do something she didn’t want to do.

  “I want my term [at the State Department] to be an important one, and running away from it now would leave it as a footnote,” Hillary said. “I want to make my mark as a statesman. Anyway, I’m young enough to wait my turn and run [for the White House] in the next cycle.”

  “I know you’re young enough!” Bill said, raising his voice yet another notch. “That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried that I’m not young enough.”

  They were seated in Bill’s home office in the converted red barn located a few short steps away from their Dutch Colonial house on 15 Old House Lane in Chappaqua, a suburb of New York City. The barn walls were lined with books on history and politics, with a good smattering of biographies. Beneath the high, long windows were souvenirs from Bill’s travels—a cigar store Indian, African bows and arrows, and a spear. Outside, four black Secret Service SUVs—two for the former president and two for the secretary of state—cooked under the August sun.

  Like so many of the verbal brawls the Clintons had engaged in down through the years, this one had a theatrical quality about it, as though it was being staged for an audience. And, in fact, their quarrel was taking place in front of a few old friends who were both fascinated and appalled by the fierce spectacle.

  Later, one of those witnesses would recall for this book: “The argument about her running had been going on for days, if not for weeks, and Hillary was clearly exasperated with Bill. He wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer. There was a reason Bill didn’t want to wait until the next presidential cycle, in 2016, when Hillary’ll be sixty-nine and Bill’ll be seventy. Bill’s had a lot of serious health setbacks—quadruple bypass surgery, a collapsed lung, two coronary stents—and all that’s left him feeling like he’s living on borrowed time.”

  In the middle of their argument, Hillary’s BlackBerry went off and she answered it. Bill kept right on talking over her phone conversation. Then Hillary’s other BlackBerry rang, and she picked that one up, too, and placed it against her other ear, and now she was talking into two phones at once, making important decisions about foreign policy, but Bill continued to argue with her, and she looked really pissed; she made a throat-cutting motion for him to shut up.

  When she hung up, Bill began to rattle off the results of a secret poll in which potential voters had been asked how they would feel about Hillary’s making a run against Obama for the White House in 2012.

  “Your poll numbers are all positive,” Bill said, pacing the floor. “African-Americans are moving away from Obama and in your direction. Latinos, too. And Jews. Women and the elderly are all on your side. Young college boys are the only ones clinging to Obama. It’s a no-brainer. You can win if you want back in the White House as much as I do.”

  A cloud passed over Hillary’s face. “Is it going to get out that you did this poll?” she asked.

  Everyone in the room instantly grasped the implication of her question: Would Barack Obama find out about Bill’s act of political treachery?

  “Nobody’s going to find out about it,” Bill assured her.

  Hillary gave him a skeptical look; she didn’t have to be told that lying came easily to her husband.

  “All of us in the room, including Hillary, assumed that Bill had commissioned the poll, although he didn’t specifically say so,” said one of their friends. “Of course, he could have been bluffing. That would be like him. Hillary has said many times that he plays liar’s poker even with her. He can’t help himself. The odd thing was that he didn’t have a bound notebook with the results. He just reeled off the number from his head. But that’s like him, too. He has an amazing ability to remember details of policy.”

  Hillary was seated in a leather chair, stroking her toy poodle, Tally, perched on her lap. Bill’s chocolate lab, Seamus, was roaming around the room, and at one point Tally leapt off Hillary’s lap and chased Seamus out of the barn. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

  But then Bill picked up the quarrel again, and he and Hillary were going at it full throttle when Chelsea showed up. She was alone, without her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. With her long, flowing blonde hair and stylish weekend outfit, she was the picture of a confident 31-year-old career woman. And in fact, Chelsea had recently joined the board of Barry Diller’s Internet media holding company IAC/InterActive Corp, and was in secret negotiations with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to become a special on-air correspondent.

  Chelsea greeted her parents’ guests with a broad smile, but she looked pained to find her parents arguing with each other. She asked her mother to step outside, and they walked across the stone patio to the fenced-in swimming pool, where they could be seen engaging in animated conversation.

  When they returned, Chelsea made it clear that she had come down on her father’s side of the argument: she wanted her mother to challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries.

  Chelsea was still smarting from the results of the 2008 primary campaign, in which her mother racked up eighteen million votes and actually beat Obama in the popular vote, but lost to him chiefly because of the votes of super delegates. Chelsea wanted to wreak revenge against Obama’s campaign operatives who had dissed her mother and tried to paint her father as a racist.

  “You deserve to be president,” Chelsea told her mother.

  Bill agreed, and he said he might be able to persuade others to commission their own polls, matching up Hillary against Obama.

  “What are you trying to do—force my hand?” Hillary said.

  “I want everyone to know how strong you poll,” Bill said.

  “Go ahead and knock yourself out,” Hillary said, shrugging.

  Bill started to think out loud about political strategy. Maybe he would leak some of the findings in the poll. Or, alternatively, he could roll out the results of the poll to a media organization. He had friends at NBC News; he could trust that network. That’s why he had steered Chelsea to Steve Capus, the president of NBC’s news division. The important thing, he concluded, was getting out the poll’s main finding—namely, that while Obama’s numbers were in the toilet, Hillary was the most popular politician in America.

  Listening to Bill Clinton, the master politician of his age, soliloquize about politics was an awesome experience, and everyone in the barn, including Hillary, hung on his every word.

  Bill flashed a sheepish smile as he revealed that he had spent the past year writing a book about how to put America back to work. In his book, he intended to take some serious shots at Obama’s jobs and tax proposals. He thought Obama had made a huge mistake by attacking Wall Street executives, many of whom were Bill’s personal friends and had pledged to pay more taxes to help cut the deficit.

  “The economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat,” he said. “America has lost its Triple-A rating. Hillary, you have years of experience on Obama. You know better than Obama does, and far better than those guys who are advising him. They don’t know what they’re doing. They govern in sound bites. You’d be the ideal candidate. You’d ... ”

  He paused for a moment, as if a new thought had suddenly occurred to him.

  “If you become president, will we have to build a second Clinton library?” he asked.

  “You bet,” Hillary said, smiling for the first time.

  “Listen,” Bill continued, “you can’t be blamed for the economy. People think of you as tough, experienced, and tested. You could defeat any Repu
blican nominee better than Obama and keep control of Congress, or at least not bleed as many seats as Obama’ll bleed the party next year. The voters remember how they were better off when we were in the White House. You could fix the economy. We could fix it if we... I mean if you were president.”

  Hillary rolled her eyes.

  “I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,” she pointed out. “I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?”

  “Loyalty is a joke,” Bill said. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s... he’s... ”

  Bill’s voice was growing hoarse—he was speaking in a rough whisper—but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.

  He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  “Barack Obama,” said Bill Clinton, “is an amateur!”