POTUS was clearly finished. Jarrod and I exchanged nervous looks. “What?” President Obama said. His tone suggested that, under a different form of government, we’d have been executed by now. “What’s up?”
It was in moments like these that I thought about a social studies exercise from third grade. Each of us was given an envelope. We started by filling it out the ordinary way—name, street, city—but soon expanded our scope. Country. Planet. Solar system. Galaxy. The point, I guess, was to broaden our horizons, to help realize that the universe was marvelous and vast.
Working at the White House was like performing the same exercise, but in reverse. Start by imagining the Milky Way, almost infinitely wide. Then zoom in. Our sun comes into focus first, a fiery dot in the empty sea of space. Next comes Earth, our fragile blue marble. Drawing closer we see a continent; then a country; then a small, gridlocked district ten miles square. And then, finally, we reach the very center of the universe, where a well-meaning but exasperated Protestant is being harassed by a pair of nitpicky Jews.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We need to do it one more time.”
POTUS sighed deeply. But he knew how much his words mattered. He was willing to give it one more try.
“On behalf of myself and my family, hog samea,” he said. He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, the universal expression for “Good enough?” It was. The president bolted.
“Have a good weekend, everybody.”
“You, too, sir.”
Once I remembered how to breathe again, I returned across West Exec to call Jacqui and tell her what had happened. And it was only then, as I tried to describe the look on the president’s face, that I understood how foolish I had been. Why didn’t I realize he would reject such gloomy language? Why didn’t I write happy holidays in English, instead of using a word so difficult to pronounce?
But that’s the downside of White House fairy dust. In most office buildings, not screwing up is the bare minimum. At the center of the universe, not screwing up takes extraordinary, almost superhuman skill. When your business card bears the presidential seal, mistakes that otherwise wouldn’t matter can snowball into catastrophe in the blink of an eye.
No wonder salmon ended up in the toilet, I thought. In the White House, it’s nearly impossible to keep it out.
6
IS OBAMA TOAST?
Just north of the White House, across Pennsylvania Avenue, is a leafy, rectangular park called Lafayette Square. The place is sleepy in the early mornings, but by 10 A.M. it comes alive like the village from Beauty and the Beast. Yuppies in yoga pants lunge through boot-camp workouts. Chinese tourists point at squirrels the way Americans might gawk at pandas. Segway tours snake between statues, the off-balance clients struggling to keep up with their guides.
Most people only enter the square on their way to someplace more famous. For an eclectic handful, however, lingering in a park near the White House is a kind of full-time job.
Back when I passed through Lafayette Square each morning on my way to work, the park’s most famous regular was also its only full-time resident. She was tiny and wrinkled, somewhere between seventy and one million years old, in a head scarf to match her baggy clothes. Her home was a tarp-covered encampment no larger than a beaver’s den. She had taken up residence there in 1981 and kept watch over the White House 24-7 ever since. Her life’s work was often described as a “peace vigil,” but that implied a kind of flower-child optimism. The signs tacked to her shanty suggested something far more harsh.
* * *
LIVE BY THE BOMB, DIE BY THE BOMB.
Ban all nuclear weapons or have a nice Doomsday!
* * *
Because the little old lady received frequent press coverage, I knew her name was Concepcion Picciotto. The other regulars had never been profiled in the Washington Post, and with nothing to go by, I assigned them nicknames in my head. Good morning, Druid! I’d think, biking by a man wearing only a loincloth and carrying only a staff. The Druid’s chest was covered in tiny, hairy curlicues. Ropey white dreadlocks dangled like hoses from his scalp. Sometimes I spotted him browsing samples at the nearby farmers’ market, but more often he sat calmly on a bench, his back to the president’s house.
Whistle Guy took the opposite approach. On his jet-black, beat-up bicycle, he ping-ponged up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. He never went anywhere without his World War II helmet, his camouflage jacket, and his namesake instrument in his mouth. This he blew incessantly. It was as though he were a lifeguard and the world was refusing to leave the pool.
For sheer auditory gusto, however, no one could match Preacher Man. Tall and lanky, his preferred position was just outside the White House gate. There, his head poking above the crowd of sightseers, he would spread the gospel the way a ballpark vendor hawks ice-cold beer.
“Jeeeeeee-ZUSS! Jee-EEE-EEEEEEE-zussssss!”
How strange, I’d think, walking past him on my way to work. That man pays my salary.
Of course, depending on his tax bill, it’s possible Preacher Man got my services for free. Even if he did file a federal return, he didn’t pay me much. In 2011, the average taxpayer deposited about one-quarter of one-tenth of one penny into my account. I could have worked at the White House for ten thousand years and cost the Druid less than one of his farmers’ market peaches. Still, the point remained. The American people had invested in me. Under no circumstances could I let their money go to waste.
This led to a wave of guilt whenever I watched YouTube videos at work. Was Whistle Guy really getting his .025 cents’ worth?
More important, it meant I was legally banned from political activity. For most people this might seem like an oxymoron. My boss’s boss was the world’s best-known politician. Wasn’t all activity political? But our lawyers were not most people. They came up with a strict set of rules to ensure that it was President Obama, not candidate Obama, being served by White House staff. Writing a speech burnishing POTUS’s image was permitted, but directly asking people to vote for him was not. Neither was fund-raising. Except for senior staff, who were exempt, White House employees were barred from all things related to the campaign.
These prohibitions weren’t new. But as 2012 began, they were newly aggravating. Six months earlier, being told I couldn’t write for rallies or fund-raisers was like being told I couldn’t write limericks or in Portuguese. Now, however, the reelect was heating up.