“I’ll tell you what, man,” you’ll say, eager to change the subject, “why don’t you give me your card. If we’re planning a staff holiday party or an out-of-office event that needs a bar, I’ll definitely give you a shout.” Raucous Rodolpho will light up. He’ll hand you his business card, which you’ll slip into your back pocket. Don’t encourage his excitement further. Keep things professional.
That night, you’ll empty your pockets onto your nightstand: keys, some change, and Raucous Rodolfo’s tapas-bar card. You’ll look at it for the first time: a glossy black background with a long, thin drawing of a barber pole running down the center. Why is there a naked woman swinging on that barber pole? Just underneath her exposed cartoon breasts you’ll find the name of the tapas bar emblazoned in shiny block letters. This is where you agreed to potentially have the White House Office of Public Engagement holiday party: RODOLFO’S LADIES: TOPLESS BAR.
Topless, not tapas. Be attentive. And be careful what you agree to.
Tip G: Be the Best Gatekeeper You Can Be
You shouldn’t hang around with sketchy characters. That’s good life advice in general. As it applies to your government job, you’ll be putting together meetings and briefings for POTUS that include community leaders from outside the White House world. That can turn into a bit of a process.
You have to collect their Social Security number and send it to the Secret Service for a background check. Then, their online and offline profiles are analyzed by the research team to make sure there’s nothing offensive, incendiary, or otherwise potentially distracting from the work everyone is doing for the Office of the President of the United States. That research department will be led by an amazing woman named Liz Jarvis-Shean. Be good to Liz. She’s a saint. She also has a couple of bottles of really nice scotch on a shelf, which she’ll share with you on especially late nights at the office.
In a couple of years, you’ll be planning a young leaders’ roundtable for the president during a visit to Davenport, Iowa. You’re going to remember that energetic kid named Romen Borsellino, who put together Senator Obama’s first-ever high school surrogate event during the campaign. You’ll want to tap him to help with this meeting.
So, you’ll send Romen’s name and vitals to Liz for vetting, and she will email you a couple of days later:
From: Liz Jarvis-Shean
To: Kalpen Modi
Subject: Romen Borsellino
In the middle of vetting for your Davenport event. Can you please have Romen Borsellino delete the tweet pasted below?
You’ll stare dumbfounded at your computer screen, trying to come up with the words to reply, when the phone at your desk will ring. It’s going to be Liz, and besides the cum thesis problem, she’ll bring up something Romen has on his Facebook wall that needs to be taken down too. She’ll email it to you:
When she sends you this photo, you’re going to laugh your face off. Then you’ll send Romen a cryptic message, asking if he can talk “about something important.” You’ll catch him on a drive from Des Moines to Davenport, and he’ll be nervous, wondering what you’re calling about. My advice? Play this up. Do not let on that you think any of this is funny. Make him sweat a little. For example:
ME: I just got part of your vetting report back. There are a few problems. I need you to take down a Facebook photo… the one with the dildo.
Silence
ME: Hello?
ROMEN: Yeah.
ME: You have to take down the photo you have on your Facebook wall. The one with the dildo.
Silence
ME: Can you hear me? On your Facebook page, there’s a photo of you with a giant dil—
ROMEN: —Yeah. Will do.
ME: There’s also a tweet. About somebody getting cum on his thesis.
ROMEN: Oh, God… just so you know, that means cum laude. My friend Nihal got cum laude on his thesis. It was a congratulatory tweet.
(He’s trying to negotiate with us?!)
ROMEN: So, can I leave that one up?
ME: If a journalist asks, can you and Nihal prove that he got cum laude on his thesis, and that it happened right before you posted that tweet?
ROMEN: Yes.
ME: Okay, so I guess you can leave that one up.2
Keep things professional. Try not to laugh. Politely thank him and end the call. Having successfully “cleaned up his digital footprint,”3 Romen will be cleared to attend the meeting. It’ll be a few more years before you find out that he had the dildo in his dorm because he was a student health educator who used it to teach students how to properly apply a condom. Or so he claims.
Anyway, congratulations. With Liz’s team taking the lead, you’ve successfully avoided a Fox News headline like MUSLIM “PRESIDENT” HUSSEIN-OBAMA MEETS WITH DILDO-MANUFACTURING, CUM-TWEETING TERRORIST.
Don’t let them make your boss the butt of a dildo joke. See what I did there? Future you has still got it.
* * *
Working in DC can be frustrating sometimes, even with my tips. And it can almost make you sympathetic to people who malign the government, who treat it as a big, bad, faraway entity that taxes them too much, does too little, and should get out of the way.
But you have a choice: You can dwell on the negative, letting it get to you until there’s nothing left of your soul. Or you can focus instead on the vast majority of people who entered public service—career staff and political appointees alike—because they (like you) are proud of our country and want to help it succeed. You are a patriotic American who took a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Choose the latter. Keep your head down and do good work. Don’t eat the vending machine sandwiches if you can avoid them.
Remember that it’s the non-sexy-sounding, non-headline-making work on outreach around environmental rules, bureaucracy that impacts human rights issues, or improving people’s ability to access education and health care where government can shine. That’s the stuff that happens when you believe in what you’re doing. You got this!
Kisses,
Kal
PS—If President Obama asks your advice on whether he should wear a blue or a tan suit to his August press briefing, for the love of God don’t say, “Tan seems kinda fun.”
1?It’s fine to use it here.
2?It’s still up.
3?A fancy, political way of saying “deleting dick pics.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN YOU DOWN WITH OPE?