The evolution of a Deep State president

All right. So then Christmas Day, 2009, happens; the so-called underwear bomber. You argue that this was a big, big deal within the White House — bigger than many outsiders appreciate. Why was this failed attack so important?

That was a turning point for Obama. He’d already had some compromises and encountered things that were sort of harder in the real world than they seemed on the campaign trail, but he was basically on track to be doing what he wanted to do — or what he thought he wanted to be doing — coming out of that first year.

And then, on Christmas, 2009, an al Qaeda terrorist operative from Yemen — well, east of Nigeria, but fed by IEC, the mini-affiliate of al Qaeda — nearly brings down a jetliner above Detroit. It would have killed almost 300 people on American soil, on [Obama’s] watch. And so, number one, that’s a gut-wrenching moment; it was only sheer luck that the bomb didn’t go off. It was not that the system they put in place worked.

And then, the fallout from that was also tremendously important. Republican critiques that he was dismantling some of the things that Bush had put into place suddenly got a lot sharper; and the sense was, if there was another attack, and if it succeeded, the blood would be on his hands. And then underscoring all that is that Scott Brown, a Republican, wins Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in deep-blue Massachusetts.

Right. That usually doesn’t get mentioned in this story. It’s usually seen as a major development in the story of the Affordable Care Act; not counter-terrorism policy. Why did it matter in that latter context, though?

The media at that time was portraying [Brown’s victory] as a reaction to Obamacare, but inside the Scott Brown campaign, the polls showed that it was really the terrorism issue that he got the most traction on. He was pounding on Obama and on his Democratic opponent for treating terrorists as criminals, for the fact that the underwear bomber had been read his Miranda warning and was being interrogated by the FBI and charged [in civil court] because Obama and Eric Holder wanted to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects from Guantanamo to New York and give them a civilian trial.

Brown kept pounding on the idea that these are terrorists and we shouldn’t give them these rights; and even in Massachusetts, at that moment, there was a certain wave of fear from the underwear bomber rolling across the country. It really resonated — and, suddenly, a Republican had won a Senate seat in Massachusetts. So inside the Obama administration, [it came to be believed that if] there is another attack, and it actually succeeds, Obama will be a failed, one-term president. He’ll lose, just like Jimmy Carter; and everything he came in there to do, including things that have nothing to do with national security, would fail.

The way events — the near-miss human disaster on Christmas Day, the political disaster of Scott Brown’s victory — dictated Obama’s actions, it raises one of the central questions of his presidency, which you talk about in the book. Namely, did he normalize the post-9/11 national security state? Or was he swept along with it?

It can’t be reduced to a single bumper sticker [answer]; and there were things that he did before the underwear attack that did have the effect of entrenching aspects of [the Bush response to 9/11]. But there was a kind of an ambivalence, or an imbalance, [in the White House] between the reformers and those who more or less represented the security state interests. And after the Christmas attack, the balance between those voices shifted dramatically, and the administration starts taking a much harder line as these debates continue to play out in the months and years to come.

The voices that are saying, “We need this surveillance tool” or “We’d better not let this person out of Guantanamo” — they have much more sway in the internal meetings. And the people who are saying, “We can dismantle this; we can be less secretive; we can do this; we can do that” in a reform perspective, they have less sway. Because the political context has changed dramatically.

So then Obama ends up locked into the dynamic we’ve seen for much of the rest of his presidency; civil liberties groups are mad at him from one end of the spectrum, while the neoconservative, unreconstructed Cheneyites rail against him from the other. I think most people at this point are familiar with the civil liberties folks’ criticism, as well as that of the Cheneyites. And they know Obama’s usual responses to the neoconservatives; but what was his pushback to civil liberties groups usually like?

I think that to an extent [he felt that] some of his critics on the left were in the business of criticizing whatever the government is doing from an individual rights perspective; so even when things got adjusted [to their liking] they just sort of moved the goal post. I know that a lot of officials in his government feel that way.

But also I think he generally had this lawyerly mindset that held that the main problem with Bush was that Bush put policies in place unilaterally. He said that, as Commander-in-Chief, he could violate statutes; and that’s what Obama thought was especially overreaching and out of hand. He felt that when you have a president who is not doing that, but is acting pursuant to Congressional authority, he shouldn’t be considered Bush-like. And that actually raises a broader theme of the book, which is that the Bush and Obama presidencies were very different in a lot of ways, despite these policy continuities between them, and one of their greatest differences concerned the metric of lawyerism.