The real power in the US government rests with the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE), where I worked. Okay, I acknowledge that maybe the president has a role to play in running the government. I get that he has the nuclear codes and yes, he is the final word on every bit of policy… Okay, fine, I’m agreeing with you, the president of the United States is an important job with huge responsibilities. I guess what I’m actually trying to say is that a lot of the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts work of running the country is done by junior and midlevel aides in offices like mine.
Oh, before this book you’d never heard of the Office of Public Engagement? You’re not down with OPE? Well, you will be in a moment. OPE wasn’t as well known as the communications or press offices. We weren’t the social media, policy, or digital strategy teams, even though people often thought we did that work. We were the outreach team, the proverbial front door to the White House: a place that executed one of Obama’s central campaign themes—that every community has a voice and that every American should have a seat at the table. Nobody should fall through the cracks.
If you wanted your voice heard in a previous White House, you’d usually need to follow tradition and hire elite, well-paid lobbyists. If you didn’t have the money, you may not have reached the right places. To Obama, that was crazy,1 so he restructured the boring-sounding Office of Public Liaison and turned it into OPE, making it more accessible in the process.
At OPE, we proactively established direct relationships with community leaders and advocacy organizations. We invited them to the White House to listen to their concerns and build support for policy changes. Each OPE staffer was in charge of several issue-group and demographic-group portfolios: Jewish Americans, African Americans, Energy and Environment, Athletics and Fitness, Rural Americans, Irish Americans—you name it, someone was there to open that proverbial front door from the inside. The president would lean on us when it came to these groups, and the outside groups in turn leaned on us when it came to sharing their respective communities’ priorities with the president.
Need to know about Obama’s stance on LGBT issues? Call his LGBT point person, Brian Bond. Immigration or Latinx issues? Email my office mate Stephanie Valencia. Disability policy? Hit up Kareem Dale. Bringing Osama bin Laden to justice? Ask bin Laden himself… OH WAIT.
Some issues (like national security) affect everybody pretty much the same, while others disproportionately impact certain communities—like LGBT folks when it comes to workplace discrimination, or young Americans when it comes to student loans—so a multifaceted dialogue was important to have.
Of course, people don’t just care about issues related to their identities; they care about a wide range of things. In prior administrations, the traditional approach to politics often merely included specific communities when it came time to check some sort of box—“May is Asian American Heritage Month, let’s make sure there’s an Asian American event.” While that sort of thing is important in a country whose textbooks still don’t integrate the full range of American communities’ contributions, Obama wanted to make sure that Muslim Americans were at the table for conversations about the Affordable Care Act, Jewish Americans were at the table for meetings about clean energy, the LGBT community was at the table for sessions on student loans. You get the point. He wanted the intersectionality and patriotism of the campaign to be part of his White House and governance.
My job as an associate director of the Office of Public Engagement was to serve as President Obama’s point person to the three communities Chris Lu had outlined in our first phone call: (1) the Arts Community, (2) Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Communities, and (3) Young Americans. Those were huge portfolios: hundreds of arts organizations spanning multiple disciplines, more than thirty-five different AAPI subgroups,2 and young people in all fifty states and the territories.
* * *
I hit the ground running on day one. My boss, Tina Tchen, handed me a large binder and explained that one of my first duties was to oversee an executive order (EO) the president wanted to create and sign, reestablishing and updating the Clinton-era White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI), henceforth to be known as “Whappy” cuz that sounds a little more fun. Among its other functions, the Whappy EO would help address health and economic disparities unique to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
“Read this tonight,” Tina said about the binder. “You have a 10 a.m. conference call tomorrow with reps from twenty-four of the federal agencies. A decision needs to be made about whether the Department of Hot Dogs (DHD) should be part of the EO or whether POTUS would find it wasteful.”
[There is obviously no Department of Hot Dogs—or is there? (There isn’t.) Out of respect to a confidential intragovernmental review process, instead of naming the actual federal agency in question, I’m calling it the Department of Hot Dogs, or DHD, for fun because everyone knows hot dogs are delicious. If OPE was actually involved in deliberations about hot dogs, there would first be an office-wide meeting to discuss the various groups we represented and which type of hot dog would be most inclusive given our specific goals—definitely no pork since that would exclude the Muslim and Jewish communities. Devout Hindus don’t eat beef. By the time you’re down to chicken or turkey dogs you might as well just get the soy ones, but at that point nobody wants them anymore and that’s why there’s no such thing as the Department of Hot Dogs in real life.]
I read Tina’s binder overnight and dialed in to the call the next morning, ready to take vigorous notes to share with my new boss. By 10:15, my fingers got tired of writing in my notepad. By 10:20, I thought my hand was going to fall off. By 10:22, I realized I was an idiot and started typing the notes on my computer instead. By 10:40, the conversation was so deep into the weeds of policy nerdom that my notes wouldn’t have made much sense outside of a think tank; it made me feel good that I (a government employee) being paid by you (the taxpayer) did in fact understand everything that was happening.
By 10:50, the call started to wrap up.
A voice said, “Good talk, everyone. So, is DHD going to be included in the EO? What’s the decision?”
I hit the Return button on my computer, typed Decision: and waited.
A couple of seconds went by. Another voice on the call said, “Come on folks. I have to leave for an eleven o’clock meeting. What’s the decision?”
My cursor blinked. A few more seconds of silence. Man, these people were making it so juicy! What would they decide?!
A third voice spoke up, this one more authoritative and intimidating.
AUTHORITATIVE AND INTIMIDATING PERSON: Well, who’s on from the White House?
I took myself off mute.
“This is Kal.”
AUTHORITATIVE AND INTIMIDATING PERSON: Okay, Kal. So, what’s the decision?
The world stood still.