“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.
You know how when you’re playing Minesweeper? And at first you just can’t get the hang of it, no matter how hard you try? But then everything begins making sense, even on the highest difficulty setting, and the goal you never even admitted having is suddenly within your reach?
It was kind of like that.
A few days later, feeling slightly stuffy in my suit, I made my way to a small kiosk a few blocks from my firm’s office. “Can I help you?” asked a Secret Service agent, from behind his pane of bulletproof glass.
“Yes, you can,” I told him. And then, just because I could, I added something.
“I have an appointment at the White House.”
3
CLEARED TO WORK
The intern escorting me to my interview had the nervous formality of a bar mitzvah boy. Mike Strautmanis, Valerie Jarrett’s chief of staff, was clearly more comfortable in his skin. Above his office fireplace, instead of a portrait or plaque, he kept a pair of signed Yao Ming sneakers. Next to his conference table he had installed one of those putting-practice machines that spits the ball back when you make a shot. A different kind of high-ranking official might have held it against me when I mispronounced his name, rhyming the first syllable with trout instead of trot. Straut let it slide.
I had spent days rehearsing my answers to interview questions. Favorite Obama speech. Greatest strength. Greatest weakness (that was sneakily also my greatest strength). But Straut didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, he rose from his chair, towering over me as he headed for the door.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m leaving for an hour. Why don’t you write a two-page speech for a breakfast roundtable with CEOs. Then I’ll take a look.”
This was madness. At my firm, I’d have at least a week for a two-pager. I’d also be given guidance on what to write. But with the clock ticking, there was no time to complain. I dove in, a white-collar MacGyver defusing a rhetorical bomb.