I’d later realize this was a warning sign, an early-onset symptom of lost perspective. But at the time, I was thrilled.
With research out of the way, I was finally ready to sit down and write. This was my first policy speech for POTUS since my return, but to my surprise, everything seemed easy. The previous forty-eight hours had left my brain completely saturated. Now, I poured that esoteric knowledge into a draft. I had written the race speech for infrastructure finance. I was sure of it. Two nights before the remarks were to be delivered, I sent them to Cody for his edits. Then I went on a Kennedy Center date with Jacqui and waited for my boss’s applause.
In the EEOB, we had a term for what happened next, and it described both the condition of the speech and the ego of the speechwriter responsible. I got blown up. I had expected Cody’s tracked changes to be minor flecks of red, the aftermath of a careless shave. Instead, I got the aftermath of a chain saw massacre.
Most painful of all, where ego was concerned, was that the new remarks were exponentially better than the old ones. Cody connected Americans’ stories and America’s story, self-interest and the national interest, in a way I simply had not. Reading through the wreckage, I wasn’t mad. I was embarrassed. In my world, there was nothing worse than being useless. My Kenya fiasco, while embarrassing, could at least be written off as a mistake. But producing something worthless? Wasting my boss’s time? In the Obama White House, these were character flaws. And they were unforgivable.
The remaining steps of the speechwriting process sped by in a demoralizing haze. Only Cody and I knew about the rewrite. My name was still on the remarks. But the privacy of the shame made it that much harder to bear. The day before the speech was delivered, policy teams, fact-checkers, and lawyers examined language they thought was mine. Their edits, by and large, were helpful. Their congratulations made me want to crawl into a hole.
I still had one more step remaining. That night I sent the remarks to “the book,” the thick binder POTUS read each night, and in the morning I was informed he had only minor changes. The other speechwriters sounded impressed. “That’s great!” they told me. I smiled weakly, wondering if they suspected the truth. Either way, the ordeal was almost over. Just a few hours later, President Obama was in Miami, reading what was still technically my speech.
“What are we waiting for?” he said. “There’s work to be done; there are workers who are ready to do it.”
It was classic warrior poet: blunt, passionate, steeped in common sense. My original draft had been far more concerned with cruise-ship disembarkation rates and high-tech hydraulic drills. It was only as I listened to the crowd cheer for Cody’s lines that I finally realized the full extent of my mistake. I had written a draft of a speech about infrastructure finance. For a cabinet undersecretary or deputy mayor, that might have been fine. For the president, however, every speech is a speech about America. Every audience is the entire United States.
I had learned a valuable lesson. But had I learned it soon enough? A month after returning to the White House, the president’s Knox College commencement had never seemed more relevant. “What will be your place in history?” I could hear him ask. From my blown-up draft, a million tiny whispers echoed in reply.
Desert island. Desert island. Desert island.
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A NEAR-PERFECT OBAMA SPEECH, ONE THAT should be canon but isn’t quite, I recommend the remarks he delivered on April 18, 2013. Three days earlier, a bomb had gone off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Two hundred sixty-four people were wounded. Three were killed. When POTUS arrived in Boston for the memorial service, the bombers had yet to be caught. His speech that day, written by Terry on impossibly short notice, had to be flawless, and it was. An extraordinary blend of toughness and tenderness, it’s the kind of thing that earned POTUS the moniker “consoler in chief.”
Yet as a nation mourned and a city searched for suspects, it was “comedian in chief” that occupied my time. The 2013 Correspondents’ Dinner was just two weeks away.
It was a strange feeling, watching news about manhunts and shootouts while trying to write something snarky about Maureen Dowd. And along with the fear and discomfort felt by the entire nation, there was a question I couldn’t shake. Since returning to the White House, I’d been given two major assignments. I’d bungled both. Would I once again screw things up?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With Favs’s departure, I was more responsible than ever for the Correspondents’ Dinner, and should have been relishing my new role. Instead, in the two years since being hired by the White House, I had never felt so utterly fraudulent. I was living the exact opposite of a superhero’s life. By day, I was a mild-mannered speechwriter. By night, I was a mess.
My inability to calm myself only added to my sense of phoniness. Unless I was forgetting something, The West Wing never did an episode where Rob Lowe buys a mouth guard because he grinds his teeth in his sleep. If it had, the writers might have learned what I did: the CVS near the White House sells two types. There’s a no-frills mouth guard for about twenty dollars. There’s also a fancy, ergonomic model for forty. I didn’t have to think twice about springing for the deluxe.
The old saying goes that you should fake it till you make it, but I think a more accurate saying would be “Fake it because you have no choice.” Coming up with punch lines. Collecting jokes from our growing diaspora of writers. Convincing everybody that a high-concept short film—starring Steven Spielberg, Tracy Morgan, and Barack Obama playing Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama—was a good idea. Each day I went to work and did the best I could, not because I was courageous, but because I couldn’t come up with an alternative. Then I went home and ground my high-tech mouth guard to a pulp.
Before I knew it, Cody was once again sauntering into the Oval, and I was once again tiptoeing behind. I felt good about our draft, but this no longer offered comfort. I had felt good about the Gridiron and Miami speeches, too.
The joke that most worried me involved the political landscape postcampaign. “One thing Republicans can all agree on after 2012 is that they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities,” the script read. “Call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with.”
It was the kind of line we never would have written in the first term. No one could remember POTUS referring to himself as a “minority” before. But with the reelect behind him, President Obama was eager to push the envelope.
“That’s pretty good,” he chuckled. Just as he did a year earlier, when the subject was eating pit bulls, he even promised a personal touch.