Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America by Dan Balz Page B

times, has gotten rockier and tougher. And it’s going to, I’m sure, have some more ups and downs during the course of me being in this office.”
    Two days after the election, he taped an interview for CBS’s
60 Minutes
. Correspondent Steve Kroft pressed him repeatedly to explain the midterm results. “I think that there are times where we said, ‘Let’s just get it done,’ instead of worrying about how we’re getting it done. And I think that’s a problem,” he said. Later he explained, “In terms of setting the tone and how this town operates, we just didn’t pay enough attention to some of the things that we had talked about. And, you know, I’m paying a political price for that.” For supporters, Obama’s performances were dismaying. “You can’t govern if you can’t tell the country where you are taking it,” Frank Rich, once one of the president’s most ardent advocates, wrote in the
New York Times
. “If he has such a plan, few, if any, Americans have any idea what it is.”
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    Obama immediately set about to rebalance his presidency and his White House. Over a period of weeks, he invited a series of outsiders into the Oval Office for private conversations. After a few official photographs, it was just the president and his invited guest. No staff members were included; often they didn’t know who was on his schedule. Obama sometimes brought a pad of paper and took careful notes in his precise handwriting. To at least one visitor he looked older—his hair was noticeably grayer than during the campaign—and thinner. Obama was drinking milkshakes to keep his weight up, one visitor said he was told. In these conversations, his visitors did not find Obama defensive.“Friendly, not downbeat,” said one. “Probing.” But he was clearly concerned about his presidency and his White House. One visitor said, “He knew things were off the rails.”
    The group that came to see the president included Washington veterans of both parties. One was Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and an early Obama supporter whose former staffers now played key roles in Obama’s White House. Another was Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director, who later became defense secretary. Panetta’s résumé included being Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and budget director, and before that a respected House member. A third was David Gergen, who had advised presidents of both parties and was now stationed at Harvard, from where he dispensed political insights for CNN. The group also included John Podesta, another Clinton White House chief of staff; Kenneth Duberstein, who had served as Ronald Reagan’s last chief of staff; Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman and a Harvard Law School classmate of the president’s; and Matthew Dowd, a former senior political adviser to George W. Bush who later broke with Bush over Iraq.
    Obama’s visitors offered constructive criticism about how he had handled himself during his first two years. “I remember telling him I thought he had lost his narrative,” one of the visitors recalled. “I didn’t think that he knew what his presidency was really about and that—and everybody told him this—he wasn’t nearly as inclusive as he needed to be in terms of even his own staff, cabinet, and supporters.” This person told Obama, “I bet if I go down the street and talk to ten people about what your presidency is about I’ll get probably ten different answers.” Another visitor said, “I think he clearly got that his presidency had been defined by the worst of the congressional skirmishes . . . , that he was like the chief butcher in the sausage factory and that’s all [people] knew about him.”
    Obama may not have been defensive, but he was not passive in these conversations or reticent to challenge his visitors. He knew which of his guests had been critical of his presidency or his leadership and made a