Thanks, Obama Page 21

  For a healthy young person, comparing health care plans involves choices no less absurd. Would you rather pay a little less if you get sick in your home state, or a lot more if you get sick anywhere else? Spend more nights in the hospital you don’t need to go to, or save money treating the cancer you don’t have? After an hour, Jacqui had made no progress whatsoever. Exhausted, we retreated to the kitchen to eat leftover ham and give her Republican father a chance to gloat.

  Then we returned to battle. After thirty more minutes, Jacqui finished answering questions. But the moment “would you rather” was over, the glitches began. We attempted to compare insurance plans, only to discover that the least-expensive options—the bronze level—didn’t seem to exist. We reloaded the site over and over. They wouldn’t appear. There are only so many times you can refresh the same page before you begin to wonder if you’re in some cruel psych experiment. But with no better options, we forged ahead. Finally, after approximately ten million refreshes, our persistence was rewarded. The full list of health care plans appeared. Jacqui chose one. The site asked her to wait.

  So we did. We waited and waited and waited and waited, watching a little glowing circle chase its tail in the middle of the screen. Finally, just as we were about to give up hope, something began loading. A new screen appeared.

  It was the home page. Every bit of information was gone. We would have to start from scratch.

  The fight that followed was quiet. We didn’t want to give Jacqui’s dad the satisfaction of knowing Obamacare was tearing us apart. But we made up for volume with intensity, alternating between personal and political in a whiplash-inducing weave.

  “You told me the site was working . . .” whispered Jacqui.

  “Well, you don’t give the tech surge enough credit.”

  “They don’t deserve it!”

  “You overreact about everything!”

  “You’re not really supportive!”

  “You always blame me instead of Congress!”

  “Oh yeah? Well, Democrats don’t care about the middle class!”

  Long-drawn-out silence.

  “You. Take. That. Back.”

  After a while we stopped arguing. What choice did we have but to log back in? Jacqui created her new account. She reanswered her questions. She repicked her plan. Once again, we waited for what felt like forever, holding our breath as the glowing circle spun. Finally, something began loading. A new screen appeared.

  It was a confirmation page. Jacqui was insured.

  I won’t say that everything became perfect in that moment. All I will say is that we jumped off that ancient twin bed and hugged each other more fiercely than we ever had before. We were crying, not with frustration this time, but with joy. True, Obamaworld had mishandled its most cherished legislative priority. True, Republicans in Congress were gleefully watching our approvals slide. But in that tiny room in New Jersey, those things didn’t matter.

  Here’s what did matter. Barack Obama fought to make insurance affordable for everyone, well past the point where it made political sense. He made mistakes. He had blind spots. Sometimes, he even let us down. But he never gave up. He never walked away from Jacqui. And because he stood by her, the person I loved would now be able to see a doctor if she got sick.

  As far as I was concerned, it was the most wonderful time of the year.

  12

  IN THE BARREL

  And then came 2014, which just sucked. Top to bottom awful. The worst.

  Consider the following encounter. Early that spring, while walking home from work, I noticed a short, plump woman approaching me in a kind of determined shuffle. I guessed she was in her late forties or early fifties. Her hair was gray and spiky, and she wore a sweater with both the color and texture of whole-grain bread.

  “Excuse me,” she asked. “Did you work for the Presidential Inaugural Committee?”

  It’s not uncommon for certain White House staffers to be recognized. One morning in 2009, when I was still at the Crisis Hut, my fellow intern Sonia floated into her cubicle on a cloud.

  “I just saw Jon Favreau at the Whole Foods!” she exclaimed.

  That was her entire story. She hadn’t spoken to the president’s chief speechwriter. She wasn’t carrying his child. She merely glimpsed him browsing overpriced lettuce. Apparently, that was enough to rock her world.

  But for every staffer who becomes a local celebrity, at least a hundred remain obscure. For my shyer colleagues, anonymity was the best part of public service. For the rest of us it was a trade-off, no different than writing songs for Rihanna or designing Dwyane Wade’s line of shoes. At least, that’s what I had always told myself. Now, standing on the sidewalk and basking in the glow of a stranger’s attention, an itch was being scratched. I’ve been noticed! I have a fan! I smiled so broadly my lips hurt.

  “That’s right!” I announced. “I spent six weeks on the Inaugural Committee.” My spiky-haired admirer nodded, thrilled to have her suspicions confirmed.

  “And didn’t you also work for Tim Kaine?”

  Now this was really stunning. Imagine meeting Joseph Gordon-Levitt and bringing up his Pop-Tarts commercial from 1991. Mentally, I upgraded the woman to superfan. Then I addressed her with the perfect blend of modesty and poise.

  “I helped with Senator Kaine’s 2012 convention speech,” I confessed. “But it was very good to begin with. I barely had to make changes.” Wowed by my down-to-earth demeanor, she nodded even more eagerly than before.

  “And now you work in the White House, right?”

  At last! Here was the question I had been anticipating.

  “I do indeed,” I said, dropping even the pretense of humility. “Actually, I started writing speeches for the president when I was just twenty-four years old.”

  The woman’s eyes grew large. I basked preemptively in her praise. Then, without warning, she jabbed a finger in my face.

  “I know you!” she cried. “You stole my inauguration tickets!”

  “Wh . . . ?” I stammered. But before I could get a word out, she escalated the charge.

  “You stole my tickets!” she shouted. “You’re a racist! You’re racist, you’re a criminal, you’re in the KKK!”

  Ordinarily, I would have rushed to defend myself. But this woman was such an expert on my life story. For a moment, I actually wondered if she knew something I did not.

  “I . . . I don’t think so?” I suggested. This did nothing to improve matters. When my accuser spoke again she was even louder, this time for the benefit of passersby.

  “He’s racist! He’s criminal! He’s KKK!”

  I briefly considered reasoning with her. A heart-to-heart chat, a little active listening, and surely we’d be back on the same page. Then the spiky-haired woman resumed yelling, and I revised my view and fled. Half walking, half running, I raced down the sidewalk in my dress shoes, my superfan shuffling behind me in pursuit.

  THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, WAS 2014. WE DID OUR JOBS. WE WERE PROUD of our accomplishments. Everyone hated us anyway.

  Our catalog of woe began, as it always seemed to, with Obamacare. (If you find yourself wishing we could move past health care already, just imagine how we felt.) As the New Year dawned, reports weren’t all bad. People were finally using Healthcare.gov. But an insurance market is like the punch at a fraternity party, where young, healthy people are the mixers and old, sick people are the booze. Get the proportions right, and the whole thing goes down smoothly. Fail to mask the alcohol, and you’re screwed.

  At the beginning of 2014, we were looking at a ten-gallon bucket of Everclear. Young people were tuning out information about Obamacare. They didn’t know Healthcare.gov was finally working, or that in most cases they could purchase insurance for less than a hundred bucks a month. The first window to buy coverage closed in March. If we couldn’t grab the attention of America’s youth by then, Obamacare premiums would skyrocket for everyone else. That would trigger what is known, in otherwise sedate policy circles, as
a death spiral. The White House communications department was ready to throw a Hail Mary pass.

  What we didn’t know was that the perfect play had been drawn up five years earlier. On Halloween 2008, a producer for the comedy website Funny Or Die had been seized with patriotic fervor. Grabbing a pen and a piece of unlined paper, he began to write.

  I, Mike Farah, guarantee that the FOD team will for sure meet or have the opportunity to meet Barack Obama between October 31st 2008 and October 31st 2016 or I’ll eat my hat.

  It is safe to say that, at the time, hat eating was the likely outcome. But Farah knew how to put himself in the path of lightning. In early 2013, he was invited to his first White House meeting. For the next twelve months he hovered in the background, never pushy but always available, like an extremely well-tanned Secret Service agent. His company produced Between Two Ferns, a weird online talk show hosted by comedian Zach Galifianakis. Maybe POTUS could appear as a guest? The idea was ludicrous. And then it wasn’t. In 2014, when desperate times called for desperate measures, Farah was there to help.

  Here I must confess something: I thought putting POTUS on Between Two Ferns would be a huge mistake. My concern was not that he would come across as unpresidential. My concern was that he would come across as kind of a dick. The camera didn’t always catch the nuance in his humor, the way a smile or raised eyebrow could soften a rhetorical blow. Good-natured teasing in person could look like bullying on-screen.

  Take what happened when President Obama met my parents. This was backstage before a speech at a New York City Sheraton, the kind of photo line POTUS had done countless times before.

  “Mr. President,” I announced when my turn came, “this is my mother, father, and sister.”

  “Mom, Dad, sis, good to see you!” (To remove the potential for hurt feelings, the president avoided “Nice to meet you” at all costs.)

  We grouped ourselves into a bell curve by height. POTUS put his arm around my shoulder, and I readied myself for our click. But instead of a camera, I was surprised to hear President Obama’s voice.

  “Uh, maybe you should put down your speech?”

  My printed draft! I had taken a copy off the plane, and now, to my horror, I realized I was clutching it like a security blanket. I trotted over to a nearby aide, handed him my file folder, and sheepishly slouched back into the frame. POTUS once again put his arm around my shoulder. But just as quickly, he released.

  “Your badge?”

  This was less playful. It was the tone Jacqui used when I was about to forget my credit card at a bar. “You’re still wearing your badge,” he repeated. “You might want to take that off.”

  The president was still smiling. But this was no longer his bright, photo-line smile. It was the can-you-believe-this-idiot smile he reserved for staff who did something harmless but dumb. As fast as I could, I yanked my ID off my neck and I stuffed it forcefully into my pocket. Naturally, this caused the lanyard to spring back out. I wrestled the lanyard in. It popped back out. I wrestled it in. It popped back out.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity of struggle, I secured my badge. I was ready for our picture. But there was no way POTUS was letting me off the hook. Instead, he turned toward my father.

  “You know,” he said, grinning slightly, “he’s a pretty good writer. But he’s a little absentminded.”

  How did President Obama do that? Did my dad write a letter to the White House, suggesting the single most accurate adjective with which to embarrass his son?

  I wouldn’t put it past him—unlike me, he wouldn’t have forgotten to attach postage. More likely, however, the president’s extraordinary ability to read a policy memo extended to reading people as well. Just as he could pluck the most important issue from pages full of jargon, he could scan a human being and intuit their most cringeworthy trait. He wasn’t being mean, exactly. The teasing was always in good fun. But behind his trash talk inevitably lay a kernel of deeply personal truth.

  That’s what worried me about Ferns. If I’d been watching that exchange with my parents on YouTube, rather than living through it, there’s a good chance POTUS might have appeared cruel. How could he trade barbs with Zach Galifianakis, one of the best-loved schlubs in America, without going too far?

  The discomfort ran the other direction as well. Rachel Goldenberg, one of the episode’s producers, later told me no one knew if the host truly had permission to read his lines. At one point, he struggled.

  “What does it feel like . . .” He hesitated, but POTUS was having none of it. “Come on, man!”

  With the president’s permission, Zach tried again.

  “What does it feel like to be the last black president?”

  I wish I could take credit for jokes like that. But when we worked with professional comedians (and Zach, Scott Aukerman, and B. J. Porter, Ferns’ creators, are three of the best) I tried not to butt in. Instead, I added a few words to the president’s plug for Obamacare. I made sure he mentioned a phone number, just in case Healthcare.gov unexpectedly crashed. Mostly I waited and worried, certain our last-gasp attempt at pitching health insurance to young people was doomed to fail.

  Here’s how wrong I was. In July 2013, I drafted a health care speech for POTUS. As I write this, it has about ten thousand YouTube views. In the twenty-four hours after the release of Between Two Ferns, eleven million people watched it online. Put another way, for every dining room table you could fill with people who have streamed my speech, ever, you could fill Radio City Music Hall with people who saw Ferns in a single day.

  And they didn’t just watch. They took action. Overnight, traffic to Healthcare.gov jumped 40 percent. In the two weeks that followed the episode’s March 11 release, the young and healthy came out of the woodwork to sign up.

  Back in 2013, before Healthcare.gov, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted seven million people would purchase insurance through Obamacare. After the site’s disastrous launch, the law’s critics confidently gloated that this projection would be way off. They were right. By mid-April, eight million people had signed up.

  On April 17, President Obama held a press conference to trumpet the good news, and Cody assigned me to write what’s known as the topper—brief, prepared remarks before the first question is asked. I was thrilled. I couldn’t wait to help POTUS tell our comeback story.

  Yet when I arrived outside the Oval Office a few minutes before the presser, the president didn’t appear excited. In fact, he looked downright glum. As usual before a public appearance, he was bantering, this time with press secretary Jay Carney. But the bouncy energy he displayed before big rallies was missing. At one point, the subject turned to weekend plans.

  “Golfing again?” Jay joked. GOP frenzy over the president’s weekly eighteen holes renewed themselves like clockwork each spring, a blooming crocus of outrage. But President Obama didn’t look amused. He looked weary.

  “Jay,” he said, “that’s the only time I get to go outside.”

  It was only once we arrived in the briefing room that I understood why POTUS might feel deflated. On television, presidents at press conferences appear larger than life. In person they look like goldfish in a bowl. The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—which holds forty-nine seated reporters—is only slightly bigger than your average American garage. The stage has all the height and majesty of a shipping pallet. President Obama wasn’t commanding his audience. He was surrounded by it.

  Before I continue, I should clarify something: I don’t think most members of the traditional White House press corps are biased toward a political party. That said, they are definitely out to get the president. It’s only natural. Every reporter wants to be Woodward and Bernstein. Setting their sights on anyone but POTUS would be like Captain Ahab chasing a guppy across the high seas.

  Along with this common dream—uncovering the next Watergate—reporters share a tendency to herd like wildebeests around a single dramatic arc. “What’s the story here?” they ask, as
though narratives are distant planets to be discovered rather than frameworks they create. As a consumer of news, I empathize. I count on journalists to help me decide what matters and what does not. But the danger arises when facts start to fit the narrative and not the other way around. Combine reporters’ desire to congeal around a story line with their innate distrust of the powerful, and a presidential comeback is hard to stage.

  Still, I was confident that our Obamacare news could pull it off. Imagine if, after its brush with the iceberg, the Titanic had not just stayed afloat but crossed the Atlantic ahead of schedule. That’s what had just happened to POTUS’s top domestic priority. Surely we could all agree this was a game changer.

  Well, no. We couldn’t. The eight million new signups, touted so enthusiastically in the president’s topper, were almost completely ignored once the reporters’ questions began.

  When will your health care law become popular?

  Can you finally fix what’s wrong with it?

  Will Democrats embrace it on the campaign trail?

  These were not unreasonable things to ask. What was unreasonable was the set of assumptions behind them. With the early failure of Healthcare.gov, the narrative had reached its “floundering president” chapter. No amount of evidence could turn the page.

  PRESIDENT OBAMA HAD A TERM FOR BEING STUCK IN THESE CYCLES of negative news coverage. He called it being “in the barrel,” and he treated it the way kindergarten teachers treat an epidemic of head lice. Deeply unpleasant. Happens once or twice a year. Eventually goes away.

  I was less certain. I still worried that Americans saw the Healthcare.gov debacle as a kind of infidelity, one they had not yet decided to forgive.