The witty banter. The brilliant grouches barging into the Oval Office. The satisfying conclusion each week. We couldn’t get enough. But being introduced to politics by The West Wing was like being introduced to sex by Debbie Does Dallas. No matter how much more satisfying the real thing was than fantasy, in certain ways it was bound to come up short.
This was especially true when it came to office space. On the DVDs I devoured, the West Wing was spacious and grand. In real life the West Wing is a human ant farm that received its last major renovation in 1934. To be fair, the Oval Office looks like it does on television. A few of the president’s top advisors occupy large, wood-paneled rooms best described as “robber-baron chic.” But dozens of remaining staffers are squeezed into tiny outer offices, or piled clumsily on top of each other like dirty dishes in a sink.
The result was the world’s most Type A sweatshop. At a time when Silicon Valley lured talent with ball pits and Ping-Pong tables, some of the most coveted jobs in Washington offered less personal space than Walmart during a Black Friday sale. Signs of overpopulation were everywhere. During peak hours, the line at the Navy Mess takeout window was so long you wondered if there might be a roller coaster at the end of it. In the ground floor that doubled as a waiting room, a faint odor of sewage occasionally infused the halls.
But the biggest lie of The West Wing, by far, was the walk-and-talk. In President Bartlet’s White House, staffers strolled side by side, trading barbs about policy while aides scurried in and out of the frame. In the actual West Wing, walking and talking was dangerous. One morning I left Favs’s office and, perhaps distracted by the sewagey smell, nearly tripped over a pair of black leather shoes. I looked up to see who they belonged to: it was a face I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I riffled through options. A new colleague? A B-list celebrity? A contestant on the latest season of Top Chef?
Oh, I realized, I know where I’ve seen you before. You’re the president of the United States!
I leapt sideways just in time to avoid learning what the Secret Service does to people who head-butt Barack Obama in the chest. Still, the lesson had been learned. In the West Wing, possibilities were endless. But space was tight.
Which was one reason I didn’t actually work there. Like most staffers, my office wasn’t at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but at 1650, in an ornate stone monolith known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The EEOB sits inside the White House security perimeter, but in both size and style is nothing like the mansion next door. It’s five stories tall. It occupies an entire city block. In 1888, Henry Adams, one of his era’s most renowned curmudgeons, called the place “an architectural infant asylum.” More than a century later, it’s hard to argue his point. I regularly got lost inside my own workplace, adrift in a sea of imposing spiral staircases and stately marble floors.
If there were a Hallways magazine, the EEOB would surely score a centerfold. Six or eight of us could have strolled through the high-ceilinged corridors arm in arm like a cadre of Von Trapps. What we lacked was power. In fairness, our nearly six hundred rooms contained a handful of top presidential advisors. But the vast majority of us, myself very much included, weren’t anywhere close.
Theoretically, no one noticed this divide. When we referred to the White House campus, we spoke of just one entity. “The building.”
“Have you worked in the building since day one?”
“Is this ask coming from inside the building? If not, I’ll ignore it.”
“Why would you get lunch outside the building? It’s Taco Wednesday!”
In reality, however, the White House campus held two distinct buildings, and everyone knew it. The pedestrian walkway between them, West Executive Avenue, took on almost mythic importance. My first day of work, I was handed a green plastic card and told to wear it around my neck. Straut pulled me aside.
“Don’t worry,” he said. His tone was low and secretive. “We’re gonna swap that out for a blue badge.”
This, I soon realized, was a big deal. A blue badge meant I could cross West Exec and Secret Service wouldn’t stop me. Green-badge holders cross as well, but only with a blue-badged escort. This didn’t quite make them second-class citizens. But there were certainly times when we blue-badgers treated them like Plain-Belly Sneetches from Dr. Seuss.
There was only one exception to our rigid caste system: a stray, tailless cat named Smokey. A malicious furball of indeterminate gender, Smokey patrolled West Executive Avenue with no dignity and no respect. Sometimes I’d hurry by a potted evergreen, late for a meeting, and Smokey would leap from hiding, hiss angrily, and disappear. Other times Smokey would ambush me near the checkpoint on the North Lawn. As I flashed my ID, what appeared to be a matted gray throw rug would bolt across my feet.
As far as I was concerned, Smokey was an intruder, so imagine my surprise when empty cans of Friskies and Purina began appearing along the wrought iron fence. At first I assumed these treats had been left by a kindly tourist. I later learned the truth: someone in the Secret Service was a cat person. Badge or no badge, Smokey was authorized to roam.
Perhaps this unique level of access explains why Smokey seemed to intuit our East-West office divide. When job numbers came in higher than expected, or we were winning the news cycle, I barely remember seeing Smokey at all. In those moments, blue-badgers flowed freely. If I had to bring a shirt to the dry cleaners, I’d take a shortcut through the Executive Mansion. If I was hungry, I’d pop over to steal a few of the M&M’s that appeared, as if by magic, outside the Situation Room.
But when a crisis was brewing, or the economy showed signs of weakness, it was as though a drawbridge had been raised. Meetings in the Roosevelt Room or chief of staff’s office were canceled. Officemates with business in the West Wing hunched between buildings in a sleep-deprived, self-important hurry.
It may be selective memory, but I’m almost certain that during these low points, Smokey guarded West Exec like a troll in a fairy tale. If I’m right, then I saw more of Smokey than ever during the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011.
The debt ceiling is boring, complicated, and can wipe out your life savings overnight. For these reasons, it’s worth taking a step back to consider it. Imagine buying something on your credit card. A blender, say, or a pair of those rubber shoe-glove hybrids that have mercifully gone out of style. At the end of the month, you pay your credit card company, you keep your ugly shoe-gloves, and your balance goes to zero. Simple.
But now imagine that instead, Congress gets to vote on whether or not you’re allowed to pay your bill. You already own your regrettable shoes. You’re not short on cash. But if a majority of lawmakers refuse to grant permission, it is nonetheless illegal for you to pay what you owe.