Jonathan Alter Wants it All

Jonathan Alter’s new book The Promise does not, as Imus advertised, come with the subtitle, “A Love Letter to President Obama.” Instead, Alter, a national affairs columnist for Newsweek, focused solely on Obama’s first year in office, something that had not yet been done.  

“I try to take the reader behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, into the Situation Room,” he explained. “What is this guy like when the camera’s off?”

Alter spoke with more than 200 people for The Promise, including Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. A Chicago native, Alter has know Obama and the people surrounding him for a long time, and had “excellent” access to pretty much everyone.

In fact, he had such unfettered access to White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel that there is an entire chapter dedicated to the notorious fireball. “I can’t tell you what’s in the chapter, because there are about forty ‘F’ words in that chapter alone,” said Alter.

It turns out Emanuel is not a big fan of “first dog” Bo Obama, who he called “off message” because he’s a purebred Portuguese water dog and not a shelter dog. Bo also “craps all the time,” Emanuel told Alter, and the Commander-in-Chief must clean it up.

One particular story from The Promise, featuring France’s First Lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy and Michelle OBama, has gotten a lot of attention. According to Alter, Bruni complained to Michelle, “The bad thing about being the wife of a head-of-state is my husband and I can no longer make love as much as we would like.”

She continued, “But we did keep a world leader waiting recently for one hour while we completed our love-making.” Mortified, Michelle said she and the President had never done such a thing.

Mixed in with this sort of cotton candy is hard news, like Obama essentially going it along on health care reform. “He was told by Joe Biden, ‘Don’t do it this year,’” said Alter. “Rahm Emanuel told me, ‘I begged the President not to do this.’ David Axelrod was against it. The economists were all against it.”

Yet, Obama moved forward, telling Alter, “If we hadn’t done it in the first year, it wouldn’t have happened,” an approach Alter likened to Reagan. “He’s playing more of a…longer term game, where instead of worrying how he’s doing day-to-day and week-to-week, he’s trying to put points on the board for the long term,” Alter said.

Also featured in The Promise is Obama’s “very compelling” struggle with economic policy. Liberals, said Alter, “had their foot on the necks of the banks” in early 2009, but never cashed in on that leverage. “Now, they’re trying to get this bill through,” he said, referring to the financial regulatory reform bill. “It’s kind of too late.”

Regardless of what one thinks about Obama politically, Alter said he’s “psychologically healthy,” a rarity among politicians. “He’s not needy, and that really hurts him in some ways,” said Alter. “All these Congressmen are needy, and he doesn’t quite understand how much they need to be stroked.”

Imus predicted The Promise would be hugely successful (as of this morning, it was already number 15 on Amazon’s bestseller list), if for no other reason than people like Alter better than they like Obama.

“Fine with me,” said Alter, who then challenged the I-Man to push the book even higher. Greedy bastard.

-Julie Kanfer