• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 66 0

consultant, offered some insights. The consultant sounded almost gleeful about running against Romney. “You could not have from our perspective a more perfectly positioned rich guy than Mitt Romney,” said the insider. “He didn’t make a product or start a chain of restaurants or do whatever. He made it on Wall Street. And if you look at anything in the polling, in the focus groups, or the zeitgeist of the country, that was the cheater way to go. The guy is going to be a cheater,” the consultant said. “There’s no question that that’s going to be the message frame that the Obama team puts around him, whether Bain & Company made their money by buying up companies, firing people, putting their money offshore, having questionable financial products. It’s all going to land in Mitt Romney’s lap. And that’s going to appeal to independents. It’s not just going to be a lefty argument. It’s going to be like this guy didn’t play by the rules and now he wants to be president.”

Obama himself doesn’t have much instinct for the jugular, the insider said, with some evident regret. Earlier in the fall, his staff had sent the president out to key states to bash Republicans for not passing his jobs bill. “That lasted about a week on the campaign trail,” said the insider. “Did you notice? He went out there and started beating them up and then he’s like, Eww, I don’t really like doing this.” (Obama may be aloof from the political hurly-burly, but he follows it closely. Unlike most presidents, who get their information from news summaries prepared by staff, Obama reads The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, sometimes on paper, sometimes on his iPad.)

Some of Obama’s key staffers were demoralized, according to the insider. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s friend and confidante, was already thinking more about Obama the man and his place in history than she was about what he might accomplish in the last year of his term. “She cares about Barack Obama as opposed to President Obama,” said the insider. If Obama was going to be a one-term president, it was already time to look to his legacy. Jarrett was not happy with her own situation at the White House, said the insider. Jarrett had tried to reach out to the business leaders, only to be thwarted by the other senior staffers. “She just stopped getting out there as much because, if you’re her, like what the fuck am I going to keep talking to them for and put myself on a limb when I come back and get my head shot off?” said the insider. “It feels like the boys will never leave her alone. Why do they hate her so much? Is it because it bugs them that she could walk in [to the Oval Office] anytime and see him after hours? I don’t know, it just feels like, no matter what, somebody is after her. Like Rahm [Emanuel] walked out the door and said to [Bill] Daley, Make sure you keep the pressure on Valerie.”

White House chief of staff Bill Daley had been brought in to impose some order on “Camp Obama,” the gaggle of young staffers who rarely began or ended a meeting on time. But a year after taking over from Emanuel, who had left to run for mayor of Chicago, Daley had already announced he would not be back in a second term. The insider suggested that Daley had announced he was leaving before he could be pushed. “People inside are unhappy with him,” the consultant said, “and so the best way to preserve your reputation is to announce your own departure.”

One person in the White House who was actually looking forward to the campaign was the first lady. “Michelle is definitely committed to gearing up. I mean, she’s getting out a lot more,” said the insider. “I think she expects to be much more active and back more to like the old days. I think she was hypersensitive to not screwing up and really felt like she was going to be judged on whether or not she was a good parent since she had sort of talked about it.”

The old days. Could Obama get the magic back? The insider wanted to believe so. “I think right now they’re still the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan, right? So they may