Alter Jonathan - The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

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For Emily, Charlotte, Tommy, and Molly

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, from The Second Coming, 1919

Since graduating from college in 1979, Ive covered nine presidential elections, which may qualify me as a masochist. Every four years, at least one candidate piously claims that this election is the most important of our lifetimes. It was never trueuntil 2012. The last election wasnt the closest contest of recent times but it may have been the most consequential, a hinge of history.

The 2012 campaign featured trivial moments, of course, but it struck me at its core as a titanic ideological struggle over the way Americans see themselves and their obligations to one another. The social contract established during the New Deal era was on the line. Barack Obamas vision was, as he put it, I am my brothers keeper and Were all in this together; Mitt Romneys faith lay in low taxes and a shrunken government as the handmaiden of business. They agreed on one thingthat the stakes were immense.

With its themes of big money and the top 1 percent, the election was a throwback to the class-based arguments that had once been a central part of our politics. Romney rejected criticism of Wall Street or calls for higher taxes on the wealthy as class warfare. Warren Buffett, hardly a left-wing bomb-thrower, summarized what had become the mainstream view: Theres class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning. Had Romney prevailed, the win would have become a rout.

I cant pretend to know for sure how Romney would have governed. But its fair to say that he wouldnt have been president of Massachusetts, with an overwhelmingly liberal legislature that had to be appeased. Romney would have arrived in office on the tide of a resurgent red state America, with a conservative Republican Congress claiming that its sweeping agenda had been validated by the voters. Emboldened movement conservatives would have given Romney little room to maneuver on issues ranging from the budget to Supreme Court nominations. He hadnt stood up to the base during the campaign and would have had a hard time doing so in office without becoming a president without a party.

Amid the cut and thrust of the campaign, I tried to keep the true stakes in mind. Had he won, Romney would likely have had the votes to repeal Obamacare as promised on Day One (under the same Senate rules requiring only fifty-one votes that led to its enactment). During the campaign he pledged to cut federal spending so deeply that it would, as his running mate Paul Ryan put it, constitute a fundamentally different vision of government. Ryan, whom the Romney transition team had already designated to supervise the budget in a new administration, said that he viewed the social safety net, especially food stamps, as a hammock for the needy that was harming the national character. The Romney-Ryan budget would have taken a machete to vital investments in the future, from college loans to medical and scientific research, while eliminating federal funding for other programs (Planned Parenthood, PBS, Amtrak) entirely.

Even if Democrats blocked some of Romneys bills, his election would have vindicated the Bush years and everyone associated with booting Obama, from Karl Rove to the Tea Party. It would have given comfort (and jobs) to those who considered climate change a hoax and the war in Iraq a noble cause. With Obamacare and his other achievements reversed, Obamas presidency might well have been seen by many historians as a fluke, an aberration occasioned in 2008 by a financial crisis and a weak opponent, John McCain.

As I learned when writing a book about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, history is usually written by the winners. If todays recovery continued or strengthened, it would have allowed a President Romney to argue that slashing taxes on the wealthy, slashing environmental regulation, slashing programs for the poor, increasing defense spending, and voucherizing Medicare were what led to economic growth. History would have recorded that Barack Obama (like Jimmy Carter) had failed to rescue the economy and Mitt Romney (like Ronald Reagan) had succeeded.

After an election, voters sometimes take the outcome for granted or say it was preordained. See! I was right! I always knew Obama was going to win! Anyone tempted to think this should note that Bill Clinton believed Obama would lose all the way up to the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, or so Romney said Clinton told him when the former president called him after the election. With a sluggish economy and a Republican Party backed by billionaires making unlimited campaign contributions, Obama could easily have been a one-term president.

The Center Holds is more than a campaign book and less than a complete history of the second two years of Obamas first term. My aim is to explain how the presidents enemies sought to wrench the country rightward, how Obama built a potent new Chicago political machine to fight back, and how his, and Romneys, performance in the 2012 campaign played out against a backdrop of hyperpartisanship and renewed class politics.

All presidents face intense opposition, but Obamas race and othernessnot to mention his longstanding determination to change the trajectory of American politicsput him in a different category. He embodies a demographic future that frightens people on the other side. Ive charted the progression of the malady known as Obama Derangement Syndrome and tried to explain the roots of the antitax and Tea Party uprisings. And Ive devoted a chapter to what I call the Voter Suppression Project, a concerted GOP effort in nineteen states to change the rules of the game to discourage Democrats from voting. Toward the end I explain how the backlash against voter suppression contributed to Obamas victory.

Im also fascinated by what I see as a strange role reversal at the heart of the campaign. Romney, the self-described numbers guy, rejected Big Data and ran a Mad Men campaign based on a vague and unscientific hope and change theme. Obama ran a state-of-the art Bain campaign, using some of the same analytics pioneered in the corporate world to redefine voter contact and build the most sophisticated political organization in American history.

The 2012 cycle will likely be seen as the first data campaign. Just as Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy have been viewed by historians as the first presidents to master radio and television, respectively, Barack Obama will likely be seen as the president who pioneered the use of digital technology that, in various forms, will now be a permanent part of politics around the world.

Like my 2010 book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, this account draws on my Chicago roots. I met Obama there when he was an Illinois state senator who had recently lost a bid for Congress. In the years since, I havent lost my fascination with the paradox of a man succeeding so spectacularly at a profession that he often dislikes. He is missing the schmooze gene that is standard equipment for people in politics. In the Washington chapters, I try to assess the consequences of this for his presidency.