Thanks, Obama Page 25
“We count on the press to shed light on the most important issues of the day.”
“And we can count on Fox News to terrify old white people with some nonsense!”
Luther was as loud as ever, but I no longer needed to worry. POTUS wasn’t breaking. For the next five minutes he was flawless, his timing impeccable, his body language perfect. When the subject turned to climate change denial, President Obama’s anger was, as promised, real.
“What about our kids?! What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible bull—”
“Sir!” Luther cried. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Whoa. Hey!”
“What?!” POTUS snapped, and the Hilton ballroom went wild.
Outside the ballroom, the reaction was no less enthusiastic. At the 9 A.M. meeting the next Monday, Jason Goldman, the White House digital director, delivered the news: Our Facebook clip of POTUS and Keegan’s performance had been viewed thirty-five million times. In just forty-eight hours, “Luther, the Anger Translator” had become the most popular government-produced video in Internet history.
I bring this up for two reasons, and the first is bragging. But the second is more important. On some level, every White House staffer is an alchemist. You arrive at the building full of faith in miracles, striving to craft something flawless and shiny from the leaden scraps of real-world events. Before long, however, you realize it’s never going to happen. Anything involving the real world, no matter how well executed, is bound to be impure.
Then one day, if you’re lucky, you’re going about your business when a shiny, golden nugget appears as if by magic in your lap. It’s one of the greatest gifts of public service: you get to be part of small miracles, long after you’ve stopped believing that miracles of any size occur.
Legacy items. That’s the term we used to describe these golden moments. Sometimes we even knew what it meant. Taking out bin Laden was a legacy item. So was rescuing the auto industry, bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But just as often, we imagined our legacy with the starry eyes of a hobo describing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We dreamed of a distant utopia, a sunny political paradise, where the credit flows like a waterfall and approvals stay sky-high.
We weren’t there yet. With twenty months to go until POTUS left office, our place in history was far from certain. But inside the building, something had undoubtedly changed. President Obama’s jaunty, let’s-go-for-it attitude was infectious. We no longer felt like turtles in our shells.
Our growing confidence was matched by growing competence as well. That’s not to disparage the early days: as White Houses go, Obama’s functioned fairly smoothly from the start. Still, the longer POTUS ran the institution, the more we learned from our mistakes. After the Healthcare.gov disaster, we began “red-teaming” a growing number of big decisions, assigning designated cynics to guard against undiluted hope. Confronted with its lack of diversity, Obamaworld gradually became a place where rooms full of white guys were the exception and not the rule. Baby steps, I know. But these baby steps made us a unicorn among bureaucracies—we improved over time.
Somewhat to my astonishment, so did I. At the risk of sounding boastful, I had now gone two full years without angering a sovereign nation. Even better, the White House finally felt like home. There was no one moment when the transformation happened. I didn’t burst forth from a cocoon. It was more like learning a language. You study, you practice, you embarrass yourself. And then one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you call them a motherfucker in perfect Portuguese.
Whoa, you think. I guess I’m learning.
It must be said that my newfound fluency in White House was less a matter of national politics than office politics. I now had enough friends in the First Lady’s office to sneak into East Room concerts without being unceremoniously bounced. Thanks to a growing list of policy contacts, I was winning more battles with fact-checkers. I had even mastered the dark art of adding a single, wildly indefensible claim to a draft when I knew lawyers would be reviewing. That way they could feel virtuous about cutting something while leaving the rest of my speech intact.
I even knew about a kind of top secret, commander in chief sonar: President Obama’s incessant whistling. I’m not sure exactly when POTUS picked up this habit. Maybe 2014, maybe before. All I know for certain is that once he started, he couldn’t be stopped. I’d be waiting for a photo line to finish or a taping to begin. Then, in the distance, I’d hear it, each note clear but the order random, like a child playing recorder or a bird badly botching a call. The louder the sound, the closer the president. When the whistling neared its crescendo, you knew to stand extra straight.
Like all things White House, the whistling also served an informal barometer of power. The more it annoyed you, the more time you spent with the boss. “It is really fucking irritating,” announced one Assistant to the President in a hold room, cementing his place in the inner circle. His tone suggested he was dying to say something. But what?
“Excuse me, sir. I know your judicial nominees are stalled and Yemen’s a nightmare, but could you please knock it the hell off?”
As a SAP, I wasn’t important enough to be annoyed by the president’s tics. I was, however, important enough to take outsiders to lunch at the Navy Mess. After showing us to our seats in the wood-paneled dining room, the uniformed wait staff would inquire about the signature dessert.
“Would anyone like a chocolate freedom?” At this, even people who didn’t like chocolate perked up. “Chocolate freedom?” they asked. Before the server could answer, I jumped in.
“Excellent idea! Chocolate freedom for everybody!”
Later, molten fudge oozing from their lava cakes, vanilla frozen yogurt secure in its candy shell, my guests’ faces would glow with rapture. There was no better ego trip. They were having a once-in-a-lifetime experience; I was having lunch. Drunk with power, or at least familiarity, I traipsed through the residence and self-righteously flashed my blue badge and was as cocksure as Rob Lowe in The West Wing. And then, just when I reached peak swagger, a coworker found me in my underwear in the coat closet of Air Force One.
Allow me to explain.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF MISFORTUNE THAT CAN BEFALL A WHITE House staffer. The first is the act of God. The van hits a pothole on the way to Andrews Air Force Base; ergo, you have coffee on your shirt.
The second is the mountaineering accident. There’s no one big mistake. Rather, there’s a series of small ones. An extra layer left at base camp. A carabineer improperly tightened. Boots a half size too small. No single oversight is worth mentioning. But add them up, throw in some bad luck, and before you know it you’re standing before your colleagues on the presidential aircraft without pants.
The events that led to my mountaineering accident began the first week of June. POTUS was scheduled to fly from D.C. to Germany on Saturday, participate in a G7 summit on Sunday, and return the following afternoon. Cody and Terry had no interest in a thirty-six-hour jet lag fiesta. They assigned me the trip.
As it happened, this was exactly what I had hoped for. I was, by now, no stranger to Air Force One. I had taken more plane selfies than I could keep track of. I knew the best beer available was Yuengling Black & Tan. I had seen the sequels to both Anchorman and Hot Tub Time Machine on the in-flight entertainment system, and monitored at least one eBay auction from midair. But for all my time on board, my farthest trip had been California. I had never traveled overnight.
Which led to my first mistake: I didn’t think about sleepwear. By the time Luke Rosa, our trip director, reminded us to bring something to change into, it was too late. I had no time to shop. The best I could do was rifle through my dresser, where two options emerged. The first was boxers and an oversize T-shirt. The second was a purchase from my freshman year of college, pajama pants adorned with pictures of the Incredible Hulk. It was a Sophie’s choice of sleepwear. I chose Hulk.
My second mistake came just a few
minutes after takeoff. We were in the staff cabin when, without warning or explanation, a member of the medical team entered and began handing out sleeping pills like candy. Foreign-trip veterans knew the drill. They immediately gobbled their meds and staked out prime nesting spots on the carpeted floor. But I stayed in my chair and abstained.
This is how I learned something: Air Force One is a surprisingly shitty place to sleep. It’s cold. It’s loud. The seats don’t recline past forty-five degrees. I understand that “Air Force One ruined my eight hours” is the epitome of a first-world problem. Still, couldn’t whoever installed the top secret communications array have made the track lighting slightly less harsh?
Apparently not. With no chemical help, sleep escaped me. When I finally drifted off, it was for an hour at most.
I awoke somewhere in French airspace, and here I made mistake number three: I ate. I wasn’t even hungry. But I remembered the flight attendant’s words of wisdom—an army marches on its stomach—and eager to be a good soldier, I gorged. Eggs. Croissants. Jam. Fruit. Coffee. Diligently plowing through my tray, I was too busy to notice the line forming along the plane’s port side. By the time my plate was clean, a dozen people stood waiting to enter the lavatory and change into business attire. It would take at least an hour before my turn came. By that time, the plane would be on the ground.
This is the point when I panicked. Waking nightmares began cartwheeling through my head. What if the plane lands, Angela Merkel is there to greet us, and I walk out onto the tarmac in my jammies? In desperation, I scanned the staff cabin for a place to change. The small room with the computer and printer was out—it had no doors. Throwing a blanket over my chair was impossible; the risk of being noticed was too great. Then, suddenly, a stroke of genius! At the front of the cabin was a shallow closet, about six feet high and two feet deep, where staffers hung their coats.
It was the perfect plan. The moment my coworkers’ heads were turned, I scooted into the closet and slid the door closed behind me. With lightning speed, I removed my shirt, socks, and pants. I reached for my trousers. I slid them off their hanger. And that’s when Luke, the trip director, decided to retrieve his coat.
How will I be remembered by those who knew me? You can’t help but ask yourself this question, especially if your work is part of something significant and grand. I liked to imagine that former colleagues, upon hearing my name many years from now, would picture someone self-assured and writerly. “He wrote those jokes I liked,” they might say. Or, “Isn’t he the one who made infrastructure finance come alive?”
Maybe some people really will remember me that way. Maybe not. But as I stood somewhere over Germany, looking from Luke’s stunned expression to the giggling faces behind him, one thing was certain. For a small but significant portion of my colleagues, I will always be startled, pasty, and half naked, a pair of balled-up Hulk pajamas at my feet.
MY LEGACY, IN OTHER WORDS, WAS COMING INTO FOCUS. BUT HOW much did my record—my modest achievements, my less-than-modest humiliations—affect that of the president himself?
According to those responsible for boosting morale, the answer was “A lot.” One day during the fourth quarter, a motivational poster appeared on the first floor of the EEOB, just outside the steps to West Exec. It was a black-and-white picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson. The caption underneath was printed in large, blocky letters.
* * *
MEETINGS OF CHANGE
* * *
I always thought this was cheating. A more accurate “meetings” poster would have shown a staffer browsing Amazon for Christmas presents while listening to a conference call on mute. Still, I got the point. Everything I did somehow affected the Oval. Every action bolstered, or diminished, the most powerful person on earth.
Too bad the message on the walls was belied by the one in the floor. Throughout the EEOB hallways, the black-and-white tiles were dotted liberally with fossils. These were not impressive specimens, dinosaur teeth or mastodon tusks. What we had were mollusks out the wazoo. Most were little more than leggy spirals. A few looked like roaches. Tyrannosaurs these were not.
And yet I couldn’t help but give our long-extinct friends a backstory. As far as I was concerned, the petrified little creatures beneath me had once been the White House staffers of their era. Swimming self-assuredly through prehistoric ooze, they reveled in their outsize importance. Perhaps they even thought about their legacies. Now, a few million years later, here they were, stomped on by the apex predators of a different age.
More than anything else, this cognitive dissonance—the disconnect between floor and poster—was the defining feature of White House life. There is something fundamentally ridiculous about putting humanity’s fate in the hands of mortals. I’m not saying there’s a better way to do it. I’m just saying that being a Very Important Person on one hand and a future fossil on the other takes an emotional toll. To live in such a contradiction, even for a righteous cause, is a low-grade form of agony. It pulls you apart at the seams.
Every White House staffer dealt with this inner turmoil differently. Some became short-tempered. Others took up yoga, smoking, or both. An impressive handful ran marathons. Almost everyone drank.
A few—fewer than you might think—became grandiose. These were the people whose egos ceased to exist except in relation to the Oval. They lost the ability to distinguish between themselves and the president, between petty personal jealousies and weighty national concerns. I don’t blame those who came to believe their jobs made them more than human. A demigod complex is the malaria of the D.C. swamp. Still, it was sad to see good people fall victim.
And what about me? Did I ever succumb? By definition, I can’t honestly say. Awash in paradox, it’s possible (likely, on some occasions) that I acted like an asshole in ways I still don’t realize. Here’s what I know for sure. On days I didn’t exercise, one beer was rarely sufficient to calm my nerves. More often than I care to admit, I went home and acted bratty until Jacqui felt as stressed as I did. There were even moments, often involving airline customer service, in which I thought without irony, Don’t you know who I am?
Also, like everyone, I aged. No matter how young or old, junior or senior, White House service was measured in dog years. Between ages twenty-four and twenty-eight, my gray hairs went from curiosity to invasive species. The dark circles under my eyes became, essentially, tattoos. It only added insult to injury to hear the wrinkles emerging along my mouth referred to as “smile lines.” I knew plenty of smiley people who didn’t lose sleep trying to describe the budget, or furrow their brows each time they saw a member of Congress on TV. These people had hobbies. They went to brunch. Their mouths were fine.
Of course no one aged more, or more publicly, than POTUS. In 2012, I wrote a joke about how he would look like Morgan Freeman by the end of his second term.
“That’s not even funny,” he said.
Three years later, I could see his point. It wasn’t just the well-documented explosion of gray hair. By 2015, President Obama’s puffy eye circles had their own puffy eye circles. His smile lines appeared to have been carved by glaciers. His fingers seemed more delicate, his skin somehow thinner. To adjust to his aging eyes, speechwriters quietly raised the font size on printed remarks from 24 to 26. Every crisis and decision had become part of him, like rings inside a tree.
So, was it worth it? This, I think, is the essential question facing anyone with a tough job, and President Obama’s was the toughest of all. He had chosen his profession with eyes open. He hadn’t taken nearly as much risk as, say, a fighter pilot or marine. Still, the sacrifices were real.
And at the beginning of his second-to-last summer in office, it was also entirely possible they would be in vain. The unique appeal of Obama—what separated him not just from other politicians, but from other Democrats—was the promise that government could do more than fix problems. Government could be a vehicle for our common aspirations. Government could tackle age-o
ld challenges, leaving our country fundamentally better than before.
This is why so much of POTUS’s legacy came down to two persistent stains on the nation’s soul. The defining policy issue of the Obama years was health care. The defining moral issue was race. And in June 2015, on each of these issues, progress was very much in doubt.
With health care, doubt came in the form of a lawsuit. By now, large parts of the Affordable Care Act were succeeding. The uninsured rate had never been lower. The cost of medical care was growing more slowly than before. Obamacare had survived a Supreme Court challenge, a government shutdown, and approximately a gajillion votes for repeal.
But the Holy Warriors refused to surrender. Undaunted, they tried another legal challenge, this time on even shakier ground. It was a truly silly argument—their case hinged on the lawmaking equivalent of a typo—and we figured the Supreme Court would never agree to hear it. Then the Supreme Court agreed to hear it. We began to sweat.
The second issue, race, was far more complicated. For obvious reasons, I don’t claim to be an authority on the subject. But I am the world’s foremost expert in pitching the following joke:
“No matter what else happens, I think there’s a good chance I’ll go down in history as America’s first black president.”
Year after year I tried to add this line to a monologue, and while it wasn’t my finest work, I don’t think that’s why it got cut. In Obamaworld, there was always the nagging fear that the president’s racial legacy would be defined by his skin color, his election, and nothing else. It was the kind of thing you didn’t joke about.
Yet halfway through 2015, that worst-case scenario also appeared to be the most likely one. Deaths of African Americans at the hands of police brought decades of simmering tension to a boil. Black Lives Matter, a movement led by a new generation of civil rights activists, was rightly dissatisfied with the pace of change. After each tragedy came a wave of protests. Occasionally there were riots. Always there was the hope that this nightmare would be the last. But it never was. The tragedies piled up.