For a moment, I wondered if I should run this line by a foreign-policy expert. That’s what Litt would have done. But then I thought better of it. Lips didn’t need some egghead to tell him how to craft a sentence. You lump the countries ending in yuh sounds together. Everything flows perfectly. The crowd goes wild. The end.
On Saturday night, my confidence was rewarded. Dressed in a tailcoat, wing-collared shirt, and white bow tie, I descended the escalator to a ballroom in the Renaissance Hotel. Just feet from the stage, I watched costumed reporters sing “My Gun” to the tune of “My Girl.” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar delivered monologues in front of a giant, glowing spatula I can only assume was the club’s namesake Gridiron.
Then, just before “Auld Lang Syne,” POTUS spoke. The laughter was consistent and chummy. The jokes singed, but never burned. During his serious close, President Obama praised reporters for risking everything in places like Syria and Kenya. Everything flowed perfectly. The crowd went wild.
Lips was fucking crushing it.
On Monday, back in the office, I was a paragon of false humility. Other speechwriters told me the remarks had been great, and I replied that it was all in the delivery. I explained to the twenty-two-year-olds that, really, when you think about it, credit belongs to the entire team. I was on top of the world, wondering if I might actually be the best wordsmith in history, when I heard from one of the president’s longest-serving speechwriters, a soft-spoken Massachusetts native named Terry. He had a question.
This was a bad sign. At nearly forty, Terry was our team’s elder statesman, and he had a talent for leading witnesses that only lawyers and parents of young children possess. If Terry wondered whether your smoke alarm was working, your house was on fire. If he asked how your girlfriend was doing, you could safely assume she was, at that very moment, enjoying sweaty intercourse with your best friend. Now Terry wanted to know if I’d seen an article in the Daily Nation, a newspaper published in Nairobi.
KENYA NOT SAFE FOR FOREIGN JOURNALISTS, SAYS OBAMA
It took some frantic googling, but I pieced together what had happened. The White House press office had released the full transcript of POTUS’s Gridiron speech. When Kenyan officials read it, they noticed their country featured in the same sentence as one of the world’s most despised regimes. They went berserk.
Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. But because this was international diplomacy, the Kenyans used their newfound berserkness to gain leverage over the United States. Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary for Information and Communications, released an official statement calling the president’s words “not only inaccurate, but exceedingly disturbing.” A group called KOT (Kenyans on Twitter) created a brand-new hashtag to channel their rage.
If you’ve never angered a country of more than forty-five million people before, it might seem like a power trip. It’s not. Sitting in my office, typing Kenya at Obama into the search bar over and over again, I felt more helpless than ever. What I wanted more than anything was someone I could talk to—a Kenyan I could call. “You think your entire country is mad at my entire country,” I would explain, chuckling at the mix-up, “when really it’s just little ol’ me.”
But no such Kenyan existed. As a junior White House staffer, I had the ability to place the salmon of distrust in the toilet of international relations. I didn’t have the ability to get it out.
Instead, senior staff were forced to busy themselves playing cleanup. These were people with serious responsibilities, global priorities on their plate. Now they had to take time away from far more worthy objectives to deal with my mess. Even then, it took an official apology on America’s behalf to put the controversy behind us. “We recognize and commend the press freedoms enshrined in Kenya’s constitution,” said an unnamed White House official. “Obviously, the situations in Syria and Kenya are quite different.”
Perhaps Lips was not crushing it after all.
I spent the rest of the day wondering if antagonizing a midsize African nation was considered a fireable offense. But in the White House, I learned, it’s not so cut-and-dried. I wasn’t the first young staffer to find their smallest screw-up magnified to national scale. I wasn’t even the first speechwriter to piss off another country by mistake.
Besides, Obamaworld wasn’t big on firing people. Exceptions were made for the grossly negligent or the publicly embarrassing. But the merely incompetent, rather than being dismissed entirely, were simply exiled from a circle of trust. It didn’t happen immediately. Instead, like a pirate marooned on a desert island, you found yourself watching as everything you ever cared about slowly disappeared. Eventually, your responsibilities vanished completely. A few lackluster employees were fine with this arrangement, cashing steady paychecks for an ever smaller amount of work. But most took the hint and resigned.
Living, as I was, in fear of being cast away, I desperately craved a shot at redemption. The days crawled by. No second chance arrived. Finally, at the end of March, Cody gave me an assignment. POTUS was scheduled to speak in Miami, where a new tunnel would soon connect the city and the port. The remarks were mine.
Not that anyone else wanted them. With the possible exceptions of toenail clippings and the Professional Bowling League, infrastructure finance is the least sexy subject known to man. Yet this only made me more eager. If I could write something riveting about the world’s most boring topic, surely I would be in my team’s good graces once again.
IN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE, THERE WAS NO SET TIME LINE FOR drafting a presidential speech. For an unexpected eulogy, the writer might have just forty-eight hours. The State of the Union took six weeks or more. But for my remarks in Miami, which were as typical as they come, I had about seven days.
My work began with a policy meeting. This is a polite way of saying that a team of experts tried, often unsuccessfully, to stuff information into my fluff-filled head. I can’t say I always enjoyed being the token ignoramus. But there was power in the role. If a concept couldn’t be explained to me, it was unlikely to make it into the speech.
The next step, after absorbing my colleagues’ wisdom, was independent research. I would later learn to focus these efforts on the interesting, rather than the technically important. But for my Miami speech, desperate to restore my reputation, I embarked on an all-day infrastructure binge. Advances in tunnel-digging technology. Incentive structures associated with various investment schemes. Dredging. By the end of my self-taught crash course, I was hooked.
Holy cow! Public-private partnerships are awesome!