Jonathan Alter's new chronicle of Barack Obama's first year in office has just been published. The Promise: President Obama, Year One, is chock full of juicy revelations, as well as a compelling narrative of the various issues that Obama had to contend with, such as one of the worst recessions in recent times, and two ongoing wars.
In the 2nd part of our interview with Alter (who will be speaking a week from tonight in Sarasota, details at the bottom), we asked Alter to explain Obama's performance with regards to Greg Craig.
Most people first heard of Craig in 1998, when he was one of the attorney's defending Bill Clinton during him impeachment saga. He was back in the news in 2000, where he defended Elian Gonzalez' father during that controversy in South Florida.
He was let go by the White House last year in pretty unceremonious fashion – essentially dumped, it appeared, after the administration continued to have troubles with closing down Guatanamo Bay prison. So, in the second part of this interview we asked Alter straight up: Did he get screwed over by the Obama White House?
Jonathan Alter. Like all personnel matters, it was complicated. On one level he did get screwed over, and the whole episode was badly handled by both Obama and Rahm Emanuel, but it wasn’t true that they took a long and loyal supporter who had taken a lot of personal risks to defy the Clintons and supported Obama. It wasn’t true that he was completely screwed. He was offered a federal judgeship on the DC Circuit which is one step below the Supreme Court. At the time there was an assumption that they just canned him. And that the idea was ‘wow, that’s a really cruel thing to do to somebody who’s been with him from the beginning.’ The truth was that Obama thought he was miscast in that role and offered him several other things he though he could do, so he acted a little more decently that it was reported at the time. But it was still a ham-handed incident.
MP: A criticism made of Obama in his first year in office is that on both the stimulus and health care, the President farmed too much of it out to Congress, You write that that one of the oldest adages in civics is that people support what they help create. But you admit, he took notion too far.
JA: He needed to intervene in the process earlier to keep it on schedule, so he should have told Max Baucus, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in the spring that ‘ it’s over, Max. Move the bill.’ He was a little too genteel in keeping them on schedule because the whole idea was it had to be done fast and they knew if it dragged on they risked losing the whole thing, as indeed they almost did. So you have to lay blame for the dog’s breakfast that health care became on the hill in part on Obama’s feet because he didn’t intervene more firmly early on.
MP: On the stimulus, you write about Obama had hoped to have billions of dollars available in stimulus funds for construction of the “smart grid.” The goal you write, was to make the grid akin o the Interstate Highway System in the 1950’s or the Internet in the 1990’s. What happened?
JA: (laughing) well, you really have read the book, which is such a pleasure, rather than just the release, which is common, so thank you.
This was one of those things that doesn’t get very much attention, but if Obama had managed to get his way on it, it could have changed the face of the country. He wanted a new, smart power grid, that would have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and moved us to a much more sensible energy policy and during the transition he was told ‘no. There’s 216 different jurisdictions. Everyone’s got a Not In My Backyard attitude toward power lines and power grids, and so they were not going to be able to get this done right away and he got really kind of agitated about it and said,’what do you mean? We went to the moon, why can’t we do this?’ And they said, “that’s just the way it is, Mr. President-elect.” And so he did get some money for smart grid and more money , and he got more money than any previous president on alternative energy but he wasn’t able to do a interstate highway system the way he hoped.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.