Thanks, Obama Read online

  Not that passing the Senate would have done the bill much good. After the 2010 landslide, Republicans redrew House districts to protect incumbents from pesky annoyances like the voters’ mood. Such rampant gerrymandering was a disgrace. It was also a success. In 2012, Democrats won a slim majority of votes for Congress. But Republicans won a large majority of the seats. An election that was supposed to teach lawmakers to respect the will of the people had instead taught them the opposite. Our representatives had nothing to fear.

  No wonder, then, that the fever didn’t break. If anything, it got worse. And just as McConnell predicted, people blamed Obama for the dysfunction others caused. The Tuesday after the Correspondents’ Dinner, POTUS held a press conference to mark the first hundred days of his second term. It was supposed to be a victory lap. Instead, ABC News correspondent Jon Karl ticked off a list of laws Congress had failed to pass. Then he delivered his challenge.

  “My question to you is: Do you still have the juice?”

  Other presidents might have relished this moment. Bill Clinton, for example, loved the drama of the nation’s highest office. Nothing made him happier than playing himself in the movie version of his life.

  But POTUS wasn’t like that. Where Clinton’s ego expressed itself in an insatiable craving for power, Obama’s expressed itself in the absolute conviction he deserved it. This faith in his own virtue is what made him authentic. He handwrote thoughtful responses to letters from conservatives. He met with kids from Make-A-Wish without mentioning it to the press. But the president’s high-mindedness also made him impatient when he felt other, less-worthy politicians were being let off the hook.

  “Jonathan”—it was as if the reporter were four years old, and the president was explaining, for the thousandth time, why they couldn’t have ice cream for dinner. “Jonathan, you suggest that somehow these folks over there have no responsibilities, and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job. Members of Congress are elected in order to do what’s right.”

  POTUS wasn’t incorrect. McConnell’s behavior was reprehensible. The do-nothing Congress was holding America back. But just because Washington is contemptible doesn’t mean a president benefits from showing contempt. We heard the same thing in focus group after focus group. Americans empathized with their commander in chief. They knew he had an impossible job. But they did not, under any circumstances, want to see him complain.

  I, however, am not the president, and will take this opportunity to complain bitterly. Jon Karl’s question was ridiculous. Not just useless, but harmful. The presidency is not an orange. You could have put Mitch McConnell on a fast, a diet, a weeklong cleanse: no amount of juice was going to change his mind. He believed he could elect more Republicans by constantly opposing President Obama than by occasionally joining him. He believed this, in part, because reporters who could help Americans understand the true cause of gridlock would rather ask POTUS about juice. Thus, obstruction continued. Nothing got done.

  Actually, that last part is not quite fair. While no new laws got passed, outside Washington, real change was taking root. The economy, on the edge of collapse four years earlier, was steadily creating jobs. Clean energy production rose. Foreclosure rates fell. So did deficits, in part because George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the superrich expired at the beginning of the year.

  During my first few months back at the White House, these signs of progress were at the heart of our communications strategy. If Washington represented America at its worst, we would highlight America at its best.

  Which is why, for Memorial Day 2013, POTUS scheduled a visit to the Jersey Shore. Less than a year earlier, Hurricane Sandy had devastated the area. Now, the tight-knit community was bouncing back. For America, the shore was a model of resilience, a shining example of our country’s determination and grit. For me, however, the shore was important for a different reason: Jacqui’s parents lived there. In fact, their home was just a few minutes from the Asbury Park Convention Hall, where the speech would take place. I could live a thousand years and never see a better point-scoring opportunity.

  Naturally, I volunteered to write the remarks.

  May 27, the morning of the speech, brought the exact opposite of beach weather. It was cold and rainy, with suffocating fog. But I wasn’t worried about sunshine. I was worried about upgrading Jacqui’s mom and dad to VIP seats. As I watched Chris Christie win a stuffed bear for POTUS on the boardwalk, I mentioned my predicament to Bobby, one of the president’s aides.

  “Why don’t we just put them in the photo line?” he asked.

  I hadn’t even thought to request this. Unlike tickets to a speech, which could be scattered to staff like confetti, a picture with the president seemed impossible to obtain. But on the road, the tear-inducing onion of White House bureaucracy shed its layers. There was no obscure form requiring five signatures, no office that could grant my request but was only reachable via fax. Bobby gave me a name. I sent an e-mail. An hour later I was standing backstage at the convention hall, happy to be out of the rain and waiting for POTUS to begin his remarks.

  “Your girlfriend’s here?” asked the prompter operator.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got her and her parents in the photo line.”

  For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then he smiled, caught somewhere between jealous and impressed.

  “You’re gonna have to work real hard to screw that one up.”

  As if the day wasn’t perfect enough already, we got to take choppers back to the National Guard base where Air Force One was parked. For these short hops, the president rode in Marine One, the champagne of helicopters. Junior staff, however, were herded onto Chinooks, twin-rotored military transports that look like flying RVs. Windows were open to the elements. Two long benches took the place of seats. The interior smelled like a blend of motor oil and locker room. It was paradise. More than walking through security checkpoints, or even flying on the presidential plane, the helos made me feel badass.

  In fairness, not everyone on these flights needed help with their badassery. While I admired the view, a half dozen of my seatmates adjusted the helmets covering their crew cuts. As I extended my phone for a helicopter selfie, they cradled assault rifles in soft cases on their laps. The pockets of their bulletproof vests bulged with deadly knickknacks. The glassy look in their eyes suggested a decidedly informal approach to human life.

  They were members of the Counter Assault Team, or “CAT team” as it was more commonly known. I once asked a more experienced speechwriter what separated these people from the rest of Secret Service. Here was his reply:

  “If something bad happens, Secret Service gets the president out of trouble. The CAT team finds the trouble and kills it.”

  That afternoon on the shore, as we boarded the helicopters, the CAT team members assumed their typical posture. Backs straight. Chins up. Mouths flattened into an expression best described as “last thing you see before you die.” I, however, was less stoic. The rain was still falling heavily. The fog had only gotten thicker. I was surprised we were cleared to fly. As we lurched upward, I remembered someone telling me that, rather than using radar, our pilots navigated by sight.

  It’s okay, I told myself, there’s a grown-up in charge of the weather call. They won’t let us do anything unsafe.

  Twenty minutes into our ten-minute flight, I reconsidered.

  For those who have never been suspended midair inside a thundering Chinook surrounded by smothering fog, let me try to explain. Imagine a kind of military-grade sensory deprivation chamber. The rotors are the world’s loudest white noise machine. Out the window lies ceaseless, unchanging gray. As cold air floods the cabin, numbness sets in.

  If you’re like me, this experience will lead you to cycle through the following questions: Are we flying in the right direction? Are we flying in any direction? Are we dying? Are we already dead? Is this limbo? Is this purgatory? Trust me: there are far more pleasant ways to spend twenty minutes on a Mon
day afternoon.

  Or thirty minutes. Or forty.

  We didn’t crash, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But by the time our helicopter landed, we had spent nearly an hour in the air. And it turned out we really were in danger. Once the choppers were airborne, the pilots realized visibility was practically zero. There was a genuine possibility that two helicopters would blindly bump each other, and that one would contain the president of the United States. That’s why our flight took so long. Rather than assemble in tight formation and risk a crash, the helos had lined up single file. When it felt like we weren’t going anywhere, we weren’t going anywhere. Our chopper was waiting its turn to land, without instruments, in pea-soup fog.

  As you can imagine, there was plenty of nervous chatter on the flight home. But for the most part, I didn’t join in. Sitting silently in my staff-cabin recliner, I felt less frightened than foolish. How many times would I need to relearn this lesson? No one is all knowing. No one is infallible. Not the speechwriters, not the people making the weather call, not the president of the United States.

  Even the trained killers of the CAT team were only human. Somewhere above New Jersey, deep in foggy purgatory, our helo had hit an unexpected patch of turbulence. I distinctly saw two of them flinch.

  RETURNING TO YOUR COLLEGE CAMPUS AND BRAGGING ABOUT YOUR recent Air Force One flight is not the only way to feel good about yourself. That said, it works.

  I learned this shortly after my near-death helicopter experience, when I attended my five-year reunion. A half decade out of school, my friends were asking the questions confronted by all twenty-somethings. What fulfills me? Are my goals worthwhile? How do I define success? Working at the White House meant I could skip these questions entirely. I once compared the president to Hitler during a meeting. How much more fulfilling can life get!

  “You’re living the dream,” I was told, at least a dozen times.

  What I didn’t tell my classmates was that, while my higher purpose seemed certain, my moment-to-moment well-being was in constant flux. I was living not one dream, but two. In the first, I flew around on Barack Obama’s private jet while he helped me score brownie points with my girlfriend’s parents. It was awesome. But the second dream was more fevered, more troubling. I was hovering midair. Men with guns surrounded me. I didn’t know where we were going. The pilots were flying blind.

  Was I in paradise, or in limbo? In a state of profound gratitude, or persistent unease? At the White House, it was often hard to say.

  At least I was no longer getting blown up quite so regularly. Still, I continued to open Cody’s edits as though their contents might explode. By now, I didn’t even have to check tracked changes to know what would befall my ego. Like most EEOB employees, I studied the West Wing with anthropological intensity, and had learned to translate my boss’s unique dialect of one-line e-mails.

  My edits. Unmitigated disaster. Pure garbage. Rewrite.

  Here are my edits. I disliked this, but I didn’t completely hate it.

  Some edits. This was acceptable, but only by the smallest possible margin.

  Good job. Good job.

  The final category of e-mail, and by far the most precious, was any message containing the words boom! or bro. These were special. They meant you were totally killing it and had established yourself as a valued member of the team.

  Four months after my return to the White House, however, booms and bros remained elusive. While the Correspondents’ Dinner had been a hit, more serious speeches continued to frustrate me. I wasn’t killing it at all.

  Frankly, neither was POTUS. The reelect was a hearty “good job” from voters, but by the summer of 2013, he was firmly in here-are-my-edits territory. Nor was there any reason to think his approvals would rise. With the fever raging, and our legislative agenda stalled, Americans were losing faith. Fog was enveloping the second term. We needed something to break through.

  That something was a speech. The decision was made to return to Knox College, the site of POTUS’s place-in-history commencement. For a week, Cody barricaded himself in his office. When he emerged, it was with a set of remarks entitled “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class.”

  No one thought the better-bargain address would boost our approvals. Thanks to a splintered bully pulpit, even presidents can no longer tell America what to think. They can, however, tell America what to think about. That’s what Cody’s speech was designed to do. Sometime in the 1970s, the remarks reminded us, higher productivity stopped generating higher wages. The cause-and-effect relationship between work and reward had disappeared. Restoring this link would be the great project of President Obama’s second term. Nor did POTUS stop there. In the rest of his address, he described what he called “cornerstones” of middle-class life. Good jobs. Affordable health care. Economic opportunity. A chance to buy a home. A secure retirement.

  This was riskier than it sounds. There’s a widespread belief that most politicians don’t try to keep their promises. That’s false. They do. But it’s for precisely this reason that politicians generally avoid promising at all. Now, POTUS had laid out five separate standards by which to judge his performance. It wasn’t hard to see the subtext. If I can deliver on these priorities, I will earn my place in history. If not, I won’t.

  AS EXPECTED, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S GUTSY NEW TONE DIDN’T reverse the effects of gridlock. But it did lift morale. For the first time in months, there was hope that the fever could be sidestepped, that our success or failure would not be left to Congress to decide. Our supporters took note.

  “He was good!” friends and family told me, assuming, as they often did, that I had written the remarks.

  “You should have seen the first draft,” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable without actually claiming credit. “It was a real Christmas tree.”

  They had no idea what I was talking about. That, of course, was the point. Like every workplace, Obamaworld was home to a members-only vocabulary. The more disposable we felt, the more comforting it became to rely on phrases outsiders didn’t understand.

  Christmas Tree. Noun. A speech hopelessly weighed down with personal agendas and irrelevant policy details.

  Due-Outs. Plural noun. Tasks assigned at the end of a meeting.

  Bigfoot. Verb. To pull rank on. (“Sorry I had to bigfoot you, but that conference call was for senior staff.”)

  Click. Noun. A picture at a photo line. (“Shouldn’t take long. Only twenty clicks.”)

  Real Person. Noun. An American living outside Washington who is not famous and does not work in government. Often shortened to “RP.”

  Equities. Plural noun. Interests.

  Stakeholders. Plural noun. People with equities.

  Socialize. Verb. To circulate a policy informally. (“Let’s socialize this with stakeholders. We don’t want to ignore any equities here.”)

  Along with the jargon came shorthand. Acknowledgments in speeches were acks. The apparatus POTUS read from was the prompter. His big annual address to Congress was the SOTU. Perhaps most important, the metal flying thing that carried the president around was always the plane. Nothing exposed you as a White House newbie faster than saying “Air Force One.”

  Then there was the shorthand for Obama himself. In 2011, POTUS was still a cool-kids-only word. Then everyone started using POTUS, and the cool kids switched to just P. The initial proved even better than the acronym; on a BlackBerry, it required only one thumb to type. It also implied you were far too busy to waste time on four extra letters. Every so often, someone took the opposite approach, referring to the president as “the president.” But this was done rarely, and only as a power move.

  “POTUS sent edits.”

  “P is running late.”

  “The president personally approved this. Do you still want to change it?”

  At times, White House etiquette was no less complicated than vocabulary. If someone forwarded an e-mail without additional text in the body, for example, it was always po
ssible they were just passing on information. More likely, however, they were sending a message in code:

  “I don’t want an archived record of me saying so, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen.”

  There was one final appendix to the Obama glossary: terms that signaled the absence, rather than the presence, of the thing they described. Chief among these was the process. I’m not sure if they used the term in the West Wing. In the EEOB, however, the process referred to the mysterious black hole all ideas entered and few escaped. POTUS almost shot a video for Comic-Con, but the process moved slowly and it got pulled down. When I suggested a Hamilton parody video featuring the president, I doubted it would survive the process, and it didn’t.

  It was the process that determined which speeches opened with an engaging anecdote and which began with a sleep-inducing parade of acks. The process even dictated where and when POTUS would speak. “How does he decide what to talk about?” interns would ask. I would dutifully pretend to know. But really, their guess was as good as mine. Maybe topics were decided upon in a scheduling meeting. Maybe they were delivered in bundles by storks.

  All I knew for certain was that, just as a surplus of stakeholders led to a Christmas tree, a big speech like the better-bargain address led to a series of message events. These were the bread and butter of POTUS speechwriting, the rhetorical equivalent of routine maintenance on your car. The goal was not to land in the history books. It was to focus America’s headline writers on a specific place and issue.

  OBAMA VISITS MEMPHIS, LAYS OUT PLAN FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGE

  IN KANSAS CITY, PRESIDENT PRAISES COMEBACK IN MANUFACTURING

  In late July, it was decided that POTUS would do one message event for each of his middle-class cornerstones, and that I would take housing policy. This was hardly a vote of confidence. Health care was timely. Education was inspiring. Housing was a sedative. Handing me remarks about mortgage rates and home equity lines of credit was like sending the chubby kid to right field.