Double Down: Game Change 2012 Read Online Free PDF

so, ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”
    Trump, meanwhile, sat rocking in his chair, simmering, simmering, his face turning burnt umber.
    Only one of Obama’s jokes fell flat: Tim Hosni Pawlenty. Favreau, in the audience, was rueful in the knowledge that it could have been so much funnier.
    The next night, Favreau learned the reason for Obama’s edit, when the president took to the airwaves to announce that halfway around the world in Pakistan, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden. No member of Obama’s political team except Daley had been aware of the secret special-ops mission during its months of planning. The Obamans were stunned, overjoyed, and awestruck at their boss’s composure the night before—his pitch-perfect comic performance just hours after giving the fateful order, as its outcome hung in the balance. Little did we know, Axelrod said to Favreau, we were just a bunch of Seinfelds in a Tom Clancy novel.
    For Obama, the decision to launch the raid had entailed gargantuan risks. On the president’s national security team, there was no consensus. Joe Biden and defense secretary Robert Gates counseled him to wait for more intel. Biden told an aide he believed that Obama had wagered his presidency on the move; had the mission gone awry and turned into another Desert One, the political consequences would have been catastrophic. When one ofthe helicopters crash-landed during the raid, two words appeared like a billboard in Obama’s mind: Jimmy Carter.
    After Obama finished his brief and sober speech to the nation from the East Room, some of his advisers wanted to celebrate. How about a fucking beer? thought Daley. Out in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, a frenzied, flag-waving crowd was chanting, “Obama got Osama! Obama got Osama!” But there would be no triumphalism inside the gates, at least not that night. The president walked silently to the elevator that would carry him up to the residence and to bed.
    In the days ahead, Obama reveled plenty. True, there were tough fights with Republicans on the horizon, especially about raising the federal government’s $14.7 trillion debt ceiling, over which the GOP was threatening a showdown, and about the budget. Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin had recently released a plan to cut the deficit by $4.4 trillion, which Obama attacked as draconian, putting forth his own $4 trillion alternative.
    But there was no denying the glory and gratification of taking out bin Laden and taking down Trump in the space of twenty-four hours. The pursuit of OBL had bedeviled Bush for years. Now its completion had earned Obama the ne plus ultra national security credential heading into 2012 and sent his approval ratings skyward. And although beating back the birthers might have seemed more trivial, it lifted a weight from Obama’s shoulders. A few weeks later, on a trip to Ireland, he jubilated in the discovery that—after all the right-wing insinuations that he was exotic, not a real American—his genetic roots stretched back to a small town on the Emerald Isle.
    “My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall O’Bamas,” he proclaimed at Trinity College in Dublin. “And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

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    THE WEAKNESS MEME
    T HE FOURSOME HIT THE LINKS at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, on Saturday morning, June 18: Obama, Biden, and a pair of Republicans from Ohio, John Boehner and the state’s new governor, John Kasich—all four clad in polo shirts, Biden and Boehner wearing shorts.
    Since the midterms, Obama had been encouraged by an assortment of establishment grandees to socialize with Boehner, get to know him, establish a human connection. Invite him up to Camp David, Obama was told, or to the White House to watch a movie.