Thanks, Obama Page 19

  Like any good right fielder, however, I pretended not to notice. Just as I had done before all my speeches, I leaned back in my ergonomic chair, my dress shoes adding to the collage of scuff marks on my wall. I relished this moment. With nothing but a blank screen and a blinking cursor, I was Beethoven sitting down at his piano. I was Picasso picking up a brush.

  Then, suddenly, an epiphany: I wasn’t doing my job at all. My work wasn’t art. It was craft. For all but the tiniest handful, government service is about competence, not genius; precision, not brilliance. It was time to stop pretending the process didn’t apply to me.

  So that’s what I did. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I harvested bits and pieces of old language, gluing them together with lines from Cody’s Knox College remarks. I punched up old anecdotes instead of finding completely new ones. True, I added a few new flourishes: a joke here, an RP story there. But there was no getting around it. It was the least original work I had ever produced.

  As if that wasn’t process-y enough, I had to run it by the fact-checkers. The idea of a White House that checks facts—the idea of a White House that believes in facts—already seems like a relic of another time. Yet less than six months ago as I write this, there was an entire research office responsible for making sure that the president’s statements were true. Our researchers saved me from countless embarrassments. They were invaluable, not just to the president but to democracy itself. Hardworking and unfailingly humble, they were model public servants. Also, they bothered the shit out of me.

  It wasn’t personal. The research office was just a few steps away from the speechwriting office. We were on the same team and friendly outside work. Inside the building, however, we feuded as bitterly as the Sharks and Jets.

  The problem, as far as researchers saw it, was that any speechwriter left unsupervised would begin writing fiction. The problem, as far as speechwriters saw it, was that researchers were almost comically risk averse. Terrified of even the slightest error, they highlighted line after line in yellow, with little notes underneath. These comments could make me bang my head against a wall.

  America is the greatest country on earth.

  Actually, the Nordic countries surpass us on several key measures.

  Our economic policies are working.

  Just flagging that Republicans might not agree.

  I didn’t blame the fact-checkers for going a little overboard. In their world, a surplus of caution was a surefire way to get ahead. But the result was an eight-year-long, cover-your-ass arms race. Research began adding nearly or almost to every assertion. POTUS began skipping over the words nearly and almost every time he spoke. Research began deferring to policy on even the most obvious questions. Speechwriting began suggesting that if every question was so important, perhaps researchers should, well, research a few answers themselves.

  I didn’t often collaborate with my fellow speechwriters on lines or paragraphs. But in the EEOB, we swapped anti-research tactics the way allies shared intelligence during the Cold War. We had no choice. If research had gone over the paragraphs you’ve just finished reading, here are just a few of the notes I would have received.

  Just a few steps away from

  Flagging that stride length varies by person, sometimes by large amounts.

  We were on the same team.

  Defer to the Office of Presidential Personnel.

  . . . as bitterly as the Sharks and Jets.

  At the end of West Side Story, someone dies. Can we say “almost as bitterly”?

  POTUS began skipping over the words nearly and almost every time he spoke.

  Should change to “nearly every time he spoke.”

  We had no choice.

  Do you have backup proving this? If not, “We had limited choices” would be safer.

  For all its truth-preserving merits, research was the process personified. No matter how excited I was at the outset, it left me completely, totally drained. My housing speech was scheduled for Tuesday, August 6. By the time I sent a draft to Cody, that Sunday afternoon, I never wanted to see it again. To be honest, I never wanted to write another speech again. Every ounce of emotional energy had evaporated. Every drop of joy was gone.

  Exhausted and famished, I went to lunch with Jacqui at a Thai restaurant near my apartment. Before we could even order, my BlackBerry vibrated. It was Cody. Too tired to care anymore, I opened the e-mail from my boss.

  Great job, bro!

  Just like that, the exhaustion vanished. I knew my next set of remarks would be another roller coaster. So would the set after that, and the set after that. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t wait to dive back in.

  This, I was realizing, is what it really means to work at the White House. Ping-ponging between emotional extremes, I had finally arrived at my inner common ground. I was in paradise and limbo. Indispensable and disposable. Defined by process and purpose. Washington was in the grip of unbreakable fever, yet there was nowhere I’d rather be.

  Was my job as wonderful as I’d imagined when I’d first walked through the gates? Of course not. But it was also more than enough. On the day of the housing speech, as I sauntered into the staff cabin and snatched a paper card off my seat, I might even have told you I was living the dream.

  Mr. LITT, the card said. Welcome aboard Air Force One.

  11

  THE HOLY WAR

  “We already have a Christmas,” I told Jacqui. “It’s called Yom Kippur.”

  This was during our first July together, when she was giddy about being halfway to December and I was not. To be clear, I didn’t hate Christmas. I had no desire to be a Grinch. I simply placed Christmas in a category with The Big Bang Theory, the Dave Matthews Band, and peyote. It wasn’t my thing.

  For Jacqui, this was unacceptable. Presbyterian on her father’s side, Catholic on her mother’s, she was not especially fervent about most aspects of her faith. But when it came to Santa Claus, indoor trees, and It’s a Wonderful Life, her evangelism easily surpassed Saint John’s. That I did not accept Christ as my lord and savior left her unbothered. That I did not accept Christmas as the most wonderful time of the year made her fear for my very soul.

  Hence the inquisition that first July. “What do you do on your Christmas?” she demanded.

  “Well, for starters, we don’t eat anything.” I hoped to sound high-minded, even spiritual. But Jacqui remained unconvinced.

  “If you don’t eat all day, then what do you do?”

  “Mostly we pray,” I said.

  “For what?” she said. “For food?”

  IF MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER WERE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE, imported from eastern Europe, and told this story, he would surely be furious to hear I was dating outside my religion. But his disapproval wouldn’t last long. One look at two dudes kissing in the gayborhood near my apartment and he would drop dead of a heart attack on the spot.

  In this way, Jacqui and I were a product of relaxing attitudes all over. Interracial, same-sex, interfaith. Second marriages, cohabitation, no-fault divorce. The overall trend, decades in the making, was neatly summarized by a leading gay-marriage slogan.

  “Love is love.”

  There was just one big exception. Politics. In 1960, a mere 5 percent of Americans said they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. A half century later, that number had exploded eightfold, to 40 percent. Partisanship, in other words, was playing a dividing-line role once reserved for religion and race.

  As a loyal Democrat, I felt firsthand the effects of political tribalism. In the mid-2000s, for example, I knew President Bush spent a scandalous amount of time on vacation. This was not a conclusion I reached via analysis. It was dogma. Then I got to the White House and learned the truth: presidents are never really on vacation. No matter how many days he spent clearing brush at his Texas ranch, George W. Bush was permanently at work. This was a mild awakening, less “God is dead” than “God has a peanut allergy.” Still, it came as a shock.


  Yet that is nothing compared to what happened across the aisle. Yes, it’s true that both Democrats and Republicans became polarized in the early twenty-first century. But it’s also true that both Porky’s and Psycho depict bad manners in the shower. Degree counts.

  After all, when Obama took office, postpartisanship was kind of his thing. On big issues—education, climate change, health care—he borrowed ideas from Republicans. Rather than starting from one extreme and negotiating toward the center, his early proposals often arrived with compromise baked in. A few decades earlier, these gestures might have been reciprocated. But this was the age of the Tea Party. Each time Obama entered new common ground, a kind of white flight occurred.

  By 2013, thanks to backlash against a Spock-like president, even logic itself had become partisan. More and more, the Republican Party was defined not by arguments but by articles of faith: Climate change wasn’t real. Voter fraud was rampant. Deficits were rising instead of falling. More guns meant less gun violence. President Obama’s economic recovery plan had yet to create a single job.

  That these ideas were demonstrably untrue was not, in and of itself, a problem. My own religion forbids consuming milk with meat. As anyone who has ever eaten a cheeseburger can tell you, this makes no sense. And that’s fine! If every tenet was rational, we wouldn’t call it a faith. But journalists who continued to treat the GOP as a traditional mesh of interest groups invariably tied themselves in knots. The conservative movement had undergone a transformation. The Republican Party had become a kind of church.

  This did not mean its members were in complete agreement. As with any self-respecting religious institution, a million sects and subgroups vied for control. It’s impossible to classify every denomination. To understand President Obama’s second term, however, all you need to know are the following three:

  First, the Country Clubbers. Guardians of the GOP’s upper-crust traditions, they believed in lower taxes, less regulation, and being polite. They were led in Congress by Speaker John Boehner. They held out hope for the resurrection of Mitt Romney. Their fortunes were not on the rise.

  Second, the Flat Earth Society, with Sarah Palin as its patron saint. These were the hard-core conspiracy theorists. They insisted that President Obama had faked his long-form birth certificate. They were certain that bike-share programs were a world-domination plot fostered by the UN.

  Finally, the Holy Warriors. Some of these crusaders were, in fact, religious. Others were more likely to quote The Lord of the Rings than Matthew or Luke. But regardless of where they spent their Sundays, what they shared was a worldview. Where traditional Republicans saw a debate between liberal and conservative, Holy Warriors saw an existential battle between good and evil. They warned endlessly of appeasement. They spoke of “defeating the Left” as though Satan’s minions were amassed along the Pacific coast.

  The Holy Warriors pursued Romneyite goals with Palinite fervor. For this reason, they were ascendant in 2013.

  If we’re being honest, however, what really put butts in pews was Obama. Nothing united Republicans more successfully than dislike of the commander in chief. And nothing provoked them more than his greatest legislative achievement. To Country Clubbers, the Affordable Care Act was a wealth transfer from rich to poor. To Flat Earthers, Obamacare meant death panels and government takeovers. To Holy Warriors it was the ultimate triumph of leftism—the final step on the road to Mordor.

  As you might imagine, the Obama White House disputed its signature law’s evilness. When it came to the law’s importance, however, we couldn’t have agreed more. We were excited by all that Obamacare could accomplish: insuring millions, slowing the rise in health care costs, ending the ban on preexisting conditions. But our attachment went beyond cost-benefit analysis. The most sacred piece of Democratic orthodoxy was that government could improve people’s lives. The most sacred piece of Republican orthodoxy was that it could not. If Obamacare worked the way it was supposed to, the debate would be over. There would be no doubt which was the one true church.

  For this reason, both sides looked toward October 1, 2013, as a kind of Judgment Day. For at that fateful moment, Americans would be able to use something called Healthcare.gov to shop for insurance online.

  On the surface, this didn’t sound very exciting. A store! On the Internet! Designed by Uncle Sam! But the moment the marketplace launched, millions of people would be newly able to buy insurance. Once that happened, repealing Obamacare would mean robbing voters in every state and district of health care they could finally afford. For the law’s opponents, Healthcare .gov was a doomsday device. It had to be stopped.

  Enter Ted Cruz. On paper, the first-term Republican senator seemed an unlikely high priest for the Holy Warriors. According to his freshman-year college roommate, young Ted was so reviled he was said to leave a layer of “cruhz” (rhymes with scuzz) on every surface he touched. But in a party that saw no difference between compromise and betrayal, there were benefits to being bad at making friends. Before long, the jowly Texan had placed himself at the helm of a great crusade. The strategy was simple. If President Obama refused to defund his own health care law before October 1, Republicans would shut the entire government down.

  The Country Clubbers whined and tut-tutted, but there was nothing they could do. To protect themselves from Tea Party challengers in their primaries, they had promised drastic action. Now the bill was due. Besides, the 2011 debt ceiling crisis left Republicans convinced that hostage-taking worked. Threaten to harm America badly enough, and President Obama would cave. The idea of a shutdown started out as crazy talk. By September, it was a near certainty.

  What followed in the White House was a kind of white-collar doomsday prep. First, employees were divided into two groups. If your job was crucial to national security, or you were senior staff, you belonged to “essential personnel.” I was part of the second category, and if I had been in charge of naming it, I would have been more polite. “Valued personnel.” “Still-special personnel.” Even just “Group Two.” But the federal bureaucracy did not care about my feelings. By decree of the United States Government, I was officially nonessential.

  After the culling came the stern legal warnings. During the shutdown, if I sent even a single e-mail from my BlackBerry, I could face a five-thousand-dollar fine. Unsure when I’d be allowed back in my office, I riffled through my desk drawers, disposing of perishable snacks. Last-minute errands in the West Wing were more serious. Staff assistants scrambled to teach their bosses to transfer a call or to choose a printer from the drop-down menu.

  Finally, on September 30, President Obama appeared on television like a principal before a nationwide snow day, listing buildings and services that would close. A few hours after his announcement, I left work. I hung my badge deep in the back of my closet. Then, just to avoid temptation, I popped open my BlackBerry, yanked out the battery, and shoved both objects deep into a drawer.

  For the next few days, I felt like a third grader whose school has burned down. On an abstract level, I knew the shutdown was hurting people. But on a personal level: vacation!

  I wasn’t alone. Washington’s bars and restaurants have always catered to functional alcoholics coping with stressful jobs. With the jobs suspended, we were free to practice our functional alcoholism full time. At a neighborhood bar called the Brixton, four dollars would buy me a cup of something called Furlough Punch. The next morning, I could nurse my hangover at the Daily Dish, where federal employees got free coffee and congressmen paid double. After yet another all-day happy hour at Lou’s City Bar, I could tuck into the “Boneless Chicken, Spineless Congress” special at Nando’s or free nachos at Mango Mike’s.

  The fun lasted a week. After that, I became overwhelmingly bored. And worried. The shutdown was the biggest political fight in generations. It wasn’t clear who would win.

  Republicans tried everything to sway public opinion. Borrowing a page from the Country Clubbers’ playbook, Fox News rebranded the
event a “government slimdown,” as if Uncle Sam were cutting carbs. When no one bought that, Palinites began buzzing about a new grassroots movement, “Truckers Ride for the Constitution.” Organizers painted an epic picture: ten thousand tractor trailers, each driven by a pissed-off patriot, circling the beltway until Obama resigned in disgrace.

  “Truckers will lead the path to saving our country if every American rides with them!” their Facebook page proclaimed.

  I disagreed with their politics, but what really bugged me was their diction. Paths are fixed objects. You can’t lead them anywhere. Not that it mattered. In the end, only a few dozen truckers showed up. They honked around a bit, inconvenienced a few commuters, and then led the path back home.

  More than any presidential speech, the shutdown forced voters to notice which party was behaving like a bunch of children and which was not. Republicans’ approval ratings began to plummet. With increasing desperation, they turned to the Holy Warriors. Surely Ted Cruz could save the day!

  But this was where politics-as-religion fell short. Blinded by devotion, the faithful hadn’t noticed that their prophet lacked a plan. The crusaders’ strategy was best summarized by one of Cruz’s close allies, an Indiana congressman named Marlin Stutzman.

  “We’re not going to be disrespected,” Stutzman told the Washington Examiner. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

  As the shutdown dragged on, there was one final hope for the Republican Party. Surely Obama would cave. But not this time. In 2011, POTUS had paid dearly for negotiating with hostage takers. Two years later, he refused to repeat his mistake. His message was as clear as his opponents’ was muddled. Stop hurting the country. Release the hostages. Or face the voters’ wrath. On October 16, 2013, the shutdown battle ended in a rout. Republicans agreed to reopen the government. In exchange, Democrats agreed to let them.

  The next morning I returned to the White House. Passing through the Secret Service checkpoint, I saw Denis McDonough, our new White House chief of staff, standing on West Executive Avenue. He was beaming as he shook everyone’s hand.