Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR  JULY 2, 2016 

 

President Obama in March 2009 reading letters from Americans in his private study late at night. Credit Callie Shell/Aurora Photos

WASHINGTON — “Are you up?”

The emails arrive late, often after 1 a.m., tapped out on a secure BlackBerry from an email address known only to a few. The weary recipients know that once again, the boss has not yet gone to bed.

The late-night interruptions from President Obama might be sharply worded questions about memos he has read. Sometimes they are taunts because the recipient’s sports team just lost.

Last month it was a 12:30 a.m. email to Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, telling them he had finished reworking a speechwriter’s draft of presidential remarks for later that morning. Mr. Obama had spent three hours scrawling in longhand on a yellow legal pad an angry condemnation of Donald J. Trump’s response to the attack in Orlando, Fla., and told his aides they could pick up his rewrite at the White House usher’s office when they came in for work.

Mr. Obama calls himself a “night guy,” and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.

He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing papers delivered at 8 p.m. by the staff secretary. He reads 10 letters from Americans chosen each day by his staff. “How can we allow private citizens to buy automatic weapons? They are weapons of war,” Liz O’Connor, a Connecticut middle school teacher, wrote in a letter Mr. Obama read on the night of June 13.

The president also watches ESPN, reads novels or plays Words With Friends on his iPad.

Michelle Obama occasionally pops in, but she goes to bed before the president, who is up so late he barely gets five hours of sleep a night. For Mr. Obama, the time alone has become more important.

“Everybody carves out their time to get their thoughts together. There is no doubt that window is his window,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s first chief of staff. “You can’t block out a half-hour and try to do it during the day. It’s too much incoming. That’s the place where it can all be put aside and you can focus.”

“Everybody carves out their time to get their thoughts together. There is no doubt that window is his window,” said Rahm Emanuel, right, Mr. Obama’s first chief of staff. Credit Drew Angerer/The New York Times

President George W. Bush, an early riser, was in bed by 10. President Bill Clinton was up late like Mr. Obama, but he spent the time in lengthy, freewheeling phone conversations with friends and political allies, forcing aides to scan the White House phone logs in the mornings to keep track of whom the president might have called the night before.

“A lot of times, for some of our presidential leaders, the energy they need comes from contact with other people,” said the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has had dinner with Mr. Obama several times in the past seven and a half years. “He seems to be somebody who is at home with himself.”

‘Insane Amount of Paper’

When Mr. Obama first arrived at the White House, his after-dinner routine started around 7:15 p.m. in the game room, on the third floor of the residence. There, on an old Brunswick pool table, Mr. Obama and Sam Kass, then the Obama family’s personal chef, would spend 45 minutes playing eight-ball.

Mr. Kass saw pool as a chance for Mr. Obama to decompress after intense days in the Oval Office, and the two kept a running score. “He’s a bit ahead,” said Mr. Kass, who left the White House at the end of 2014.

In those days, the president followed the billiards game with bedtime routines with his daughters. These days, now that both are teenagers, Mr. Obama heads directly to the Treaty Room, named for the many historical documents that have been signed in it, including the peace protocol that ended the Spanish-American War in 1898.

“The sports channel is on,” Mr. Emanuel said, recalling the ubiquitous images on the room’s large flat-screen television. “Sports in the background, with the volume down.”

By 8 p.m., the usher’s office delivers the president’s leather-bound daily briefing book — a large binder accompanied by a tall stack of folders with memos and documents from across the government, all demanding the president’s attention. “An insane amount of paper,” Mr. Kass said.

Mr. Obama often reads through it in a leather swivel chair at his tablelike desk, under a portrait of President Ulysses S. Grant. Windows on each side of Grant look out on the brightly lit Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.

Other nights, the president settles in on the sofa under the 1976 “Butterfly” by Susan Rothenberg, a 6-foot-by-7-foot canvas of burnt sienna and black slashes that evokes a galloping horse.

“He is thoroughly predictable in having gone through every piece of paper that he gets,” said Tom Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser from 2010 to 2013. “You’ll come in in the morning, it will be there: questions, notes, decisions.”

 

Mr. Obama often works on speeches late into the night, like the one he gave in Selma, Ala., on the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” Here, people listened to his speech last year. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

Seven Almonds

To stay awake, the president does not turn to caffeine. He rarely drinks coffee or tea, and more often has a bottle of water next to him than a soda. His friends say his only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds.

 “Michelle and I would always joke: Not six. Not eight,” Mr. Kass said. “Always seven almonds.”

The demands of the president’s day job sometimes intrude. A photo taken in 2011 shows Mr. Obama in the Treaty Room with Mr. McDonough, at that time the deputy national security adviser, and John O. Brennan, then Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism chief and now the director of the C.I.A., after placing a call to Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan shortly after Japan was hit by a devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake. “The call was made near midnight,” the photo caption says.

But most often, Mr. Obama’s time in the Treaty Room is his own.

“I’ll probably read briefing papers or do paperwork or write stuff until about 11:30 p.m., and then I usually have about a half-hour to read before I go to bed, about midnight, 12:30 a.m., sometimes a little later,” Mr. Obama told Jon Meacham, the editor in chief of Newsweek, in 2009.

In 2014, Mr. Obama told Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan of ABC’s “Live With Kelly and Michael” that he stayed up even later — “until like 2 o’clock at night, reading briefings and doing work” — and added that he woke up “at a pretty reasonable hour, usually around 7.”

‘Can You Come Back?’

Mr. Obama’s longest nights — the ones that stretch well into the early morning — usually involve speeches.

One night last June, Cody Keenan, the president’s chief speechwriter, had just returned home from work at 9 p.m. and ordered pizza when he heard from the president: “Can you come back tonight?”

Mr. Keenan met the president in the usher’s office on the first floor of the residence, where the two worked until nearly 11 p.m. on the president’s eulogy for nine African-Americans fatally shot during Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Three months earlier, Mr. Keenan had had to return to the White House when the president summoned him — at midnight — to go over changes to a speech Mr. Obama was to deliver in Selma, Ala., on the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when protesters were brutally beaten by the police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“There’s something about the night,” Mr. Keenan said, reflecting on his boss’s use of the time. “It’s smaller. It lets you think.”

In 2009, Jon Favreau, Mr. Keenan’s predecessor, gave the president a draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech the night before they were scheduled to leave for the ceremony in Oslo. Mr. Obama stayed up until 4 a.m. revising the speech, and handed Mr. Favreau 11 handwritten pages later that morning.

 

Mr. Obama in February walking from the West Wing to the White House residence. Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times

On the plane to Norway, Mr. Obama, Mr. Favreau and two other aides pulled another near-all-nighter as they continued to work on the speech. Once Mr. Obama had delivered it, he called the exhausted Mr. Favreau at his hotel.

“He said, ‘Hey, I think that turned out O.K.,’” Mr. Favreau recalled. “I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Let’s never do that again.’”

Some Time for Play

Not everything that goes on in the Treaty Room is work.

In addition to playing Words With Friends, a Scrabble-like online game, on his iPad, Mr. Obama turns up the sound on the television for big sports games.

“If he’s watching a game, he will send a message. ‘Duke should have won that game,’ or whatever,” said Reggie Love, a former Duke basketball player who was Mr. Obama’s personal aide for the first three years of his presidency.

The president also uses the time to catch up on the news, skimming The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on his iPad or watching cable. Mr. Love recalls getting an email after 1 a.m. after Mr. Obama saw a television report about students whose “bucket list” included meeting the president. Why had he not met them, the president asked Mr. Love.

“‘Someone decided it wasn’t a good idea,’ I said,” Mr. Love recalled. “He said, ‘Well, I’m the president and I think it’s a good idea.’”

Mr. Obama and his wife are also fans of cable dramas like “Boardwalk Empire,” “Game of Thrones” and “Breaking Bad.” On Friday nights — movie night at the White House — Mr. Obama and his family are often in the Family Theater, a 40-seat screening room on the first floor of the East Wing, watching first-run films they have chosen and had delivered from the Motion Picture Association of America.

There is time, too, for fantasy about what life would be like outside the White House. Mr. Emanuel, who is now the mayor of Chicago but remains close to the president, said he and Mr. Obama once imagined moving to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shack that sold only one size (medium) and one color (white). Their dream was that they would no longer have to make decisions.

During difficult White House meetings when no good decision seemed possible, Mr. Emanuel would sometimes turn to Mr. Obama and say, “White.” Mr. Obama would in turn say, “Medium.”

Now Mr. Obama, who has six months left of solitary late nights in the Treaty Room, seems to be looking toward the end. Once he is out of the White House, he said in March at an Easter prayer breakfast in the State Dining Room, “I am going to take three, four months where I just sleep.”

___________

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter @shearm.

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Source: nytimes

Federal Judge Blocks All of Mississippi’s Vicious Anti-LGBTQ Law From Taking Effect

By Mark Joseph Stern

Roberta Kaplan, the attorney who masterminded the lawsuit against HB 1523, with Edie Windsor, whom she represented in her successful effort to challenge the federal same-sex marriage ban.

Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Logo TV

Anti-LGBTQ activists just suffered their worst defeat since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision—a rout so stinging and decisive that it calls into question the viability of their entire strategy post-Obergefell.  

That drubbing came in the form of an astonishing 60-page opinion by U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves blocking every single part of Mississippi’s sweeping, vicious anti-LGBTQ segregation law from taking effect. The law, HB 1523, granted special protections to three religious beliefs: Those who oppose same-sex marriage; those who oppose sex outside of marriage; and those who dislike trans and gender-nonconforming people. Starting July 1, HB 1523 would have allowed religious landlords to evict gay and trans renters; permitted religious employers to fire workers for being LGBTQ; granted state and private adoption agencies the right to turn away same-sex couples; allowed private businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people; given doctors a right to refuse to treat LGBTQ people in most circumstances; and permitted clerks to refuse to marry same-sex couples.

Hours before HB 1523 was set to take effect, Reeves issued an injunction, holding that the law, in its entirety, violates both the Equal Protection Clause and the Establishment Clause. (Reeves had already halted the clerk-specific portion of the bill.) His decision marks a momentous occasion—the first time a federal judge has found that so-called “religious liberty” bills, designed to disadvantage LGBTQ people, violate the U.S. Constitution. Reeves’ opinion is worth paying careful attention to; its findings and logic are certain to be invoked in similar decisions across the country in the coming years.

The genius of the lawsuit against HB 1523, which was brought by Windsor mastermind Roberta Kaplan, is its fusion of fundamental yet typically distinct constitutional principles: “the guarantee of religious neutrality and the promise of equal protection of the laws.” Mississippi argued that its law promoted religious liberty. Quite the opposite, Reeves explains: In reality, HB 1523 “establishes an official preference for certain religious beliefs over others,” a quintessential violation of the Establishment Clause. Anti-LGBTQ religious beliefs are explicitly favored; adherents to those beliefs receive a special right to discriminate that is unavailable to all others. “Persons who hold contrary religious beliefs are unprotected,” Reeves explains; “the State has put its thumb on the scale to favor some religious beliefs over others.”

This favoring of certain religious sects is especially problematic because it “comes at the expense of other citizens,” namely LGBTQ people. The Supreme Court has found that laws that advance religious beliefs in a way that burdens those who don’t share those beliefs violate the Establishment Clause. HB 1523 is guilty of this sin, because it gives anti-LGBTQ Mississippians “an absolute right to refuse service to LGBT citizens without regard for the impact on their employer, coworkers, or those being denied service.”

By uniquely burdening the LGBTQ community, Reeves notes, HB 1523 also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans, laws motivated by “animus” toward sexual minorities are unconstitutional. And as Reeves demonstrates in his decision, it is beyond rational belief that HB 1523 was motivated by anything but “a bare desire to harm” LGBTQ people. Reeves charts the legislative history of the law, noting that its sponsors and supporters repeatedly declared that its purpose was to legalize discrimination against sexual and gender minorities. These legislators were surprisingly honest about their aversion toward LGBTQ people. The speaker of the House stated that Obergefell was “in direct conflict with God’s design for marriage as set forth in the Bible” and declared, “I don’t care what the Supreme Court says.” Other representatives called HB 1523 “balancing legislation” to Obergefell, “very specific to same-sex marriage,” intended to relegate LGBTQ Mississippians to second-class citizenship once again.

The text and history of HB 1523, Reeves writes, clearly “indicate that the bill was the State’s attempt to put LGBT citizens back in their place after Obergefell.”

Under the guise of providing additional protection for religious exercise, HB 1523 creates a vehicle for state-sanctioned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. … The majority of Mississippians were granted special rights to not serve LGBT citizens, and were immunized from the consequences of their actions. LGBT Mississippians, in turn, were “put in a solitary class with respect to transactions and relations in both the private and governmental sphere” to symbolize their second-class status. As in Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell, this “status-based enactment” deprived LGBT citizens of equal treatment and equal dignity under the law.

 “The deprivation of equal protection of the laws is HB 1523’s very essence,” Reeves concludes. “It violates the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Mississippi is almost certain to appeal this ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit, which leans conservative. But Reeves’ ruling is essentially bulletproof, on everything from technical issues like standing—Kaplan found the perfect plaintiffs, religious leaders who are disfavored by HB 1523—to broad constitutional questions like equal dignity. His opinion is largely a recitation of well-established Supreme Court decisions, highlighting their stark relevance to HB 1523. This is a landmark ruling, one whose breadth, depth, and analytical incisiveness cannot be easily rebuked. Reeves has given LGBTQ advocates their biggest triumph since Obergefell. Any state looking to pass a similar anti-LGBTQ “religious liberty” law has now been warned: The Constitution will not tolerate your efforts to discriminate against LGBTQ people under the feeble guise of selective religious freedom. 

*Update: This post has been updated to reflect the work of the Mississippi Center for Justice in the litigation against HB 1523.

Source: slate

If the name 'Bombay' was erased for being a relic of colonial rule, why do we still use 'India'?

Language Log

A short history, and the politics, of the many names of the country.

Image credit:  Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP

Jun 24, 2016 · 08:00 am   Updated Jun 24, 2016 · 11:17 am

Shoaib Daniyal

One of the last vestiges of “Bombay” is about to be wiped out. More than 20 years after Bombay was renamed as Mumbai, the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre is preparing to make the High Court located in the city follow suit. In the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament, legislation will be moved to rename Bombay High Court as Mumbai High Court. At the same time, Madras High Court will also get an identity that reflects the city’s current name, Chennai.

Language nationalism is an on-and-off factor in Indian politics. In the 1960s, Tamils rioted over concerns that the New Delhi was forcing Hindi down their throats. Mumbai frequently sees Marathi nationalists go on rampage against purported outsiders. The 1990s saw a spate of city renamings, with colonial names replaced by local language names.

Globally, language identity is the most common basis for nationalism. This means that renaming has been a common activity: Burma became Myanmar, Ceylon, Sri Lanka and Siam, Thailand.

What is interesting, however, is that Indian nationalism has never involved itself in matters of nomenclatural identity. But this is not for the lack of options. Like Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai, the country also has three names that are in popular use: India, Bhārata and Hindustan.

India as “Bhārata”

The oldest of these is Bhārata, a Sanskrit word dating to the Puranas, which would make it at least 2,000 years old. Now, Puranic geography isn’t the most accurate at describing the planet, but it makes up in imagination what is lost in accuracy. The Puranas envisage a land mass on which humans dwell called Jambudvipa – “jambu” being the Sanskrit name for the Indian blackberry and the origin of “jamun” in Hindi-Urdu. Jambudvipa, in turn, was divided into nine parts, one of which was Bhāratavarsa.

However, as Indologist Bimala Churn Law points out: “Bhāratavarsa is not our India of present geographical area." An exact mapping of the Pauranic Bhāratavarsa is difficult – and mostly moot given how different modern geography is from ancient myth – but it might have also included faraway Sumatra, now in modern-day Indonesia.

Bhārata, as a word for India, therefore, has far more modern origins. Nevertheless, given the prestige of Sanskrit, Bhārata has been borrowed into almost every Indian language as a name for India.

India as Hindustan

The other local language name for the country is Hindustan. It started off as an exonym – an external name for a geographical place (like Peking , the name given by foreigners, versus Beijing) – and is a Persian word. Hindu was the Persian name of the people who inhabited that land. In Sanskrit, it has the same origin as Sindhu. Like Bhārata, Hindustan was geographically ambiguous in ancient times (like any geographical name at the time). It referred to the area around the Indus (hence Sindh) or the entire area east of the river (a fairly good fit then with modern-day India).

Indians themselves would use this word only when Persian-speaking Turks established multiple sultanates in the subcontinent, starting with the Mamluk Sultanate in Delhi in 1206 AD.

In medieval India, while the word Hindustan was very popular, it didn’t refer to the entire subcontinent but only a part of it, which roughly corresponds to the modern-day cow belt. Thus, there is a town called Sirhind – Persian for “head of Hind” – close to the Punjab-Haryana border, and plundering Maratha armies would often talk of entering Hindustan from the Deccan as they crossed the river Tapi. This is also why, when the British encountered spoken Hindi-Urdu, they took to calling it Hindustani in much the same way as Bengali was the British name for the language spoken by people in Bengal.

Hindustan, the subcontinent

As the modern concept of nationalism took root during the British Raj, the name Hindustan started being used as a pars pro toto for the Indian subcontinent. This is not uncommon. The Holland and Netherlands phenomenon is another example of a single region overshadowing a larger geographical area. Nevertheless, shades of the old meaning survive today. Bengalis still refer to, say, people of Uttar Pradesh-origin as Hindustanis.

While the name Hindustan has no status in the eyes of the Indian state whose formal names remain Bhārata and India, it is the most popular, even natural, word in spoken Hindi-Urdu for the country. Consequently, Hindustan/Hindustani is a common word used by Bollywood for India across film titles and song lyrics, while Bhārat is rarer and only reserved for formal occasions.

Along with Bollywood, the Hindutva ideology is a great promoter of Hindustan as it is a key part of the alliterative slogan “Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan”. This trilogy of religion, language and region, as a defining aspect of Hindutva, was proposed by Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Savarkar, who was perhaps unaware of the common Persian origin of all three words, leading to the delicious irony of a chauvinist movement using a word of foreign origin to name itself.

India as India

The name given to the land by the ruling British owes its origin to the word “Hind”, which entered the Greek and Latin languages as “India”, literally the region of the river Indus. The name “India” was perhaps the first unambiguous, legal name for the whole subcontinent that was in common use. However, the name India as a synonym for the Indian subcontinent ended in 1947 with Partition.

Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted Pakistan and Hindustan to add up to “India” after Partition, objected to New Delhi's appropriation of the word “India”. In September 1947, eight weeks after Partition, Jinnah wrote to India’s governor general Louis Mountbatten: “It is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word “India” which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion”.

Anti-“India” nationalists

Nationalist movements usually dislike exonyms, doubly so when they are an outcome of colonialism. Thus, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Zimbabwe all replaced their colonial names – Ceylon, Burma and Rhodesia.

In much the same way, there were quite a few political formations within India, which, for reasons of their own, agreed with Jinnah that India wasn’t a suitable name for the newly-partitioned county. These came to the fore in the Constituent Assembly, as the body discussed the very first article of the Constitution which read: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. The pro-Bharat constituency was a mixed group of Hindu and Hindi nationalists. Seth Govind Das, a Congressmen from Madhya Pradesh and head of the All India Cow Protection League, attacked the name India as a colonial imposition with some non-partisan help from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The word India does not occur in our ancient books. It began to be used when the Greeks came to India. They named our Sindhu river as Indus and India was derived from Indus. There is a mention of this in Encyclopedia Britannica. On the contrary, if we look up the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas and our great and ancient book the Mahabharat, we find a mention of the name “Bharat”.

In the end, the name India was retained, a rare example of a colonial exonym being used in a post-colonial state. In 1950, this was a strategic decision since the name India carried with it international prestige and provided a stable link with 200 years of the British Raj – an advantage Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two other successor states of the Raj did not have.

Opposing and accepting 'India'

Nevertheless, historical movements to expel the name “India” keep resurfacing. The Samajwadi Party, using Hindi rather than Hindu nationalism, asked to rename India as “Bharat” in its manifesto for the 2004 General Elections.

Hindutva ideologues, repeating Savarkar’s etymological confusion, still continue to ask for “Hindustan” to be brought back. In 2003, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, part of the Sangh Parivar, made the demand for Hindustan as did Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, in 2013.

Unlike, say Tamil or Kannada identity, language is hardly central to Hindu nationalism, so the movement for Hindustan has remained rather listless. Hindi nationalism was a major force till 1947, mostly in opposition to its Siamese twin Urdu, but the distributed nature of the language means its politics is quite different from, say, Marathi. Hindi, even in its home states, is mostly an urban language and states like Uttar Pradesh have vast rural swathes where languages like Awadhi or Bhojpuri, and not Hindi, are native tongues.

Additionally, after 200 years of India being the official name of the land, it is slowly ceasing to be an exonym and is being absorbed into Indian languages. The name “India” is now used by non-Anglophones quite easily, and is so common that it is even entering written forms. This represents an interesting contrast with regional exonyms such as West Bengal (Paschim Banga), Madras (Chennai) and Bangalore (Bengaluru), amongst others, which have followed the globally more common option of reasserting local language names.

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Source: scrollin