Thanks, Obama Page 4

  “Everyone does it,” she informed me.

  Our movement has no place for line cutters, I thought. But part of me wondered if she and a tiny man with a white mustache knew something I did not.

  I FIGURED FINDING MY PLACE IN OBAMA’S WASHINGTON WOULD BE quick and straightforward, like learning your house at Hogwarts. But just to be on the safe side, I found an internship with a crisis communications firm while I waited for the sorting to begin. This was a boutique agency, the kind that boasted former lawmakers on the board. It was also the kind of place that makes you sign an agreement prohibiting future use of its real name.

  “You’ll love the Crisis Hut,” my interviewer promised over the phone. She knew I came from the Obama campaign, and she assured me her own organization was no less devoted to hope and change.

  “One of our clients is a company that manufactures cribs. When a crib collapsed and killed a baby, we helped them get a second chance!”

  I accepted her offer, confident I would be a Crisis Hut employee for no more than a few weeks. I was a former organizer with outstanding numbers. How long could finding something take?

  But Obama had hired more field staff than any campaign in history. There simply weren’t enough jobs to go around. The Ohio campaign team held regular check-in conference calls. Listening to them was like reading logs from an Arctic expedition as it slowly realizes it’s doomed.

  January 21: Fired up! Ready to go!

  February 9: Stay positive. Positions take a long time to fill.

  March 16: Ask yourself: Am I setting my sights too high?

  April 3: Remember, it’s okay not to get a job.

  It was during these months that I realized the phrase Before Iowa was being used in Washington the way Before Christ was once used in Galilee. It seemed only fair that those who joined the campaign BI, like Steph Speirs, got first pick of jobs. But other hiring decisions were harder to swallow. Miranda, the inaugural ball line cutter, joined the campaign after I did, yet she landed a coveted administration post just weeks after arriving in D.C.

  By that time I was frustrated, but not surprised. Even the new Washington, it seemed, rewarded a particular set of skills. A talent for flattery. An unshakable sense of entitlement. A sense of confidence out of proportion to one’s achievements. I don’t mean to imply that 2009 was an endless series of House of Cards sex-murders in a desperate climb to the top. All else being equal, however, a slight inclination toward sex-murder didn’t hurt.

  Nor was I above playing the game. A friend of a friend was twenty-six years old, a bona fide professional working in health care policy, and I was thrilled when he agreed to meet me for coffee. For thirty minutes, I tried desperately to soak in his wisdom. He saved the best for last.

  “Remember,” he proclaimed, “networking is only bullshit if you’re bullshit.” Then he headed for the door, tossed his paper cup in the recycling, and never replied to my e-mails again.

  After the Obama campaign, working at the Crisis Hut felt like joining the marketing department of Soylent Green. Our clients included a Wall Street bank that helped wreck the economy, a coal company that considered worker safety a form of socialism, and a gold magnate whose mining process involved small lakes full of cyanide. Facebook updates from former coworkers were like postcards from a country where my visa had been denied. “We got the stimulus!” posted one former Ohio colleague, now a White House staffer. I was happy to see President Obama’s economic package pass Congress. Still, I winced. This was a new kind of we. I wasn’t included. My movement was moving on.

  Things only got worse. By March, friends who had yet to land a job began slinking out of D.C. like baboons rejected by the troop. This was around the time I informed Gertrude, my Crisis Hut supervisor, that our mining magnate’s profits were threatened by jewelers using reclaimed gold.

  “Stupid environmentalists,” she replied, in a tone that struck me as oddly personal. “Always trying to be green, am I right?”

  Looking back, I had reached what campaign organizers refer to as a “choice point.” On one hand, I could ditch the Crisis Hut, abandon the job search, and return to a life of Manhattan planktonism. On the other hand I could stay, making my peace with disaster-prone coal companies and cyanide-filled lakes. But both paths felt like surrender. I wasn’t ready to choose. Instead, with my work life spiraling downward and my dreams of changing Washington unfulfilled, I did what every D.C. intern dreams of doing. I went rogue.

  It started with the dress code. I began wearing shirts I’d bought during a study-abroad program in China, a collection whose dominant theme was “polyester.” Next I brought my laptop from home, abandoned my cubicle, and set up shop in the break room. If the economy hadn’t been shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, perhaps my coworkers would have complained. But preoccupied by weightier concerns, they let me go about my business.

  More and more often, my business was a euphemism for playing Minesweeper. It was one of two free games that shipped with my laptop, and I began by clicking through the easy grids, ten by ten. Soon, however, I was playing six to eight hours a day, and had advanced all the way to a hundred by a hundred. When even this failed to attract notice, I came up with my boldest act of rebellion yet: answering questions exclusively in analogies to the game of Minesweeper I was currently playing.

  “David, did you finish that report on infrastructure investment?” Gertrude might ask.

  “Almost,” I’d reply. “But you know how when you’re playing Minesweeper? And you’re on the highest difficulty setting? And you only have one mine left but it’s taking you a long time to decide where to click? It’s kind of like that.” I’d drum my fingers on the keyboard, hard at imaginary work.

  “I might not be done for a while.”

  I congratulated myself on my cunning. But I was an intern Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Late one morning, straggling to work and draped in synthetic fabric, I heard a voice behind me. It was Bill, Gertrude’s angular, shark-faced boss.

  “My office. Now.”

  Less than three years later, I’d meet with White House interns hungry for advice. How had I managed to land a dream job? I would play my part, furrowing my brow and mumbling something about doing what you love. But in those moments, what I really thought about was the way my shoes sank into the beige carpet as I walked to Bill’s corner office. From a burnished wood picture frame, his wife and son stared at me accusingly. Once seated at his desk, my boss’s boss leaned backward, shark eyes flashing with a mix of anger and bewilderment. In the break room, I had felt defiant and alive. Now I just felt childish.

  I learned something about myself that day: I am not above begging for forgiveness.

  I was lucky to receive it. Most rogue interns never get a second chance. And here it’s worth mentioning that I benefited from what was known in 2009 as being fortunate, and is now more commonly called privilege. It’s not like I flashed an Ivy League gang sign and was handed a career. If I had stood on a street corner yelling, “I’m white and male, and the world owes me something!” it’s unlikely doors would have opened. What I did receive, however, was a string of conveniences, do-overs, and encouragements. My parents could help me pay rent for a few months out of school. I went to a university lousy with successful D.C. alumni. No less significantly, I avoided the barriers that would have loomed had I belonged to a different gender or race.

  Put another way, I had access to a network whether I was bullshit or not. A friend’s older brother worked as a speechwriter for John Kerry. When my Crisis Hut term expired, he helped me find an internship at West Wing Writers, a firm founded by former speechwriters for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In the summer of 2009, my new bosses upgraded me to full-time employee.

  Without meaning to, I had stumbled upon the chance to learn a skill. The firm’s partners were four of the best writers in Washington, and each taught me something different. Vinca LaFleur helped me understand the benefits of subtle but well-timed alliteration. Paul Or
zulak showed me how to coax speakers into revealing the main idea they hope to express. From Jeff Shesol, I learned that while speechwriting is as much art as craft, and no two sets of remarks are alike, there’s a reason most speechwriters punctuate long, flowy sentences with short, punchy ones. It works.

  The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything.

  At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show:

  “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.”

  Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd.

  “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.”

  That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic.

  Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

  Besides, working for well-heeled clients came with its own set of perks. One of our clients, a bona fide billionaire, owned a pro basketball team. A few months after starting my new job, I was invited to a game. As I took my plush seat in a luxury box, I marveled at the bounty before me. Free beer. An amazing view. Unlimited hot dogs. The perfect afternoon.

  Then the subject turned to Obama’s proposed health care law, and suddenly everything changed. My host’s eyes took on a wistful, faraway quality.

  “I’ll tell you,” the billionaire sighed, looking out from the owner’s box. “It just doesn’t pay to be rich anymore.”

  In fairness, our client was not the only one who had come slightly unglued over Obama’s policies. On April 15, 2009, I was walking through downtown Washington when I came across a crowd of people railing against government and waving tricornered hats. It was hard to take them seriously while they were wearing Halloween costumes. Imagine watching someone dressed as a sexy kitten endorse a Medicare privatization scheme. Still, I shouldn’t have dismissed them. On television and in person, the conservative colonists multiplied with alarming speed.

  Some of the leaders of the backlash said their name was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.” Maybe this was true at first. But the Tea Party was soon infused with paranoia that had nothing to do with taxes. While the ugliness caught Washington observers by surprise, anyone who had spent time in a battleground state recognized it instantly. Back in Ohio, volunteers had been told to check boxes corresponding to a voter’s most important issue: economy, environment, health care. But what box were you supposed to check when a voter’s concern was that Obama was a secret Muslim? Or a terrorist? Or a communist? Or the actual, literal Antichrist? How could you convince a voter whose pastor told them your candidate would bring about the biblical end of days?

  Other people were just plain racist. Outside an unemployment center in Canton, a skinny white man with stringy hair and a ratty T-shirt told me he would never, ever support my candidate. When I asked why, he took two fingers and tapped them against the veiny underside of his forearm. At first I didn’t understand.

  “You won’t vote for Obama because you’re a heroin addict?”

  It took me at least ten seconds to realize he was gesturing to the color of his skin.

  This sort of thing was not part of every conversation. It would be wrong to say racism was the only thing eroding Obama’s support. But it would be equally wrong to deny its existence. Better to say that bigotry was like one of the Beach Boys who wasn’t Brian Wilson. The lyrics would have been the same without those unmistakable ooohs and ahhs, but it would have been a whole different sound.

  For the first few months of the campaign, this paranoid, prejudiced stew simmered in the background. Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his vice president, and everything blew up. As a speechwriter, I learned to use the phrase permission structure to describe the conditions that allow a choice to be made. If you’re counting calories, for example, “cheat day” might be the permission structure for a plate of deep-fried chicken wings followed by several slices of chocolate cake.

  Sarah Palin was a permission structure unto herself. With the mannerisms of June Cleaver and the worldview of Joe McCarthy, she gladly trumpeted what the Bush administration merely implied.

  “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America.”

  “He’s palling around with terrorists.”

  “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.”

  Suddenly, every day was cheat day. In the countryside, volunteers reported that Obama yard signs were being used for target practice. Mailboxes were bashed off their posts in the middle of the night. One day I ducked into a Panera at the shopping center. When I returned to the parking lot, I found an elderly white man in a sport coat verbally assaulting the bumper sticker on my car. Perhaps he was protesting the idea of a black president. More likely, skin color was just one of many things that made Obama seem so wrong. His big-city background. His youth. His Ivy League degree. His name. The fact that Ludacris was on his iPod and Pat Boone was not. There was an endless buffet of otherness to choose from.

  At first I imagined that, in the same way that only the winning candidate gets to live in the White House, only the winning philosophy gets to come to D.C. During Obama’s first hundred days, that appeared to be the case. Congress expanded health insurance for low-income children, invested in clean energy and infrastructure, and helped protect equal pay. The president created a task force to save the auto industry, expanded women’s health funding, and reversed George W. Bush’s ban on stem cell research.

  But my movement wasn’t the only one with big ambitions. On September 12, 2009, more than seventy-five thousand Tea Partiers marched on Washington, a pale sea dotted with pastel lawn chairs and yellow Don’t Tread on Me flags.

  Once again, Sarah Palin gave voice to the crowd. On August 7, she had claimed the president’s proposed health care law included “death panels.” This was categorically false. It would have been equally honest to decry Obama’s plan to lay eggs inside your brain. But the Tea Partiers believed it anyway. As tricornered hats advanced toward the National Mall, the phrase was on everyone’s mind.

  The dishonesty made me furious, but as a budding speechwriter, I had to give Sarah Palin credit for a well-crafted slogan. Death panels had captured the Right’s imagination no less thoroughly than Yes we can had captured the Left. The middle ground was shrinking. You had to pick a side.

  Team Yes We Can continued notching victories. On March 23, 2010, President Obama’s sweeping health care overhaul finally passed. I thought of Wendy, my vol from Ohio. My eyes filled with tears. But Team Death Panels was gaining strength. For Republicans in Congress, voting on one of Obama’s laws had become like critiquing one of Hitler’s paintings. You were required to hate it, whether you liked it or not.

  As the November elections drew closer, an anti-Obama wave began to build. My bosses at the speechwriting firm
gave me five weeks off to try and stem the tide. From a tiny cubicle in Democratic National Committee headquarters, I resumed recruiting vols and calling voters, but this time there would be no Election Night relief. We lost every single congressional race we hoped to win. With newfound control over the House of Representatives, Republicans now held veto power over any law the president hoped to pass.

  I hadn’t stopped believing in Obama. But the idea of a new Washington had never seemed so absurd. It was time to leave the nation’s capital. I sublet my room to a producer for NPR music, sent invites for a going-away party, and began looking for an apartment in Chicago. Obama’s reelection campaign was setting up its headquarters there. I would knock on the door, show them my numbers from Ohio, and unpack boxes until somebody hired me.

  But there was something I didn’t fully appreciate: hacking away blindly at the vines and shrubbery of life, a career path had emerged. In an act of remarkable generosity, my bosses sent my writing samples to David Axelrod, President Obama’s messaging guru, and his chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Jon asked for my résumé. Thanks to my 2010 campaign work, we had mutual friends who could vouch for me. One of these friends introduced me to Tyler Lechtenberg, a speechwriter for the First Lady, who quietly suggested I might not want to leave town. Without realizing it, I had become not bullshit.

  A few days later, Jon and I met for coffee. His deputy was leaving, he told me. I could add my name to the long list eager to join his team. But there was another option. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior advisor, had spent months looking for a speechwriter without success. If I was interested, I would become the sole candidate for the job.

  It was, in other words, a choice point. Would I put my faith in meritocracy? Or would I seize the chance to cut in line? Two years earlier, I would have eagerly applied to be a presidential speechwriter, confident the best person would win. Not anymore. I told Jon I wanted the job with Ms. Jarrett. Then I double-crossed the NPR producer, took back my room, and made sure I owned a suit, shirt, and tie.