Now, standing before our suicide squad, Joel presented his findings: President Obama’s narrow lead was even more fragile than it appeared. A small but significant percentage of voters remained undecided. They held the president’s fate, and ours, in their hands.
At first glance this might seem strange. We had just been through four years of nonstop partisan conflict. Who could possibly be undecided at this point? And it’s true: for most of us, a vote for president is as fixed and certain as the answer to a password recovery question. What was your first pet’s name? What was your high school mascot? Which candidate do you support?
For a sizable number of Americans, however, presidential preference is surprisingly malleable. Would you cheat on your husband? Would you sleep with George Clooney? In politics, sometimes the answer depends entirely on the questions being asked.
This was the essence of Joel’s research. When the election was framed as a performance review—Has Obama met expectations?—we did poorly. The economy was growing more slowly than most voters would like. Our best hope was not to change minds, but to change the subject. If you had to choose between Obama and Romney, who would you rather have as your boss? When the election was seen as a job interview—a choice between two potential hires—voters chose Obama every time.
To make this choice as clear as possible, Joel field-tested a smorgasbord of messages. At the conference table in Charlotte, he presented us with the winner:
“President Obama understands that the economy grows not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up.”
These fourteen words were drilled into our heads like the Lord’s Prayer or the rules of Fight Club. Not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up. Not from the top down, but from the middle out and the bottom up. We dutifully inserted the line in speech after speech. This is what’s known as “message discipline,” but the existence of a technical term doesn’t make it feel less silly. Imagine going to a cocktail party full of strangers. Now imagine being told that, in every conversation, you’re expected to say that Shake Shack owes its success less to savvy marketing than to its proprietary blend of meats. It’s weird.
The only thing more bizarre than message discipline, it turns out, is a lack of it. As we were preparing for our convention, Republicans were finishing theirs, and on August 30 we huddled in our hotel lobby to watch Mitt Romney’s big speech. All week long, rumors had buzzed. Republicans held an ace up their sleeve. Was it a well-known Democrat? A prominent general?
When the surprise guest was revealed to be Clint Eastwood, the worried knots in our stomachs untangled into confusion. Allotted five minutes of stage time, the actor-director rambled for twelve. Even stranger, he spent the majority of his time pretending a nearby chair was the president of the United States. GOP convention-goers thoroughly enjoyed the performance. But outside the hall, thirty million Americans had tuned in hoping to see a potential president, and were forced to watch an octogenarian insult furniture instead.
In our hotel lobby, we exchanged joyous, disbelieving looks. Thanks to a poorly timed, profoundly odd spectacle, Romney’s moment in the spotlight had been completely undercut. That gave us an opportunity. It also gave us a mission. Make sure no one goes Eastwood in Charlotte.
ON MONDAY, JUST HOURS BEFORE OUR CONVENTION BEGAN, I received a surprise assignment. It came from Erik Smith, the longtime Democratic operative in charge of the program.
“Big news,” he said. “Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Kerry Washington are speaking on Thursday. Want to write the script?” His offer came with implied wink and nudge, as if he were appointing me bikini inspector.
“Sure,” I said. But I didn’t think much about it. I simply added the actresses to the long list of speakers I’d been assigned. Most were no strangers to the soapbox. Former Virginia governor Tim Kaine. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. A Miami talk-show host named Cristina Saralegui. For them, appearing in public was routine.
For a few others, however, speaking at a convention was as far from normal as you could get. These men and women were not politicians. They were students and parents and factory workers who had been helped by the president’s policies. They led lives viewers at home could relate to. Now they were being asked to share their stories, in front of twenty thousand people, in two minutes or less. It was one of these stories that occupied the bulk of my focus as our convention began.
I first learned about Zoe Lihn from a short film produced by the campaign. The video began with a two-year-old girl giving an eager kiss to a purple stuffed sheep. Then her mother faced the camera. “My name is Stacey Lihn, I’m from Phoenix, Arizona, and the Affordable Care Act is saving my daughter’s life.”
As the video continued, Stacey explained that Zoe was born with a congenital heart defect. At just fifteen hours old, she endured her first open-heart surgery. A second surgery followed four months later. Here, Zoe interrupted the video to proudly offer her dad a piece of fruit.
“Apple!”
“That’s an orange.”
“Oh.”
It was adorable. It was also heartbreaking. When Zoe was born, insurance companies were allowed to place limits on the total amount of coverage one person could receive. At just six months old, Zoe was halfway to her lifetime cap.
Then came the Affordable Care Act. Thanks to Obamacare, lifetime limits on coverage were prohibited. Stacey and her husband, Caleb, could once again afford their daughter’s care. But Zoe needed at least one more surgery to repair her heart, and it was scheduled for 2013. If the law were repealed and the lifetime caps reinstated, the Lihns would be helpless. For Zoe, the 2012 election could mean life or death.
After three years as a speechwriter, I had grown slightly numb to gut-wrenching stories, the same way medical students grow accustomed to the sight of blood. But the Lihns were different. Stacey’s authenticity was almost impossible to find in Washington. Her talent for connecting the personal and political was almost impossible to find anywhere else. I was determined not to let her down.
In an ideal world, Stacey and I would have met in person on multiple occasions, over a period of weeks, to carefully prepare her remarks. In the real world, we had twenty minutes on the phone. With so little time, “speechwriting” was not much more than glorified transcription. I wrote down everything Stacey said. I cut all but the 260 most memorable words. Then e-mailed them to her so she could rehearse.