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

Obamans cared about those people and places but were more intently focused on the coalition that had elected their man: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites (especially single women), and young voters in new swing states such as Colorado and Virginia. The tension between these views bubbled beneath the surface throughout Obama’s term, with implications for the reelect. And in November, the conflict reached a boil over a potentially scalding issue: contraception.
    The source of the controversy, as with so many others, was the Affordable Care Act. Under the law, insurers were compelled to offer “preventive health services” to women for free, but Congress had left it to the Department of Health and Human Services to determine which benefits to include. In August 2011, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius—with the backing of Jarrett, Michelle’s chief of staff, and several other female White House aides—issued interim rules saying that contraceptives would be covered. While the agency provided an exemption for “religious employers,” it was so narrow that it largely left out Catholic hospitals, universities, and other church-affiliated institutions.
    Dozens of Catholic groups cried foul. Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, who had invited Obama to give the commencement address at the school in 2009 over the objections of many Catholic bishops, wrote the president a letter contending that the rule would violate religious freedom. As the initial uproar made its way into the press, some of the administration’s prominent Catholics began to fret. “Now we’re fighting the Catholics?” defense secretary Leon Panetta complained to Daley by phone. “What’s going on here?”
    Biden and Daley objected to the policy, thinking the religious exemption should be broadened. And they worried about the political fallout from getting crosswise with Catholic voters and the church hierarchy, already upin arms over the administration’s decision to no longer support the Defense of Marriage Act—which Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York declared could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions and to the detriment of both institutions.”
    Dolan was a towering figure in the church, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a cagey political operator. Biden knew him well. In early November, with Dolan planning to be in town ahead of the conference’s annual plenary, the VP slipped the archbishop’s name onto Obama’s schedule—without alerting the White House staff.
    Obama walked into the meeting with little preparation, believing it would be about a range of issues—then found himself cornered on contraception. He hadn’t analyzed the arguments surrounding the exemption in detail, let alone reached a conclusion. On top of that, he was sympathetic to the church’s position. Now on the spot, feeling ambushed, Obama edged out over the tips of his skis, telling Dolan he would seek a solution agreeable to both sides.
    That was all the pink-cheeked prelate needed to box Obama in. On November 14, Dolan told reporters at the plenary about the meeting, describing it as “extraordinarily friendly” and adding that Obama had been “very sensitive” to church concerns over the contraceptive mandate. “He was very ardent in his desire to assure me that this is something he will look long and hard at. And I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.”
    The signal that the White House was considering widening the exemption touched off a tizzy. With Obama having left on a trip to Asia, congressional Democrats burned up the phone lines on conference calls with Rouse and Jarrett, telling them it was crazy for a pro-choice president to be wavering this way. In a tense meeting with Daley, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards threatened that the group would run ads against Obama if he abandoned Sebelius’s original