Thanks, Obama Read online

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s only a card.”

  Unfortunately, the magic didn’t last. After just two dates, and an equal number of lackluster make-out sessions, Rachel called it quits. I didn’t need to ask what happened. Blinded by my business card, she had leaned in to kiss Rob Lowe’s character from The West Wing and instead made contact with me. Even I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.

  And yet, as unsatisfying as this encounter was, it was the only time my job title improved my love life. Working at the White House made me no more seductive. If anything, meeting people was harder than ever, since I was constantly at work. A few months after receiving my first box of business cards, I threw in the towel and took the online dating plunge.

  I once heard Chase refer to OkCupid as “practice.” But I approached composing a profile with the same intensity I devoted to writing Valerie’s remarks. What was the subtext of my favorite movies and TV shows? Were my “Six Things I Can’t Live Without” in the perfect order? Most important, how could I make myself appealing while disclosing as little personal information as possible? I know that sounds paranoid. It was paranoid. It was also smart. With just a year until the election, even the lowliest presidential staffers were targets for the conservative press.

  It hadn’t always been this way. For most of American history your private life stayed private, even if you were commander in chief. Even after Bill Clinton’s escapades made headlines, it was understood that the young were off-limits until they reached trophy size.

  But by late 2011, inspired by the success of Fox News, new right-wing outlets were exploding like spores from a fungus. It wasn’t just Breitbart and Glenn Beck TV. The Washington Free Beacon combed through Facebook pages of young Democrats, searching for embarrassing pics. Something called Project Veritas acted as a far-right candid camera, baiting progressives into saying something stupid, then releasing the heavily edited results. It was open season on everybody.

  Determined to stay out of the crosshairs, I left my dating profile aggressively vague. This was particularly difficult on OkCupid, which relies on hundreds of questions to surface a match.

  What’s your relationship with marijuana?

  Pass.

  Which is worse, book burning or flag burning?

  No. Absolutely not.

  How willing are you to try new things sexually?

  Far more willing than I am to answer this question, that’s for sure.

  I was a blank slate, and it was hardly surprising when my online matches and I failed to hit it off in person. Then, to my surprise, I came across a profile nearly as vague as mine. It belonged to someone I’ll call Nora. When I sent her a message, she explained that she, too, had joined OkCupid to avoid meeting people at work. We made a date for the following week, at an underground bar on Connecticut Avenue. As usual in Washington, we started by comparing careers.

  NORA: I’m in communications.

  ME: That’s so funny, I’m also in communications! In the private sector or government?

  NORA: In the administration. How about you?

  ME: Small world! I’m in the administration, too! Which agency?

  NORA: Well, actually, I work at the White House.

  ME: Wait, what?

  Not only did we belong to the same department. We worked in the same building. On the same floor. Nora’s office was down the hall.

  What would have been cute in a romantic comedy felt icky and overly personal in real life. That was our first and only date, but from then on we’d administer clipped, uncomfortable nods in the hallway, as though we’d run into each other at a porno theater the night before. I was through with online dating. I was ready to give it up.

  And then I met Jacqui. I found her attractive, of course. But even more than her looks, I was struck by her sense of purpose. She seemed fiercely determined, even just crossing the street. Halfway through her third year of law school, she nonetheless managed to make it through an entire evening without once using the phrase according to the law. She told me about growing up in New Jersey, and yet, despite my New York City background, I found her impossible to hate.

  About an hour into our first date, a waiter came to take the drinks menu. Jacqui smiled and shot out a hand. “We’re keeping that,” she said. Her tone was warm and charming, while also suggesting someone might lose a finger if he didn’t obey. My favorite TV show is The Sopranos. I’ve always had an odd thing for Laura Linney. I was floored.

  IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, I WAS BEGINNING MY FIRST SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP in years. At work, I was going through what can only be described as a slutty phase. I was, of course, Valerie Jarrett’s speechwriter. But Bill Daley, then the White House chief of staff, had also been told I was his speechwriter. Straut and his fellow senior staffers were told I was the senior staff speechwriter. Three years out of college, I wrote six commencement addresses for five different White House VIPs.

  In the House of Cards version of my life, my exhausting schedule would have been rewarded with influence. Slowly but surely, I would turn speakers against each other, putting words in their mouths in the service of some nefarious end. But that’s not how speeches work. In the real world, speechwriters are more like personal trainers than puppet masters. They can help you present the most attractive version of yourself to the public. They can’t turn you into someone you’re not.

  Nor can they “find your voice.” This is the most common misconception about speechwriting. It came up especially often in the years before I started at the White House, when I wrote for CEOs. “You seem capable,” they would tell me, “but can you really find my voice?”

  “I think I can manage it,” I’d reply gravely.

  Left unsaid is that it would be easy, because when it comes to rhetorical styling, 99.9 percent of speeches sound the same. Martin Luther King had a voice. John F. Kennedy had a voice. With all due respect, you probably don’t.

  What you do have are thoughts. What you need, although you may not know it, is someone to organize them. A good writer can take your ten ideas and turn them into one coherent whole. Where you see two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun, a speechwriter sees a Big Mac.

  Just as important, speechwriters act as stand-ins for the audience. If you’re working with a writer, chances are you’re an expert. And if you’re an expert, chances are you’re boring. You can’t help it. The more you know about a subject, the harder it is to express your knowledge in a way the rest of us understand. As professional dilettantes, speechwriters use their short attention spans to your advantage. Sifting through the dense muck of fact and anecdote, they find nuggets worth something to the outside world.

  This doesn’t always turn out perfectly. Sometimes the final draft will forgo a single thesis in favor of a seven-point list, causing eyes to glaze over. (If the list is divided into sublists, as occasionally happens, the remarks can legally be used during surgery as anesthesia.) Other times the speaker insists on heaps of esoteric verbiage, then blames the writer when audience members start checking their phones mid-speech. But if you’re holding the pen, and everything works as it’s supposed to—if you define the forest of an argument without losing sight of the trees—the speaker will be forever grateful for your work.

  “Wow, you really found my voice!” they’ll say.

  And you’ll say thank you. If you were the kind of person who enjoyed correcting powerful people for no reason, you would have gone into a different line of work.

  Because that’s the other thing about speechwriting: unlike novelists or poets, the speechwriter must let go. Take prepositions. Valerie followed the rule that you could never use one to end a sentence. I found this unnecessary. In my own writing, preposition placement isn’t something I lose sleep over. But this was not my own writing. It belonged to Valerie, and the prepositions rule was one about which I did not argue.

  The same went for “At the end of the day.” I’ve always liked the si
ngsong nature of the phrase, but each time I added it to a draft, Valerie cut it. That this was a matter of preference rather than grammar was unimportant. Speechwriters and speakers are free to disagree on just about anything. But at the end of the day, the speaker is always right.

  Besides, Valerie’s remarks were far easier than Bill Daley’s. With the chief of staff, the challenge was not word choice but pronunciation. A compact, broad-shouldered man, Bill had developed the habit of speaking with his chin tucked into his neck. With most words this wasn’t a problem. S sounds, however, lodged themselves in his Adam’s apple before tumbling unceremoniously from his mouth. I tried to skirt this obstacle by avoiding sibilants at all costs. But consider the sorts of sentences Bill might be expected to say.

  “As the president’s chief of staff, I assure you he takes the possibility of rising deficits seriously.”

  “One of the president’s most successful and courageous actions was his decision to send in Seal Team Six.”

  Sometimes, speechwriters must surrender to circumstance.

  There was one final element to my professional promiscuity: I was beginning to write more often for the president. In the summer of 2011, there were eight of us who wrote POTUS remarks. Like many speechwriting teams, we were all below the age of forty. (At the time, we were also exclusively white and male, a regrettable trend my hiring did nothing to reverse.)

  There was no “education writer” or “jobs writer.” Still, each member of the team had a niche. Favs held the pen on major economic and political addresses. His deputy, Adam Frankel, handled civil rights. Cody Keenan (who became deputy once Adam left) took tragedies and the middle class; if it belonged in a Springsteen album, Cody was on it. Along with jokes, Jon Lovett was responsible for all things science and technology. Ben Rhodes and Terry Szuplat handled foreign policy. Kyle O’Connor, the youngest POTUS speechwriter, took whatever everyone else didn’t want.

  I took whatever Kyle didn’t want. This meant I was not exactly writing for the history books. A brief ode to Puerto Rico. A shout-out to some longtime Chicago friend. A few kind words for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. But if my remarks weren’t destined for greatness, they did help me learn President Obama’s verbal tics. When delivering praise, for example, he avoided good and great, preferring synonyms that were ever-so-slightly formal.

  “Our fantastic attorney general, Eric Holder, is in the house.”

  “I want to thank Congresswoman Chu for her outstanding work on this issue.”

  “Senator Klobuchar is doing a tremendous job.”

  He had other preferences as well. Some speakers subscribe to an old bit of wisdom: “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, then tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” But President Obama was more lawyerly than folksy. He preferred to make one argument start to finish, to tell a single story with a beginning, middle, and end.

  Then there were the ad-libs. Unlike Vice President Biden, who regularly gave his teleprompter operator a heart attack, POTUS didn’t often go off script. Occasionally, however, he’d cock his head slightly to the side and pause. It happened so quickly I think only the speechwriters noticed. But if you knew what to look for, you could see a dialogue play out in his head.

  You know, this line isn’t cutting it. I bet I could come up with something better.

  Are you sure? Maybe the speechwriter knows something you don’t?

  He’s how old? Twenty-five? Seems unlikely.

  Then the president would deliver something on the fly and, nine times out of ten, the crowd would break into applause. More than any other speaker I’ve seen, President Obama thrived on this enthusiasm. On the rare occasions he didn’t receive it, it reminded me of one of my bad OkCupid dates: POTUS and the crowd, going through the motions, trapped in a downward spiral of disinterest. When the speech finally ended, he would give a short, stoic nod, the kind that says, “Well, moving on.”

  But other times, right after his remarks were finished, President Obama would give the podium a satisfied little thump with his right hand. This was his way of declaring victory, a quiet but unmistakable “nailed it.” These were the speeches where the crowds started off cheering, and the cheering only grew as the remarks went on. When the audience was with him, POTUS found a gear no other speaker could match.

  That’s why, if my OkCupid profile had included the question, “What’s the most important thing about remarks for President Obama?” I would have said this: Write long sentences. Most speakers can’t handle them. They need to keep things tight. Otherwise they get lost. But Barack Obama could control a run-on sentence the way a sports car makes turns at speed, emphasizing, pausing, finding beats within the words and phrases not because of the punctuation but thanks to his innate talent as an orator, his voice rising and falling and carrying you along with it, so that by the time he reached his final crescendo you felt bigger than yourself, and better than yourself, and part of and proud of and lucky to be alive in the greatest country on earth.

  POTUS speeches were fun.

  They were also, in theory at least, the best way for the president to influence the public he served. One of the most important moments in the 2008 campaign had come during the primaries, after ABC News uncovered video of Obama’s pastor making racially charged remarks. The candidate’s response to the scandal? A sober, thoughtful, thirty-eight-minute address. The remarks were titled “A More Perfect Union,” but were soon known as “The Race Speech.” Their resounding success set the bar for every bit of rhetoric that followed. In White House meetings, it even became a running joke.

  “We need a race speech for Greek Independence Day.”

  “We need a race speech for congratulating the winner of the Stanley Cup.”

  But beneath the sarcasm lay a growing sense of insecurity. More than ever, it seemed that even the most well-crafted presidential address was powerless to change America’s course.

  GRIDLOCK. THAT WAS THE SHORTHAND REPORTERS USED. BUT IT wasn’t quite right. Gridlock is an accident, an inconvenience. What happened on Capitol Hill was a strategy, and its architect was Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell.

  McConnell’s tactics were informed by a pair of brilliant, if somewhat evil, insights. The first was that Americans hold their president almost entirely responsible for the performance of the government as a whole. Under his direction, Republicans in Congress behaved like offensive linemen hoping to get their quarterback fired. They knew failing to do their jobs would make them look bad. But they also knew POTUS would take the hit. No matter who caused the loss, Obama’s name would wind up with an L beside it.

  McConnell’s second insight was that, if he was shameless enough for long enough, he would never get the comeuppance he deserved. Some political reporters slant left, others right, but what unites them is the desire to break new stories. Kick a puppy live on camera, and everyone will cover it. Kick a puppy per day, and steadfastly refuse to apologize, and within two weeks the press moves on.

  This is what happened, metaphorically at least, in the fall of 2011. Republicans voted in lockstep against funding for teachers, cops, firefighters, and laid-off construction workers. These were causes that once inspired compromise. Everyone was shocked to see lawmakers from either party oppose them. But the surprise wore off. With frightening speed, obstruction became the new normal. Reporters might as well have written about the sun rising in the east.

  I found this demoralizing, and I don’t think I was alone. In one set of POTUS remarks, I wrote that a frustrating thing about being president was not being allowed outside to take a walk. It was a throwaway line, a setup to an opening joke. But when I got the draft back from the Oval, President Obama’s only edit had been to add to my list.

  “To clear your head,” he wrote. “Or jump into a car just to take a drive.” At times like these, faced with an ever-growing litany of frustrations, I found myself wondering if presidential speeches were nothing more than window dressing. Really. What was the point?


  And then, in December 2011, POTUS addressed the URJ.

  In the weeks before President Obama spoke at the Union of Reform Judaism’s biannual conference, Jarrod Bernstein, OPE’s Jewish liaison, laid out the challenge we faced. In 2008, the Jewish community had overwhelmingly supported the president. Now, however, doubt was spreading. A tall, brash New Yorker, Jarrod summarized our objective with a Yiddishism.

  “They need to know he feels it in his kishkes,” he said. (The word means “intestines,” but as an idiom it translates somewhere between “heart” and “balls.”)

  I knew I couldn’t write a better economic address than Favreau, or a better eulogy than Cody. But I didn’t sit through eight years of Hebrew school for nothing. My kishke credentials were unmatched.

  After Favs gave me the go-ahead, I spent a week putting together a draft. I talked to rabbis. I included a reference to the weekly Torah portion. Ben and Terry, the foreign-policy writers, added a section about Israel. A few minutes before the speech, as POTUS prepared to take the stage at a Maryland convention center, Jarrod asked if he needed any last-minute coaching.

  “Nah,” he said, “I’ve got this.”

  He was right. Addressing the crowd of five thousand, POTUS read a line about his daughter Malia, a fixture on her school’s bar and bat mitzvah party circuit. There was a pause, almost imperceptibly brief. He cocked his head to one side.

  “There is quite a bit of negotiation around the skirts that she wears at these bat mitzvahs,” he ad-libbed. “Do you guys have these conversations as well?”

  The crowd roared with laughter and applause. The president fed off the audience’s enthusiasm, and the audience fed off the president’s in turn. A quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel. A paean to the uniquely American success story so many Jewish immigrants had shared. A firm defense of our alliance with Israel.

  OBAMA SPEAKS JEWISH, read the next day’s headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. REPUBLICANS DON’T.