Thanks, Obama Read online

  “Four-zero-niner, we have a garment situation in progress. Over.”

  An older lady in an expensive gown gave me a look suggesting I had recently crawled out of a sewer. Then she saw my earpiece, apologized, and immediately stepped aside.

  “VIP coat retrieval, roger.”

  “Priority jacket acquisition, ten-four.”

  Five minutes later, I was at the front of the line. Five minutes after that, I returned, bearing my girlfriend’s coat. And five minutes after that, we were zipping through the freezing night air in a pedicab, on our way to watch Chicago’s mayor sway awkwardly as a lineup of living legends played the blues.

  Classic Lips.

  WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO THAT OVAL OFFICE MEETING—MY FIFTH, Lips’s first—during which the Gridiron Dinner was discussed. In 1885, when the Gridiron Club was founded, most of its members were grouchy old print journalists. Today, they still are. At their annual spring meeting, guests wear white tie. Reporters don costumes and perform parody songs about the politicians they cover. Petits fours are eaten. The evening ends with a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” It’s a four-hour homage to what people did before TV.

  While nothing compares to journalists in Elvis wigs singing “Block Barack Around the Clock” (this actually happened, in 2011), the evening’s real highlights are the guest speakers. By tradition there’s a Republican, a Democrat, and, if the invitation is accepted, the president of the United States.

  Like the rest of the program, these monologues are a throwback to a simpler time. Even the Gridiron’s motto—Singe, but Never Burn—is an artifact of a happier, pre-Internet age. The draft I sent to POTUS included such scintillating topics as “Budget Cuts,” “Press Conferences,” and “Guys Named Gene.” I can’t say he laughed uproariously at any of the jokes. But he understood his audience. Pronouncing himself satisfied, he showed us to the door.

  I never dreamed of grabbing an Oval Office apple. Even as Lips, my cockiness had limits. Still, as I left the meeting, there was brashness in my step. I had been back at the White House less than a week. Already, I was meeting with the president himself!

  As if that weren’t enough, the building was being restocked. Eager twenty-two-year-olds, fresh off their first campaign, were filling the entry-level jobs. Shyly, the newcomers would ask if I could get coffee sometime. When I agreed to, they practically melted with relief.

  “Don’t worry,” I’d tell them. “Networking’s only bullshit if you’re bullshit.”

  To my surprise, however, I also had real pearls of wisdom to dispense. These had nothing to do with career ladders and everything to do with the unique environment in which we worked.

  “Don’t tell them I sent you, but the fifth-floor librarians keep a bowl of candy by the reference desk.”

  “Steer clear of the gym on Tuesdays. It’s Zumba night.”

  “You know the medical unit in the basement? You can take all the free Advil and Band-Aids you can carry. They’ll even give you Sudafed if you sign for it.”

  The wide-eyed youngsters would thank me. Then I’d return to my desk, the drawers stocked with candy and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, to continue working on my Gridiron draft.

  By the middle of the week the jokes were almost finished, and I turned to what we called “the serious close.” These are staples of humor speeches, two or three paragraphs of sincerity at the end of otherwise lighthearted remarks. Since the audience was full of reporters, I took the occasion to praise journalists who embodied the best of the free press.

  “They’ve risked everything to bring us stories from places like Syria and Kenya,” I wrote, “stories that need to be told.”

  For a moment, I wondered if I should run this line by a foreign-policy expert. That’s what Litt would have done. But then I thought better of it. Lips didn’t need some egghead to tell him how to craft a sentence. You lump the countries ending in yuh sounds together. Everything flows perfectly. The crowd goes wild. The end.

  On Saturday night, my confidence was rewarded. Dressed in a tailcoat, wing-collared shirt, and white bow tie, I descended the escalator to a ballroom in the Renaissance Hotel. Just feet from the stage, I watched costumed reporters sing “My Gun” to the tune of “My Girl.” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar delivered monologues in front of a giant, glowing spatula I can only assume was the club’s namesake Gridiron.

  Then, just before “Auld Lang Syne,” POTUS spoke. The laughter was consistent and chummy. The jokes singed, but never burned. During his serious close, President Obama praised reporters for risking everything in places like Syria and Kenya. Everything flowed perfectly. The crowd went wild.

  Lips was fucking crushing it.

  On Monday, back in the office, I was a paragon of false humility. Other speechwriters told me the remarks had been great, and I replied that it was all in the delivery. I explained to the twenty-two-year-olds that, really, when you think about it, credit belongs to the entire team. I was on top of the world, wondering if I might actually be the best wordsmith in history, when I heard from one of the president’s longest-serving speechwriters, a soft-spoken Massachusetts native named Terry. He had a question.

  This was a bad sign. At nearly forty, Terry was our team’s elder statesman, and he had a talent for leading witnesses that only lawyers and parents of young children possess. If Terry wondered whether your smoke alarm was working, your house was on fire. If he asked how your girlfriend was doing, you could safely assume she was, at that very moment, enjoying sweaty intercourse with your best friend. Now Terry wanted to know if I’d seen an article in the Daily Nation, a newspaper published in Nairobi.

  KENYA NOT SAFE FOR FOREIGN JOURNALISTS, SAYS OBAMA

  It took some frantic googling, but I pieced together what had happened. The White House press office had released the full transcript of POTUS’s Gridiron speech. When Kenyan officials read it, they noticed their country featured in the same sentence as one of the world’s most despised regimes. They went berserk.

  Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. But because this was international diplomacy, the Kenyans used their newfound berserkness to gain leverage over the United States. Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary for Information and Communications, released an official statement calling the president’s words “not only inaccurate, but exceedingly disturbing.” A group called KOT (Kenyans on Twitter) created a brand-new hashtag to channel their rage.

  If you’ve never angered a country of more than forty-five million people before, it might seem like a power trip. It’s not. Sitting in my office, typing Kenya at Obama into the search bar over and over again, I felt more helpless than ever. What I wanted more than anything was someone I could talk to—a Kenyan I could call. “You think your entire country is mad at my entire country,” I would explain, chuckling at the mix-up, “when really it’s just little ol’ me.”

  But no such Kenyan existed. As a junior White House staffer, I had the ability to place the salmon of distrust in the toilet of international relations. I didn’t have the ability to get it out.

  Instead, senior staff were forced to busy themselves playing cleanup. These were people with serious responsibilities, global priorities on their plate. Now they had to take time away from far more worthy objectives to deal with my mess. Even then, it took an official apology on America’s behalf to put the controversy behind us. “We recognize and commend the press freedoms enshrined in Kenya’s constitution,” said an unnamed White House official. “Obviously, the situations in Syria and Kenya are quite different.”

  Perhaps Lips was not crushing it after all.

  I spent the rest of the day wondering if antagonizing a midsize African nation was considered a fireable offense. But in the White House, I learned, it’s not so cut-and-dried. I wasn’t the first young staffer to find their smallest screw-up magnified to national scale. I wasn’t even the first speechwriter to piss off another country by mistake.

  Besides, Ob
amaworld wasn’t big on firing people. Exceptions were made for the grossly negligent or the publicly embarrassing. But the merely incompetent, rather than being dismissed entirely, were simply exiled from a circle of trust. It didn’t happen immediately. Instead, like a pirate marooned on a desert island, you found yourself watching as everything you ever cared about slowly disappeared. Eventually, your responsibilities vanished completely. A few lackluster employees were fine with this arrangement, cashing steady paychecks for an ever smaller amount of work. But most took the hint and resigned.

  Living, as I was, in fear of being cast away, I desperately craved a shot at redemption. The days crawled by. No second chance arrived. Finally, at the end of March, Cody gave me an assignment. POTUS was scheduled to speak in Miami, where a new tunnel would soon connect the city and the port. The remarks were mine.

  Not that anyone else wanted them. With the possible exceptions of toenail clippings and the Professional Bowling League, infrastructure finance is the least sexy subject known to man. Yet this only made me more eager. If I could write something riveting about the world’s most boring topic, surely I would be in my team’s good graces once again.

  IN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE, THERE WAS NO SET TIME LINE FOR drafting a presidential speech. For an unexpected eulogy, the writer might have just forty-eight hours. The State of the Union took six weeks or more. But for my remarks in Miami, which were as typical as they come, I had about seven days.

  My work began with a policy meeting. This is a polite way of saying that a team of experts tried, often unsuccessfully, to stuff information into my fluff-filled head. I can’t say I always enjoyed being the token ignoramus. But there was power in the role. If a concept couldn’t be explained to me, it was unlikely to make it into the speech.

  The next step, after absorbing my colleagues’ wisdom, was independent research. I would later learn to focus these efforts on the interesting, rather than the technically important. But for my Miami speech, desperate to restore my reputation, I embarked on an all-day infrastructure binge. Advances in tunnel-digging technology. Incentive structures associated with various investment schemes. Dredging. By the end of my self-taught crash course, I was hooked.

  Holy cow! Public-private partnerships are awesome!

  I’d later realize this was a warning sign, an early-onset symptom of lost perspective. But at the time, I was thrilled.

  With research out of the way, I was finally ready to sit down and write. This was my first policy speech for POTUS since my return, but to my surprise, everything seemed easy. The previous forty-eight hours had left my brain completely saturated. Now, I poured that esoteric knowledge into a draft. I had written the race speech for infrastructure finance. I was sure of it. Two nights before the remarks were to be delivered, I sent them to Cody for his edits. Then I went on a Kennedy Center date with Jacqui and waited for my boss’s applause.

  In the EEOB, we had a term for what happened next, and it described both the condition of the speech and the ego of the speechwriter responsible. I got blown up. I had expected Cody’s tracked changes to be minor flecks of red, the aftermath of a careless shave. Instead, I got the aftermath of a chain saw massacre.

  Most painful of all, where ego was concerned, was that the new remarks were exponentially better than the old ones. Cody connected Americans’ stories and America’s story, self-interest and the national interest, in a way I simply had not. Reading through the wreckage, I wasn’t mad. I was embarrassed. In my world, there was nothing worse than being useless. My Kenya fiasco, while embarrassing, could at least be written off as a mistake. But producing something worthless? Wasting my boss’s time? In the Obama White House, these were character flaws. And they were unforgivable.

  The remaining steps of the speechwriting process sped by in a demoralizing haze. Only Cody and I knew about the rewrite. My name was still on the remarks. But the privacy of the shame made it that much harder to bear. The day before the speech was delivered, policy teams, fact-checkers, and lawyers examined language they thought was mine. Their edits, by and large, were helpful. Their congratulations made me want to crawl into a hole.

  I still had one more step remaining. That night I sent the remarks to “the book,” the thick binder POTUS read each night, and in the morning I was informed he had only minor changes. The other speechwriters sounded impressed. “That’s great!” they told me. I smiled weakly, wondering if they suspected the truth. Either way, the ordeal was almost over. Just a few hours later, President Obama was in Miami, reading what was still technically my speech.

  “What are we waiting for?” he said. “There’s work to be done; there are workers who are ready to do it.”

  It was classic warrior poet: blunt, passionate, steeped in common sense. My original draft had been far more concerned with cruise-ship disembarkation rates and high-tech hydraulic drills. It was only as I listened to the crowd cheer for Cody’s lines that I finally realized the full extent of my mistake. I had written a draft of a speech about infrastructure finance. For a cabinet undersecretary or deputy mayor, that might have been fine. For the president, however, every speech is a speech about America. Every audience is the entire United States.

  I had learned a valuable lesson. But had I learned it soon enough? A month after returning to the White House, the president’s Knox College commencement had never seemed more relevant. “What will be your place in history?” I could hear him ask. From my blown-up draft, a million tiny whispers echoed in reply.

  Desert island. Desert island. Desert island.

  IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A NEAR-PERFECT OBAMA SPEECH, ONE THAT should be canon but isn’t quite, I recommend the remarks he delivered on April 18, 2013. Three days earlier, a bomb had gone off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Two hundred sixty-four people were wounded. Three were killed. When POTUS arrived in Boston for the memorial service, the bombers had yet to be caught. His speech that day, written by Terry on impossibly short notice, had to be flawless, and it was. An extraordinary blend of toughness and tenderness, it’s the kind of thing that earned POTUS the moniker “consoler in chief.”

  Yet as a nation mourned and a city searched for suspects, it was “comedian in chief” that occupied my time. The 2013 Correspondents’ Dinner was just two weeks away.

  It was a strange feeling, watching news about manhunts and shootouts while trying to write something snarky about Maureen Dowd. And along with the fear and discomfort felt by the entire nation, there was a question I couldn’t shake. Since returning to the White House, I’d been given two major assignments. I’d bungled both. Would I once again screw things up?

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With Favs’s departure, I was more responsible than ever for the Correspondents’ Dinner, and should have been relishing my new role. Instead, in the two years since being hired by the White House, I had never felt so utterly fraudulent. I was living the exact opposite of a superhero’s life. By day, I was a mild-mannered speechwriter. By night, I was a mess.

  My inability to calm myself only added to my sense of phoniness. Unless I was forgetting something, The West Wing never did an episode where Rob Lowe buys a mouth guard because he grinds his teeth in his sleep. If it had, the writers might have learned what I did: the CVS near the White House sells two types. There’s a no-frills mouth guard for about twenty dollars. There’s also a fancy, ergonomic model for forty. I didn’t have to think twice about springing for the deluxe.

  The old saying goes that you should fake it till you make it, but I think a more accurate saying would be “Fake it because you have no choice.” Coming up with punch lines. Collecting jokes from our growing diaspora of writers. Convincing everybody that a high-concept short film—starring Steven Spielberg, Tracy Morgan, and Barack Obama playing Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama—was a good idea. Each day I went to work and did the best I could, not because I was courageous, but because I couldn’t come up with an alternative. Then I went home and ground my high-tech mouth guard to
a pulp.

  Before I knew it, Cody was once again sauntering into the Oval, and I was once again tiptoeing behind. I felt good about our draft, but this no longer offered comfort. I had felt good about the Gridiron and Miami speeches, too.

  The joke that most worried me involved the political landscape postcampaign. “One thing Republicans can all agree on after 2012 is that they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities,” the script read. “Call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with.”

  It was the kind of line we never would have written in the first term. No one could remember POTUS referring to himself as a “minority” before. But with the reelect behind him, President Obama was eager to push the envelope.

  “That’s pretty good,” he chuckled. Just as he did a year earlier, when the subject was eating pit bulls, he even promised a personal touch.

  “I might add a little wave there. Maybe a ‘hello,’ or something.” How strange. There I was, sick with nervousness, and POTUS was having fun.

  While I doubt President Obama looked forward to spending his Saturday night with the press corps, I always got the sense he enjoyed reading jokes. Unlike most politicians, President Obama missed being treated like a normal person. I once overheard him say that this was why he loved meeting babies: they had no idea who he was.

  But everyone else did. Even five-year-olds could recognize Obama. Without quite intending to, POTUS had become the most famous person on earth. And he paid a price for it. Going for a walk. Eating at a restaurant. Catching a movie. Activities the rest of us take for granted were for Barack Obama a distant memory. It’s not like joking with staff in the Oval was entirely casual. No one forgot which person was the president. But it was as close to normalcy as POTUS was likely to get.