E-Book: Drama, Disarray, Infighting in Obama Campaign

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by Tony Lee 

A new e-book, Obama’s Last Stand, reveals details about the disarray in President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and Obama’s thin-skinned narcissism that, according to the mainstream media’s own standards, should disqualify Obama from being elected again. 

When then-candidate Obama was running for president in 2008, Obama and his campaign tried to put to rest doubts about his lack of executive and private sector experience by making the argument that Obama was the CEO of his campaign.

Ben Smith, who often sets the mainstream media’s narrative and now is the editor of the liberal BuzzFeed, helped the Obama campaign make this argument in a 2007 article in Politico.

“His campaign is unique among the major political organizations this cycle, and unusual in presidential politics, for its apparent unity, and for the fact that virtually none of its internal campaign arguments have spilled over into the press,” Smith wrote then. 

Smith added:

The campaign's culture is also relevant because Obama for America is the largest organization Obama has ever run.

If the campaign’s culture was relevant in 2008, it should be more relevant now because, after Obama has mismanaged the economy, a campaign is one of the only things on record that Obama has ever managed competently. 

Glenn Thrush, who wrote the book, writes that the Obama campaign is "not exclusively about hope and change anymore, words that seem like distant echoes even to Obama’s original loyalists — and to the president himself." He notes that 2012 is a campaign in which Obama is intent on beating a candidate Obama holds in contempt.  Perhaps this is one reason why Obama’s 2012 campaign has often seemed nasty and personal. Last week, Romney told Obama to take his campaign of anger and division “back to Chicago.” 

The book reveals some insights into Obama's character with an account of a sitting president of the United States needlessly agitating a friend of Marco Rubio's in a hotel lobby: 

Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.

“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”

The book, though, details the infighting among Obama's top advisers, which may be reflective of a team who knows they must run on divisive tactics because they cannot sell Obama's economy.

Vice President Joe Biden, according to Thrush, jumped the gun in announcing support for gay marriage, “caused greater disharmony in the White House than was reported at the time” because Obama had planned to make his evolution on the matter public before the Democratic National Convention. Biden thought he got thrown under the bus by Obama’s 2012 campaign manager while other Obama aides fumed at Biden. 

David Axelrod and Stephanie Cutter, two of Obama’s top surrogates, childishly clashed because Axelrod “suspected Cutter of taking a network TV appearance he had been asked to do.” Thrush reports Cutter and Axelrod were not on speaking terms after the incident. 

According to the Weekly Standard, the spat was over an appearance on CNN’s “Starting Point” with Soledad O’Brien. 

Thrush reports that “many of Obama’s advisers have quietly begun questioning whether they should have picked [Debbie] Wasserman Schultz” to be DNC chair. Team Obama, according to Thrush, secretly commissioned a pollster to conduct the popularity of Obama’s surrogates and Wasserman Schultz “ranked at the bottom.” 

Thrush writes that many on Obama’s team “now regret not dispatching an aide of [Obama 2008 campaign manager David] Plouffe’s stature” to run a pro-Obama super-PAC, which is a concession that Bill Burton, the White House’s former deputy communications director who now runs the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA, is not the best person for that job. 

According to Thrush, Obama has also been angered by the self-promotion of his advisers and the campaign’s silly tactics. Thrush cites an incident when David Axelrod was heckled by protestors in Boston. The incident angered Obama, who ordered aides to never engage in such an “ill-conceived spectacle.’’ 

Obama, according to Thrush, fears that Romney will win and take credit for an “economic rebound Obama sees as just around the corner.” 

So Obama, after mismanaging the economy for four years and thinking the “private sector is doing fine,” thinks he is leading the country out of the recession. He also thinks that if the country elects Romney to fix the economy and Romney turns the country around, Obama should get all the credit. This is a combination of delusion and narcissism that is patently on display. 

During the 2008 campaign, the Obama campaign, with the help of the mainstream media, repeatedly made the argument that Obama could be the country's CEO because of how well he was managing his campaign. The details in this book should be enough for the mainstream media, if they hold him to their standards, to disqualify Obama for reelection.