THAT, IN A NUTSHELL, WAS 2014. WE DID OUR JOBS. WE WERE PROUD of our accomplishments. Everyone hated us anyway.
Our catalog of woe began, as it always seemed to, with Obamacare. (If you find yourself wishing we could move past health care already, just imagine how we felt.) As the New Year dawned, reports weren’t all bad. People were finally using Healthcare.gov. But an insurance market is like the punch at a fraternity party, where young, healthy people are the mixers and old, sick people are the booze. Get the proportions right, and the whole thing goes down smoothly. Fail to mask the alcohol, and you’re screwed.
At the beginning of 2014, we were looking at a ten-gallon bucket of Everclear. Young people were tuning out information about Obamacare. They didn’t know Healthcare.gov was finally working, or that in most cases they could purchase insurance for less than a hundred bucks a month. The first window to buy coverage closed in March. If we couldn’t grab the attention of America’s youth by then, Obamacare premiums would skyrocket for everyone else. That would trigger what is known, in otherwise sedate policy circles, as a death spiral. The White House communications department was ready to throw a Hail Mary pass.
What we didn’t know was that the perfect play had been drawn up five years earlier. On Halloween 2008, a producer for the comedy website Funny Or Die had been seized with patriotic fervor. Grabbing a pen and a piece of unlined paper, he began to write.
I, Mike Farah, guarantee that the FOD team will for sure meet or have the opportunity to meet Barack Obama between October 31st 2008 and October 31st 2016 or I’ll eat my hat.
It is safe to say that, at the time, hat eating was the likely outcome. But Farah knew how to put himself in the path of lightning. In early 2013, he was invited to his first White House meeting. For the next twelve months he hovered in the background, never pushy but always available, like an extremely well-tanned Secret Service agent. His company produced Between Two Ferns, a weird online talk show hosted by comedian Zach Galifianakis. Maybe POTUS could appear as a guest? The idea was ludicrous. And then it wasn’t. In 2014, when desperate times called for desperate measures, Farah was there to help.
Here I must confess something: I thought putting POTUS on Between Two Ferns would be a huge mistake. My concern was not that he would come across as unpresidential. My concern was that he would come across as kind of a dick. The camera didn’t always catch the nuance in his humor, the way a smile or raised eyebrow could soften a rhetorical blow. Good-natured teasing in person could look like bullying on-screen.
Take what happened when President Obama met my parents. This was backstage before a speech at a New York City Sheraton, the kind of photo line POTUS had done countless times before.
“Mr. President,” I announced when my turn came, “this is my mother, father, and sister.”
“Mom, Dad, sis, good to see you!” (To remove the potential for hurt feelings, the president avoided “Nice to meet you” at all costs.)
We grouped ourselves into a bell curve by height. POTUS put his arm around my shoulder, and I readied myself for our click. But instead of a camera, I was surprised to hear President Obama’s voice.
“Uh, maybe you should put down your speech?”
My printed draft! I had taken a copy off the plane, and now, to my horror, I realized I was clutching it like a security blanket. I trotted over to a nearby aide, handed him my file folder, and sheepishly slouched back into the frame. POTUS once again put his arm around my shoulder. But just as quickly, he released.
“Your badge?”
This was less playful. It was the tone Jacqui used when I was about to forget my credit card at a bar. “You’re still wearing your badge,” he repeated. “You might want to take that off.”
The president was still smiling. But this was no longer his bright, photo-line smile. It was the can-you-believe-this-idiot smile he reserved for staff who did something harmless but dumb. As fast as I could, I yanked my ID off my neck and I stuffed it forcefully into my pocket. Naturally, this caused the lanyard to spring back out. I wrestled the lanyard in. It popped back out. I wrestled it in. It popped back out.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of struggle, I secured my badge. I was ready for our picture. But there was no way POTUS was letting me off the hook. Instead, he turned toward my father.
“You know,” he said, grinning slightly, “he’s a pretty good writer. But he’s a little absentminded.”
How did President Obama do that? Did my dad write a letter to the White House, suggesting the single most accurate adjective with which to embarrass his son?
I wouldn’t put it past him—unlike me, he wouldn’t have forgotten to attach postage. More likely, however, the president’s extraordinary ability to read a policy memo extended to reading people as well. Just as he could pluck the most important issue from pages full of jargon, he could scan a human being and intuit their most cringeworthy trait. He wasn’t being mean, exactly. The teasing was always in good fun. But behind his trash talk inevitably lay a kernel of deeply personal truth.
That’s what worried me about Ferns. If I’d been watching that exchange with my parents on YouTube, rather than living through it, there’s a good chance POTUS might have appeared cruel. How could he trade barbs with Zach Galifianakis, one of the best-loved schlubs in America, without going too far?
The discomfort ran the other direction as well. Rachel Goldenberg, one of the episode’s producers, later told me no one knew if the host truly had permission to read his lines. At one point, he struggled.
“What does it feel like . . .” He hesitated, but POTUS was having none of it. “Come on, man!”
With the president’s permission, Zach tried again.
“What does it feel like to be the last black president?”
I wish I could take credit for jokes like that. But when we worked with professional comedians (and Zach, Scott Aukerman, and B. J. Porter, Ferns’ creators, are three of the best) I tried not to butt in. Instead, I added a few words to the president’s plug for Obamacare. I made sure he mentioned a phone number, just in case Healthcare.gov unexpectedly crashed. Mostly I waited and worried, certain our last-gasp attempt at pitching health insurance to young people was doomed to fail.
Here’s how wrong I was. In July 2013, I drafted a health care speech for POTUS. As I write this, it has about ten thousand YouTube views. In the twenty-four hours after the release of Between Two Ferns, eleven million people watched it online. Put another way, for every dining room table you could fill with people who have streamed my speech, ever, you could fill Radio City Music Hall with people who saw Ferns in a single day.