I kept hoping he would break the tension and yell at me. White House photo. Once they arrived at the campaign office, Obama asked for a private room so that he could have a meeting with Love. With a calm and "even and firm" voice, Obama began: "Listen, Reggie, I think you're a great guy. But, Obama paused and leaned forward if you're not up to doing this job, I can get someone else to do it. You have one job and if I have to worry about all this stuff, then you're not making it easy for me to do my job.
Help me do my job ," he said as he rose from the table and walked out of the room. Obama and Love walking near the White House in Love was responsible for informing various organizations that the candidate would be tardy but was unable to do so.
It was like that eerie calm before a tornado swoops in and levels your entire house. Nobody said anything. According to Love, Obama then turned to aide Marvin Nicholson and said "Marvin, talk to Reggie because I am not having this conversation with him.
After Love was "schooled" by Nicholson, he accidentally made another error: He got Obama's lunch order wrong. Obama looked at me with blank disbelief. Why the GOP, Dems agree on trade expansion. The president's remarks during an event meant to highlight his push for an Asian trade deal illuminated the often-aloof chief executive's deepest frustrations with the profession he has chosen. He disdains the news media's fleeting attention to headline-grabbing symptoms—riots—rather than systemic economic and social problems.
He loathes the propensity of fellow politicians to "feign concern" rather than take action. Read More Harry Reid: Stepping down, yes. I had more than a passing knowledge of H1N1 after working on U. What I knew scared the hell out of me. In Philadelphia alone, more than twelve thousand died in the span of a few weeks. The effects of the pandemic went beyond the stunning death tolls and the shutdown of economic activity; later research revealed that those who were in utero during the pandemic grew up to have lower incomes, poorer educational outcomes, and higher rates of physical disability.
It was too early to tell how deadly this new virus would be. On the same day that Kathleen Sebelius was confirmed as H. Secretary, we sent a plane to pick her up from Kansas, flew her to Washington to be sworn in at a makeshift ceremony in the Oval Office, and immediately asked her to lead a two-hour conference call with W.
A few days later, we pulled together an interagency team to evaluate how ready the United States was for a worst-case scenario. Over the course of the next six months, we did exactly that. A summertime dip in H1N1 cases gave the team time to work with drugmakers and incentivize new processes for quicker vaccine production. They pre-positioned medical supplies across regions and gave hospitals increased flexibility to manage a surge in flu cases. They evaluated—and ultimately rejected—the idea of closing schools for the rest of the year, but worked with school districts, businesses, and state and local officials to make sure that everyone had the resources they needed to respond in the event of an outbreak.
Although the United States did not escape unscathed—more than twelve thousand Americans lost their lives—we were fortunate that this particular strain of H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than the experts had feared. Still, I took great pride in how well our team had performed. Without fanfare or fuss, they not only helped keep the virus contained but strengthened our readiness for any future public-health emergency—which would make all the difference several years later, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa triggered a full-blown panic.
This, I was coming to realize, was the nature of the Presidency: sometimes your most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed. The slow march toward health-care reform consumed much of the summer. As the legislation lumbered through Congress, we looked for any opportunity to help keep the process on track.
The good news was that the key Democratic chairs—especially Baucus and Waxman—were working hard to craft bills that they could pass out of their respective committees before the traditional August recess. The bad news was that the more everyone dug into the details of reform, the more differences in substance and strategy emerged—not just between Democrats and Republicans but between House and Senate Democrats, between the White House and congressional Democrats, and even between members of my own team.
Most of the arguments revolved around the issue of how to generate a mixture of savings and new revenue to pay for expanding coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. Baucus, given his interest in producing a bipartisan bill, hoped to avoid anything that could be characterized as a tax increase. Instead, he and his staff had calculated the windfall profits that a new flood of insured customers would bring to hospitals, drug companies, and insurers, and had used those figures as a basis for negotiating billions of dollars in up-front contributions—through fees or Medicare-billing reductions—from each industry.
To sweeten the deal, Baucus was also prepared to make certain policy concessions. Politically and emotionally, I would have found it a lot more satisfying to just go after the drug and insurance companies and see if we could beat them into submission.
They were wildly unpopular with voters, and for good reason. We had no way to get to sixty votes in the Senate for a major health-care bill without at least the tacit agreement of the big industry players. It was a big hurdle to clear, a case of politics as the art of the possible. But for some of the more liberal Democrats in the House, where no one had to worry about a filibuster, and among progressive advocacy groups that were still hoping to lay the groundwork for a single-payer health-care system, our compromises smacked of capitulation, a deal with the devil.
Quick as the House Democrats were to mount their high horse, they were also more than willing to protect the status quo when it secured their prerogatives or benefitted politically influential constituencies. Otherwise, any new money put into the system would yield less and less care for fewer and fewer people over time. House Democrats hated the idea. And so long as the unions were opposed to the Cadillac tax, most House Democrats were going to be, too. The squabbles quickly found their way into the press, making the whole process appear messy and convoluted.
By late July, polls showed that more Americans disapproved than approved of the way I was handling health-care reform, prompting me to complain to Axe about our communications strategy.
Toward the end of the month, versions of the health-care bill had passed out of all the relevant House committees. The Senate Health and Education Committee had completed its work as well.
Once that was done, we could consolidate the different versions into one House and one Senate bill, ideally passing each before the August recess, with the goal of having a final version of the legislation on my desk for signing before the end of the year. As the summer wore on, his optimism that he could produce a bipartisan bill began to look delusional.
From that point on, conservatives followed the script, repeating the phrase like an incantation. Unsurprisingly, given the atmosphere, the group of three G. My team and I did everything we could to help Baucus win their support.
I had Grassley and Snowe over to the White House repeatedly and called them every few weeks to take their temperature. Nancy-Ann became a permanent fixture in their Senate offices and took Snowe out to dinner so often that we joked that her husband was getting jealous. Tell her if she votes for the bill she can have the White House—Michelle and I will move to an apartment!
And still we were getting nowhere. Grassley was a different story. He talked a good game about wanting to help the family farmers back in Iowa who had trouble getting insurance they could count on, and when Hillary Clinton had pushed health-care reform, in the nineties, Grassley had actually co-sponsored an alternative that in many ways resembled the Massachusetts-style plan we were proposing, complete with an individual mandate.
With his long, hangdog face and throaty Midwestern drawl, he would hem and haw about this or that problem he had with the bill without ever telling us what exactly it would take to get him to yes. Even I, the resident White House optimist, finally got fed up and asked Baucus to come by for a visit. Baucus shook his head. A part of me wanted to get up, grab Baucus by the shoulders, and shake him till he came to his senses.
As a sweetener, my team suggested that Michelle and the girls join me, and that we visit some national parks along the way. I was thrilled by the suggestion. But, as much as Michelle and I with the help of infinitely patient Secret Service agents tried to approximate a normal childhood for our daughters, it was hard, if not impossible, for me to take them places like an ordinary dad would.
A trip to get ice cream or a visit to a bookstore was now a major production, involving road closures, tactical teams, and the omnipresent press pool. But I felt it acutely. It had lasted a month and burned a lasting impression into my mind—and not just because we went to Disneyland although that was obviously outstanding. We had dug for clams during low tide in Puget Sound, ridden horses through a creek at the base of Canyon de Chelly, in Arizona, watched the endless Kansas prairie unfold from a train window, spotted a herd of bison on a dusky plain in Yellowstone, and ended each day with the simple pleasures of a motel ice machine, the occasional swimming pool, or just air-conditioning and clean sheets.
That one trip gave me a glimpse of the dizzying freedom of the open road, how vast America was, and how full of wonder.
Getting from point A to point B happened too fast and too comfortably, and the days were too stuffed with prescheduled, staff-monitored activity—absent that familiar mixture of surprises, misadventures, and boredom—to fully qualify as a road trip. But in the course of an August week we watched Old Faithful blow, and looked out over the ochre expanse of the Grand Canyon. The girls went inner-tubing.
At night, we played board games and tried to name the constellations. Of course, one of the things Malia and Sasha had to put up with on the trip out West was their dad peeling off every other day to talk about health care. People shared stories about how the existing health-care system had failed their families, and asked questions about how the emerging bill might affect their own insurance.
Even those who opposed our effort listened attentively to what I had to say. Outside, though, the atmosphere was very different.
Heading to and from every venue, we were greeted by dozens of angry protesters. Some shouted through bullhorns. Others flashed a single-fingered salute. This new and suddenly potent force in American politics had started months earlier, as a handful of ragtag, small-scale protests against bank bailouts and the Recovery Act. It is clear from the post-summit rhetoric that the Chinese leadership views the Quad as a component of a broader toolkit that the US is working to put together with the ultimate aim of containing China.
US actor Michael K. Williams, who starred as Omar Little in the widely acclaimed television series "The Wire," died of an accidental drug overdose, authorities said Friday. If the bigger game is to set up a web of networks to put China in its place, there could soon be other groupings. India, however, will now have to make adjustments to its own strategic outlook. President Joe Biden's top cabinet members unsuccessfully tried to dissuade him from pulling all US troops from Afghanistan, hoping he would leverage the withdrawal to seek a political settlement, a new book says.
Then the second plane. Then a third plane hit the Pentagon. Then a fourth plane was downed in Pennsylvania. Terrorists had struck the United States with full force. The US ambassador to Switzerland also serves as the chief envoy to Liechtenstein. Speaking at his first virtual fundraiser since the election, Obama said: "What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner - and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey.
Nearly all Covid deaths in the US now are in people who weren't vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day - now down to under - could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine. Optimism that a deal was imminent faded as the latest talks ended Sunday without tangible indications of significant progress. And on Monday, in his first public comments since the vote, incoming Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi rejected a key Biden goal of expanding on the nuclear deal if negotiators are able to salvage the old one.
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