Thanks, Obama Page 14

  On the convention’s final evening, I watched with my fellow speechwriters as both actresses delivered their remarks to loud applause. A few hours later, Barack Obama formally accepted the nomination for president of the United States.

  He began by admitting that politics had lost some of its luster since 2008. “Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising.”

  But the rest of his speech urged us to remember that for all their frustrations, campaigns still mattered. Doing big things was exhausting. The opposition to change was dispiriting. Still, progress depended on our willingness to try.

  “Our path is harder,” President Obama told us. “But it leads to a better place.”

  He was referring to jobs, education, and health care—not tirades about Oscar nominations delivered over the phone. Still, I couldn’t help but think about the past two days. So much of my energy had gone toward Harvey. Time that might have been spent on issues that truly mattered was spent e-mailing publicists instead. Where did that place me on the scale of moral flabitude? Was putting all that effort into pleasing one powerful person really the right thing to do?

  But what if I looked at it a different way? Were a few hours of my time worth placating someone who paid the salaries of organizers in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio? What if those organizers swung an election? What if that election got Zoe Lihn her heart surgery? What if that surgery saved her life?

  This, I had begun to realize, was politics. Sometimes the answer depends entirely on the questions being asked.

  8

  THAT FIRST REAL TASTE OF BLOOD

  Along with gadzooks and hubba hubba, the word zinger fell from favor decades ago. Yet like a species of stick insect once thought to be extinct, it can still be found thriving on a small rocky island in the English language. That island is presidential debate prep.

  The moment I returned to Washington from Charlotte, the zinger machine went into overdrive. POTUS and Romney were set to face off for the first time on October 3. That gave us less than a month to prepare. Each day, I spent hours thinking of clever jabs or vicious comebacks. Then I’d send the best of the bunch to Favs, who was curating submissions from writers across the country.

  I wish I could say the goal of these one-liners was to win an argument. It wasn’t. The goal was to make POTUS look good on TV. For better or worse (mostly for worse), debates have become a reality show. Al Gore lost one by sighing on camera. Richard Nixon lost an even bigger one by sweating where JFK stayed dry. I can’t imagine most Americans would feel unsafe knowing the commander in chief occasionally sweats or sighs. Yet during the biggest nights of election season, these are the standards by which we judge. Imagine trying to explain this to a Martian. Imagine trying to convince it that this—a dog show, but for people—is what makes us the greatest democracy on earth.

  And yet, even in a made-for-TV political era, the truth has a way of coming out. On September 17, my twenty-sixth birthday, Mother Jones magazine released a leaked cell phone video of Mitt Romney. I couldn’t have asked for a better present. The footage wasn’t quite in focus, but over the heads of well-heeled donors, you could spot the unmistakable jawline of the Republican nominee.

  “There are forty-seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said matter-of-factly. “There are forty-seven percent who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” It was appalling: a presidential candidate writing off nearly half the people he hoped to serve.

  To those of us who spent time reading right-wing media, however, it wasn’t a surprise. Under Ronald Reagan, conservative theory held that handouts for the rich were good for everyone. Wealthy people would use their tax cuts to buy expensive stuff. Middle-class people would get jobs making expensive stuff. Poor people would get jobs selling middle-class people cheap versions of the expensive stuff they made.

  But in the age of Obama, something had seeped from the comments section of Fox Nation into the mainstream GOP. According to the new theory, the entire lower half of the income scale was full of leeches. These deadbeats were getting more than they deserved. Once a matter of economics, cutting rich people’s taxes had become a matter of morals instead.

  I don’t know if Romney truly believed what he was caught saying. But it hardly mattered. When you lead a political party, you can’t help but reflect its members’ views. And Americans were horrified to see those views on camera. A week after the video, the Gallup tracking poll had us up by six points, one of our largest margins of the campaign. Our odds on FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s website, rocketed above 80 percent. Rumors spread that our opponent’s biggest donors were about to abandon him. Romney was toast.

  And Democrats were celebrating. In the weeks after the 47 percent video, even the DNC cubicles seemed cheery. For the first time since July, I abandoned my French bakery and joined Devlin at work. Sure, a few strange reports were coming out of debate prep in Las Vegas. Why, for example, did POTUS feel the need to abandon his practice sessions and tour the Hoover Dam? But these were random oddities. No use letting them darken our mood. Besides, as debate night drew closer, I was told that one of my zingers was a consensus favorite among the senior staff.

  “Why is Governor Romney keeping all his plans secret? Is it because they’re just too good?”

  Out of context, this line may not seem like much. But on debate-prep island, it was a rare specimen: snappy, on message, with just enough snark. I couldn’t wait to see POTUS unleash it. It would demolish Romney on the spot.

  On the night of October 3, I logged into a livestream from my DNC desk. My coworkers had long ago left the second floor for watch parties. Fluorescent lights flickered ominously in the abandoned halls. But I had never felt so confident. Romney was on the ropes. We didn’t even need a decisive win on the debate stage—with a tie, or even a not-too-catastrophic loss, a second term would be guaranteed. And we had the best political performer in a generation on our side.

  At 9 P.M., the candidates took the stage at dueling podiums—Romney in a red tie, President Obama in a blue one. POTUS spoke first. By coincidence, the debate fell on his twentieth wedding anniversary, and he began by addressing the First Lady in the crowd. “I just want to wish, sweetie, you a happy anniversary, and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of forty million people.”

  Cute, right? Not to me. Like anyone who had spent lots of time listening to President Obama, I knew immediately that something was off. The instrument was out of tune. That stilted, forced delivery? The word sweetie dropped haphazardly into the middle of a sentence? It was as though this were candidate school and Barack Obama was taking his oral exams.

  Then our opponent spoke. “Congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary.” On my computer screen I could see Mitt Romney’s mouth moving, but surely the voice belonged to someone else. The candidate addressing POTUS was warm. He was charming. He sounded like a human. “I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine, here with me.” Where the audience had chuckled politely at President Obama’s opening line, Romney earned an appreciative, genuine laugh.

  My stomach turned.

  For the next few minutes I forced myself to stare at my monitor, hoping President Obama would bounce back. Then, revising my strategy, I began pacing the empty hallway and muttering fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. Romney was fighting for his political life, landing blow after blow.

  POTUS, to put it mildly, was not. After almost two years spent watching President Obama, I knew when he was phoning it in. The annoyed half smile. The words Now look, at the beginning of every sentence. The halting “uh” sounds that could suck the soul out of a phrase.

  Nor was it hard to guess why this was happening. For all his talent in front of the camera, POTUS hated political theater. At times, he rea
ped the benefits from refusing to play the game. But now he was paying dearly. With every lackadaisical answer, he breathed new life into Romney’s campaign.

  More than an hour into the debate, POTUS used my zinger. It failed to zing. Not long after, I turned off the livestream in a daze. I plodded down the second-floor hall, up the concrete steps, back through the third floor, and down the elevator. Then I drove to Jacqui’s house. We spent the night cycling through unwelcome emotions: sadness, anger, confusion, despair. It was as though a friend had died testing a bungee cord he’d designed himself.

  ROMNEY SHARP AND STEADY IN FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

  PRESIDENT OBAMA SNOOZES AND LOSES

  OBAMA FLUNKED THE FIRST DEBATE. BUT WHY?

  The headlines the next morning were brutal. But they weren’t unfair. Trudging to my desk on the morning of October 4, I thought of everyone who had invested themselves in the idea of Barack Obama. My vols in Ohio. My coworkers in the White House. My fellow speechwriters from the convention. Scarlett and Kerry. Stacey Lihn. And at our campaign’s most critical moment, just when we had turned a long-shot reelection bid into a sure thing, our candidate had acted like he didn’t even care. This wasn’t just a missed opportunity, or a subpar performance. This was an insult.

  I was angry. More than that, I was heartbroken. The myth of Obama was not that he was somehow more than human. It was that he was the best possible version of a human, and that by following him—by believing without thinking, by rarely asking questions and never admitting doubts—I could become the best possible version of a human, too. Now I saw how stupid that was. POTUS was brilliant. He was talented. He was on the right side of history. But at the end of the day, Barack Obama was just a guy.

  I still liked the president and believed he deserved reelection. But slumped in my cubicle, staring into Devlin’s frightened face, I knew my relationship with my candidate had changed forever. My days in Obamaworld weren’t finished. But my days as an Obamabot were done.

  “WE CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE.”

  As catchy phrases go, “Yes we can” was more exciting. But in the days after the debate, our old slogan failed to inspire. I had been drawn to politics in a kind of patriotic ecstasy. But what kept me there now was a list of pragmatic considerations, a bloodless preference for a concrete set of policy goals. Obama’s reelection would insure more people. Create more jobs. Help more students pay off loans. It was the political equivalent of a vegan cookie—all nutrition, no taste. Still, it kept me from quitting my job.

  Also, Mitt Romney scared me now. He still seemed like a fundamentally decent person. But the 47 percent video suggested that, as president, he would be governed by his party’s darkest impulses.

  This was not just a matter of rhetoric. Presidents in movies choose between good and evil, but real life rarely works that way. More often, presidents choose between easy and hard, between those who have power and those who do not. I thought of two-year-old Zoe Lihn, unknowingly waging a battle with her giant insurance company and the army of lobbyists it employed. I had no doubt whose side President Romney would take.

  As the idea of losing became more frightening, it also became more real. On Nate Silver’s site, our chances of winning had been climbing by 7 percent per month. After the debate, they fell 7 percent in just two days. I had no clue how long the slide would last. I refreshed the site obsessively, as if my clicks held the power to reverse the trend. They didn’t, of course. By October 17, we had gone from a slam dunk to a virtual coin toss.

  The only thing sinking faster than our poll numbers was morale. The entire DNC was summoned to an emergency meeting, during which we were told to stop refreshing FiveThirtyEight. Then the pep talks began. “When the game’s on the line,” said one high-ranking aide, “the president’s the guy you want holding the ball.” A week earlier this might have reassured me, but not anymore. Had this guy spent debate night in a coma?

  Other Obama advisors addressed the disaster as well. On a conference call, David Axelrod tried valiantly to shoulder the blame. He had set the strategy, he told us. He should have let POTUS be more aggressive in his attacks. I admired Axe’s loyalty, but for the first time I found one of his arguments entirely unconvincing. Of course he would say that, I thought. He’s an Iowan.

  By this I did not mean David Axelrod was born in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids. I meant he was one of a few dozen people who were with Obama from the very start. For nearly a year the Iowans crisscrossed the Hawkeye State, down twenty points in the polls. It was the political equivalent of living in caves, surviving on rainwater and grubs. Cold nights. Long odds. The Butter Cow at the state fair. These were the stories they told when times got tough, the way George Washington’s aides must have once regaled new conscripts with tales of Valley Forge.

  I envied the Iowans’ unflappability. Surviving a near-death experience had put ice water in their veins. But left unchecked, their confidence could become delusion. I had seen it just two years earlier, when Democrats trailed badly in midterm polls. As conventional wisdom declared we were done for, Obamaworld veterans were summoned to lift our hopes. “Don’t forget, this is exactly what they told us before Iowa,” they promised. I understood their point. Sometimes pundits write you off because they can’t imagine anything beyond the status quo. But other times pundits write you off because you’re about to get your ass kicked. No one knew which kind of year 2012 would be.

  This much was clear: for all his chest-thumping swagger in the Oval, POTUS had been wrong. Romney could beat him. And strangely, rather than worrying the president, this seemed to animate him. He was like a fighter who only gets going after that first taste of blood. Romney had landed a punishing blow. POTUS was through playing around.

  He also seemed to reconsider his disdain for political theater. During the debate, Romney had proposed cutting funding for PBS. Now, President Obama pounced. “Elmo, you better make a run for it!” he cried in speeches. It was a silly line—something designed for TV cameras. But the president’s passion was genuine, and crowds responded. So did I. For all my disappointment with his first-debate performance, I had no doubt President Obama understood how much depended on this campaign.

  I also knew that, of the seven billion people on earth, no one hated losing more than POTUS. His competitiveness was legendary, even among his Type A staff. On one occasion, Hope Hall goaded the president into doing an on-camera impression of Frank Underwood, Kevin Spacey’s character from House of Cards. When I asked her how she coerced the commander in chief, she smiled.

  “Easy. I just told him I didn’t think he could do it.”

  President Obama’s deep-seated hatred of second place served him well at the next debate. He came out swinging and, by a small yet decisive margin, was declared winner of the night. But then, just as we seemed to be regaining momentum, both sides hit pause.

  It was time for the Al Smith Dinner.

  ON AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1960, JOHN F. KENNEDY AND RICHARD Nixon ditched the campaign trail, donned white tie, and drove to the Waldorf Astoria hotel. There, they spent an evening telling jokes to wealthy New Yorkers. It’s a tradition that has repeated itself nearly every four years since.

  The Al Smith Dinner raises millions for local charities, but a noble cause does nothing to diminish the evening’s strangeness. Imagine if, with five minutes left in the Super Bowl, the opposing quarterbacks rushed to the fifty-yard line to sing “I Will Always Love You” in a karaoke duet. Now imagine if, in addition to playing for opposing teams, each quarterback loathed everything the other stood for. Welcome to the Al Smith.

  While Favs and Cody drafted more important speeches, I worked with our usual team of joke writers to assemble a draft. After months of intense campaigning, we had plenty to make fun of. Our opponent’s stiffness. His gaffes. The 47 percent video. My script referenced them all. I even asked our advance team to create a “binder full of women,” a prop inspired by one of Romney’s second-debate gaffes. But on the day of the speech, when Favs
took the draft to the president, POTUS cut nearly every aggressive joke. There would be no binder on the podium that night. My mind instantly went to the days before the first debate. Was he pulling punches again?

  But this time, I was wrong to second-guess the president’s instincts. As I watched the competing monologues from the comfort of Jacqui’s couch, my attention turned from the speakers to the audience. The room was a sea of strained smiles. A complicated code of etiquette writhed just below the surface. For the first time, I realized how risky my initial draft had been. To throw bombs would have been satisfying. But it also would have made the president seem desperate and cruel. POTUS was playing the long game. Where I had tried to win an evening, the president was trying to win a campaign.

  So was Romney—and to my great disappointment, he was doing okay. Like the Iowans, he had come face-to-face with political mortality, and it stripped away his fear. “We’re down to the final months of the president’s term,” he said at the Al Smith Dinner, face beaming with a confident grin. The crowd, mostly white and wealthy, applauded with relish. A few people even whistled.

  “He looked like a president,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan not long after. “He looked like someone who’d just seen good internals.”

  Perhaps he had. But while Peggy Noonan may not have known it, Obama had seen good internals, too. Where public polling found the race essentially even, Joel Benenson’s numbers showed us reclaiming our narrow lead. Even more important, with just a few weeks until Election Day, the pool of undecided voters was shrinking. The campaign wasn’t over. But the time for persuasion had passed.