The Time of Our Lives Read Free Page B

9.8 just before the midterm elections. That number didn’t reflect those off the statistical grid who had given up looking for work. Confidence in the young president and his team drawn largely from the academic and political worlds plummeted heading into November.
    President Obama was vilified as a socialist out to destroy the country, and questions were raised about his birthplace, despite a newspaper account and evidence from the state of Hawaii that, in fact, he was born in that state on August 4, 1961.
    A national libertarian movement called the Tea Party arose out of a rage against government spending, anxiety about the economy, and the perceived distance between the priorities of Washington and those of grassroots America.
    The president’s failure to aggressively attack unemployment and his concentration instead on a massive and complex health care reform law troubled even his most ardent supporters. By the fall, national polls showed that by a margin of four to one, likely voters felt their personal finances were worse off in the last few years.
    The president and his team responded by relying on the power of personality, sending Obama into the heartland for backyard sessions with “just folks” and into large rallies with the party faithful.
    Meanwhile, the Tea Party derided a federal stimulus program, reform of the big financial institutions, and an auto industry rescue as more examples of government run amok. In fits and starts Obama tried to find his voice as a populist and then as a healer, but the troubled economy resisted his charms and policies.
    Nothing worked.
    In the November 2010 congressional elections, the president, in his own word, took a “shellacking.” Democrats lost sixty-three seats in the House, dropping to their lowest level in that chamber since 1940. They barely hung onto the Senate, encouraging Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to immediately announce his goal was to deny President Obama a second term.
    THE PRESENT
    More unexpected dramatic and consequential change was just over the horizon in a part of the world where America remained deeply involved in the longest wars in its history—in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan.
    The president, the CIA, and the U.S. military gave the world a startling and welcome May Day 2011 surprise. They ordered a nighttime raid deep into Pakistan to attack a fortified compound in a bucolic residential area where they suspected Osama bin Laden was living.
    The president made the call to proceed with the high-risk mission. A Navy SEAL team helicoptered across Pakistan from Afghanistan on a Sunday to make the strike, and it was brilliantly executed. Osama bin Laden, the number one terrorist in the world, was killed in the raid. No Americans were wounded or lost.
    President Obama’s credibility as a leader, a cool and courageous commander in chief, soared briefly just at a time when the country was expressing deep doubts about those qualities for his management of the economy and his reaction to earlier, unexpected developments in the Middle East.
    The administration and most of the world had been caught off guard by events that profoundly reordered the political and physical landscape of the region. When a Tunisian fruit vendor committed suicide by setting himself on fire to protest his homeland’s autocratic and corrupt government, news of his desperate act spread across the Islamic world, including Egypt, the most populous of the Middle Eastern countries and a close ally of the United States.
    Demonstrators took over Cairo’s central city, demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruthlessly ruled his country for more than thirty years, mocking Egypt’s constitutional guarantees of free elections.
    In the opening days of the uprising, the Obama administration steered an uncertain course, publicly calling for its ally Mubarak to leave immediately and privately pleading with him to institute a succession plan that