Or thirty minutes. Or forty.
We didn’t crash, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But by the time our helicopter landed, we had spent nearly an hour in the air. And it turned out we really were in danger. Once the choppers were airborne, the pilots realized visibility was practically zero. There was a genuine possibility that two helicopters would blindly bump each other, and that one would contain the president of the United States. That’s why our flight took so long. Rather than assemble in tight formation and risk a crash, the helos had lined up single file. When it felt like we weren’t going anywhere, we weren’t going anywhere. Our chopper was waiting its turn to land, without instruments, in pea-soup fog.
As you can imagine, there was plenty of nervous chatter on the flight home. But for the most part, I didn’t join in. Sitting silently in my staff-cabin recliner, I felt less frightened than foolish. How many times would I need to relearn this lesson? No one is all knowing. No one is infallible. Not the speechwriters, not the people making the weather call, not the president of the United States.
Even the trained killers of the CAT team were only human. Somewhere above New Jersey, deep in foggy purgatory, our helo had hit an unexpected patch of turbulence. I distinctly saw two of them flinch.
RETURNING TO YOUR COLLEGE CAMPUS AND BRAGGING ABOUT YOUR recent Air Force One flight is not the only way to feel good about yourself. That said, it works.
I learned this shortly after my near-death helicopter experience, when I attended my five-year reunion. A half decade out of school, my friends were asking the questions confronted by all twenty-somethings. What fulfills me? Are my goals worthwhile? How do I define success? Working at the White House meant I could skip these questions entirely. I once compared the president to Hitler during a meeting. How much more fulfilling can life get!
“You’re living the dream,” I was told, at least a dozen times.
What I didn’t tell my classmates was that, while my higher purpose seemed certain, my moment-to-moment well-being was in constant flux. I was living not one dream, but two. In the first, I flew around on Barack Obama’s private jet while he helped me score brownie points with my girlfriend’s parents. It was awesome. But the second dream was more fevered, more troubling. I was hovering midair. Men with guns surrounded me. I didn’t know where we were going. The pilots were flying blind.
Was I in paradise, or in limbo? In a state of profound gratitude, or persistent unease? At the White House, it was often hard to say.
At least I was no longer getting blown up quite so regularly. Still, I continued to open Cody’s edits as though their contents might explode. By now, I didn’t even have to check tracked changes to know what would befall my ego. Like most EEOB employees, I studied the West Wing with anthropological intensity, and had learned to translate my boss’s unique dialect of one-line e-mails.
My edits. Unmitigated disaster. Pure garbage. Rewrite.
Here are my edits. I disliked this, but I didn’t completely hate it.
Some edits. This was acceptable, but only by the smallest possible margin.
Good job. Good job.
The final category of e-mail, and by far the most precious, was any message containing the words boom! or bro. These were special. They meant you were totally killing it and had established yourself as a valued member of the team.
Four months after my return to the White House, however, booms and bros remained elusive. While the Correspondents’ Dinner had been a hit, more serious speeches continued to frustrate me. I wasn’t killing it at all.
Frankly, neither was POTUS. The reelect was a hearty “good job” from voters, but by the summer of 2013, he was firmly in here-are-my-edits territory. Nor was there any reason to think his approvals would rise. With the fever raging, and our legislative agenda stalled, Americans were losing faith. Fog was enveloping the second term. We needed something to break through.
That something was a speech. The decision was made to return to Knox College, the site of POTUS’s place-in-history commencement. For a week, Cody barricaded himself in his office. When he emerged, it was with a set of remarks entitled “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class.”
No one thought the better-bargain address would boost our approvals. Thanks to a splintered bully pulpit, even presidents can no longer tell America what to think. They can, however, tell America what to think about. That’s what Cody’s speech was designed to do. Sometime in the 1970s, the remarks reminded us, higher productivity stopped generating higher wages. The cause-and-effect relationship between work and reward had disappeared. Restoring this link would be the great project of President Obama’s second term. Nor did POTUS stop there. In the rest of his address, he described what he called “cornerstones” of middle-class life. Good jobs. Affordable health care. Economic opportunity. A chance to buy a home. A secure retirement.
This was riskier than it sounds. There’s a widespread belief that most politicians don’t try to keep their promises. That’s false. They do. But it’s for precisely this reason that politicians generally avoid promising at all. Now, POTUS had laid out five separate standards by which to judge his performance. It wasn’t hard to see the subtext. If I can deliver on these priorities, I will earn my place in history. If not, I won’t.
AS EXPECTED, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S GUTSY NEW TONE DIDN’T reverse the effects of gridlock. But it did lift morale. For the first time in months, there was hope that the fever could be sidestepped, that our success or failure would not be left to Congress to decide. Our supporters took note.
“He was good!” friends and family told me, assuming, as they often did, that I had written the remarks.
“You should have seen the first draft,” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable without actually claiming credit. “It was a real Christmas tree.”
They had no idea what I was talking about. That, of course, was the point. Like every workplace, Obamaworld was home to a members-only vocabulary. The more disposable we felt, the more comforting it became to rely on phrases outsiders didn’t understand.
Christmas Tree. Noun. A speech hopelessly weighed down with personal agendas and irrelevant policy details.
Due-Outs. Plural noun. Tasks assigned at the end of a meeting.
Bigfoot. Verb. To pull rank on. (“Sorry I had to bigfoot you, but that conference call was for senior staff.”)
Click. Noun. A picture at a photo line. (“Shouldn’t take long. Only twenty clicks.”)
Real Person. Noun. An American living outside Washington who is not famous and does not work in government. Often shortened to “RP.”
Equities. Plural noun. Interests.
Stakeholders. Plural noun. People with equities.