Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin, John Heilemann Page A

to have his back. To violate his trust this way is a serious, serious blow. It’s unconscionable—just unconscionable.
    Obama had spoken for maybe four minutes. Biden’s soliloquy lasted twice that long. When he ran out of steam, he pushed back from the table and stomped out of the room, too.
    For the next two hours, the remaining Obamans sat there shell-shocked, sorting through the rubble of the POTUS-VPOTUS double walkout. A discussion ensued about what had now become an even more pressing topic than before: how to subdue the plague of books and authors. Gibbs, himself mired in controversy over the story about him in the upcoming Kantor tome, let fly with a red-faced tirade in which the operative word was “fucking.” (“This is fucking unprecedented” . . . “It’s fucking bullshit” . . . “He fucking doesn’t deserve this” . . . “We can’t fucking win this election if we can’t fucking trust each other, and we’re letting him fucking down.”) Othersangrily insisted that the question of books was a side issue. Someone stuck a knife in the president’s back; he wanted the perpetrator to come forward. And we’re talking about these process questions? Say what?
    Obama, meanwhile, returned to the Oval to wait for a confessor to arrive—a wait that would turn out to be interminable. Surely Plouffe was right that the strategy meetings would need to be shrunken down, but that was merely falling action. Obama had just come through the worst political stretch he had ever suffered. Now he was hurtling into the campaign, the greatest challenge of his life. He needed help, he needed focus, he needed the team to right the ship, set their course, and sail into 2012. Instead he felt like he was splashing around in a sea of drama, with no land in sight.
    Obama had no time to brood; his schedule was always packed. From the tsuris of the Roosevelt Room, he would move on to a White House tour for “wounded warriors,” then to lunch with his cabinet secretaries—and then to an indignity so fitting and ironic it made his head spin. At 2:55 p.m. he had a meeting in the Oval Office. The meeting was with David Maraniss. For a fucking book interview.

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    THE UNCLE JOE PROBLEM
    D ALEY DIDN’T FOLLOW BIDEN out the door that day, but in spirit he was right there with him. The chief of staff and the vice president were a pair of plump green peas in a pod: both Irish Catholic sexagenarians with old-school tastes, old-school tendencies, and old-school values. In the hypermodern Obama White House, they often seemed the odd men out—which in the late fall of 2011 was creating yet another set of headaches for Obama.
    Biden and Daley talked all the time about their alienation from their colleagues. They didn’t use the term “alienation,” though—that was a ten-cent word. The COS’s office was across the hall from the VP’s, and Daley would often go in there and close the door and the two of them would let loose. Plouffe they considered as sharp as a scalpel but just as sterile, a guy incapable of glad-hand bullshitting, which was Joe and Bill’s avocation. They cackled about the fact that Emanuel referred to Jarrett and Rouse as Uday and Qusay, after Saddam Hussein’s power-mad sons, and over the nickname others had bestowed on Jarrett: the Night Stalker, for the way she would visit the Obamas in the residence after hours and eviscerate her rivals. They admired the president, but marveled at his lack of bonhomie. (“He doesn’t even know how to swear right,” Biden complained.) They werelike the gray-haired hecklers in the balcony on The Muppet Show, the Statler and Waldorf of the White House.
    What set Biden and Daley apart was about more than personalities, however. It was also about their approach to politics, which centered around the New Deal coalition and its attendant geography: blue-collar voters, Catholics, ethnic whites, and senior citizens in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The