Once, after carrying out a particularly harsh legal attack on Republicans, Bob Bauer recalls, a conservative magazine called him an “evil genius.” He took it as a compliment. “I was really proud of that,” he said. “I thought: This is cool.”
For decades, Democrats have turned to him as a lawyer to fight their battles against the opposition. Turn around a House race they apparently lost? Accuse the other side of criminal activity? Go to court to cut off Republican money flows? Find a legal justification for an ethically dubious strategy? Mr. Bauer was their man.
But now Bauer, President Biden’s personal lawyer and formerly President Barack Obama’s White House counsel, is looking back and rethinking all that. Perhaps, he says, this win-at-all-costs political approach doesn’t actually lead to a healthy, functioning democracy. Maybe, while taking the “genius” part seriously, he should have been more concerned about the “evil” part.
In a new book, “The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis,” to be published Tuesday, Bauer takes stock of what he sees as the hardening of American politics and examines the tension between ethical decisions and “warrior mentality” that today dominates the world of government and campaigns. And in the process of reflecting on what went wrong, Mr. Bauer, who calls himself a “committed partisan warrior,” stopped to grapple with his own role in the wars.
“I tell stories that range from youthful peccadilloes to more significant mistakes that I think I made in thinking about what it meant to win a policy or win an election, about how far you’ll go to do that,” he said at a recent evening at the Historical Society from New York, where he discussed the book.
“How can we improve policy?” he asked. “How can we defend our democratic norms by focusing on the choices that people in positions of public responsibility have to make? And how can we do them in a way that respects those norms and respects those institutions – as opposed to politics as a blood sport, whatever the cost?
This has become an era of blood sport in politics, put on steroids by former President Donald J. Trump, who accuses opponents of treason, suggests executing a general he considers disloyal, promises to pardon the violent looters of January 6, 2021, and promises to make “retribution” the mission of a second term if he wins. Last week, he sent a fundraising email with the subject line “My revenge plan.”
Bauer asserts, however, that while Trump is the extreme version of what politics has become, past attempts to push the boundaries of propriety have made it “easier for demagogues to show up” and threaten the political system. Long before Trump’s rise, he said in an interview, people in both parties began to give in to the impulse to “treat your opponent as your enemy and destroy him.”
Bauer doesn’t really seem like an evil genius. No one would confuse him with Lee Atwater. He is thoughtful and polite, strong, but not known for the kind of performative anger that is common in politics today. Bearded and bespectacled, he looks like the law professor he became at New York University. People who have worked with him over the years consider him to be extremely ethical.
He doesn’t remember what he did that classified him as an evil genius. But he remembers the enormous pleasure he felt from the denomination, and that’s the point. Winning mattered a lot. “Someone in these conversations has to say, ‘We owe voters more than this,’” he said in the interview. “We don’t need to do this to win.”
Mr. Bauer speaks from experience. As Biden’s personal adviser, he plays an important role in the current power structure, alongside his wife, Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser. Bauer has helped the president navigate some of the most sensitive moments in recent years, most notably special counsel Robert K. Hur’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Hur did not press criminal charges but published a report describing Biden as a “nice, well-intentioned elderly man with a poor memory.”
Bauer has had a role in most of the significant political-legal wars of recent decades, representing Democratic Party organizations and candidates, advising House and Senate Democratic leaders during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment battle, and serving as Mr. . later White House counselor.
In recent years, however, Bauer retired from his law firm, Perkins Coie, and increasingly turned his energies to finding ways to fix the system, working with Republicans such as Benjamin Ginsberg and Jack L. Goldsmith. Among other projects, he advised lawmakers who revised the 2022 Electoral Count Act to make clear that no vice president can single-handedly overturn an election, and advised a bipartisan group that in April recommended changes to the Insurrection Act to limit the power of presidents. to send troops onto American streets.
Ginsberg, a longtime election lawyer who represented George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, among others, before breaking with the Republican Party over his support for Trump, said Bauer has always been “a principled, ethical guy” who managed to zealously represent his clients without exceeding limits that should not be exceeded.
“We have been fighting each other over issues for 40 years and it is always important, he knew, to fight fiercely for our candidate,” Ginsberg said. “But his concept of the rule of law is that the process works best if there are fierce supporters on each side, but with an appreciation for the democratic process, institutions and norms.”
Goldsmith, a former Bush Justice Department official who wrote a book with Bauer in 2020 called “After Trump” about ways to reform the presidency, expressed admiration for Bauer’s willingness to engage in introspection. “What is remarkable is his ability to rise above his previous assignments to be candid, self-reflective and penetratingly insightful in diagnosing some of the deepest problems in our politics,” he said.
Bauer’s new book recounts experiences that now seem different to him. There was a time when he helped House Democrats overturn Indiana’s certification of a Republican candidate’s victory and put a Democrat in office. Then there was the time he tried to get the IRS to intervene in the elections, penalizing campaigns for negative publicity. And there were times when he accused a House Republican leader of extortion and Democratic rivals of criminal campaign violations.
“I am willing to take responsibility for the things I have said publicly and the things I have advocated as courses of action that, in retrospect, I recognize reflect a sincere commitment to success, but which would have been reckless,” Bauer said in the interview. .
He came to believe that politics doesn’t have to be like this. “I reject the premise that a tough policy has to be a policy that is indifferent to these concerns” about ethics and institutions, he said. “It is absurd to think that we have to do whatever it takes. It is extremely dangerous.”
None of this, he said, means that Democrats — or, for that matter, Republicans — should slow down. Mr. Bauer did not give up on wars. He just plans to fight them more ethically – and engage the other side between battles.
“I’m still a Democrat,” he said. “I will play as active a role as possible in the 2024 campaign. But having said that, I am trying to suggest that you can be tough and successful and at the same time be mindful of the effect your choices have on the health of your life. and democratic institutions.”
