Thanks, Obama Read online

Page 11


  Still, Romney hadn’t emerged from the primary unscathed. Like the fraternity pledge who acquires a tattoo saying eggplant in Chinese, he’d made a few mistakes in a bid for his peers’ attention. He labeled himself “severely conservative.” His support of “self-deportation” for immigrants eroded his bipartisan appeal.

  Most helpful of all, Romney was gaffe prone. This was a greater liability than ever, since each verbal stumble now lived forever online.

  Corporations are people, my friend.

  I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.

  Taken separately, these comments were mere hiccups. But string them together and they suggested a blind spot where ordinary Americans were concerned, the BMW zooming down the shoulder of the highway, wondering why the rule-following Fords and Hondas are upset. POTUS was still less popular than we would have liked. Romney led in plenty of polls. But between our opponent’s emerging flaws and the fact that a large chunk of McCain’s base had died of old age, Obama wasn’t toast just yet.

  “Do we have a shot?” friends asked.

  “It’ll be close,” I’d say, toeing the cautiously optimistic party line. “But I’d rather be us than them.”

  Us and them. Obama’s election was supposed to end that kind of thinking. Watching the inauguration on a barroom screen, I was certain a new era had arrived. We would heal old wounds. We would find new ways to work together. Sure, we would have our disagreements, but always with the knowledge that we belonged to the same team.

  Instead, the opposite had occurred. In just a few years, dividing lines had rippled across America like cracks in a car windshield. It wasn’t just conservative versus liberal. Each time I biked to work I passed McPherson Square, the local headquarters of the new movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Pedaling by their tarp village in my navy-blue suit, I could feel their antiestablishment loathing seeping through the fabric. But I’m a Democrat! pleaded the voice inside my head. This led to an imaginary argument that ended, inevitably, in rage. Hey, pal, I may not be a white guy with dreadlocks, but I believe in justice, too!

  At other times, however, I had to concede the occupiers’ point. This was especially true in January 2012, when I worked on POTUS’s speech before something called the Alfalfa Club.

  Put ten thousand protestors in a tent camp with ten thousand typewriters, and they would never dream up anything as offensive as the Alfalfa. Founded in 1913, the club’s stated mission is to bring together America’s most powerful people for no good reason at all. The sole guiding principles are (a) an excess of food and (b) an excess of alcohol. It’s the grown-up equivalent of the fridge at the Kennedy Center, minus the symphony and ballet.

  The club meets just once a year, on the third Saturday of January, in the ballroom of a Washington hotel. There, decked out in tuxedos and gowns, two hundred Alfalfans dine on lobster and steak while roasting each other gently. (Jokes about money are acceptable, for example. Jokes about power are not.) Along with “nominating” a presidential candidate to give a tongue-in-cheek acceptance speech, the club inducts new members. These are grown men and women who, for the term of their initiation, willingly agree to be referred to as “sprouts.” Ridiculous, I know.

  But before you dismiss the Alfalfa entirely, consider who the list of former sprouts includes: Henry Kissinger. Warren Buffett. Alan Greenspan. Sandra Day O’Connor. Mike Bloomberg. Neil Armstrong. Newt Gingrich. Chuck Schumer. Madeleine Albright. Colin Powell. Steve Forbes. Bill Clinton. Jeb Bush. George W. Bush. George H. W. Bush. Others have names you wouldn’t recognize, but represent organizations you would. Marriott. Procter & Gamble. The army. The air force. General Motors. Goldman Sachs. All have a seat at the table.

  I doubt many Alfalfans see their club as a tool for protecting the status quo, but that’s the way it’s worked out. The organization barred African Americans until a decade after the Civil Rights Act. Doors were closed to women until 1994. Even the banquet’s date is retrograde: it honors the birthday of Robert E. Lee.

  It’s hardly surprising that America’s first black president found the Alfalfa less than wonderful. In 2009, Barack Obama spoke there, just as every president had before him, but he didn’t exactly pay his respects. “Look at the person sitting on your left,” he said. “Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my e-mail address.”

  Nor did POTUS let the Robert E. Lee thing slide. Instead, he thrust it into the spotlight: “If he were here with us tonight, the general would be 202 years old. And very confused.”

  By normal standards this was nothing. At the Alfalfa, it was the rough equivalent of insulting everyone’s mother and farting loudly into the mic. When POTUS left, I imagine he vowed never to return.

  Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich?

  In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead!

  I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame.

  I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight.

  I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them.

  Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president.

  I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door.

  I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation.

  That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here.

  It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.’”

  By this point, President Obama was showing us the door. But when he heard Favs’s story he paused briefly and puffed up. It was like watching a boxer at a weigh-in.

  “Well,” he said, “Mitt Romney can’t beat me.”

  If chest bumping had been permitted in the Oval, we would have gone for it. Instead we did the next best thing, laughing with outsize confidence as we strutted from the room.

  The incident left me with no grand illusions regarding comedy. I didn’t think a few one-liners could create new jobs or push our approval above 50 percent. Still, I was proud. Without viol
ating the ban on political activity, I had helped POTUS send a warning shot across Romney’s bow. Maybe I even discouraged an anti-Obama SuperPAC. The point was that I had played some small role in the biggest political battle of my lifetime. And I hoped that when the 2012 Correspondents’ Dinner rolled around, I’d have the chance to do it again.

  WHEN I WORKED AT THE WHITE HOUSE, PEOPLE OFTEN ASKED ME IF I used jokes to advance the president’s agenda. I always said no, by which I always meant yes. That’s not to say each punch line was poll tested. I simply felt that if the leader of the free world was required to host a comedy night, it ought to be worth his time.

  Under Jon Lovett’s supervision the previous year, POTUS’s assault on Trump had more than met this standard. The conventional wisdom, which I wholeheartedly subscribed to, was that Obama had “destroyed” the birther king. He had “demolished” him. But in late 2011, Lovett moved to Hollywood to write sitcoms. I became, by default, the White House’s token funny person. As I prepared to run the joke-writing process for the first time, destroying and demolishing Romney seemed like obvious goals.

  This was easier said than done. Back in 2011, Trump was the rare breed of public figure loathed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Romney was different. He had friends. Step even an inch over the line, and they would complain to reporters, who would milk the ensuing controversy for days.

  With a frontal assault out of the question, the best we could hope for was a series of bank shots. By laughing at his own expense, POTUS could appear both confident and humble. By injecting arguments directly into setups and punch lines, he could bypass the media back-and-forth. Perhaps most important, by joking about controversy, he could diffuse it. If the president’s willing to laugh at something, how bad can it really be?

  By the time I began writing jokes, three weeks before the dinner, there was plenty of controversy to diffuse. In March, a hot mic caught POTUS telling Russian president Dmitry Medvedev he’d have “flexibility” after the election. Policy-wise, this was reasonable. Stripped from context, with the frisson of excitement that comes from eavesdropping on world leaders, it looked bad.

  So did the debacle unfolding at the Government Services Administration. The agency’s sole purpose was to spend taxpayer money wisely. Yet it had recently shelled out more than eight hundred thousand dollars for a Las Vegas conference featuring a mind reader and a clown. And GSA staff weren’t the only federal employees whose entertainment choices had gotten them in trouble. On a recent trip to Colombia, several Secret Service agents had been caught soliciting prostitutes when one of them skipped out on the bill.

  Then there were the scandals involving dogs. I know that sounds absurd. It is absurd. But the fact remains: in April 2012, two canine controversies were major political news.

  The first dated back to 1983, when a young Mitt Romney drove his family to a vacation home in Canada. This was unremarkable. What was remarkable is that, the car overstuffed with bags and children, he had transported his family’s Irish setter in a carrier strapped to the roof. Hoping to contain the fallout, Romneyites dug up a scandalous story of their own. In his autobiography Obama admitted that, as a six-year-old in Indonesia, he had eaten dog meat.

  The whole thing was stupid. Neither anecdote said much about the president each man would make. Yet political commentators couldn’t get enough of these stories. Was it worse to mistreat a dog as an adult or ingest one as a child? In 2012, somewhat astonishingly, plenty of political reporters felt this question was worthy of their time. And it was my mission to leave no controversy, real or nonsensical, unaddressed.

  To that end, I compiled a long list of topics and sent them out to what amounted to our writers’ room. David Axelrod and Jon Lovett sent in jokes from the growing Obama diaspora. Other one-liners came from Jeff Nussbaum and his West Wing Writers team. More than a half dozen contributors came from entertainment rather than politics. Nell Scovell created Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Kevin Bleyer was a producer on The Daily Show. Nina Pedrad wrote for 30 Rock and New Girl. Judd Apatow was (and is) the leading comedy mogul of his generation, behind everything from Girls to Knocked Up to Freaks and Geeks.

  Perhaps our friends in Hollywood knew how to crank out an endless series of amazing jokes. I certainly didn’t. For me, the secret to writing one funny line was to write about twenty-five awful ones first. Most evenings I would comb through the day’s rubble and sigh. But after picking the diamonds from the rough, and combining them with material coming from outside the building, a monologue began to take shape.

  A few days before the dinner, Favs and I went to the Oval to present about forty of our favorite lines. Together with David Plouffe, the president’s senior advisor, and Jay Carney, the press secretary, we sat on the couches while POTUS read out loud. Each time he laughed, I made a mental note. Each time he didn’t, I had a mental breakdown.

  Then he reached my first dog joke and my heart stopped beating entirely. It relied on an obscure reference to one of Sarah Palin’s lines from the 2008 campaign. It also involved eating man’s best friend. As POTUS read off the page, I wondered if we hadn’t made a mistake putting it before him.

  “Sarah Palin’s getting back in the game, guest hosting on the Today show. Which reminds me of an old saying: What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?”

  He paused, just slightly.

  “A pit bull is delicious.”

  We all fell silent. Was POTUS confused? Was he disgusted? Then, to my enormous relief, he grinned.

  “That’s pretty good,” he said, chuckling. “A pit bull is delicious. I like that.” He smiled again, mulling things over. “I’m just letting you know, I might add something here. ‘Maybe a little soy sauce.’ Something like that.” He made a shaking gesture with his hand, sprinkling imaginary seasoning onto his canine meal.

  As my heart resumed beating, President Obama finished reading the jokes, culling about a dozen or so from our list. Then he ushered us out of the Oval, shaking his head in mock disbelief. As I left the room, I heard him chuckle. When he spoke, it was with the same officious tone he used when acknowledging a congressman in the crowd.

  “A pit bull,” he proclaimed, “is delicious.”

  THE DAY BEFORE THE DINNER, WE GATHERED IN THE CABINET ROOM to record a short audio piece making fun of the hot mic with the Russian president. POTUS sat near the door to the Outer Oval, directly beneath a portrait of Harry Truman. I sat next to him, cast as “White House Aide.”

  I had only one line: Mr. President, they’re ready for you. But with Barack Obama sitting to my right, I felt the tightness in my chest that had ruined my high school dreams of stardom.

  “Mr. President they’re! Ready-FOR you.”

  Ignoring my botched delivery, POTUS recorded his lines.

  “I’m the president of the United States, and I’m opening for Jimmy Kimmel?”

  “Right now I’m like a five on the Just for Men scale. I think I could go to six and nobody would notice.”

  “I could really use a cigarette.”

  POTUS was a better actor than I was. Still, his timing was off. He emphasized some of the wrong words. He paused in awkward places. We were allotted only ten minutes, enough for just two recordings, and I began to wonder what would happen if his delivery didn’t improve.

  I certainly wasn’t helping. As we began our second and final take, I flubbed my line even worse than before.

  “MR. PRESIDENTthey’rereadyfor . . . you?”

  This made what happened next all the more remarkable. I hadn’t taken my eyes off President Obama. I knew for a fact he had not practiced. And yet the difference between his first and second read-throughs was the difference between a guy puffing through kickboxing class and Jean-Claude Van Damme. He took beats at just the right moments. He hit the precise words to sell each punch line best. His tone was the perfect blend of annoyance and self-regard. It was as if he’d spent a full day rehearsing. It was that much better.

  I’d often heard s
enior staff describe President Obama as the smartest guy in the room, but only now did I realize what they meant. He didn’t speak seven languages or know the Latin names of species or multiply large numbers in his head. What he did, more quickly than anyone, was strip away complicated issues to their essence and make the most of the information obtained. No one was better at getting to the point.

  Jon Lovett returned from Los Angeles for the dinner that year, and on the morning of April 29, he, Favs, and I did one final run-through in the Oval. By now the script was nearly final. In fact, we had only one new line to run by President Obama. During a recent speech, Vice President Biden had remarked that POTUS had a “big stick.” He was referring to foreign policy, but his hand gesture was, to put it mildly, undiplomatic. Jeff Nussbaum pounced.

  “Let’s just put it this way,” read his joke. “Dreams aren’t the only thing I got from my father.”

  POTUS laughed so loudly that I secretly hoped he would add the line to the script. But this was an election year; a presidential dick joke was a bridge too far. And so, with nothing more to add, we were finished. Favs and Lovett went to a fancy brunch party. POTUS went to play golf. I went home to nap.

  I ATTENDED THAT YEAR’S CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER AS A GUEST OF the Agence France-Presse. It’s a wonderful organization, but they’re hardly the cool kids of the media world. Where the Time and Bloomberg tables overflowed with celebrities, the seat to my right was occupied by a well-regarded Irish novelist. His face seemed sculpted from putty. His eyes glittered beneath thick black brows. He was not exactly a movie star.

  In fairness, however, I was not exactly a Washington insider. Perhaps that’s why we made quite a team. As we passed around the basket of rolls, my novelist explained his theory of Hamlet. I nodded, genuinely absorbed. Even better, by the time the salad course was finished, he was on his fourth glass of wine and his stage whisper had become a full-throated scream. At one point during the evening, Jake Tapper, then a reporter with ABC News, stood to receive a prize from the Correspondents’ Association. My tablemate snorted.