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colleagues in the Senate could resist Kennedy "but not Lyndon": "That 
man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it." 
Obama delivers no such beatings. Last April, when, in the wake of the 
mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, eighty-three per cent of 
Americans declared themselves in favor of background checks for gun 
purchases, the Times ran a prominent article making the case that the 
Senate failed to follow the President's lead at least partly because of his 
passivity as a tactical politician. It described how Mark Begich, a 
Democratic senator from Alaska, had asked for, and received, a crucial 
favor from the White House, but then, four weeks later, when Begich voted 
against the bill on background checks, he paid no price. No one shut down 
any highway lanes in Anchorage; no Presidential fury was felt in Juneau or 
the Brooks Range. The historian Robert Dallek, another guest at the 
President's table, told the Times that Obama was "inclined to believe that 
sweet reason is what you need to use with people in high office." 
Yet Obama and his aides regard all such talk of breaking bread and 
breaking legs as wishful fantasy. They maintain that they could invite every 
Republican in Congress to play golf until the end of time, could deliver 
punishments with ruthless regularity—and never cut the Gordian knot of 
contemporary Washington. They have a point. An Alaska Democrat like 
Begich would never last in office had he voted with Obama. L.B.J., elected 
in a landslide victory in 1964, drew on whopping majorities in both houses 
of Congress. He could exploit ideological diversity within the parties and 
the lax regulations on earmarks and pork-barrel spending. "When he lost 
that historic majority, and the glow of that landslide victory faded, he had 
the same problems with Congress that most Presidents at one point or 
another have," Obama told me. "I say that not to suggest that I'm a master 
wheeler-dealer but, rather, to suggest that there are some structural 
institutional realities to our political system that don't have much to do 
with schmoozing." 
Dallek said, "Johnson could sit with Everett Dirksen, the Republican 
leader, kneecap to kneecap, drinking bourbon and branch water, and 
Dirksen would mention that there was a fine young man in his state who 
would be a fine judge, and the deal would be cut. Nowadays, the media 
would know in an instant and rightly yell `Corruption!' " 
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Caro finds the L.B.J.-B.H.O. comparison ludicrous. "Johnson was unique," 
he said. "We have never had anyone like him, as a legislative genius. I'm 
working on his Presidency now. Wait till you see what he does to get 
Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act through. But is 
Obama a poor practitioner of power? I have a different opinion. No matter 
what the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, it's a major advance in 
the history of social justice to provide access to health care for thirty-one 
million people." 
At the most recent dinner he attended at the White House, Caro had the 
distinct impression that Obama was cool to him, annoyed, perhaps, at the 
notion appearing in the press that his latest Johnson volume was an implicit 
rebuke to him. "As we were leaving, I said to Obama, `You know, my book 
wasn't an unspoken attack on you, it's a book about Lyndon Johnson," 
Caro recalled. L.B.J. was, after all, also the President who made the 
catastrophic decision to deepen America's involvement in the quagmire of 
Vietnam. "Obama seems interested in winding down our foreign wars," 
Caro said approvingly. 
When Obama does ask Republicans to a social occasion, he is sometimes 
rebuffed. In the fall of 2012, he organized a screening at the White House 
of Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln." Spielberg, the cast, and the 
Democratic leadership found the time to come. Mitch McConnell, John 
Boehner, and three other Republicans declined their invitations, pleading 
the press of congressional business. In the current climate, a Republican, 
especially one facing challenges at home from the right, risks more than he 
gains by socializing or doing business with Obama. Boehner may be 
prepared to compromise on certain issues, but it looks better for him if he 
is seen to be making a deal with Harry Reid, in the Senate, than with 
Barack Obama. Obama's people say that the President's attitude is, Fine, so 
long as we get there. Help me to help you. 
When I asked Obama if he had read or seen anything that fully captured 
the experience of being in his office, he laughed, as if to say, You just have 
no idea. "The truth is, in popular culture the President is usually a side 
character and a lot of times is pretty dull," he said. "If it's a paranoid 
conspiracy-theory movie, then there's an evil aide who is carrying 
something out. If it's a good President, then he is all-wise and all-
knowing"—like the characters played by Martin Sheen in "The West 
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Wing," and Michael Douglas in "The American President." Obama says 
that he is neither. "I'll tell you that watching `Lincoln' was interesting, in 
part because you watched what obviously was a fictionalized account of 
the President I most admire, and there was such a gap between him and me 
that it made you want to be better." He spoke about envying Lincoln's 
"capacity to speak to and move the country without simplifying, and at the 
most fundamental of levels." But what struck him most, he said, was 
precisely what his critics think he most avoids—"the messiness of getting 
something done." 
He went on, "The real politics resonated with me, because I have yet to see 
something that we've done, or any President has done, that was really 
important and good, that did not involve some mess and some strong-
arming and some shading of how it was initially talked about to a particular 
member of the legislature who you needed a vote from. Because, if you're 
doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it—there's 
going to be some aspects of it that aren't clean and neat and immediately 
elicit applause from everybody. And so the nature of not only politics but, I 
think, social change of any sort is that it doesn't move in a straight line, 
and that those who are most successful typically are tacking like a sailor 
toward a particular direction but have to take into account winds and 
currents and occasionally the lack of any wind, so that you're just sitting 
there for a while, and sometimes you're being blown all over the place." 
The politician sensitive to winds and currents was visible in Obama's coy 
talk of his "evolving" position on gay marriage. Obama conceded in one of 
our later conversations only that it's "fair to say that I may have come to 
that realization slightly before I actually made the announcement" favoring 
gay marriage, in May of 2012. "But this was not a situation where I kind of 
did a wink and a nod and a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn." The turn may 
not have been a sudden one-eighty; to say that your views are "evolving," 
though, is to say there is a position that you consider to be more advanced 
than the one you officially hold. And he held the "evolved" position in 
1996, when, as a candidate for the Illinois state senate, he filled out a 
questionnaire from Outlines, a local gay and lesbian newspaper, saying, "I 
favor legalizing same-sex marriages." 
When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the 
legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any 
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dispatch and get in front of the issue. "As has been well documented, I 
smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very 
different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a 
big chunk of my adult life. I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol." 
Is it less dangerous? I asked. 
Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That's one of his moves. 
When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing 
himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in 
paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the 
middle of a sentence and say, "Scratch that," or, "I think the grammar was 
all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again." 
Less dangerous, he said, "in terms of its impact on the individual 
consumer. It's not something I encourage, and I've told my daughters I 
think it's a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy." What clearly does 
trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for 
marijuana among minorities. "Middle-class kids don't get locked up for 
smoking pot, and poor kids do," he said. "And African-American kids and 
Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources 
and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties." But, he said, "we should 
not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time 
when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the 
same thing." Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in 
Colorado and Washington that "it's important for it to go forward because 
it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of 
people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get 
punished." 
As is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. "Having said all that, those 
who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these 
social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of 
hair on that policy. And the experiment that's going to be taking place in 
Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge." He noted 
the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. "I also think that, when it 
comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social 
costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-
drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, 
Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show 
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is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody 
says, We've got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn't going to kill you or 
rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?" 
V—MAGIC KINGDOMS 
By Monday night, Obama was in Los Angeles, headed for Beverly Park, a 
gated community of private-equity barons, Saudi princes, and movie 
people. It was a night of fund-raisers—the first hosted by Magic Johnson, 
who led the Lakers to five N.B.A. championships, in the eighties. In the 
Beast, on the way to Johnson's house, Obama told me, "Magic has become 
a good friend. I always tease him—I think he supported Hillary the first 
time around, in '08." 
"He campaigned for her in Iowa!" Josh Earnest, a press spokesman, said, 
still sounding chagrined. 
"Yeah, but we have developed a great relationship," Obama said. "I wasn't 
a Lakers fan. I was a Philadelphia 76ers fan, because I loved Doctor J."—
Julius Erving—"and then became a Jordan fan, because I moved to 
Chicago. But, in my mind, at least, what has made Magic heroic was not 
simply the joy of his playing." Obama said that the way Johnson handled 
his H.I.V. diagnosis changed "how the culture thought about that—which, 
actually, I think, ultimately had an impact about how the culture thought 
about the gay community." He also talked about Johnson's business 
success as something that was "deeply admired" among African-
Americans—"the notion that here's somebody who would leverage fame 
and fortune in sports into a pretty remarkable business career." 
"Do you not see that often enough, by your lights?" I asked. 
"I don't," Obama said. 
The Obamas are able to speak to people of color in a way that none of their 
predecessors could. And the President is quick to bring into the public 
realm the fact that, for all his personal cool, he is a foursquare family man. 
He has plenty of hip-hop on his iPod, but he also worries about the 
moments of misogyny. Once, I mentioned to him that I knew that while 
Malia Obama, an aspiring filmmaker, was a fan of "Girls," he and Michelle 
Obama were, at first, wary of the show. 
"I'm at the very young end of the Baby Boom generation, which meant 
that I did not come of age in the sixties—took for granted certain freedoms, 
certain attitudes about gender, sexuality, equality for women, but didn't 
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feel as if I was having to rebel against something," Obama said. "Precisely 
because I didn't have a father in the home and moved around a lot as a kid 
and had a wonderfully loving mom and grandparents, but not a lot of 
structure growing up, I emerged on the other side of that with an 
appreciation for family and marriage and structure for the kids. I'm sure 
that's part of why Michelle and her family held such appeal to me in the 
first place, because she did grow up with that kind of structure. And now, 
as parents, I don't think we're being particularly conservative—we're 
actually not prudes. . . . But, as parents, what we have seen, both in our 
own family and among our friends, is that kids with structure have an 
easier time of it." 
He talked about a visit that he made last year to Hyde Park Academy, a 
public high school on Chicago's South Side, where he met with a group of 
about twenty boys in a program called Becoming a Man. "They're in this 
program because they're fundamentally good kids who could tip in the 
wrong direction if they didn't get some guidance and some structure," 
Obama recalled. "We went around the room and started telling each other 
stories. And one of the young men asked me about me growing up, and I 
explained, You know what? I'm just like you guys. I didn't have a dad. 
There were times where I was angry and wasn't sure why I was angry. I 
engaged in a bunch of anti-social behavior. I did drugs. I got drunk. Didn't 
take school seriously. The only difference between me and you is that I was 
in a more forgiving environment, and if I made a mistake I wasn't going to 
get shot. And, even if I didn't apply myself in school, I was at a good 
enough school that just through osmosis I'd have the opportunity to go to 
college. 
"And, as I'm speaking, the kid next to me looks over and he says, `Are you 
talking about you?' And there was a benefit for them hearing that, because 
when I then said, You guys have to take yourselves more seriously, or you 
need to have a backup plan in case you don't end up being LeBron or Jay 
Z Z. . . they might listen. Now, that's not a liberal or a conservative thing. 
There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so 
thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle 
and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of institutional 
barriers and racism, and we're engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps, 
Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook." 
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Obama thought that this reaction was sometimes knee-jerk. "I always tell 
people to go read some of Dr. King's writings about the African-American 
community. For that matter, read Malcolm X. . . . There's no contradiction 
to say that there are issues of personal responsibility that have to be 
addressed, while still acknowledging that some of the specific pathologies 
in the African-American community are a direct result of our history." 
The higher we went up into Beverly Hills, the grander the houses were. 
This was where the big donors lived. But Obama's thoughts have been 
down in the city. The drama of racial inequality, in his mind, has come to 
presage a larger, transracial form of economic disparity, a deepening of the 
class divide. Indeed, if there is a theme for the remaining days of his term, 
it is inequality. In 2011, he went to Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of 
Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 New Nationalism speech—a signal moment in 
the history of Progressivism—and declared inequality the "defining issue 
of our time." He repeated the message at length, late last year, in 
Anacostia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., this 
time noting that the gap between the rich and the poor in America now 
resembled that in Argentina and Jamaica, rather than that in France, 
Germany, or Canada. American C.E.O.s once made, on average, thirty 
times as much as workers; now they make about two hundred and seventy 
times as much. The wealthy hire lobbyists; they try to secure their interests 
with campaign donations. Even as Obama travels for campaign alms and is 
as entangled in the funding system at least as much as any other politician, 
he insists that his commitment is to the middle class and the disadvantaged. 
Last summer, he received a letter from a single mother struggling to 
support herself and her daughter on a minimal income. She was drowning: 
"I need help. I can't imagine being out in the streets with my daughter and 
if I don't get some type of relief soon, I'm afraid that's what may happen." 
"Copy to Senior Advisers," Obama wrote at the bottom of the letter. "This 
is the person we are working for." 
In one of our conversations, I asked him what he felt he must get done 
before leaving office. He was silent for a while and then broke into a 
pained grin. "You mean, now that the Web site is working?" Yes, after that. 
"It's hard to anticipate events over the next three years," he said. "If you 
had asked F.D.R. what he had to accomplish in 1937, he would have told 
you, `I've got to stabilize the economy and reduce the deficit.' Turned out 
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there were a few more things on his plate." He went on, "I think we are 
fortunate at the moment that we do not face a crisis of the scale and scope 
that Lincoln or F.D.R. faced. So I think it's unrealistic to suggest that I can 
narrow my focus the way those two Presidents did. But I can tell you that I 
will measure myself at the end of my Presidency in large part by whether I 
began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the 
middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this 
society." 
Obama met last summer with Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist 
who became famous for a book he wrote on social atomization, "Bowling 
Alone." For the past several years, Putnam and some colleagues have been 
working on a book about the growing opportunity gap between rich and 
poor kids. Putnam, who led a Kennedy School seminar on civic 
engagement that Obama was in, sent the President a memo about his 
findings. More and more, Putnam found, the crucial issue is class, and he 
believes that a black President might have an easier time explaining this 
trend to the American people and setting an agenda to combat it. Other 
prominent politicians—including Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, and Jeb Bush 
—have also consulted Putnam. Putnam told me that, even if legislation 
combatting the widening class divide eludes Obama, "I am hoping he can 
be John the Baptist on this." And Obama, for his part, seems eager to take 
on that evangelizing role. 
"You have an economy," Obama told me, "that is ruthlessly squeezing 
workers and imposing efficiencies that make our flat-screen TVs really 
cheap but also puts enormous downward pressure on wages and salaries. 
That's making it more and more difficult not only for African-Americans 
or Latinos to get a foothold into the middle class but for everybody—large 
majorities of people—to get a foothold in the middle class or to feel secure 
there. You've got folks like Bob Putnam, who's doing some really 
interesting studies indicating the degree to which some of those 
`pathologies' that used to be attributed to the African-American community 
in particular—single-parent households, and drug abuse, and men dropping 
out of the labor force, and an underground economy—you're now starting 
to see in larger numbers in white working-class communities as well, 
which would tend to vindicate what I think a lot of us always felt." 
VI-A NEW EQUILIBRIUM 
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After the event at Magic Johnson's place—the highlight was a tour of an 
immense basement trophy room, where Johnson had installed a gleaming 
hardwood basketball floor and piped in the sound of crowds cheering and 
announcers declaring the glories of the Lakers—the Beast made its way to 
the compound that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers built. Haim Saban, 
who made his billions as a self-described "cartoon schlepper," was born in 
Egypt, came of age in Israel, and started his show-business career as the 
bass player in the Lions of Judah. His politics are not ambiguous. "I am a 
one-issue guy," he once said, "and my issue is Israel." His closest political 
relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he was crushed when she 
lost to Obama, in 2008. Saban publicly expressed doubts about whether 
Obama was sufficiently ardent about Israel, but he has come around. 
The main house on Saban's property is less of an art museum than Jon 
Shirley's, though it features a Warhol diptych of Golda Meir and Albert 
Einstein over the fireplace. The fund-raiser was held in back of the main 
house, under a tent. Addressing a hundred and twenty guests, and being 
peppered with questions about the Middle East, Obama trotted around all 
the usual bases—the hope for peace, the still strong alliance with Israel, the 
danger of "lone wolf' terror threats. But, while a man who funds the Saban 
Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution may have 
warmed to Obama, there is no question that, in certain professional 
foreign-policy circles, Obama is often regarded with mistrust. His Syria 
policy—with its dubious "red line" and threats to get rid of Bashar al-
Assad; with John Kerry's improvised press-conference gambit on chemical 
weapons—has inspired little confidence. Neither did the decision to 
accelerate troop levels in Afghanistan and, at the same time, schedule a 
withdrawal. 
Obama came to power without foreign-policy experience; but he won the 
election, in part, by advocating a foreign-policy sensibility that was wary 
of American overreach. If George W. Bush's foreign policy was largely a 
reaction to 9/11, Obama's has been a reaction to the reaction. He withdrew 
American forces from Iraq. He went to Cairo in 2009, in an attempt to 
forge "a new beginning" between the United States and the Muslim world. 
American troops will come home from Afghanistan this year. As he 
promised in his first Presidential campaign—to the outraged protests of 
Hillary Clinton and John McCain alike—he has extended a hand to 
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traditional enemies, from Iran to Cuba. And he has not hesitated in his 
public rhetoric to acknowledge, however subtly, the abuses, as well as the 
triumphs, of American power. He remembers going with his mother to live 
in Indonesia, in 1967—shortly after a military coup, engineered with 
American help, led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. 
This event, and the fact that so few Americans know much about it, made a 
lasting impression on Obama. He is convinced that an essential component 
of diplomacy is the public recognition of historical facts—not only the 
taking of American hostages in Iran, in 1979, but also the American role in 
the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime 
Minister of Iran, in 1953. 
The right's response has been to accuse Obama of conducting a foreign 
policy of apology. Last year, Republican senators on the Foreign Affairs 
Committee, including Marco Rubio, of Florida, demanded to know if 
Samantha Power, Obama's nominee for U.N. Ambassador and the author 
of "A Problem from Hell," a historical indictment of American passivity in 
the face of various genocides around the world, would ever "apologize" for 
the United States. (In a depressing Kabuki drama, Power seemed forced to 
prove her patriotic bona fides by insisting repeatedly that the U.S. was "the 
greatest country on earth" and that, no, she would "never apologize" for it.) 
Obama's conservative critics, both at home and abroad, paint him as a 
President out to diminish American power. Josef Joffe, the hawkish editor 
of Die Zeit, the highbrow German weekly, told me, "There is certainly 
consistency and coherence in his attempt to retract from the troubles of the 
world, to get the U.S. out of harm's way, in order to do 'a little nation-
building at home,' as he has so often put it. If you want to be harsh about it, 
he wants to turn the U.S. into a very large medium power, into an XXL 
France or Germany." 
Obama's "long game" on foreign policy calls for traditional categories of 
American power and ideology to be reordered. Ben Rhodes, the deputy 
national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me that 
Washington was "trapped in very stale narratives." 
"In the foreign-policy establishment, to be an idealist you have to be for 
military intervention," Rhodes went on. "In the Democratic Party, these 
debates were defined in the nineties, and the idealists lined up for military 
intervention. For the President, Iraq was the defining issue, and now Syria 
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is viewed through that lens, as was Libya—to be an idealist, you have to be 
a military interventionist. We spent a trillion dollars in Iraq and had troops 
there for a decade, and you can't say it wielded positive influence. Just the 
opposite. We can't seem to get out of these boxes." 
Obama may resist the idealism of a previous generation of interventionists, 
but his realism, if that's what it is, diverges from the realism of Henry 
Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft. "It comes from the idea that change is 
organic and change comes to countries in its own way, modernization 
comes in its own way, rather than through liberation narratives coming 
from the West," Fareed Zakaria, a writer on foreign policy whom Obama 
reads and consults, says. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who worked at the State 
Department as Hillary Clinton's director of policy planning, says, "Obama 
has a real understanding of the limits of our power. It's not that the United 
States is in decline; it's that sometimes the world has problems without the 
tools to fix them." Members of Obama's foreign-policy circle say that 
when he is criticized for his reaction to situations like Iran's Green 
Revolution, in 2009, or the last days of Hosni Mubarak's regime, in 2011, 
he complains that people imagine him to have a "joystick" that allows him 
to manipulate precise outcomes. 
Obama told me that what he needs isn't any new grand strategy—"I don't 
really even need George Kerman right now"—but, rather, the right strategic 
partners. "There are currents in history and you have to figure out how to 
move them in one direction or another," Rhodes said. "You can't 
necessarily determine the final destination. . . . The President subscribes 
less to a great-man theory of history and more to a great-movement theory 
of history—that change happens when people force it or circumstances 
do." (Later, Obama told me, "I'm not sure Ben is right about that. I believe 
in both.") 
The President may scorn the joystick fantasy, but he does believe that his 
words—at microphones from Cairo to Yangon—can encourage positive 
change abroad, even if only in the long run. In Israel last March, he told 
university students that "political leaders will never take risks if the people 
do not push them to take some risks." Obama, who has pressed Netanyahu 
to muster the political will to take risks on his own, thinks he can help 
"create a space"—that is the term around the White House—for forward 
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movement on the Palestinian issue, whether he is around to see the result 
or not. 
Administration officials are convinced that their efforts to toughen the 
sanctions on Iran caused tremendous economic pain and helped Hassan 
Rouhani win popular support in the Iranian Presidential elections last year. 
Although Rouhani is no liberal—he has revolutionary and religious 
credentials, which is why he was able to run—he was not Ayatollah Ali 
Khamenei's favored candidate. Khamenei is an opaque, cautious figure, 
Administration officials say, but he clearly acceded to Rouhani as he saw 
the political demands of the population shift. 
The nuclear negotiations in Geneva, which were preceded by secret 
contacts with the Iranians in Oman and New York, were, from Obama's 
side, based on a series of strategic calculations that, he acknowledges, may 
not work out. As the Administration sees it, an Iranian nuclear weapon 
would be a violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and a threat to 
the entire region; it could spark a nuclear arms race reaching Saudi Arabia, 
Egypt, and Turkey. (Israel has had nukes since 1967.) But the White House 
is prepared to accept a civilian nuclear capacity in Iran, with strict 
oversight, while the Israelis and the Gulf states regard any Iranian nuclear 
technology at all as unacceptable. Obama has told Netanyahu and 
Republican senators that the absolutist benchmark is not achievable. 
Members of Obama's team believe that the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, 
and the Gulf states, who are now allied as never before, want the U.S. to be 
their proxy in a struggle not merely for de-nuclearization in Iran but for 
regime change—and that is not on the Administration's agenda, except, 
perhaps, as a hope. 
Republican and Democratic senators have expressed doubts about even the 
interim agreement with Iran, and have threatened to tighten sanctions still 
further. "Historically, there is hostility and suspicion toward Iran, not just 
among members of Congress but the American people," Obama said, 
adding that "members of Congress are very attentive to what Israel says on 
its security issues." He went on, "I don't think a new sanctions bill will 
reach my desk during this period, but, if it did, I would veto it and expect it 
to be sustained." 
Ultimately, he envisages a new geopolitical equilibrium, one less turbulent 
than the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle. "It 
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would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if 
Sunnis and Shias weren't intent on killing each other," he told me. "And 
although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran 
to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not 
trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing 
a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between 
Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there's 
competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare. 
"With respect to Israel, the interests of Israel in stability and security are 
actually very closely aligned with the interests of the Sunni states." As 
Saudi and Israeli diplomats berate Obama in unison, his reaction is, 
essentially, Use that. "What's preventing them from entering into even an 
informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations is not that 
their interests are profoundly in conflict but the Palestinian issue, as well as 
a long history of anti-Semitism that's developed over the course of decades 
there, and anti-Arab sentiment that's increased inside of Israel based on 
seeing buses being blown up," Obama said. "If you can start unwinding 
some of that, that creates a new equilibrium. And so I think each individual 
piece of the puzzle is meant to paint a picture in which conflicts and 
competition still exist in the region but that it is contained, it is expressed 
in ways that don't exact such an enormous toll on the countries involved, 
and that allow us to work with functioning states to prevent extremists 
from emerging there." 
During Obama's performance under Saban's tent, there was no talk of a 
Sunni-Israeli alignment, or of any failures of vision on Netanyahu's part. 
Obama did allow himself to be testy about the criticism he has received 
over his handling of the carnage in Syria. "You'll recall that that was the 
previous end of my Presidency, until it turned out that we are actually 
getting all the chemical weapons. And no one reports on that anymore." 
VII-HAMMERS AND PLIERS 
Obama's lowest moments in the Middle East have involved his handling of 
Syria. Last summer, when I visited Za'atari, the biggest Syrian refugee 
camp in Jordan, one displaced person after another expressed anger and 
dismay at American inaction. In a later conversation, I asked Obama if he 
was haunted by Syria, and, though the mask of his equipoise rarely slips, 
an indignant expression crossed his face. "I am haunted by what's 
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happened," he said. "I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in 
another Middle Eastern war. It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in 
which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short 
of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what 
we did in Iraq. And when I hear people suggesting that somehow if we had 
just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that somehow Assad would 
be gone by now and we'd have a peaceful transition, it's magical thinking. 
"It's not as if we didn't discuss this extensively down in the Situation 
Room. It's not as if we did not solicit—and continue to solicit—opinions 
from a wide range of folks. Very early in this process, I actually asked the 
C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an 
insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't 
come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle. And the 
truth is that the challenge there has been, and continues to be, that you have 
an authoritarian, brutal government who is willing to do anything to hang 
on to power, and you have an opposition that is disorganized, ill-equipped, 
ill-trained, and is self-divided. All of that is on top of some of the sectarian 
divisions. . . . And, in that environment, our best chance of seeing a decent 
outcome at this point is to work the state actors who have invested so much 
in keeping Assad in power—mainly the Iranians and the Russians—as well 
as working with those who have been financing the opposition to make 
sure that they're not creating the kind of extremist force that we saw 
emerge out of Afghanistan when we were financing the mujahideen." 
At the core of Obama's thinking is that American military involvement 
cannot be the primary instrument to achieve the new equilibrium that the 
region so desperately needs. And yet thoughts of a pacific equilibrium are 
far from anyone's mind in the real, existing Middle East. In the 2012 
campaign, Obama spoke not only of killing Osama bin Laden; he also said 
that Al Qaeda had been "decimated." I pointed out that the flag of Al 
Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in 
Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too. 
"The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a 
jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe 
Bryant," Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. "I 
think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden 
and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the 
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homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power 
struggles and disputes, often sectarian. 
"Let's just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in 
a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along 
sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and 
specific enough that it doesn't lead us to think that any horrible actions that 
take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist 
Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to 
wade into." 
He went on, "You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the 
region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are 
in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just 
dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to 
gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, 
territory. . . . And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that 
stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those 
problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not 
going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational 
network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center. We 
have to be able to distinguish between these problems analytically, so that 
we're not using a pliers where we need a hammer, or we're not using a 
battalion when what we should be doing is partnering with the local 
government to train their police force more effectively, improve their 
intelligence capacities." 
This wasn't realism or idealism; it was something closer to policy 
particularism (this thing is different from that thing; Syria is not Libya; 
Iran is not North Korea). Yet Obama's regular deployment of drones has 
been criticized as a one-size-fits-all recourse, in which the prospect of 
destroying an individual enemy too easily trumps broader strategic and 
diplomatic considerations, to say nothing of moral ones. A few weeks 
before Obama left Washington to scour the West Coast for money, he 
invited to the White House Malala Yousafzai, the remarkable Pakistani 
teen-ager who campaigned for women's education and was shot in the head 
by the Taliban. Yousafzai thanked Obama for the material support that the 
U.S. government provided for education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and 
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among Syrian refugees, but she also told him that drone strikes were 
"fuelling terrorism" and resentment in her country. 
"I think any President should be troubled by any war or any kinetic action 
that leads to death," Obama told me when I brought up Yousafzai's 
remarks. "The way I've thought about this issue is, I have a solemn duty 
and responsibility to keep the American people safe. That's my most 
important obligation as President and Commander-in-Chief. And there are 
individuals and groups out there that are intent on killing Americans—
killing American civilians, killing American children, blowing up 
American planes. That's not speculation. It's their explicit agenda." 
Obama said that, if terrorists can be captured and prosecuted, "that's 
always my preference. If we can't, I cannot stand by and do nothing. They 
operate in places where oftentimes we cannot reach them, or the countries 
are either unwilling or unable to capture them in partnership with us. And 
that then narrows my options: we can simply be on defense and try to 
harden our defense. But in this day and age that's of limited—well, that's 
insufficient. We can say to those countries, as my predecessor did, if you 
are harboring terrorists, we will hold you accountable—in which case, we 
could be fighting a lot of wars around the world. And, statistically, it is 
indisputable that the costs in terms of not only our men and women in 
uniform but also innocent civilians would be much higher. Or, where 
possible, we can take targeted strikes, understanding that anytime you take 
a military strike there are risks involved. What I've tried to do is to tighten 
the process so much and limit the risks of civilian casualties so much that 
we have the least fallout from those actions. But it's not perfect." 
It is far from that. In December, an American drone flying above Al Bayda 
province, in Yemen, fired on what U.S. intelligence believed was a column 
of Al Qaeda fighters. The "column" was in fact a wedding party; twelve 
people were killed, and fifteen were seriously injured. Some of the victims, 
if not all, were civilians. This was no aberration. In Yemen and Pakistan, 
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, American drones have 
killed between some four hundred and a thousand civilians—a civilian-to-
combatant ratio that could be as high as one to three. Obama has never 
made it clear how the vast populations outraged and perhaps radicalized by 
such remote-control mayhem might figure into his calculations about 
American security. 
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"Look, you wrestle with it," Obama said. "And those who have questioned 
our drone policy are doing exactly what should be done in a democracy—
asking some tough questions. The only time I get frustrated is when folks 
act like it's not complicated and there aren't some real tough decisions, and 
are sanctimonious, as if somehow these aren't complicated questions. 
Listen, as I have often said to my national-security team, I didn't run for 
office so that I could go around blowing things up." 
Obama told me that in all three of his main initiatives in the region—with 
Iran, with Israel and the Palestinians, with Syria—the odds of completing 
final treaties are less than fifty-fifty. "On the other hand," he said, "in all 
three circumstances we may be able to push the boulder partway up the hill 
and maybe stabilize it so it doesn't roll back on us. And all three are 
connected. I do believe that the region is going through rapid change and 
inexorable change. Some of it is demographics; some of it is technology; 
some of it is economics. And the old order, the old equilibrium, is no 
longer tenable. The question then becomes, What's next?" 
VIII-AMONG THE ALIENS 
On his last day in Los Angeles, Obama romanced Hollywood, taking a 
helicopter to visit the DreamWorks studio, in Glendale. Jeffrey Katzenberg, 
Obama's host and the head of DreamWorks Animation, is one of the 
Democrats' most successful fund-raisers. But it is never a good idea for the 
White House to admit to any quid pro quo. When one of the pool reporters 
asked why the President was going to Katzenberg's studio and not, say, 
Universal, a travelling spokesman replied, "DreamWorks obviously is a 
thriving business and is creating lots of jobs in Southern California. And 
the fact of the matter is Mr. Katzenberg's support for the President's 
policies has no bearing on our decision to visit there." 
That's pretty rich. Katzenberg has been a supporter from the start of 
Obama's national career, raising millions of dollars for him and for the 
Party's Super PACs. Nor has he been hurt by his political associations. Joe 
Biden helped pave the way with Xi Jinping and other officials so that 
DreamWorks and other Hollywood companies could build studios in 
China. (In an awkward postscript, the S.E.C. reportedly began 
investigating, in 2012, whether DreamWorks, Twentieth Century Fox, and 
the Walt Disney Company paid bribes to Chinese officials, in violation of 
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.) 
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A flock of military helicopters brought the Obama party to Glendale, and, 
after a short ride to DreamWorks Animation, Katzenberg greeted the 
President and gave him a tour. They stopped in a basement recording 
studio to watch a voice-over session for a new animated picture called 
"Home," starring the voice of Steve Martin. Greeting Martin, Obama 
recalled that the last time they saw each other must have been when Martin 
played banjo with his band at the White House. 
Martin nodded. "I always say the fact that I played banjo at the White 
House was the biggest thrill of his life." 
Katzenberg explained that "Home" was the story of the Boov, an alien race 
that has taken over the planet. Martin is the voice of Captain Smek, the 
leader of the Boov. 
"Where did we go?" Obama asked Tim Johnson, the director. "Do they 
feed us?" 
"Mostly ice cream." 
Katzenberg said that, unlike dramatic films with live actors, nineteen out of 
twenty of DreamWorks' animated pictures succeed. 
"My kids have aged out," Obama said. "They used to be my excuse to 
watch them all." 
Katzenberg led Obama to a conference room, where the heads of most of 
the major movie and television studios were waiting. There would be 
touchy questions about business—particularly about the "North versus 
South" civil war in progress between the high-tech libertarians in Silicon 
Valley and the "content producers" in Los Angeles. The war was over 
intellectual-property rights, and Obama showed little desire to get in the 
middle of these two constituencies. If anything, he knows that Silicon 
Valley is ascendant, younger, more able to mobilize active voters, and he 
was not about to offer the studio heads his unqualified muscle. 
Finally, the subject switched to global matters. Alan Horn, the chairman of 
Walt Disney Studios, raised his hand. "First," he said, "I do recommend 
that you and your family see `Frozen,' which is coming to a theatre near 
you. " 
Then he asked about climate change. 
IX-LISTENING IN 
On the flight back to Washington, Obama read and played spades with 
some aides to pass the time. (He and his former body man Reggie Love 
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took a break to play spades at one point during the mission to kill Osama 
bin Laden.) After a while, one of the aides led me to the front cabin to talk 
with the President some more. The week before, Obama had given out the 
annual Presidential Medals of Freedom. One went to Benjamin C. Bradlee, 
the editor who built the Washington Post by joining the Times in 
publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, and who stood behind Bob 
Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they began publishing the Watergate 
exposés that led to the fall of the Nixon Presidency. I asked Obama how he 
could reconcile such an award with his Administration's aggressive leak 
investigations, which have ensnared journalists and sources, and its 
hostility to Edward Snowden's exposure of the N.S.A.'s blanket 
surveillance of American and foreign communications. 
After a long pause, Obama began to speak of how his first awareness of 
politics came when, as an eleven-year-old, he went on a cross-country bus 
trip with his mother and grandmother and, at the end of each day, watched 
the Watergate hearings on television. "I remember being fascinated by 
these figures and what was at stake, and the notion that even the President 
of the United States isn't above the law," he said. "And Sam Ervin with his 
eyebrows, and Inouye, this guy from Hawaii—it left a powerful impression 
on me. And so, as I got older, when I saw `All the President's Men,' that 
was the iconic vision of journalism telling truth to power, and making sure 
our democracy worked. And I still believe that. And so a lot of the tensions 
that have existed between my White House and the press are inherent in 
the institution. The press always wants more, and every White House, 
including ours, is trying to make sure that the things that we care most 
about are what's being reported on, and that we're not on any given day 
chasing after fifteen story lines." 
Then Obama insisted that what Snowden did was "not akin to Watergate or 
some scandal in which there were coverups involved." The leaks, he said, 
had "put people at risk" but revealed nothing illegal. And though the leaks 
raised "legitimate policy questions" about N.S.A. operations, "the issue 
then is: Is the only way to do that by giving some twenty-nine-year-old free 
rein to basically dump a mountain of information, much of which is 
definitely legal, definitely necessary for national security, and should 
properly be classified?" In Obama's view, "the benefit of the debate he 
generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way 
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of doing it." Once again, it was the President as Professor-in-Chief, 
assessing all sides, and observing the tilt of the scales. (The day before his 
speech last week on reforming the N.S.A., he told me, "I do not have a 
yes/no answer on clemency for Edward Snowden. This is an active case, 
where charges have been brought.") 
The coverage of the leaks, Obama complained, paints "a picture of a rogue 
agency out there running around and breaking a whole bunch of laws and 
engaging in a `domestic spying program' that isn't accurate. But what that 
does is it synchs up with a public imagination that sees Big Brother 
looming everywhere." The greater damage, in his view, was the way the 
leaks heightened suspicions among foreign leaders. Obama enjoyed a good 
relationship with Angela Merkel, but he admitted that it was undermined 
by reports alleging that the U.S. tapped her cell phone. This, he said, felt 
"like a breach of trust and I can't argue with her being aggravated about 
that." 
But, he said, "there are European governments that we know spy on us, 
and there is a little bit of Claude Rains in `Casablanca'—shocked that 
gambling is going on." He added, "Now, I will say that I automatically 
assume that there are a whole bunch of folks out there trying to spy on me, 
which is why I don't have a phone. I do not send out anything on my 
BlackBerry that I don't assume at some point will be on the front page of a 
newspaper, so it's pretty boring reading for the most part." 
Obama admitted that the N.S.A. has had "too much leeway to do whatever 
it wanted or could." But he didn't feel "any ambivalence" about the 
decisions he has made. "I actually feel confident that the way the N.S.A. 
operates does not threaten the privacy and constitutional rights of 
Americans and that the laws that are in place are sound, and, because 
we've got three branches of government involved and a culture that has 
internalized that domestic spying is against the law, it actually works pretty 
well," he said. "Over all, five years from now, when I'm a private citizen, 
I'm going to feel pretty confident that my government is not spying on 
me." 
Obama has three years left, but it's not difficult to sense a politician with 
an acute sense of time, a politician devising ways to widen his legacy 
without the benefit of any support from Congress. The State of the Union 
speech next week will be a catalogue of things hoped for, a resumption of 
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