Thanks, Obama Read online

  Then came Charleston. On June 17, a white, mop-topped twenty-one-year-old walked into a black church and, after taking part in Bible study, shot nine people dead. The killer’s name was Dylann Roof, and he didn’t choose his target at random. He hoped to start a race war or, even better, convince America a race war had already begun.

  It seemed entirely possible he would succeed, setting off a perpetual motion machine of chaos, violence, and hate. And even if Roof’s act of terror failed to metastasize, there was no question Charleston left America exhausted and depressed. On the next evening’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart told his audience he was out of jokes. Instead, he delivered a deeply pessimistic tirade.

  “We still won’t do jack shit,” he said. “Yeah. That’s us.”

  The following Monday, a sense of gloom and uncertainty hung over the country. The White House was no exception. It was quite possible that, sometime before the week was out, the Supreme Court would rob millions of their health care. It was certain that on Friday the president would go to Charleston, where even the consoler in chief seemed no match for the cold logic of despair. Our string of fourth-quarter wins suddenly felt less exhilarating. Would President Obama’s faith in America prove unfounded? Would his legacy, and ours, fall apart? No one knew.

  And then, in a period of less than forty-eight hours, everything was answered.

  IT STARTED ON THURSDAY, WITH A RULING BY THE SUPREME COURT. Lots of people think that White House aides get advance notice of these decisions. Surely someone knows a guy who knows a guy. No, they don’t. Instead, judgments are unveiled like Oscar winners, a tradition both cruel and unusual for staffers who spend every waking hour creating the illusion of control. Imagine a careful, calculating poker player pausing halfway through a hand for an interlude of Russian roulette. That’s what decision days are like.

  In June 2015, these tense moments were even tenser than usual. At approximately 9:55 A.M., as the justices prepared to release their rulings, the entire building stopped whatever it was doing. The minutes ticked down, then the seconds. By now Jacqui was covered through her employer, so her insurance didn’t hang in the balance. But for Zoe Lihn and millions like her, the next moment could be the most important of their lives. I bit my cheek nervously. My feet twitched.

  And then, at 10 A.M., an anticlimax. The court would rule on something other than Obamacare. My adrenaline still pumping, I’d return to work.

  Until June 25, that is. At 9:59 A.M. that Thursday, the Affordable Care Act was a Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously alive and dead. Then, just one minute later, the court unveiled its decision. By a 6–3 vote, the Holy Warriors were defeated. Barack Obama’s signature achievement would not be overturned in court.

  Long before the ruling, Cody had drafted multiple sets of remarks, one for each possible judgment. That morning, standing in the Rose Garden, POTUS delivered the most triumphant of the bunch.

  “Five years in, this is no longer about a law. This is not about the Affordable Care Act as legislation, or Obamacare as a political football. This is health care in America.”

  Obviously, this was optimistic. Obamacare’s days as a political football weren’t exactly over. But the president’s broader point was undeniable. For a population nearly twice the size of Virginia, the Affordable Care Act was not an ideological minefield or political prize. It was insurance. Congress could still weaken the law. Maybe they could even one day repeal it. But the fundamental principles behind Obamacare—that everyone deserves access to health care, and that the government can help secure it—were now woven into American life.

  For the rest of the day, it was as though the entire White House had taken political ecstasy. Glowing coworkers smiled at each other for no reason. Meetings began and ended with hugs and high fives. Even the chocolate freedom tasted sweeter. It seemed nothing could top that moment.

  Until, just one day later, something did.

  Two somethings, actually. At 10 A.M. on Friday, June 26, I heard a wave of squealing outside my office. When I opened the door I found interns flooding the corridors, like the children in Matilda when Miss Trunchbull gets her due. The Supreme Court had just handed down another ruling. Same-sex marriage was legal nationwide.

  I could barely believe it. The college students bouncing giddily in the hallways were not quite old enough to remember 2004, when opposing “the homosexual agenda” helped vault George W. Bush to a second term. But I was. A freshman in college, I was home for Thanksgiving that year when my childhood friend Chris came out to me. I will always remember what I thought next.

  That’s too bad. He’ll never be able to get married.

  This, remember, was in Manhattan. Even for a blue state like New York, legalizing marriage equality seemed not just unlikely but preposterous. You might as well have told me we’d all be riding dragons or growing prehensile tails. Now, just a decade later, Chris could get married in any state he pleased.

  This time it was Sarada Peri, a fellow EEOB speechwriter, who had written multiple versions of a Rose Garden address. She, too, got to shred all but the most inspiring speech.

  “Progress on this journey often comes in small increments,” said the president. “Two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

  In 239 years of presidential history, it was hard to find a moment like the one we were living through: a young century’s most progressive law, and its most dramatic step toward equality, each ratified in a single twenty-four-hour span. Yet even now, President Obama had no time to celebrate the thunderbolts of justice. In just a few hours, he would be on his way to Charleston. He had a eulogy to give.

  THE PREVIOUS WEEK, AS CODY BEGAN WORKING ON THE REMARKS for Charleston, I heard through the grapevine that POTUS wasn’t excited about speaking. He had already addressed the nation eight times after mass shootings. Over and over, he said something would have to change. Then nothing changed. Why would this time be different?

  By the day of the speech, however, the president had his answer. When Dylann Roof appeared in court, victims’ family members, who had every reason to hate him, offered words of forgiveness instead. Rather than defend the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina capitol, the state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, called for it to be taken down. A killer had hoped to summon the worst of America through his actions. Instead, the best of America rose up in response. In his eulogy, President Obama found a word to explain what had happened.

  Grace.

  “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us,” the president said. “For he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.” He spoke eloquently of these new insights. The pain caused by the Confederate flag. The horror of gun violence. The pernicious, lasting scars of racism.

  Even more important than his words, however, was the way he said them. New speechwriters, writing their first remarks for an African American audience, would often be told, “Take ’em to church.” For these speeches, POTUS borrowed his cadence from the civil rights movement and generations of black preachers. Our job was to find language to match. But until Charleston, these were smaller, targeted events, not national addresses. When the whole world was watching, POTUS was a kind of crossover artist, as much professor as pastor, as much Kennedy as King.

  Not anymore. “The church is and always has been the center of African American life,” he said, “a place to call our own.”

  Not their own. Our own. So often, after a tragedy or injustice, it fell to President Obama to explain what black America was going through, to be a kind of anger translator in reverse. But this time, instead of describing the anguish of his fellow Americans, he joined them in their grief. With every word the president spoke, you could see his heartbreak building. Then, without warning, he paused, looked down, and shook his head.

  Watching on the li
vestream, I was confused. I had studied President Obama for years. I thought I knew every gesture. But this I hadn’t seen before. Was he about to cry? To walk away? For another moment, there was only silence. An arena of mourners held its breath.

  Then, softly, the most powerful person on earth began to sing.

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

  One of the pastors onstage laughed, delighted. “Sing it, Mr. President!”

  That saved a wretch like me.

  Behind him, a second pastor nodded and clapped. Before long, the entire arena was singing. Some cried uncontrollably. Some smiled broadly. Most did both. As POTUS came to the speech’s crescendo, a church organist began improvising a riff behind him. When the president reached his final line, he made sure to emphasize the fourth-to-last word.

  “May God continue to shed his grace on the United States of America.”

  With his right hand, he gave the podium a satisfied little thump.

  THERE ARE RARE MOMENTS WHEN EVERYONE IN WASHINGTON flocks to the White House on some unspoken command. The night of the bin Laden raid was one such moment. Friday, June 26, was another. I met Jacqui after work, about a mile north of the building. Without having to discuss it, we joined the throng.

  Then we reached Lafayette Park, and we stopped and stared in amazement. The White House was lit up in the colors of the rainbow. Up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, couples of every description were holding hands. They cheered. They laughed. They cried. Mostly they looked up, toward the house where their president lived, lost in something as close as you can get in politics to wonder.

  Every legacy needs its defining moment, an image that lives forever in our minds. Barack Obama gave us plenty to choose from. Historians will debate. But on that summer evening, I made my choice. For a part of me, the president will always be singing, almost but not quite on key.

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

  That saved a wretch like me.

  In that golden, miraculous moment, he looks vulnerable and human. His hair is gray. His heart is breaking. But as he thanks a higher power for the chance at something more than wretchedness, his voice is crystal clear.

  I once was lost, but now am found

  Was blind, but now I see.

  In less than two days, Barack Obama had secured his place in history. No, the problems he faced were not solved forever. The Affordable Care Act was still under attack. Race was still a fault line. Discrimination against LGBT Americans remained far too real. But I now lived in a country where health care was a right and not a privilege; where you could marry who you loved; where a black president could go to the heart of the old Confederacy and take all of us, every color and creed, to church.

  President Obama had not just fixed an economy. He had not just ended a war. He had made America a better place than the one where I grew up. The country I lived in seven years ago, the country I lived in seven days ago, had been fundamentally transformed.

  On January 3, 2008, a freshman senator told me that people who love this country can change it. For the next seven and a half years I hoped that promise was true, and worked to make it true, but never knew for sure. Now, standing outside the iron gates of the rainbow White House, I no longer had to wonder. There was still a long road ahead for people who loved this country. But could they change it?

  Yes. We did.

  15

  THE FINISH LINE

  And yet something wasn’t right. The past two days had been a nonstop moment of triumph, an Obamabot’s wildest dream. But I didn’t feel triumphant at all. Earlier that morning, right after the ruling legalizing gay marriage, I ran into our speechwriting intern Chelsea. Chelsea had started at the White House only a few weeks earlier. Now she was grinning ear to ear, basking in the latest piece of history.

  “Just so you know,” I heard myself say, “it’s not always like this.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. I gotta get out of here.

  Burnout. That was the word everyone outside the building used, but it wasn’t quite right. What really took place was a kind of emotional erosion, each intense, thankless workday another drip on the idealistic portion of the soul. I knew plenty of staffers who arrived at the White House awestruck and shiny eyed. Eighteen months later, they sounded like convicts planning to break out of jail.

  I was not yet a prisoner of 1600 Pennsylvania. I still loved my job. But I didn’t always like my job, and the more time passed, the larger the unlikable things loomed. I was tired of fighting with fact-checkers over sentences like “These steps are making a difference.” I was tired of arguing with staffers who wanted POTUS to ack them by name at the Hanukkah party. I was tired of explaining that not every set of remarks needs its own, novel-length appendix on the budget process. These frustrations hadn’t grown more numerous. But they had grown more frustrating.

  Also, two years before my thirtieth birthday, I felt over-the-hill. “Of course I love The West Wing,” gushed Chelsea the intern. “I watched every episode on Netflix in eighth grade.” This was bad enough. The final straw came a few weeks later, when a young assistant in the real-life West Wing e-mailed me about a draft.

  “I don’t think POTUS can say, ‘We’re all in this together,’” he informed me. “That’s a line from High School Musical.”

  The benefit of seniority was that I felt no need to respond to such nonsense. I was secure in my knowledge that the concept of teamwork predated 2006. Still, even as I gained authority, I could feel myself losing perspective. Without meaning to, I had added a stop to my West Wing tours, directing guests to a glowing red cube near the Mess.

  “This is our new soda machine!” I would announce. “The best part is you can combine flavors. I’m a big fan of raspberry lime ginger ale, but everyone has their favorites.”

  “Looks nice,” my guests would murmur, eager to change the subject. “And what’s that over there?”

  “Oh, that? That’s the door to the Situation Room.”

  SO YES, I WAS FEELING A LITTLE ERODED. EVEN SO, THE END OF THE second term was less than a year and a half away. I could do eighteen months standing on my head. In the end, it was the successes, not the frustrations, that made me feel ready to leave. POTUS himself put it best:

  “We haven’t won every battle. We’ve still got a lot more work to do. But when the cynics told us we couldn’t change our country for the better, they were wrong.”

  To hear President Obama so firmly declare victory was satisfying beyond belief. But it also marked, as firmly as a graduation day, the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. POTUS still had plenty on his to-do list. So did Cody: a final SOTU, a Democratic Convention speech, a farewell address. But with five first-rate speechwriters working beside me in the EEOB, and plenty more across Washington waiting in the wings, my own role no longer felt so vital. Thanks to the commissioned-officer seal on my business card, I was now essential personnel. But in the best possible way, I felt more nonessential than ever before.

  And then a strange thing happened. Once I decided it was time to leave, I got way better at my job. I stopped worrying if drafts would get blown up. If I feared a line might go too far, I wrote it anyway. What were they going to do, fire me?

  The week after the Charleston eulogy, Cody assigned me a speech on criminal justice reform, to be delivered at the national convention of the NAACP. I was excited about the topic, a cause whose time had come. But I could also hear echoes of the immigration address I had so badly bungled. For thousands of NAACP convention-goers, mass incarceration was a moral failing. It left gaping holes in families and neighborhoods, belying America’s ideals. UFGs saw it differently. As far as Karen was concerned, the best argument was economic. Why spend eighty billion dollars a year on prisons when we can spend that money on roads and schools instead?

  I sat in my office, knowing I would have to thread a needle and doubting that I could. But to my surprise, something had changed. I felt looser. Instead of writing in risk-averse fits and starts, I let the
words and sentences flow: facts, stories, arguments, principles, wrapped around each other like strands strengthening a cord. When I sent the draft to Cody, I was certain it was the best of my career.

  And then nothing. Hours passed. I waited for edits. No word. I had been writing speeches long enough to know what was happening. Cody was making major changes. When my draft came back, it would be soaked in red. Finally, long after I had abandoned hope, the light on my BlackBerry blinked. Eyes downcast, I opened my boss’s reply.

  Great job, bro! You really found the muse on this one.

  I wasn’t sure if Cody had only recently begun believing in muses, or if he had always believed in them and I had only now discovered mine. It didn’t matter. I practically levitated.

  The next day, Ferial Govashiri, the president’s personal assistant, asked if I could swing by the Oval. For the first time in my four years working for Barack Obama, it was just me and POTUS in the room. We went through his notes, along with the paragraphs he had written by hand on a yellow legal pad. I returned to my office and made his edits. The next day we flew to Philadelphia, where, waiting backstage for the president, the board of the NAACP broke into a spontaneous rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

  During my time at the White House, it must be said that I wrote some truly bad speeches. Some were overly technical. Some were boring. A few were not just flawed but embarrassing, like poems you write in high school and find years later in a drawer. But on this particular afternoon, four years after my first remarks for the president, POTUS stood before a packed convention hall and delivered a perfect speech. The audience gasped when he described the scope of the problem. They applauded as he spoke of actions he would take. He went through cost-benefit analysis and detailed policy proposals without ever losing sight of his big moral case.