Thanks, Obama Read online

  “Welcome back! Good to see you. Good to see you. Welcome back!”

  And why not celebrate? For five years, we had fought an endless string of uphill battles. Now, at last we were victorious. The promised land was finally in sight.

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I ALMOST SET BARACK OBAMA’S HAIR on fire.

  In fairness, it was technically a team effort, one that began when Hope Hall decided to film the weekly address outdoors. By positioning the camera on the first-floor balcony of the residence, she could capture the immaculate green sweep of the South Lawn. In the distance, across Constitution Avenue, the west face of the Washington Monument would glisten in the afternoon sun. What better way to show America that the government had reopened?

  Once Hope laid out her vision, our A/V team began bringing it to life. In the White House, while civilians do the filming and writing, lights and sound equipment are handled by enlisted military personnel. I enjoyed spending time with the A/V guys, not least because our paths to 1600 Pennsylvania were often quite different. At age nineteen, for example, I was disciplined for falling short of a science requirement. Jared was disciplined for machine-gunning a dolphin during an offshore training exercise. Still, less than a decade later, his professionalism was a tribute to the reforming power of military service. Like all members of his team, Jared worked with an attention to detail I never could have matched.

  For the weekly address the day after the shutdown, the person in charge of equipment was a skinny, muscly marine named Joe. Joe was a firm believer in contingency plans. Arriving at the taping, I found extra-long extension cords snaking into the residence. The spare camera battery was charging on its stand. A boom mic warded off ambient noise.

  Joe even remembered to bring “diva lights,” the suitcase-size LED arrays you sometimes see in behind-the-scenes pictures of models on a shoot. One high-wattage panel was positioned on either side of the president’s chair. Then, to prevent any glare, Joe shielded each light with something called a diffusion cover, essentially a large Tupperware lid.

  The taping was scheduled for early afternoon, so in theory the extra lighting was unnecessary. But we were lucky Joe played it safe. It soon became clear that even by White House standards POTUS was running way behind. I puttered around the residence for hours, killing time staring at portraits of Ben Franklin (pensive), and of Martin Van Buren’s daughter-in-law (unexpectedly hot).

  Finally, as the sun was beginning to set, we got word: P was moving. In anticipation, the diva lights burst on. But instead of heading to the balcony, the president and Denis, the chief of staff, began pacing the perimeter of the South Lawn. One lap. Two laps. Then three. It was nearly dark by the time they finished. Stepping out onto the balcony, President Obama looked tired and perturbed.

  Then he sat down, and his attitude immediately shifted. I was always impressed by how rapidly POTUS cycled between moods at these tapings. He could arrive from a deadly serious meeting on Afghanistan, perk up to record a Michael Jordan birthday greeting, and then let his face fall for a solemn tribute to our troops. For weekly addresses, POTUS adopted a tone that was both formal and slightly severe, as if he were narrating a video about the dangers of backyard trampolines.

  “This week, because Democrats and responsible Republicans came together, the government was reopened.”

  All of a sudden, I smelled something. Bug spray? Sunscreen? I glanced at Hope and Joe to see if they had noticed it, too. They hadn’t. Probably a false alarm.

  “Specifically, there are three places where I believe that Democrats and Republicans can work together right away,” POTUS continued. He dropped both hands in an emphatic gesture, underscoring his point.

  That’s when I saw it.

  The plastic lid on one of the diva lights had begun to smolder. A tiny, molten hole was releasing a curl of toxic smoke just a few inches from the president’s left ear. I turned my head toward Joe. Just a few seconds earlier, his face had been reassuringly calm. Now, he looked constipated with fright.

  But POTUS was on a roll, and he didn’t catch Joe’s expression. Nor, thanks to the breeze that evening, did he notice the sheet of burning poison by his head. “First, we should sit down and pursue a balanced approach to a responsible budget,” the president said. His demeanor was cool and collected, a sharp contrast to the red-hot, glowing chaos nearby. Fumes began to build. The plastic took on the urgent, quivering quality of newspaper in a fireplace moments after a match is lit.

  So naturally, without hesitation, I jumped in and saved the day. I extinguished the flame, rescued the president, and earned myself the gratitude of Barack Obama, the nation, and the world.

  At least, that’s what happened in my robust fantasy life. Here’s what I did in my real life. Nothing. I remained totally frozen. Completely silent. And since then, I’ve asked myself the same question at least a thousand times.

  Why? Why didn’t I speak up? For that matter, why didn’t Hope? Why didn’t Joe?

  The more I’ve thought about it, the more certain I am that our tongues weren’t tied by shock or fear. What held us back was the same bureaucratic angel that saved me at the Correspondents’ Dinner two years before. Staaaaay in your laaaaaane. I was in charge of writing the script. Joe was in charge of preparing the set. Hope was in charge of operating the camera. What we needed was someone in charge of making sure the president’s head was not incinerated. But no such person existed. No one had been assigned that due-out. And in Obamaworld, straying outside your lane was a mortal sin.

  Not a moment too soon, the president noticed Joe and me share a look of abject horror. Instantly, his attitude changed.

  “Guys, what’s going on?”

  Silence.

  “What?” he snapped.

  Remarkably, we still said nothing. But while I remained paralyzed, POTUS’s question snapped Joe to life. Grabbing a towel, he sprinted past me and smothered the diva light.

  Once President Obama realized what had happened, he fixed us with a withering look. I prepared myself for a completely justified tirade. But to my surprise, his expression grew weary instead of angry. With a new plastic cover in place, he raced through the taping and into his house.

  “Have a great weekend, everyone.”

  “Um, you, too, sir.”

  I am not saying Barack Obama was a saint, capable of forgiving any trespass. Here’s what I’m suggesting instead: his responsibilities were so great, and he took them so seriously, that his employees’ almost burning his face off barely registered on his list of concerns. There was too much else to worry about. The shutdown had wreaked havoc on our economy. The Holy Warriors were vowing to continue their crusade.

  And finally, there was the issue that threatened Obama’s entire presidency, the one that had surely been responsible for his long, somber walk around the South Lawn with his chief of staff. There was no use sugarcoating it. The Obamacare website was a mess.

  “JUST VISIT HEALTHCARE.GOV,” SAID POTUS ON OCTOBER 1, THE DAY the online marketplace opened. “There, you can compare insurance plans side by side the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.”

  This was a bold claim, belied only by the fact that it wasn’t true. On October 1, Americans could indeed type Healthcare.gov into their browsers. But the idea that anyone could actually use the site was, to put it mildly, a stretch. A lucky handful purchased coverage. For millions more, buying insurance through Obamacare was like returning a defective Kvartal at IKEA multiplied by a Comcast customer service rep. The user interface made airplane cockpits appear straightforward. The pages loaded so slowly they might as well have been written by hand.

  That was assuming you could access the site at all. One reporter set out to create an account, and succeeded—after sixty-three tries.

  By now, Healthcare.gov’s early faults have been well chronicled. Less commonly understood is the way the website was to Obamacare what LeBron is to the Cleveland Cavaliers. With the star player sidelined, everything e
lse began falling apart.

  Nowhere were the consequences more dire than with a simple, ten-word promise: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Between 2008 and 2013, President Obama made some variant of this pledge approximately three dozen times. This was surprising. Ordinarily, such blanket statements drew a flurry of angry fact-checks.

  If you like your plan

  Flagging that people with objectively crummy insurance plans may nonetheless like them.

  . . . you can keep your plan.

  Insurance companies might be forced to drop plans that don’t meet the law’s higher standards. Just flagging.

  These caveats were ignored, and in theory shouldn’t have mattered. The Americans at greatest risk of losing insurance had overpriced, subpar plans to begin with. Surely they would welcome the online marketplace with open arms. Imagine learning you could trade in your beat-up ’92 Civic for a brand-new Lexus. You wouldn’t be furious. You’d be thrilled.

  With no Healthcare.gov, however, there was no marketplace. The Lexuses were locked inside a labyrinth of buggy code. Meanwhile, the ’92 Civics were being unceremoniously scrapped. Four million Americans were informed their old insurance would soon be taken away.

  “If you like your plan” was not a lie, exactly. It was an act of unfounded optimism rather than willful deceit. But when people are terrified about losing health care, such distinctions cease to matter. For the first time ever, President Obama’s credibility with voters began to erode.

  This is why the Obamacare rollout was not merely a hiccup or a growing pain. It was a disaster. Imagine if every flight sold through Kayak wound up, unexpectedly, in Mogadishu. Imagine if Amazon accidently began shipping nests of angry hornets to people’s homes.

  And here’s where the business world and political world diverge. If Kayak or Amazon are in crisis, it’s a story. If a presidency is in crisis, it’s the story. In the White House, good news is fleeting, and bad news is Groundhog Day. Night after night, Americans heard the exact same report. President Obama’s site wasn’t working. His promises weren’t being kept.

  Then there was the most dispiriting news of all: outside the building, people had tried to warn us. In March, a team of McKinsey consultants predicted that Healthcare.gov might not be ready on schedule. In July, the site failed key tests. In August, insurance companies briefed Nancy Pelosi’s office with concerns. In hindsight, I could even recall my own father intervening. “I have this friend in Connecticut,” he told me that summer. “He says these sites are going to be a mess.”

  This wasn’t entirely random. My dad happens to be a doctor. But he didn’t work in government. He certainly wasn’t the president of the United States. So what accounted for our massive blind spot? Put another way, how is it that Andy Litt knew Healthcare.gov was going to be a shitshow and Barack Obama did not?

  While I’ll never be entirely certain, here’s my guess: no one told POTUS his law was in trouble for the same reason no one told him his head might be set aflame. What we needed was a designated pessimist, someone in charge of sounding the alarm. But role of the naysayer hadn’t been assigned to anyone. As a result, no one spoke up.

  In Obamaworld, the typical response to crisis was to circle the wagons, but Healthcare.gov was no typical crisis. Not long after the government reopened, POTUS announced that a cadre of patriotic programmers was being flown in from California. The fate of the second term—the future of hope and change—was no longer in our hands. Only Silicon Valley’s disruptors could save us now.

  IN DECEMBER, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S APPROVAL RATINGS FELL TO 40 percent, the same number George W. Bush hit three months after Hurricane Katrina dealt his presidency a mortal blow.

  “What’s the mood like over there?” friends asked, less in a spirit of concern than rubbernecking. The Obama White House was imploding. They wanted juicy details. Determined not to give them the satisfaction, I told them we were just fine.

  “Everyone’s feeling great!” I promised.

  But I was lying. In truth, the mood was awful. We slouched through the EEOB’s hallways. We plodded across West Exec. It was as if every White House staffer had been simultaneously broken up with.

  And in a way, we had been broken up with. The most pressure-packed workplace in the country was no longer located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Overnight, the center of the universe had left us for a nondescript building in Maryland, the headquarters for our heroic team of nerds. I rooted for what reporters were calling “the tech surge.” I wanted it to succeed. But on a more personal level, I wanted life to go back to normal. I wanted the White House to feel White House-y again.

  Part of me doubted it ever would. Websites can be fixed, but the damage to Obama’s movement would be far more difficult to repair. In Washington, you often hear people say that “perception is reality.” I usually like to imagine these people walking through plate-glass windows. This time, however, they had a point. After our shutdown triumph, the Obamacare rollout was supposed to be the knockout punch. The battle over the size and scope of government—an argument decades in the making—would be settled once and for all.

  Instead, thanks to unforced errors, our greatest victory had become our most catastrophic defeat. To the press, Obamacare would be forever mired in controversy. To the law’s opponents, Healthcare.gov would be a symbol of government’s inability to do anything right. It was disappointing. It was infuriating. More than anything, it was exhausting. Sure, we were on the right side of history. But would we ever actually prevail?

  Perhaps it sounds corny, but what kept me going was Zoe Lihn. “I refuse to walk away from forty million people who have the chance to get health insurance for the first time,” said POTUS, and despite my growing doubts, I agreed with him. I thought about Zoe’s mom, Stacey, standing on that Charlotte stage. I thought about Wendy, my Ohio volunteer, pacing our campaign headquarters despite near-crippling pain.

  And I thought about Jacqui. A year earlier, after earning her law degree, she had graduated into one of the toughest job markets new lawyers had ever encountered. While she found work that paid decently, it didn’t come with benefits. She was uninsured.

  I should add that Jacqui was in perfect health. Her situation was nothing like Wendy’s or Zoe Lihn’s. Yet this was precisely the point: my girlfriend was one of the lucky ones, and her lack of coverage was something we worried about literally every day. The night Jacqui first met my family, we were walking to a bar in Brooklyn when my sister accidentally brought a spike heel down on her foot. More than her pain, I remember her panic. Was something broken? How much would an emergency room cost? Could we set a bone using duct tape and WebMD?

  There we were, two well-educated professionals in the richest country on earth, wondering if we knew how to jury-rig a splint.

  OUR A-TEAM OF CODERS COULDN’T UNDO THE DAMAGE TO THE president’s credibility. They could, however, make Healthcare.gov suck less. By mid-December, the site’s error rate was under 1 percent. In speeches, we urged Americans to try signing up online.

  In private, however, I advised Jacqui to wait. Engineers were still fixing faulty code. The insurance wouldn’t actually kick in until New Year’s. Why not give it more time?

  Specifically, why not wait until Christmas? Two years into our relationship, I had finally promised to spend Jacqui’s favorite holiday in New Jersey with her family. I saw this as a gesture, like telling an English friend you’ll go with him to watch a soccer game. She saw it as a full-blown embrace, like telling an English friend you’ll tattoo Saint George’s Cross on your forehead and beat a Scotsman with a pipe.

  Thus my real reason for suggesting Jacqui wait to buy insurance. If the Christmas spirit overwhelmed me, I could always count on Healthcare.gov to darken the mood. Driving north on the turnpike, we listened to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and I casually wondered who paid for Grandma’s outpatient therapy. A nativity scene became an excuse to mention that, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, pregnancy was no
longer a preexisting condition.

  And yet, despite my determination to be a wet blanket, Christmas charmed me. It wasn’t just the presents and pajama-clad mornings. Beneath the cheer and sleigh bells, I found a web of often-contradictory traditions. Layers of familial angst needed managing. There was the constant sense that one’s celebrating was not quite celebratory enough. And to think I worried about fitting in! Pork products notwithstanding, Christmas was the most Jewish thing I’d done in months.

  Lost in piles of wrapping paper and mountains of spiral-cut ham, we nearly didn’t get around to health care. But once Christmas Day was over, we decided it was time to take the plunge. On the night of December 25, 2013, Jacqui and I closed the door to her childhood bedroom. Then, cautiously, we opened Healthcare.gov.

  When speechwriters sought out Real People for POTUS remarks, we tended toward the dramatic: hero firefighters, single moms returning to college, wounded veterans beating the odds to recover. If an anecdote wasn’t extraordinary (or, as often happened with midwesterners, the RP was frustratingly humble), I wasn’t above teasing out a quote.

  “So, would you say getting hired at the Chrysler plant made you believe that, in America, anything is possible?”

  “Uh, I guess so.”

  “No, really. Would you say it?”

  What I had forgotten, until I myself became a real person, were the countless far less dramatic stories that begin with a decision a politician makes. Red light cameras are installed to compensate for a budget shortfall, and suddenly you’re opening a ticket in the mail. A trade deal stalls in Washington, and a dentist in Malaysia buys a Hyundai instead of a Ford. A president makes health care reform a priority, and five years later a pair of twenty-somethings sit on a twin bed, wondering if their relationship will survive history’s most infamous online store.

  The first step, creating an account, went smoothly. But if signing in was easier than expected, what followed was hopelessly complex. To help you pick the right insurance plan, the site asked a series of questions. These reminded me of the “would you rather” game I used to play on the middle school bus. Would you rather fart every time you blink or have hiccups forever? Have no nose at all, or a second nose on your butt?