We had no choice.
Do you have backup proving this? If not, “We had limited choices” would be safer.
For all its truth-preserving merits, research was the process personified. No matter how excited I was at the outset, it left me completely, totally drained. My housing speech was scheduled for Tuesday, August 6. By the time I sent a draft to Cody, that Sunday afternoon, I never wanted to see it again. To be honest, I never wanted to write another speech again. Every ounce of emotional energy had evaporated. Every drop of joy was gone.
Exhausted and famished, I went to lunch with Jacqui at a Thai restaurant near my apartment. Before we could even order, my BlackBerry vibrated. It was Cody. Too tired to care anymore, I opened the e-mail from my boss.
Great job, bro!
Just like that, the exhaustion vanished. I knew my next set of remarks would be another roller coaster. So would the set after that, and the set after that. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t wait to dive back in.
This, I was realizing, is what it really means to work at the White House. Ping-ponging between emotional extremes, I had finally arrived at my inner common ground. I was in paradise and limbo. Indispensable and disposable. Defined by process and purpose. Washington was in the grip of unbreakable fever, yet there was nowhere I’d rather be.
Was my job as wonderful as I’d imagined when I’d first walked through the gates? Of course not. But it was also more than enough. On the day of the housing speech, as I sauntered into the staff cabin and snatched a paper card off my seat, I might even have told you I was living the dream.
Mr. LITT, the card said. Welcome aboard Air Force One.
11
THE HOLY WAR
“We already have a Christmas,” I told Jacqui. “It’s called Yom Kippur.”
This was during our first July together, when she was giddy about being halfway to December and I was not. To be clear, I didn’t hate Christmas. I had no desire to be a Grinch. I simply placed Christmas in a category with The Big Bang Theory, the Dave Matthews Band, and peyote. It wasn’t my thing.
For Jacqui, this was unacceptable. Presbyterian on her father’s side, Catholic on her mother’s, she was not especially fervent about most aspects of her faith. But when it came to Santa Claus, indoor trees, and It’s a Wonderful Life, her evangelism easily surpassed Saint John’s. That I did not accept Christ as my lord and savior left her unbothered. That I did not accept Christmas as the most wonderful time of the year made her fear for my very soul.
Hence the inquisition that first July. “What do you do on your Christmas?” she demanded.
“Well, for starters, we don’t eat anything.” I hoped to sound high-minded, even spiritual. But Jacqui remained unconvinced.
“If you don’t eat all day, then what do you do?”
“Mostly we pray,” I said.
“For what?” she said. “For food?”
IF MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER WERE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE, imported from eastern Europe, and told this story, he would surely be furious to hear I was dating outside my religion. But his disapproval wouldn’t last long. One look at two dudes kissing in the gayborhood near my apartment and he would drop dead of a heart attack on the spot.
In this way, Jacqui and I were a product of relaxing attitudes all over. Interracial, same-sex, interfaith. Second marriages, cohabitation, no-fault divorce. The overall trend, decades in the making, was neatly summarized by a leading gay-marriage slogan.
“Love is love.”
There was just one big exception. Politics. In 1960, a mere 5 percent of Americans said they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. A half century later, that number had exploded eightfold, to 40 percent. Partisanship, in other words, was playing a dividing-line role once reserved for religion and race.
As a loyal Democrat, I felt firsthand the effects of political tribalism. In the mid-2000s, for example, I knew President Bush spent a scandalous amount of time on vacation. This was not a conclusion I reached via analysis. It was dogma. Then I got to the White House and learned the truth: presidents are never really on vacation. No matter how many days he spent clearing brush at his Texas ranch, George W. Bush was permanently at work. This was a mild awakening, less “God is dead” than “God has a peanut allergy.” Still, it came as a shock.
Yet that is nothing compared to what happened across the aisle. Yes, it’s true that both Democrats and Republicans became polarized in the early twenty-first century. But it’s also true that both Porky’s and Psycho depict bad manners in the shower. Degree counts.
After all, when Obama took office, postpartisanship was kind of his thing. On big issues—education, climate change, health care—he borrowed ideas from Republicans. Rather than starting from one extreme and negotiating toward the center, his early proposals often arrived with compromise baked in. A few decades earlier, these gestures might have been reciprocated. But this was the age of the Tea Party. Each time Obama entered new common ground, a kind of white flight occurred.
By 2013, thanks to backlash against a Spock-like president, even logic itself had become partisan. More and more, the Republican Party was defined not by arguments but by articles of faith: Climate change wasn’t real. Voter fraud was rampant. Deficits were rising instead of falling. More guns meant less gun violence. President Obama’s economic recovery plan had yet to create a single job.
That these ideas were demonstrably untrue was not, in and of itself, a problem. My own religion forbids consuming milk with meat. As anyone who has ever eaten a cheeseburger can tell you, this makes no sense. And that’s fine! If every tenet was rational, we wouldn’t call it a faith. But journalists who continued to treat the GOP as a traditional mesh of interest groups invariably tied themselves in knots. The conservative movement had undergone a transformation. The Republican Party had become a kind of church.
This did not mean its members were in complete agreement. As with any self-respecting religious institution, a million sects and subgroups vied for control. It’s impossible to classify every denomination. To understand President Obama’s second term, however, all you need to know are the following three:
First, the Country Clubbers. Guardians of the GOP’s upper-crust traditions, they believed in lower taxes, less regulation, and being polite. They were led in Congress by Speaker John Boehner. They held out hope for the resurrection of Mitt Romney. Their fortunes were not on the rise.