Socialize. Verb. To circulate a policy informally. (“Let’s socialize this with stakeholders. We don’t want to ignore any equities here.”)
Along with the jargon came shorthand. Acknowledgments in speeches were acks. The apparatus POTUS read from was the prompter. His big annual address to Congress was the SOTU. Perhaps most important, the metal flying thing that carried the president around was always the plane. Nothing exposed you as a White House newbie faster than saying “Air Force One.”
Then there was the shorthand for Obama himself. In 2011, POTUS was still a cool-kids-only word. Then everyone started using POTUS, and the cool kids switched to just P. The initial proved even better than the acronym; on a BlackBerry, it required only one thumb to type. It also implied you were far too busy to waste time on four extra letters. Every so often, someone took the opposite approach, referring to the president as “the president.” But this was done rarely, and only as a power move.
“POTUS sent edits.”
“P is running late.”
“The president personally approved this. Do you still want to change it?”
At times, White House etiquette was no less complicated than vocabulary. If someone forwarded an e-mail without additional text in the body, for example, it was always possible they were just passing on information. More likely, however, they were sending a message in code:
“I don’t want an archived record of me saying so, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen.”
There was one final appendix to the Obama glossary: terms that signaled the absence, rather than the presence, of the thing they described. Chief among these was the process. I’m not sure if they used the term in the West Wing. In the EEOB, however, the process referred to the mysterious black hole all ideas entered and few escaped. POTUS almost shot a video for Comic-Con, but the process moved slowly and it got pulled down. When I suggested a Hamilton parody video featuring the president, I doubted it would survive the process, and it didn’t.
It was the process that determined which speeches opened with an engaging anecdote and which began with a sleep-inducing parade of acks. The process even dictated where and when POTUS would speak. “How does he decide what to talk about?” interns would ask. I would dutifully pretend to know. But really, their guess was as good as mine. Maybe topics were decided upon in a scheduling meeting. Maybe they were delivered in bundles by storks.
All I knew for certain was that, just as a surplus of stakeholders led to a Christmas tree, a big speech like the better-bargain address led to a series of message events. These were the bread and butter of POTUS speechwriting, the rhetorical equivalent of routine maintenance on your car. The goal was not to land in the history books. It was to focus America’s headline writers on a specific place and issue.
OBAMA VISITS MEMPHIS, LAYS OUT PLAN FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGE
IN KANSAS CITY, PRESIDENT PRAISES COMEBACK IN MANUFACTURING
In late July, it was decided that POTUS would do one message event for each of his middle-class cornerstones, and that I would take housing policy. This was hardly a vote of confidence. Health care was timely. Education was inspiring. Housing was a sedative. Handing me remarks about mortgage rates and home equity lines of credit was like sending the chubby kid to right field.
Like any good right fielder, however, I pretended not to notice. Just as I had done before all my speeches, I leaned back in my ergonomic chair, my dress shoes adding to the collage of scuff marks on my wall. I relished this moment. With nothing but a blank screen and a blinking cursor, I was Beethoven sitting down at his piano. I was Picasso picking up a brush.
Then, suddenly, an epiphany: I wasn’t doing my job at all. My work wasn’t art. It was craft. For all but the tiniest handful, government service is about competence, not genius; precision, not brilliance. It was time to stop pretending the process didn’t apply to me.
So that’s what I did. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I harvested bits and pieces of old language, gluing them together with lines from Cody’s Knox College remarks. I punched up old anecdotes instead of finding completely new ones. True, I added a few new flourishes: a joke here, an RP story there. But there was no getting around it. It was the least original work I had ever produced.
As if that wasn’t process-y enough, I had to run it by the fact-checkers. The idea of a White House that checks facts—the idea of a White House that believes in facts—already seems like a relic of another time. Yet less than six months ago as I write this, there was an entire research office responsible for making sure that the president’s statements were true. Our researchers saved me from countless embarrassments. They were invaluable, not just to the president but to democracy itself. Hardworking and unfailingly humble, they were model public servants. Also, they bothered the shit out of me.
It wasn’t personal. The research office was just a few steps away from the speechwriting office. We were on the same team and friendly outside work. Inside the building, however, we feuded as bitterly as the Sharks and Jets.
The problem, as far as researchers saw it, was that any speechwriter left unsupervised would begin writing fiction. The problem, as far as speechwriters saw it, was that researchers were almost comically risk averse. Terrified of even the slightest error, they highlighted line after line in yellow, with little notes underneath. These comments could make me bang my head against a wall.
America is the greatest country on earth.
Actually, the Nordic countries surpass us on several key measures.
Our economic policies are working.
Just flagging that Republicans might not agree.
I didn’t blame the fact-checkers for going a little overboard. In their world, a surplus of caution was a surefire way to get ahead. But the result was an eight-year-long, cover-your-ass arms race. Research began adding nearly or almost to every assertion. POTUS began skipping over the words nearly and almost every time he spoke. Research began deferring to policy on even the most obvious questions. Speechwriting began suggesting that if every question was so important, perhaps researchers should, well, research a few answers themselves.
I didn’t often collaborate with my fellow speechwriters on lines or paragraphs. But in the EEOB, we swapped anti-research tactics the way allies shared intelligence during the Cold War. We had no choice. If research had gone over the paragraphs you’ve just finished reading, here are just a few of the notes I would have received.
Just a few steps away from
Flagging that stride length varies by person, sometimes by large amounts.
We were on the same team.
Defer to the Office of Presidential Personnel.
. . . as bitterly as the Sharks and Jets.
At the end of West Side Story, someone dies. Can we say “almost as bitterly”?
POTUS began skipping over the words nearly and almost every time he spoke.
Should change to “nearly every time he spoke.”