Thanks, Obama Page 7

  But the biggest lie of The West Wing, by far, was the walk-and-talk. In President Bartlet’s White House, staffers strolled side by side, trading barbs about policy while aides scurried in and out of the frame. In the actual West Wing, walking and talking was dangerous. One morning I left Favs’s office and, perhaps distracted by the sewagey smell, nearly tripped over a pair of black leather shoes. I looked up to see who they belonged to: it was a face I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I riffled through options. A new colleague? A B-list celebrity? A contestant on the latest season of Top Chef?

  Oh, I realized, I know where I’ve seen you before. You’re the president of the United States!

  I leapt sideways just in time to avoid learning what the Secret Service does to people who head-butt Barack Obama in the chest. Still, the lesson had been learned. In the West Wing, possibilities were endless. But space was tight.

  Which was one reason I didn’t actually work there. Like most staffers, my office wasn’t at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but at 1650, in an ornate stone monolith known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The EEOB sits inside the White House security perimeter, but in both size and style is nothing like the mansion next door. It’s five stories tall. It occupies an entire city block. In 1888, Henry Adams, one of his era’s most renowned curmudgeons, called the place “an architectural infant asylum.” More than a century later, it’s hard to argue his point. I regularly got lost inside my own workplace, adrift in a sea of imposing spiral staircases and stately marble floors.

  If there were a Hallways magazine, the EEOB would surely score a centerfold. Six or eight of us could have strolled through the high-ceilinged corridors arm in arm like a cadre of Von Trapps. What we lacked was power. In fairness, our nearly six hundred rooms contained a handful of top presidential advisors. But the vast majority of us, myself very much included, weren’t anywhere close.

  Theoretically, no one noticed this divide. When we referred to the White House campus, we spoke of just one entity. “The building.”

  “Have you worked in the building since day one?”

  “Is this ask coming from inside the building? If not, I’ll ignore it.”

  “Why would you get lunch outside the building? It’s Taco Wednesday!”

  In reality, however, the White House campus held two distinct buildings, and everyone knew it. The pedestrian walkway between them, West Executive Avenue, took on almost mythic importance. My first day of work, I was handed a green plastic card and told to wear it around my neck. Straut pulled me aside.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. His tone was low and secretive. “We’re gonna swap that out for a blue badge.”

  This, I soon realized, was a big deal. A blue badge meant I could cross West Exec and Secret Service wouldn’t stop me. Green-badge holders cross as well, but only with a blue-badged escort. This didn’t quite make them second-class citizens. But there were certainly times when we blue-badgers treated them like Plain-Belly Sneetches from Dr. Seuss.

  There was only one exception to our rigid caste system: a stray, tailless cat named Smokey. A malicious furball of indeterminate gender, Smokey patrolled West Executive Avenue with no dignity and no respect. Sometimes I’d hurry by a potted evergreen, late for a meeting, and Smokey would leap from hiding, hiss angrily, and disappear. Other times Smokey would ambush me near the checkpoint on the North Lawn. As I flashed my ID, what appeared to be a matted gray throw rug would bolt across my feet.

  As far as I was concerned, Smokey was an intruder, so imagine my surprise when empty cans of Friskies and Purina began appearing along the wrought iron fence. At first I assumed these treats had been left by a kindly tourist. I later learned the truth: someone in the Secret Service was a cat person. Badge or no badge, Smokey was authorized to roam.

  Perhaps this unique level of access explains why Smokey seemed to intuit our East-West office divide. When job numbers came in higher than expected, or we were winning the news cycle, I barely remember seeing Smokey at all. In those moments, blue-badgers flowed freely. If I had to bring a shirt to the dry cleaners, I’d take a shortcut through the Executive Mansion. If I was hungry, I’d pop over to steal a few of the M&M’s that appeared, as if by magic, outside the Situation Room.

  But when a crisis was brewing, or the economy showed signs of weakness, it was as though a drawbridge had been raised. Meetings in the Roosevelt Room or chief of staff’s office were canceled. Officemates with business in the West Wing hunched between buildings in a sleep-deprived, self-important hurry.

  It may be selective memory, but I’m almost certain that during these low points, Smokey guarded West Exec like a troll in a fairy tale. If I’m right, then I saw more of Smokey than ever during the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011.

  The debt ceiling is boring, complicated, and can wipe out your life savings overnight. For these reasons, it’s worth taking a step back to consider it. Imagine buying something on your credit card. A blender, say, or a pair of those rubber shoe-glove hybrids that have mercifully gone out of style. At the end of the month, you pay your credit card company, you keep your ugly shoe-gloves, and your balance goes to zero. Simple.

  But now imagine that instead, Congress gets to vote on whether or not you’re allowed to pay your bill. You already own your regrettable shoes. You’re not short on cash. But if a majority of lawmakers refuse to grant permission, it is nonetheless illegal for you to pay what you owe.

  This arbitrary hurdle is the debt ceiling. The difference is that if you don’t pay your bills, a pushy guy calls your house a lot. If America defaults on its debts, the global economy implodes.

  The debt ceiling is an accident of history. There is no good reason for the world financial system to have a self-destruct button on Capitol Hill. But it does, and on May 10, 2011, House Speaker John Boehner threatened to press it. At a fund-raiser with wealthy Manhattanites, he acknowledged that triggering a default would be catastrophic. Yet he also warned that unless Obama cut trillions of dollars to federal programs, without raising taxes on the rich by even a penny, he would default nonetheless. His threat was almost comically absurd.

  BANK ROBBER (somehow straight-faced): Violence is never the answer. Also, hand over the money or I’ll shoot!

  As late spring became early summer, Boehner’s ransom demands occasionally came up in our West Wing meetings. But I never got the feeling we were truly alarmed. Because the debt ceiling was so dangerous, threatening not to raise it had always been a hyperbolic form of protest. It was the political equivalent of declaring that you’ll kill yourself if Melissa from work posts another baby picture online.

  Besides, it seemed only fair to cut the speaker some slack. A new, angry cohort of Tea Partiers had swelled the Republican ranks. By making extravagant threats, Boehner was throwing a bone to his most radical members. After letting his fellow Republicans shake their sillies out, he would surely join President Obama in a grand, bipartisan bargain to reduce the national debt.

  If this was Boehner’s strategy, however, it proved too clever by half. Only after he had begun his game of chicken did he realize that the right wing had cut the brakes. Instead of paring back their wish list, Republicans began adding to it. Eager to stay on the Tea Party’s good side, Majority Leader Eric Cantor dropped out of negotiations he was supposed to lead. Throughout June and July, sillies were shaken. Wiggles were waggled. But nothing went away. Each day President Obama was presented with a choice that might as well have been written in letters cut from magazines.

  IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR ECONOMY ALIVE, YOU WILL AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING DEMANDS.

  It was around this time that Smokey became, in my mind at least, a constant fixture on the fringes of West Exec. Senior advisors stopped delivering remarks. Check-in sessions were scrapped. I was eager to write speeches, but Valerie was busy dealing with behind-the-scenes emergencies. She no longer had speeches to give. Each morning I’d display my fancy badge, walk down the grand corridor to my office, and have almost nothin
g to do.

  As the crisis snowballed, I responded like any self-respecting millennial: I retreated into my phone. When I wasn’t reading press clips about stalled negotiations, I passed the time with a game called Race Penguin. This sounds like a slur one Black Panther might hurl at another, but in fact the game’s protagonist was a black-and-white bird, a cartoon one, who slid on his belly across different landscapes. If he got through the level fast enough, he lived to slide another day. If not, a polar bear ate him. As I tapped the screen, controlling my penguin’s actions, I imagined his tortured existence, each moment a cocktail of monotony and stress. I could relate.

  Race Penguin featured twenty-four levels, divided into three stages of eight. I completed the first stage, Ice World, around the time Republicans added an unworkable balanced budget amendment to their ransom demands. As I polished off the second stage, Desert World, Democratic leader Harry Reid made a major concession. Tax increases would no longer be required as part of a final deal.

  By July 25, I was on the game’s very last level, the final section of Rainbow World, and President Obama had no choice but to deliver a prime-time debt-ceiling address. It was a tense moment for the president. The economy was less than two weeks from collapse. It was also a tense moment for me. My penguin was stuck. No matter how flawless his performance, how well-timed his slides, the polar bear always caught him. I could reach only one conclusion. The game was broken. It was impossible to win.

  “TONIGHT, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE DEBATE WE’VE BEEN HAVING in Washington over the national debt.”

  The president’s address to the nation was the kind of speech reporters were already calling “Vintage Obama.” Sober. Smart. Postpartisan. “The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government,” he said.

  Watching the livestream from my office, headphones in my ears and feet on my desk, I was sure the remarks would move the needle. Two and a half years earlier, one of Obama’s speeches had changed my life. Surely tonight’s speech could change public opinion and bring Congress to its senses.

  A few days and several hundred penguins later, President Obama announced he would cut more than two trillion dollars from the budget, while getting essentially nothing in return.

  The moment the news broke, Jon Carson, the Office of Public Engagement’s executive director, called a meeting in one of the EEOB’s handsomely decorated conference rooms. Ensconced in leather chairs, surrounded by portraits of severe-looking dead white men, we went over our talking points. Most of the cuts weren’t immediate. Most social safety-net programs had been spared.

  But was I wrong to think the stern, pasty faces on the walls looked skeptical? As hard as we tried to frame the debate, the most important point was the one that went unsaid: if you have to hold an hour-long meeting about why you won, you didn’t.

  The debt-ceiling deal did nothing to pacify Republicans in Congress. If anything, the situation grew worse. “It’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming,” declared Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, promising more brinkmanship to come.

  I longed to wipe the self-satisfied grin from McConnell’s turtlish face. If I was being honest, however, my anger at the Tea Party was nothing compared to my disappointment in the president who caved to its demands. From the moment I laid eyes on my candidate, what drew me to him was not just that he was on the right side of history. It was that he knew how to win. Sure, there would be small setbacks, but when the stakes were highest, Obama would prevail. Not this time. In his biggest fight yet with the Republican Congress, with trillions on the line, he had come up short.

  People in Washington talk about disillusionment the way people in high school talk about virginity. Your most mature peers have already gone all the way, you’re told. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s only a matter of time. Maybe you’ll settle down as a career public servant, remaining as pure as possible. Maybe you’ll join a lobbying firm and sleep with anything that moves. It doesn’t matter. The point is that there will be a single, defining moment, and it will close the door on your childhood forever.

  Except that’s not how disillusionment works. In the wake of a lopsided debt deal, I didn’t suddenly decide President Obama was a fraud. I had no impulse to yell about betrayal while sweeping papers off my desk. Instead, I was struck by even more worrisome questions. What if we’re all just race penguins? What if the game is broken? What if we do everything right, and the polar bears still eat us in the end?

  DURING THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, AS NEWS REMAINED GRIM and our approval ratings struggled to recover, friends and family grew concerned.

  “What’s the feeling like over there?” they wondered. They asked this as if there were some special emotion that exists nowhere but the White House, frustropefulness, maybe, or chaostalgia.

  Other times they would frame the question more personally. “Is my buddy Joe okay? How’s Barack holding up?”

  To my surprise, my friends and family were disappointed when I told them I had no idea. Now that they knew a White House staffer, they assumed they had direct access to the president of the United States. Sitting in my EEOB office one afternoon, I received a text from my little sister. How come the department of Homeland Security doesn’t have a mailing address? Even under the best of circumstances, this is a disconcerting question to receive from a family member. But if you work in the White House you want to have an answer. I didn’t.

  It was like that with everything. Grandpa Irving e-mailed to ask if “my people” might take a look at his plan for a national network of water pipelines. Uncle Gabe warned me that Obamacare was causing black-market health care clinics to pop up left and right. Most of all, everyone had one question.

  “So, have you met Obama yet?”

  “No, not yet,” I would say, hoping to change the subject. Instead, I’d get a look, which I soon learned means, “You may be twenty-four years old and working at the White House, but you’re still a disappointment to your family and friends.”

  I couldn’t blame them. They assumed, just as I had, that the White House is like The West Wing, where everyone hangs out with the president. Either that or it’s like Scandal, where everyone has sex with the president. But really, the White House is like the Death Star. There are thousands of busy people running around, each trying to make their own little piece of the ship function the way it’s supposed to.

  “Just because Darth Vader is the public face of the organization doesn’t mean every stormtrooper gets one-on-one time,” I’d explain. This never worked.

  Frankly, no one was more disappointed than I was. No one wanted me to meet Obama more than me. There were two reasons for this. The first was corny, but true: I believed there must be something I could do for my country, even if I didn’t yet know exactly what it was. I thought I could be the kind of person who makes the president a tiny bit better at his job, just by being in the room.

  The second reason is that I wanted Barack Obama and me to become best friends. I’m not saying I assumed this would happen. None of us did. But anyone who worked in the Obama White House and tells you they didn’t imagine becoming buddies with the president is either lying or named Michelle. Every so often you’d hear stories. Someone from the Office of Management and Budget got a fist bump in the hallway. A staff secretary was invited to play cards on Air Force One. The moral was obvious. Any moment could change your life forever.

  My first chance at a life-changing moment came in November 2011, when Favs asked me to write the Thanksgiving video address. If the State of the Union is on one end of the speechwriting spectrum, “Happy Thanksgiving, America!” is firmly on the other. Still, I was floored. I had written jokes for the president, but this was different. Here was an opportunity to write something profound, something unique, something all-American. I researched past Thanksgiving videos. I read essays about Pilgrims. I went through draft after draft.

  Finally, on the day of the taping, I made my way to the D
iplomatic Room. It was one of the most beautiful rooms in the residence, the walls covered in a wraparound mural of nineteenth-century American life. By the fireplace, a wooden chair had been set up for the president’s arrival. I stood as far from it as I could. Behind the camera, a woman in a vest and button-down shirt was adjusting the focus.

  “First time here?” she asked. I tried to sound nonchalant and casual. Instead, I immediately cracked.

  “Yes! Help! What do I do?”

  This was how I learned that Hope Hall, the president’s videographer, was a deeply calming presence. A rare free spirit in a building full of joiners, she smiled serenely. Then she told me not to worry. All I had to do was wait.

  So I waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, just as I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was a nightmare or a practical joke, one of the A/V guys got an e-mail on his BlackBerry.

  “He’s moving.”

  There was a kind of crackling in the air. Then, a minute later, President Obama walked through the door. Suddenly, my nose itched. Was I allowed to sneeze? Had I turned off my phone? Did I have loose change in my pocket? I was struck with an overwhelming desire to shift my weight from leg to leg.

  The president was standing up, so we stood up. He sat down, so we sat down. He looked at the camera, but before he could begin taping, Hope stopped him. “Mr. President, this is David,” she said. “This is the first video he’s ever written for you.”

  President Obama looked at me.

  “Hey, David,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  I had exactly one thought in that moment. I did not realize we were going to have to answer questions. And I have no idea what happened next. I literally blacked out. I went home for Thanksgiving, and my family said, “Have you met Obama yet?” and I said, “Yeah,” and they said, “What did he say?” and I said, “How’s it going?” and they said, “What did you say?” and I said, “I don’t know, I blacked out.”