Thanks, Obama Page 12

  “Really?” he shouted. “Now they’re givin’ feckin’ awards to their feckin’ selves?”

  The wine continued disappearing, and by the time President Obama took the stage, I had a one-man cheering section. After the audio making fun of his hot mic moment, POTUS began with a joke about the bin Laden raid.

  “Last year at this time—in fact, on this very weekend—we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals.” The giant screens on either side of the podium displayed a picture of a sneering Donald Trump.

  “Did you write that?” my novelist mouthed. When I nodded, he gave me two enthusiastic thumbs-up.

  My mouth was dry. I clutched my chair nervously. But even in my deer-in-headlights state, it was amazing how quickly three weeks of work flew by. Before I knew it, the president was delivering his line about eating pit bulls, adding imaginary soy sauce as promised. We played a short video from a SuperPAC called Dogs for Romney, defending the right of canines everywhere to ride on the roof. For the last line of the night, the president returned to damage control.

  “I had a lot more material prepared, but I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew.”

  Just like that, it was over. POTUS sat down, Jimmy Kimmel told fifteen minutes of jokes, and the entire Hilton ballroom began streaming out the door. I was trying to make sense of it all when I saw someone from the corner of my eye.

  “Oh my gosh. That’s Diane Keaton!” I don’t usually gape at celebrities, but this was one of my all-time favorite actresses. And now she was headed in our direction, dressed in a bowler hat, jacket, and tie.

  My cheering section didn’t waste an instant. “Let’s introduce ourselves!” My novelist took off in pursuit like a cheetah in a nature documentary, only drunk. Diane Keaton saw him coming. She tried to flee. But it was hopeless. Bottlenecking her between two tables, my new friend pounced, cheerfully putting an arm around the actress’s waist. “Look at what I bought at the train station!” he shouted, as though this were an acceptable form of greeting. Then he reached into his pants pocket and produced a cardboard disposable camera. It was the kind I remembered from summer camp, the kind where you advance the film by rotating a plastic wheel.

  “Don’t we want to see if it works?” my novelist asked.

  “No, that’s okay,” said Diane Keaton.

  “Come on, we have to test it. It’ll be fun!”

  “Well, really, I . . .”

  “All right then.” He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me close, and took a decidedly old-fashioned selfie. “Oh good, it works!” he announced.

  “That was . . . impressive,” I said, as he released his trophy back into the wild. It was a fittingly surreal end to the most grueling three weeks of my life.

  I WALKED INTO THE OFFICE ON MONDAY ASSUMING THAT, WITH THE dinner over, I would simply pick up where I left off. I would write speeches for senior staff, and occasionally for POTUS, always on the lookout for remarks involving jokes, Jews, or some combination of the two. If only it were that easy. Something was missing. Was it the joy of writing comedy? The chance to eavesdrop on Arianna Huffington and George Clooney? The fact that my Diane Keaton picture never arrived in the mail?

  But as the weeks rolled on, I realized it wasn’t a lack of glamour that was bothering me. Instead, I kept thinking back to a line Valerie liked to include in her commencements: “Put yourself in the path of lightning.” For just one night, a seventeen-minute comedy monologue was the center of political attention. It was the place to address controversies, to take shots at opponents, to project confidence to the public we served.

  Now, however, lightning was once again striking the campaign trail. More and more speeches—for both the president and senior staff—were the ones I could not legally write. I kind of liked having job security. I kind of loved drinking Kennedy Center beer. But nothing was as intoxicating as being part of the action.

  Not long after the dinner, I asked Favs if I could leave the White House for the campaign. He agreed, but proposed a plan that kept me in Washington: I would work on political speeches for POTUS, but from the Democratic National Committee in D.C.

  Which is how I found myself, a few weeks later, standing beside a conference table covered in turkey pinwheels and cheap champagne. Straut said something generous. Coworkers wrapped leftovers in paper napkins. I turned in my blue badge and BlackBerry. Just like that, I was no longer a government employee.

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

  Leaving the building, I passed by Preacher Man. Whistle Guy’s screeching echoed down the street. Walking to the bus stop I noticed the Druid, stoic as always on his bench. It had only been a year, yet somehow I’d grown used to having them around.

  How strange, I thought. These people no longer pay my salary.

  Would I be back a few months from now? Was I leaving for good? That was up to the voters to decide.

  7

  GOING EASTWOOD

  The Republican National Committee headquarters, perched conveniently on Capitol Hill, is everything an office building should be. The four-story façade is as white and well-maintained as the people who work there. Gray accents provide a restrained pop of color. Tasteful moldings lend class. Imagine if a bank branch mated with a country club and raised a perfect child. That’s the Republican National Committee. It’s a lovely place.

  Compare this to the Democrats. As far as I can tell, the DNC headquarters was designed by someone who had never seen a building before. Mud-colored concrete follows a blueprint of random angles and arbitrary curves. Gray metal awnings punctuate walls the way a cat on a keyboard punctuates a sentence. Rainwater pools in ill-conceived balconies, trickling to the sidewalk and leaving rusty streaks behind. My freshman year of college I wore a fedora to class in the sincere belief it would establish me as both stylish and smart. The outside of the Democratic National Committee is the architectural equivalent of that hat.

  And yet, remarkably, the inside is worse. The humorist Will Rogers once declared, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.” He meant it as a joke, but whoever came up with the DNC floor plan clearly took it as a motto. For example, why insert the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, by law a separate entity from National Committee, right in the middle of the second floor?

  That might not sound like much of a problem. It was a nightmare. My new desk was also on the second floor of the DNC and should have been a short walk from the elevator. But to avoid even a hint of unlawful collusion, I was barred from entering the Congressional Committee office at any time. Legally speaking, their carpets were made of molten lava. This meant that each morning I took the following route. First, I rode the elevator to the third floor. Then I walked the entire length of the building, past the reception desk, the break room, and the fund-raising offices. Next, I descended a fluorescent-lit flight of neglected concrete steps. Having reached the second floor, I then walked halfway back across the building, in the exact opposite direction, until I reached my cubicle. This daily trek didn’t exactly make me Lawrence of Arabia. But neither did it suggest a well-oiled machine.

  I suppose I could have followed the example of my intern, an eager poli-sci student named Devlin. Devlin showed up early. He never once complained about the labyrinthine commute. But such cheerful blindness to our surroundings proved impossible for me to summon. Of course he’s excited about everything, I thought. He’s twenty-one. I was now twenty-five, and grizzled by a year of government service. Even small signs of dysfunction were exhausting.

  Before long, I began working from home. Presidential campaigns are often described in military terms—battleground states, foot soldiers, air cover—but in 2012, my war room was a French bakery called Le Caprice. Each morning I’d tell myself I was only buying coffee. Then a poll would have Romney up in Colorado, or a Senate Democrat would say something dumb.

  Oh, well, I’d think. Better have a chocolate croissant.

&nb
sp; Around 10:30 A.M., after my first almond cookie but before my goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich, I’d get to work. This was less thrilling than my new job title implied. “Speechwriter to the President” suggested access and influence. In reality I was a kind of rhetorical handyman, keeping our stump speech up to code. Changing Iowa to Ohio and vice versa. Tracking down numbers for Favs and Cody. Turning talking points into remarks and remarks back into talking points. Compared to 2008, my job was way more important. It was also way less fun.

  I wasn’t the only one making this trade-off. There’s a saying in Washington: “You campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” But the reelect was nothing if not prosaic. Obama’s soaring rhetoric was supplemented with a careful defense of his record. Twenty-thousand-person crowds at sports arenas gave way to two-thousand-person crowds at high school gyms. Decisions in the field, once made on a kind of cowboy instinct, were increasingly driven by data analytics. It drove my organizer friends nuts.

  And yet sitting in Le Caprice, my lap dusted in cookie crumbs, I didn’t really mind. After all, America was not exactly clamoring for an encore of 2008. Back then, the country was falling in love. Imperfections were easy to overlook. Now, nearly half a decade into a relationship with Obama, voters weren’t so forgiving. They still liked their president. They believed his heart was in the right place. But was he perfect? Metaphorically speaking, the nation had noticed that its leader left dishes in the sink.

  So, no, from a political perspective, a prosaic campaign didn’t worry me. From a personal perspective, however, the dangers were harder to ignore. Weeks on the Le Caprice diet had produced a noticeable softness around my middle. Devlin’s reports from headquarters were growing lonelier by the day. Worst of all, I was losing my sense of connection to the people I theoretically served. In Washington you never stop hearing about the details of policy, but you rarely see its effects. Imagine if no one who worked in Hollywood went to the movies or watched TV. It’s a strange condition. It eats away at you.

  And if you’re not careful, it can dissolve whatever brought you to our nation’s capital in the first place. By now, I knew my share of go-getters who moved to Washington to change the world but had since become hollowed out. They held fancy-sounding jobs but took hour-long naps under their desks. They set up conference calls to discuss other, earlier conference calls. They could sniff out an open bar like a pig hunting truffles, but were physically incapable of paying attention to anyone who couldn’t help their careers.

  I wondered what transformed these onetime idealists into connoisseurs of networking and sloth. Then I wiped chocolate from my upper lip and ignored Devlin’s latest e-mail. Maybe I already knew.

  In August, as my concern over moral flabitude neared a breaking point, my old boss Jeff Nussbaum appeared with an offer. The Democratic National Convention was just one month away, and along with the marquee speeches—POTUS, FLOTUS, Biden—there would be dozens of remarks seen by almost no one outside the hall. Jeff was responsible for making sure these second-tier speeches went smoothly. Could I take a ten-day leave of absence from my DNC job, come to Charlotte, North Carolina, and help out?

  On one hand, nothing about the work sounded fancy. I wouldn’t be writing for POTUS, not even in a handyman role. On the other hand, this was a chance to leave Washington and visit a bona fide swing state. I told Jeff I needed time to think it over. But really, I couldn’t wait to go.

  POLITICAL CONVENTIONS WERE ONCE INFUSED WITH DRAMA. EVERY four years the nation’s cronies gathered in back rooms to chomp cigars, shout “Huzzah!” for their preferred candidates, and emerge, days later, with a consensus nominee. But that was decades ago. Today conventions are music festivals for people who flip out over Senator Claire McCaskill but have absolutely no idea what a Skrillex is.

  TV executives have noticed that this is not for everybody. On the big three networks, each of our four nights in Charlotte was only carried live from 10 to 11 P.M. But inside the hall, the parade of speakers began hours earlier. The governor of Connecticut. The CEO of Costco. The president of the AFL-CIO. There were more than a hundred speakers in all, each one with a few precious moments on the party’s biggest stage.

  Hence Jeff ’s real responsibility: Keep these people in line. Don’t let them say something embarrassing. Don’t let them bore the audience to tears.

  Above all, don’t let them go over their allotted time. If you ever are asked to speak at a political convention, I have no doubt you will find yourself thinking you deserve an extra minute. I am here to tell you something. You don’t. It doesn’t matter how important you are outside the arena. Unless you’re being nominated for president, you’re singing backup, even when you take the stage.

  To help him corral his herd of VIPs, Jeff had recruited the speechwriting version of the Suicide Squad. There was John “J. P.” Pollack, winner of the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship. Alexandra Veitch, whose pearls and cardigans hid the rhetorical equivalent of a shiv up her sleeve. Sarada Peri, who did hard time at Teach for America and the Kennedy School of Government. Andy Barr, the surprisingly upbeat grouch (or surprisingly grouchy optimist) who ran comms for Al Franken’s first Senate campaign. And then there was me, glowing faintly from White House fairy dust, still terrified by the idea of meeting with roommates to discuss a chore chart but increasingly comfortable in a suit.

  Each morning we trudged into the bowels of the Time Warner Cable Arena like the dwarfs in Snow White. Ordinarily home to the Charlotte Hornets, the 780,000-square-foot building had been transformed into a temporary home for the campaign. For some departments, working out of luxury boxes or spacious concession areas, this was a major upgrade.

  For speechwriting, it was not. We were handed the referees’ locker room, a space designed for three people to quickly change clothes before and after games. There were fifteen of us, working sixteen-hour days. We were crammed together like supermarket lobsters. It was as far from Le Caprice as I could get.

  And yet I loved it. Something about our combination clicked. Besides, the election was perilously close. In Charlotte, everything we’d fought for over four long years would be defended over just four days. Who cared if I was literally rubbing shoulders with my coworkers? Who cared if a flimsy plastic curtain was the only thing separating our office from the bathroom on the other side? Lightning was striking left and right.

  We were free to leave our basement office—lone speechwriters would occasionally escape for snacks or coffee—but only once did we venture to the surface as a group. About a week before the convention started, we walked five blocks from the arena to a downtown office tower. In a dusty conference room, we gathered around a gray plastic conference table. Then, like a bearded, bushy-eyebrowed guardian angel, Joel Benenson appeared.

  When it comes to clothing, political strategists have two options: you can dress smart, or you can dress a little schlubby because everyone already knows you’re smart. Joel was firmly in the latter camp. His suits were slightly baggy. His shoes were more comfortable than stylish. No one cared. Our campaign’s chief pollster was quite possibly the world’s leading expert on America’s middle class. Each night his surveys went into the field like an army of tiny therapists. “So, the recession is finally over. How does that make you feel?”

  Now, standing before our suicide squad, Joel presented his findings: President Obama’s narrow lead was even more fragile than it appeared. A small but significant percentage of voters remained undecided. They held the president’s fate, and ours, in their hands.

  At first glance this might seem strange. We had just been through four years of nonstop partisan conflict. Who could possibly be undecided at this point? And it’s true: for most of us, a vote for president is as fixed and certain as the answer to a password recovery question. What was your first pet’s name? What was your high school mascot? Which candidate do you support?

  For a sizable number of Americans, however, presidential preference is surprisingly malleable. Would you chea
t on your husband? Would you sleep with George Clooney? In politics, sometimes the answer depends entirely on the questions being asked.

  This was the essence of Joel’s research. When the election was framed as a performance review—Has Obama met expectations?—we did poorly. The economy was growing more slowly than most voters would like. Our best hope was not to change minds, but to change the subject. If you had to choose between Obama and Romney, who would you rather have as your boss? When the election was seen as a job interview—a choice between two potential hires—voters chose Obama every time.

  To make this choice as clear as possible, Joel field-tested a smorgasbord of messages. At the conference table in Charlotte, he presented us with the winner:

  “President Obama understands that the economy grows not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up.”

  These fourteen words were drilled into our heads like the Lord’s Prayer or the rules of Fight Club. Not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up. Not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up. We dutifully inserted the line in speech after speech. This is what’s known as “message discipline,” but the existence of a technical term doesn’t make it feel less silly. Imagine going to a cocktail party full of strangers. Now imagine being told that, in every conversation, you’re expected to say that Shake Shack owes its success less to savvy marketing than to its proprietary blend of meats. It’s weird.

  The only thing more bizarre than message discipline, it turns out, is a lack of it. As we were preparing for our convention, Republicans were finishing theirs, and on August 30 we huddled in our hotel lobby to watch Mitt Romney’s big speech. All week long, rumors had buzzed. Republicans held an ace up their sleeve. Was it a well-known Democrat? A prominent general?