I wasn’t the only one making this trade-off. There’s a saying in Washington: “You campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” But the reelect was nothing if not prosaic. Obama’s soaring rhetoric was supplemented with a careful defense of his record. Twenty-thousand-person crowds at sports arenas gave way to two-thousand-person crowds at high school gyms. Decisions in the field, once made on a kind of cowboy instinct, were increasingly driven by data analytics. It drove my organizer friends nuts.
And yet sitting in Le Caprice, my lap dusted in cookie crumbs, I didn’t really mind. After all, America was not exactly clamoring for an encore of 2008. Back then, the country was falling in love. Imperfections were easy to overlook. Now, nearly half a decade into a relationship with Obama, voters weren’t so forgiving. They still liked their president. They believed his heart was in the right place. But was he perfect? Metaphorically speaking, the nation had noticed that its leader left dishes in the sink.
So, no, from a political perspective, a prosaic campaign didn’t worry me. From a personal perspective, however, the dangers were harder to ignore. Weeks on the Le Caprice diet had produced a noticeable softness around my middle. Devlin’s reports from headquarters were growing lonelier by the day. Worst of all, I was losing my sense of connection to the people I theoretically served. In Washington you never stop hearing about the details of policy, but you rarely see its effects. Imagine if no one who worked in Hollywood went to the movies or watched TV. It’s a strange condition. It eats away at you.
And if you’re not careful, it can dissolve whatever brought you to our nation’s capital in the first place. By now, I knew my share of go-getters who moved to Washington to change the world but had since become hollowed out. They held fancy-sounding jobs but took hour-long naps under their desks. They set up conference calls to discuss other, earlier conference calls. They could sniff out an open bar like a pig hunting truffles, but were physically incapable of paying attention to anyone who couldn’t help their careers.
I wondered what transformed these onetime idealists into connoisseurs of networking and sloth. Then I wiped chocolate from my upper lip and ignored Devlin’s latest e-mail. Maybe I already knew.
In August, as my concern over moral flabitude neared a breaking point, my old boss Jeff Nussbaum appeared with an offer. The Democratic National Convention was just one month away, and along with the marquee speeches—POTUS, FLOTUS, Biden—there would be dozens of remarks seen by almost no one outside the hall. Jeff was responsible for making sure these second-tier speeches went smoothly. Could I take a ten-day leave of absence from my DNC job, come to Charlotte, North Carolina, and help out?
On one hand, nothing about the work sounded fancy. I wouldn’t be writing for POTUS, not even in a handyman role. On the other hand, this was a chance to leave Washington and visit a bona fide swing state. I told Jeff I needed time to think it over. But really, I couldn’t wait to go.
POLITICAL CONVENTIONS WERE ONCE INFUSED WITH DRAMA. EVERY four years the nation’s cronies gathered in back rooms to chomp cigars, shout “Huzzah!” for their preferred candidates, and emerge, days later, with a consensus nominee. But that was decades ago. Today conventions are music festivals for people who flip out over Senator Claire McCaskill but have absolutely no idea what a Skrillex is.
TV executives have noticed that this is not for everybody. On the big three networks, each of our four nights in Charlotte was only carried live from 10 to 11 P.M. But inside the hall, the parade of speakers began hours earlier. The governor of Connecticut. The CEO of Costco. The president of the AFL-CIO. There were more than a hundred speakers in all, each one with a few precious moments on the party’s biggest stage.
Hence Jeff ’s real responsibility: Keep these people in line. Don’t let them say something embarrassing. Don’t let them bore the audience to tears.
Above all, don’t let them go over their allotted time. If you ever are asked to speak at a political convention, I have no doubt you will find yourself thinking you deserve an extra minute. I am here to tell you something. You don’t. It doesn’t matter how important you are outside the arena. Unless you’re being nominated for president, you’re singing backup, even when you take the stage.
To help him corral his herd of VIPs, Jeff had recruited the speechwriting version of the Suicide Squad. There was John “J. P.” Pollack, winner of the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship. Alexandra Veitch, whose pearls and cardigans hid the rhetorical equivalent of a shiv up her sleeve. Sarada Peri, who did hard time at Teach for America and the Kennedy School of Government. Andy Barr, the surprisingly upbeat grouch (or surprisingly grouchy optimist) who ran comms for Al Franken’s first Senate campaign. And then there was me, glowing faintly from White House fairy dust, still terrified by the idea of meeting with roommates to discuss a chore chart but increasingly comfortable in a suit.
Each morning we trudged into the bowels of the Time Warner Cable Arena like the dwarfs in Snow White. Ordinarily home to the Charlotte Hornets, the 780,000-square-foot building had been transformed into a temporary home for the campaign. For some departments, working out of luxury boxes or spacious concession areas, this was a major upgrade.
For speechwriting, it was not. We were handed the referees’ locker room, a space designed for three people to quickly change clothes before and after games. There were fifteen of us, working sixteen-hour days. We were crammed together like supermarket lobsters. It was as far from Le Caprice as I could get.
And yet I loved it. Something about our combination clicked. Besides, the election was perilously close. In Charlotte, everything we’d fought for over four long years would be defended over just four days. Who cared if I was literally rubbing shoulders with my coworkers? Who cared if a flimsy plastic curtain was the only thing separating our office from the bathroom on the other side? Lightning was striking left and right.
We were free to leave our basement office—lone speechwriters would occasionally escape for snacks or coffee—but only once did we venture to the surface as a group. About a week before the convention started, we walked five blocks from the arena to a downtown office tower. In a dusty conference room, we gathered around a gray plastic conference table. Then, like a bearded, bushy-eyebrowed guardian angel, Joel Benenson appeared.
When it comes to clothing, political strategists have two options: you can dress smart, or you can dress a little schlubby because everyone already knows you’re smart. Joel was firmly in the latter camp. His suits were slightly baggy. His shoes were more comfortable than stylish. No one cared. Our campaign’s chief pollster was quite possibly the world’s leading expert on America’s middle class. Each night his surveys went into the field like an army of tiny therapists. “So, the recession is finally over. How does that make you feel?”