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session. And, in particular, it would help remediate the president’s weakness with independent voters, who saw him as an insuppressible spender. Just as bin Laden’s killing would make it hard for Republicans to attack Obama on national security, a grand bargain would neutralize them on the deficit. Heading into 2012, he would be clothed in a doubly dense suit of chain mail.
    Not everyone in the White House was convinced that Obama would need such thick armor. In the afterglow of the OBL triumph, some had lost sight of just how dicey his reelection prospects were. Plouffe had not. In mid-June, Daley had arranged a senior staff retreat at Fort McNair, a leafy Washington Army base on the peninsula at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, but it was Plouffe who dominated the proceedings. In a detailed presentation, he ran through several swing states, showing how dips of only a few percentage points from 2008—in Obama’s support among independents, in turnout among young voters or African Americans—could spell defeat in 2012.
    “Guys, we have no margin for error here,” Plouffe told his colleagues. What he was thinking was more pointed: I need to scare the shit out of these people.
    Obama wasn’t especially scared or even mindful of the electoral details that kept Plouffe awake at night. His focus was on the macro picture, notthe micro-politics. His main objective was to avoid a default on America’s debt, which would wreak financial havoc—and, for all its perils, a grand bargain that spread the pain around equally might actually be easier to pull off than a smaller one. It would boost business confidence, bolstering the economy. And it would put America’s fiscal house in order for a decade or more.
    But while the country’s finances were his top priority, he wasn’t ignoring his campaign’s, or the epic clash of cash that the race ahead would bring. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed unlimited spending by outside groups, a raft of conservative tycoons were lining up to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to smite him down. Obama hoped that a grand bargain might reduce their ardor, along with that of their amen corner in the broader business world. Watching the Republican presidential field take shape, he and his people saw Mitt Romney as the likeliest nominee. They took him seriously as a candidate, yet he did not make them sweat. The money, however, was another story—in more ways than one.
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    T WENTY-SIX HOURS AFTER Obama hosted Boehner on the Truman Balcony, the president’s motorcade deposited him at a venue that was a mite less exclusive but nearly as ornate: the restaurant Daniel, on East Sixty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Unlike the House speaker, the people in the dining room were supporters of Obama’s, the kind willing to part with $35,800—the maximum annual contribution to a presidential candidate and his party—to share his company for an hour. Yet Obama brought a certain trepidation to the fund-raiser, for the crowd mostly hailed from Wall Street, a community with whom his relationship was, to put it gently, suboptimal.
    At Obama’s side was Jim Messina, his campaign manager. Messina was forty-one years old, pale-skinned, rapid-talking, and profane. As Plouffe’s deputy on the 2008 campaign, Emanuel’s in the White House, and chief of staff to Montana senator Max Baucus before those gigs, he had earned a reputation as a genially ruthless fixer—a very nice guy who would merrily club you with a truncheon if you crossed him. In 2002, while running Baucus’s reelection effort, Messina okayed a notorious ad insinuating that hisboss’s opponent was gay; in 2010, he served as Obama’s point man on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Messina saw no conflict between these episodes. He was all about winning.
    Dispatched to Chicago in February, Messina was busy building