My OPE colleagues were no less frustrated. Eager to get in on the action, they began a mass exodus from Washington to the swing states. With so many employees leaving, going-away parties were held with the speed and frequency of Vegas weddings. These took place in a stately EEOB office suite that once belonged to the Secretary of War. Around 4 P.M. each Friday, we would arrive to find the conference table piled with Costco turkey pinwheels, cheap bottles of champagne, and sheet cake preordered from the Navy Mess. After a few minutes of mingling, Straut would send off the soon-to-be departed with a toast.
“Nobody embodies this movement more than Ashley,” Straut might proclaim. “We don’t know what we’re going to do without her. But we’ll sleep better knowing the reelect is in good hands.” Every speech was a variation on the same theme, yet they never failed to move me. I’m so lucky to have known them, I’d think, dabbing my eyes with a napkin bearing the logo of Presidential Food Service. At least they’re headed to a better place.
No official policy required us to discuss coworkers as if they were going to heaven rather than, say, Pennsylvania. It was simply the way we felt. Washington had tainted us with its original sin of bureaucracy. Now a lucky few had been deemed worthy. How pure of heart our colleagues were! How full of faith!
Yet after the last crumbs of cake had been cleared, and the cheese tray scavenged by interns, a few of us admitted there were benefits to being left behind. When I asked my coworker Emily if she planned to join the reelect, she winced.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I kind of like having job security.” She said this as if it were unspeakably shameful, as if she kind of liked wearing Nazi uniforms or heaving cinder blocks from a highway overpass. I understood her guilt, but I also understood her point. In 2008, I had been gloriously unmoored. Four years later, returning to Ohio would mean giving up a once-in-a-lifetime job.
It wasn’t just my career that kept me from setting sail. Jacqui and I were in a honeymoon phase. For some couples this might have meant staring ceaselessly into each other’s eyes, limbs tangled like a clumsy octopus while meals went uneaten and eviction notices piled up. Luckily, neither of us was that sentimental. Instead, giddy with each other’s attention, we came home tipsy and mixed the contents of my liquor cabinet into new and thrilling concoctions. “It’s an Island Julep!” we declared to my roommate Amanda, pouring a bottle of crème de menthe into a saucepan of coconut rum.
A White House job, it must be said, was not always conducive to romance. There’s a reason Marvin Gaye never sang about getting an e-mail from his boss’s assistant and abruptly canceling dinner plans. On the other hand, there was date night at the Kennedy Center. The president and First Lady received tickets to every performance. When they didn’t use them, which was almost always, their seats were distributed by lottery to White House staff. Beethoven’s symphonies. Mozart’s operas. Swan Lake. Jacqui and I relished the chance to broaden our cultural horizons.
Even more than that, we relished the free booze. I don’t know who stocked the fridge in the president’s box, but I suspect it was a college kid preparing for a blizzard. Mini bottles of champagne; Budweiser; M&M’s; Whitman’s samplers; mints; plus a few fun-size packs of almonds for nourishment. No wonder people loved the opera.
It would be unfair, I think, to say this sort of perk was corrupting. I had good, noble reasons for wanting Barack Obama to win a second term. We had an economic recovery to continue. A health care law to implement. A global threat of climate change to confront. Still, listening to the high notes of an aria, my hand on the small of Jacqui’s back, a shameful thought crossed my mind.
If POTUS loses this election, who’s going to pay for my Kennedy Center beer?
This danger (the election, not the beer) was one I had only recently begun to take seriously. I had always thought about Obama being defeated the way I thought about losing a finger in a garbage disposal or watching an entire Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. I knew it could happen. I just couldn’t imagine it happening to me. Then we reached the end of 2011, and the economy was barely improving. Our approval rating had dropped to 42 percent. Even the most basic pieces of legislation remained stalled in Congress. Maybe that garbage-disposal accident wasn’t so unlikely after all.
Nor did I assume, as I had in 2008, that Barack Obama’s moral clarity was certain to prevail. Back then POTUS had appeared infallible, a grand master checkmating the status quo. Now, after a year on the inside, I had learned the truth. The White House doesn’t play chess. The White House plays whack-a-mole. If it wasn’t an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it was a military setback in Afghanistan or economic turmoil rippling across the EU. For each crisis we batted down, another popped up. With Election Day looming, the chance of another 2008-style landslide was near zero. Our only hope was to keep the moles at bay long enough to secure a second term.
Even this would be a challenge. About a year before Election Day, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story. The headline drained the blood from my fingers.
SO, IS OBAMA TOAST?
The article’s author, Nate Silver, had successfully predicted the winner of forty-nine states in the 2008 elections. While I didn’t think he was God, I would not have been surprised to learn that he and the Almighty chatted once a week. And here was his prediction for 2012: If Republicans nominated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and the economy didn’t grow, POTUS had just a 17 percent chance to win. If growth maintained its postrecession average, the president’s odds improved. But not by much.
Our best hope was for Republicans to nominate someone other than Romney in the primaries, but the other candidates faltered one by one. Businessman Herman Cain was alleged to have sexually harassed employees. Texas governor Rick Perry was kind of a dunce. Newt Gingrich was famously undisciplined and had unsavory business ties. Four years later, of course, these qualities would no longer be considered deal breakers, even when they were all possessed by the same person. But these were far more innocent times. When the dust settled, Romney was the last man left.
It wasn’t hard to see why this made Nate Silver pessimistic about our chances. With his sculpted hair and confident jawline, Mitt Romney cut the profile of a president in a movie. You could easily imagine him punching an alien in the kisser or sending Russkies packing with a single icy stare. And his appeal ran deeper than looks. As a private citizen, Romney had built a wildly successful company. As a public servant, he had served as the Republican governor of Massachusetts, a reliably blue state. He seemed like the kind of guy who could get things done.
Still, Romney hadn’t emerged from the primary unscathed. Like the fraternity pledge who acquires a tattoo saying eggplant in Chinese, he’d made a few mistakes in a bid for his peers’ attention. He labeled himself “severely conservative.” His support of “self-deportation” for immigrants eroded his bipartisan appeal.
Most helpful of all, Romney was gaffe prone. This was a greater liability than ever, since each verbal stumble now lived forever online.
Corporations are people, my friend.