I tried my best to recover, suggesting that perhaps printing out drafts wasn’t necessary after all. But it was too late. While the actresses reluctantly joined me at the computer, any semblance of authority had vanished. After fifteen fruitless minutes, Erik poked his head in. He seemed pleasantly surprised to find me alive, but disappointed to find me unproductive. A minute after that, Jeff appeared, took Scarlett Johansson to a different office, and left me and Kerry Washington alone to figure out her remarks.
At first I wondered if this, too, was part of Harvey’s strategy. Strangle him with an extension cord, Kerry! It’ll look like a printer accident! But for some reason, one-on-one, everything snapped into place. Kerry’s remarks didn’t actually need much polish. In the patriotic atmosphere of the convention hall, it was far easier to explain how seriously we took limits on time. Just twenty minutes later, Kerry and I exited the cubicle with a draft. Just ten minutes after that, Jeff and Scarlett wrapped up her draft, too.
On the convention’s final evening, I watched with my fellow speechwriters as both actresses delivered their remarks to loud applause. A few hours later, Barack Obama formally accepted the nomination for president of the United States.
He began by admitting that politics had lost some of its luster since 2008. “Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising.”
But the rest of his speech urged us to remember that for all their frustrations, campaigns still mattered. Doing big things was exhausting. The opposition to change was dispiriting. Still, progress depended on our willingness to try.
“Our path is harder,” President Obama told us. “But it leads to a better place.”
He was referring to jobs, education, and health care—not tirades about Oscar nominations delivered over the phone. Still, I couldn’t help but think about the past two days. So much of my energy had gone toward Harvey. Time that might have been spent on issues that truly mattered was spent e-mailing publicists instead. Where did that place me on the scale of moral flabitude? Was putting all that effort into pleasing one powerful person really the right thing to do?
But what if I looked at it a different way? Were a few hours of my time worth placating someone who paid the salaries of organizers in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio? What if those organizers swung an election? What if that election got Zoe Lihn her heart surgery? What if that surgery saved her life?
This, I had begun to realize, was politics. Sometimes the answer depends entirely on the questions being asked.
8
THAT FIRST REAL TASTE OF BLOOD
Along with gadzooks and hubba hubba, the word zinger fell from favor decades ago. Yet like a species of stick insect once thought to be extinct, it can still be found thriving on a small rocky island in the English language. That island is presidential debate prep.
The moment I returned to Washington from Charlotte, the zinger machine went into overdrive. POTUS and Romney were set to face off for the first time on October 3. That gave us less than a month to prepare. Each day, I spent hours thinking of clever jabs or vicious comebacks. Then I’d send the best of the bunch to Favs, who was curating submissions from writers across the country.
I wish I could say the goal of these one-liners was to win an argument. It wasn’t. The goal was to make POTUS look good on TV. For better or worse (mostly for worse), debates have become a reality show. Al Gore lost one by sighing on camera. Richard Nixon lost an even bigger one by sweating where JFK stayed dry. I can’t imagine most Americans would feel unsafe knowing the commander in chief occasionally sweats or sighs. Yet during the biggest nights of election season, these are the standards by which we judge. Imagine trying to explain this to a Martian. Imagine trying to convince it that this—a dog show, but for people—is what makes us the greatest democracy on earth.
And yet, even in a made-for-TV political era, the truth has a way of coming out. On September 17, my twenty-sixth birthday, Mother Jones magazine released a leaked cell phone video of Mitt Romney. I couldn’t have asked for a better present. The footage wasn’t quite in focus, but over the heads of well-heeled donors, you could spot the unmistakable jawline of the Republican nominee.
“There are forty-seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said matter-of-factly. “There are forty-seven percent who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” It was appalling: a presidential candidate writing off nearly half the people he hoped to serve.
To those of us who spent time reading right-wing media, however, it wasn’t a surprise. Under Ronald Reagan, conservative theory held that handouts for the rich were good for everyone. Wealthy people would use their tax cuts to buy expensive stuff. Middle-class people would get jobs making expensive stuff. Poor people would get jobs selling middle-class people cheap versions of the expensive stuff they made.
But in the age of Obama, something had seeped from the comments section of Fox Nation into the mainstream GOP. According to the new theory, the entire lower half of the income scale was full of leeches. These deadbeats were getting more than they deserved. Once a matter of economics, cutting rich people’s taxes had become a matter of morals instead.
I don’t know if Romney truly believed what he was caught saying. But it hardly mattered. When you lead a political party, you can’t help but reflect its members’ views. And Americans were horrified to see those views on camera. A week after the video, the Gallup tracking poll had us up by six points, one of our largest margins of the campaign. Our odds on FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s website, rocketed above 80 percent. Rumors spread that our opponent’s biggest donors were about to abandon him. Romney was toast.
And Democrats were celebrating. In the weeks after the 47 percent video, even the DNC cubicles seemed cheery. For the first time since July, I abandoned my French bakery and joined Devlin at work. Sure, a few strange reports were coming out of debate prep in Las Vegas. Why, for example, did POTUS feel the need to abandon his practice sessions and tour the Hoover Dam? But these were random oddities. No use letting them darken our mood. Besides, as debate night drew closer, I was told that one of my zingers was a consensus favorite among the senior staff.
“Why is Governor Romney keeping all his plans secret? Is it because they’re just too good?”
Out of context, this line may not seem like much. But on debate-prep island, it was a rare specimen: snappy, on message, with just enough snark. I couldn’t wait to see POTUS unleash it. It would demolish Romney on the spot.