Thanks, Obama Read online

  That’s what presidential speeches could still do. They couldn’t persuade the unpersuadable. But they could remind the rest of us why we believed, renewing our faith despite frustration. Watching from the wings of the ballroom, I couldn’t help but imagine my great-grandparents arriving in America, bewildered and penniless, a century before. Now here I was, helping the most powerful person on earth tell their story, and the story of so many others like them.

  By the time the president delivered his satisfied thump to the podium, I had my first White House niche. I continued writing for Valerie, Bill, and the rest of the senior staff. I continued to take the POTUS speeches no one else wanted. But I also knew that if something kishke-related came up, I was the go-to guy.

  THAT’S HOW I FOUND MYSELF STANDING IN THE WHITE HOUSE library, next to my favorite men’s room, on a Friday evening in April 2012. The president’s Passover message was the final item on his schedule, the only thing left between him and the weekend. And on this particular Friday, POTUS was especially in need of a break. He had just finished a trip through Asia, a weeklong odyssey of tedious summits and brutal jet lag. Now he was running two and a half hours late, which was two hours late even for him.

  As we waited for the president to arrive, I made nervous small talk with the other White House staffers in the room. Jarrod was there, clutching his pocket Haggadah the way a vampire hunter might hold a cross. Luke, one of the most buoyant and upbeat members of the A/V team, sat behind a laptop to control the prompter. Hope Hall wasn’t there that day, which I didn’t think would matter.

  It did. From the moment President Obama entered the library, the look on his face made it clear he would rather be anywhere else. Ordinarily this was when Hope would cheer him up. She would remind him he was almost through with the schedule, or recall some silly detail from earlier that day. Without her, however, POTUS remained grumpy.

  “All right,” he said. “One take.”

  He was moving through the script, the weekend so close he could taste it, when he came to a line I had cribbed from the Passover liturgy. “In every generation, there are those who have tried to destroy the Jewish people.” He got halfway through it. Then he grimaced.

  “Okay, wait, stop. I didn’t read this on the plane. Isn’t that line kind of a downer?”

  “Well . . .” I stammered. But it was too late.

  “I mean, this is supposed to be a party, right? What’s the deal? Like, ‘Everyone’s out to get us, have some matzo.’”

  In fact, that was exactly the deal. POTUS had summed up five thousand years of Jewish history in just eight words. Jarrod tried to explain this, paging valiantly through his Haggadah in a search for sources, but the president’s patience had run out.

  “Look, just—does anyone have a pen?”

  I had never heard of POTUS rewriting anything on the spot before. I would never hear of it again. But there, pen in hand, he scrawled something on the draft I had printed. He began to dictate to Luke, who was typing into the old-timey word processor that controlled the prompter.

  “There are those who have targeted . . .”

  “There are those who what?”

  Luke’s struggle to keep pace only left POTUS more irritated. Standing from his chair, he stalked over to the laptop.

  “Move.”

  With his notes in front of him, the president extended his fingers like he was about to conduct a symphony. Then, pecking deliberately, he made his edits.

  In every generation, there are those who have targeted the Jewish people for harm.

  I was both embarrassed and impressed. POTUS recognized that my script might, unintentionally, cause controversy. In just five minutes, he rewrote it to express the same idea, but in far more measured tones. He did so on no sleep, ravaged by jet lag, after traveling tens of thousands of miles across the globe.

  This, I thought, is why he gets to be the president.

  POTUS resumed filming, racing through his revised draft. Jarrod, Luke, and I stood perfectly still. We were almost finished—just seconds away. Then the president hit the words happy holidays in Hebrew (chag sameach) and everything went to crap.

  Except for Spanish, which POTUS insisted he could pronounce flawlessly without phonetics, it was our job to spell out all foreign words. [Bon-JOOR]. [DAHN-keh SHANE]. [ah-ree-vah-DARE-chee ROW-muh]. The system worked well, unless we encountered a sound unused in English, in which case it broke down completely. Take, for example, the hard ch in Hebrew. This is not the soft, gentle sound from the beginning of child. It’s the harsh, throat-clearing one from the end of blech. Unless you practiced it growing up, it’s nearly impossible to get right.

  “Thanks, and cog somatch,” said POTUS. He looked at Jarrod and me, wondering if he could leave now, but we stopped him.

  “It’s kind of a chhhh,” I said, making a noise like a lawn mower in need of repair.

  “Chhh,” Jarrod repeated, phlegm building in his throat. “Chhhh, chhhhhhhh.” Looking deeply unhappy, the president gave it another try.

  “Chawg Samayah.”

  “Chong Semeeyuh.”

  “Hagg Sommah.”

  POTUS was clearly finished. Jarrod and I exchanged nervous looks. “What?” President Obama said. His tone suggested that, under a different form of government, we’d have been executed by now. “What’s up?”

  It was in moments like these that I thought about a social studies exercise from third grade. Each of us was given an envelope. We started by filling it out the ordinary way—name, street, city—but soon expanded our scope. Country. Planet. Solar system. Galaxy. The point, I guess, was to broaden our horizons, to help realize that the universe was marvelous and vast.

  Working at the White House was like performing the same exercise, but in reverse. Start by imagining the Milky Way, almost infinitely wide. Then zoom in. Our sun comes into focus first, a fiery dot in the empty sea of space. Next comes Earth, our fragile blue marble. Drawing closer we see a continent; then a country; then a small, gridlocked district ten miles square. And then, finally, we reach the very center of the universe, where a well-meaning but exasperated Protestant is being harassed by a pair of nitpicky Jews.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We need to do it one more time.”

  POTUS sighed deeply. But he knew how much his words mattered. He was willing to give it one more try.

  “On behalf of myself and my family, hog samea,” he said. He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, the universal expression for “Good enough?” It was. The president bolted.

  “Have a good weekend, everybody.”

  “You, too, sir.”

  Once I remembered how to breathe again, I returned across West Exec to call Jacqui and tell her what had happened. And it was only then, as I tried to describe the look on the president’s face, that I understood how foolish I had been. Why didn’t I realize he would reject such gloomy language? Why didn’t I write happy holidays in English, instead of using a word so difficult to pronounce?

  But that’s the downside of White House fairy dust. In most office buildings, not screwing up is the bare minimum. At the center of the universe, not screwing up takes extraordinary, almost superhuman skill. When your business card bears the presidential seal, mistakes that otherwise wouldn’t matter can snowball into catastrophe in the blink of an eye.

  No wonder salmon ended up in the toilet, I thought. In the White House, it’s nearly impossible to keep it out.

  6

  IS OBAMA TOAST?

  Just north of the White House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, is a leafy, rectangular park called Lafayette Square. The place is sleepy in the early mornings, but by 10 A.M. it comes alive like the village from Beauty and the Beast. Yuppies in yoga pants lunge through boot-camp workouts. Chinese tourists point at squirrels the way Americans might gawk at pandas. Segway tours snake between statues, the off-balance clients struggling to keep up with their guides.

  Most people only enter the square on their way to someplace more famous
. For an eclectic handful, however, lingering in a park near the White House is a kind of full-time job.

  Back when I passed through Lafayette Square each morning on my way to work, the park’s most famous regular was also its only full-time resident. She was tiny and wrinkled, somewhere between seventy and one million years old, in a head scarf to match her baggy clothes. Her home was a tarp-covered encampment no larger than a beaver’s den. She had taken up residence there in 1981 and kept watch over the White House 24-7 ever since. Her life’s work was often described as a “peace vigil,” but that implied a kind of flower-child optimism. The signs tacked to her shanty suggested something far more harsh.

  * * *

  LIVE BY THE BOMB, DIE BY THE BOMB.

  Ban all nuclear weapons or have a nice Doomsday!

  * * *

  Because the little old lady received frequent press coverage, I knew her name was Concepcion Picciotto. The other regulars had never been profiled in the Washington Post, and with nothing to go by, I assigned them nicknames in my head. Good morning, Druid! I’d think, biking by a man wearing only a loincloth and carrying only a staff. The Druid’s chest was covered in tiny, hairy curlicues. Ropey white dreadlocks dangled like hoses from his scalp. Sometimes I spotted him browsing samples at the nearby farmers’ market, but more often he sat calmly on a bench, his back to the president’s house.

  Whistle Guy took the opposite approach. On his jet-black, beat-up bicycle, he ping-ponged up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. He never went anywhere without his World War II helmet, his camouflage jacket, and his namesake instrument in his mouth. This he blew incessantly. It was as though he were a lifeguard and the world was refusing to leave the pool.

  For sheer auditory gusto, however, no one could match Preacher Man. Tall and lanky, his preferred position was just outside the White House gate. There, his head poking above the crowd of sightseers, he would spread the gospel the way a ballpark vendor hawks ice-cold beer.

  “Jeeeeeee-ZUSS! Jee-EEE-EEE-EEEE-zussssss!”

  How strange, I’d think, walking past him on my way to work. That man pays my salary.

  Of course, depending on his tax bill, it’s possible Preacher Man got my services for free. Even if he did file a federal return, he didn’t pay me much. In 2011, the average taxpayer deposited about one-quarter of one-tenth of one penny into my account. I could have worked at the White House for ten thousand years and cost the Druid less than one of his farmers’ market peaches. Still, the point remained. The American people had invested in me. Under no circumstances could I let their money go to waste.

  This led to a wave of guilt whenever I watched YouTube videos at work. Was Whistle Guy really getting his .025 cents’ worth?

  More important, it meant I was legally banned from political activity. For most people this might seem like an oxymoron. My boss’s boss was the world’s best-known politician. Wasn’t all activity political? But our lawyers were not most people. They came up with a strict set of rules to ensure that it was President Obama, not candidate Obama, being served by White House staff. Writing a speech burnishing POTUS’s image was permitted, but directly asking people to vote for him was not. Neither was fund-raising. Except for senior staff, who were exempt, White House employees were barred from all things related to the campaign.

  These prohibitions weren’t new. But as 2012 began, they were newly aggravating. Six months earlier, being told I couldn’t write for rallies or fund-raisers was like being told I couldn’t write limericks or in Portuguese. Now, however, the reelect was heating up.

  My OPE colleagues were no less frustrated. Eager to get in on the action, they began a mass exodus from Washington to the swing states. With so many employees leaving, going-away parties were held with the speed and frequency of Vegas weddings. These took place in a stately EEOB office suite that once belonged to the Secretary of War. Around 4 P.M. each Friday, we would arrive to find the conference table piled with Costco turkey pinwheels, cheap bottles of champagne, and sheet cake preordered from the Navy Mess. After a few minutes of mingling, Straut would send off the soon-to-be departed with a toast.

  “Nobody embodies this movement more than Ashley,” Straut might proclaim. “We don’t know what we’re going to do without her. But we’ll sleep better knowing the reelect is in good hands.” Every speech was a variation on the same theme, yet they never failed to move me. I’m so lucky to have known them, I’d think, dabbing my eyes with a napkin bearing the logo of Presidential Food Service. At least they’re headed to a better place.

  No official policy required us to discuss coworkers as if they were going to heaven rather than, say, Pennsylvania. It was simply the way we felt. Washington had tainted us with its original sin of bureaucracy. Now a lucky few had been deemed worthy. How pure of heart our colleagues were! How full of faith!

  Yet after the last crumbs of cake had been cleared, and the cheese tray scavenged by interns, a few of us admitted there were benefits to being left behind. When I asked my coworker Emily if she planned to join the reelect, she winced.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I kind of like having job security.” She said this as if it were unspeakably shameful, as if she kind of liked wearing Nazi uniforms or heaving cinder blocks from a highway overpass. I understood her guilt, but I also understood her point. In 2008, I had been gloriously unmoored. Four years later, returning to Ohio would mean giving up a once-in-a-lifetime job.

  It wasn’t just my career that kept me from setting sail. Jacqui and I were in a honeymoon phase. For some couples this might have meant staring ceaselessly into each other’s eyes, limbs tangled like a clumsy octopus while meals went uneaten and eviction notices piled up. Luckily, neither of us was that sentimental. Instead, giddy with each other’s attention, we came home tipsy and mixed the contents of my liquor cabinet into new and thrilling concoctions. “It’s an Island Julep!” we declared to my roommate Amanda, pouring a bottle of crème de menthe into a saucepan of coconut rum.

  A White House job, it must be said, was not always conducive to romance. There’s a reason Marvin Gaye never sang about getting an e-mail from his boss’s assistant and abruptly canceling dinner plans. On the other hand, there was date night at the Kennedy Center. The president and First Lady received tickets to every performance. When they didn’t use them, which was almost always, their seats were distributed by lottery to White House staff. Beethoven’s symphonies. Mozart’s operas. Swan Lake. Jacqui and I relished the chance to broaden our cultural horizons.

  Even more than that, we relished the free booze. I don’t know who stocked the fridge in the president’s box, but I suspect it was a college kid preparing for a blizzard. Mini bottles of champagne; Budweiser; M&M’s; Whitman’s samplers; mints; plus a few fun-size packs of almonds for nourishment. No wonder people loved the opera.

  It would be unfair, I think, to say this sort of perk was corrupting. I had good, noble reasons for wanting Barack Obama to win a second term. We had an economic recovery to continue. A health care law to implement. A global threat of climate change to confront. Still, listening to the high notes of an aria, my hand on the small of Jacqui’s back, a shameful thought crossed my mind.

  If POTUS loses this election, who’s going to pay for my Kennedy Center beer?

  This danger (the election, not the beer) was one I had only recently begun to take seriously. I had always thought about Obama being defeated the way I thought about losing a finger in a garbage disposal or watching an entire Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. I knew it could happen. I just couldn’t imagine it happening to me. Then we reached the end of 2011, and the economy was barely improving. Our approval rating had dropped to 42 percent. Even the most basic pieces of legislation remained stalled in Congress. Maybe that garbage-disposal accident wasn’t so unlikely after all.

  Nor did I assume, as I had in 2008, that Barack Obama’s moral clarity was certain to prevail. Back then POTUS had appeared infallible, a grand master checkmating the status quo. Now, after a ye
ar on the inside, I had learned the truth. The White House doesn’t play chess. The White House plays whack-a-mole. If it wasn’t an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it was a military setback in Afghanistan or economic turmoil rippling across the EU. For each crisis we batted down, another popped up. With Election Day looming, the chance of another 2008-style landslide was near zero. Our only hope was to keep the moles at bay long enough to secure a second term.

  Even this would be a challenge. About a year before Election Day, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story. The headline drained the blood from my fingers.

  SO, IS OBAMA TOAST?

  The article’s author, Nate Silver, had successfully predicted the winner of forty-nine states in the 2008 elections. While I didn’t think he was God, I would not have been surprised to learn that he and the Almighty chatted once a week. And here was his prediction for 2012: If Republicans nominated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and the economy didn’t grow, POTUS had just a 17 percent chance to win. If growth maintained its postrecession average, the president’s odds improved. But not by much.

  Our best hope was for Republicans to nominate someone other than Romney in the primaries, but the other candidates faltered one by one. Businessman Herman Cain was alleged to have sexually harassed employees. Texas governor Rick Perry was kind of a dunce. Newt Gingrich was famously undisciplined and had unsavory business ties. Four years later, of course, these qualities would no longer be considered deal breakers, even when they were all possessed by the same person. But these were far more innocent times. When the dust settled, Romney was the last man left.

  It wasn’t hard to see why this made Nate Silver pessimistic about our chances. With his sculpted hair and confident jawline, Mitt Romney cut the profile of a president in a movie. You could easily imagine him punching an alien in the kisser or sending Russkies packing with a single icy stare. And his appeal ran deeper than looks. As a private citizen, Romney had built a wildly successful company. As a public servant, he had served as the Republican governor of Massachusetts, a reliably blue state. He seemed like the kind of guy who could get things done.