You could practically hear the sound of hearts sliding into throats.
I was the only speechwriter at these meetings. Most of Valerie’s employees in the Office of Public Engagement (OPE, for short) were “liaisons,” professional extroverts each responsible for a slice of the Obama coalition. Young people, African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, state legislators, enviromentalists: an eager young person was assigned to them all. Where other offices thrived on gallows humor, our corner of the White House buzzed with earnest optimism.
“We put the OPE in HOPE!” my coworkers wrote in e-mails, without any trace of irony whatsoever.
I also attended meetings of the POTUS speechwriting team, where, to my relief, sarcasm thrived. Still, I wondered if Jon Favreau would welcome me in. Thanks to his youth, and the quality of his work, President Obama’s twenty-nine-year-old chief speechwriter had become something of a local celebrity. He dated Hollywood actresses. Gawker posted pictures of him playing beer pong without his shirt. I was no good at beer pong. I couldn’t begin to imagine a scenario in which gossip blogs clamored for my shirtless pics. I worried that Jon and I might not get along.
What I hadn’t realized was that, above all else, Favs was a prodigy. Speechwriters, even great ones, tend to lead either from the head or heart. I was a head-first writer, connecting logical dots and only later adding emotions. Heart-first people went the other way around. Favs was the only true switch-hitter I ever met. His writing was both lyrical and well organized, arcing between timeless values and everyday concerns with astounding ease and grace.
Perhaps because he possessed innate talent, Favs tended to separate people into two categories: those who had it and those who did not. I was lucky enough to be lumped into the haves. From the day I arrived he acted as if, all evidence to the contrary, his team benefited from having me around.
“So, is it amazing?” friends would ask.
Of course it was amazing. Sometimes Kathy, Valerie’s assistant, would explain that we needed to reschedule a meeting because Valerie had been called into the Oval. She said this casually, as though her boss had been put on hold with the cable company and not summoned by the leader of the free world. Other times I would watch Favs and the POTUS speechwriters spitball lines for a set of remarks. A few days later, I would see those exact same lines on the front page of the New York Times. It was unbelievable. I felt like Cinderella at the ball.
Left unmentioned was that I also felt like Cinderella before the ball. I had never worked so hard in my life. In the speechwriting world, “holding the pen” means bearing responsibility for a set of remarks. My first week at the White House, I held the pen on seven speeches in five days. It was not uncommon for me to edit a single speech four times in an eight-hour span.
Also, the ratio between reward and risk was perilously skewed. If I did my job flawlessly, no one would notice. Fail to properly attribute a quote, however, or omit the L from public investment, and my mistake would be national news. Each day brought a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but each night brought intensely literal dreams about work. Tomorrow’s speech left a senator unthanked. I had botched the phonetic spelling of buenas noches. I had failed to confirm a statistic with the relevant policy team.
The focal point—of both my workdays and my nightmares—was a black plastic rectangle the size of a deck of cards: my BlackBerry. By 2011, the BlackBerry was already becoming an anachronism. It was as if the entire federal government had signed up for Jazzercise, or gone to Blockbuster to rent Space Jam on VHS. It didn’t matter. Like nearly every White House staffer, I lived and died by my device. Before long, I developed a Spidey-sense for incoming e-mail. My nerves would tingle, I would check the home screen, and then, a millisecond later, the red light on the top right corner would flash.
At the time, I didn’t see this as a warning sign. It was a badge of honor. The moment a new message appeared, my thumbs leapt into action. I could read a chain of messages, reply to the sender, and relock the screen within seconds, all while carrying on a separate conversation face-to-face. I was an e-mail samurai.
I was also, however, a basket case. I would never have admitted it, but each new message triggered a fight-or-flight response. Every blinking light meant Valerie had another round of edits, or that a new set of talking points had to be composed ASAP. The only thing more frightening than a flurry of new e-mails was no e-mails at all. Just three minutes without feeling a vibration in my holster, and full-blown panic would set in.
Is there a malfunction? Did I miss a reply? Should I ping someone to ask why no one’s pinging me?
I told myself I was handling the pressure. Then one afternoon, several hundred e-mails into my day, I yawned and something popped. Almost immediately, my right cheek ballooned. My face pulsed and throbbed. A few seconds of googling gave me a diagnosis: temporomandibular joint disorder. In layman’s terms, I had clenched my jaw so tightly it had simply given way. Far more shocking than the injury, however, were my coworkers’ reactions. When I described my condition to Jessica, a liaison in intergovernmental affairs, I assumed I’d get some sympathy. Maybe she’d even advise me to take the day off.
“Yeah, that happens a lot,” she said, barely looking up from her computer. “First time for me was on the John Edwards campaign. Just don’t chew for a while.”
I followed her advice, and a week later my jaw no longer ached. But as my BlackBerry kept up its incessant buzz, I couldn’t help but wonder if the White House had made a mistake. I had at least some talent. I was sure of that. Yet I also knew that there were more than three hundred million people in America. True, some of them were babies. But a lot of them were adults. It seemed unlikely that I was the best We, the People, could do.
ON THE LAST WEDNESDAY MORNING IN APRIL, I WALKED BY STRAUT’S office and noticed a crowd gathered around his TV. This was unusual. At the White House, televisions were almost always muted, the manic gestures of cable-news pundits a silent backdrop for actual work. Now, though, the volume was turned up full blast. In the center of the screen was President Obama, making an announcement from the briefing room. He looked profoundly annoyed. I turned to Alex, Straut’s assistant.
“Holy crap! He’s releasing his birth certificate?”