This was the part where President Obama was supposed to publicly scale back his ambitions. But something strange happened. Instead of humbling himself before the press corps, POTUS stood his ground. “The principles that we’re fighting for, the things that motivate me every single day and motivate my staff every day—those things aren’t going to change,” he said. For those who don’t speak press conference, let me translate. The president told reporters to fuck off.
It wasn’t just talk. A few days after the presser, Beijing and Washington signed a joint climate deal, the first time China had ever agreed to limit carbon emissions. Coal-state senators like McConnell howled, but were powerless to stop it. That same week, I wrote a script for a Facebook video endorsing net neutrality. Cable companies whined fiercely, as did many of the lawmakers who counted on their donations. President Obama didn’t care.
Yet climate and the Internet were mere warm-ups. No executive action was more fraught than immigration.
After the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney received just 27 percent of the Latino vote, Republicans conducted an autopsy of the results. It seems almost unbelievable today, but their most urgent recommendation was unanimous. Support immigration reform! Do it now!
GOP senators from states like Florida and Arizona got the message. Together with Democrats, they passed a bill to allow eleven million undocumented immigrants to become citizens over time. But in the House, where the Tea Party ruled and the districts were gerrymandered, reform went nowhere. In July 2014, the president announced he would no longer wait for Congress. He would act without delay.
Then, for several months, he delayed. This time the problem wasn’t Republicans. It was Democrats. Already afraid to be tied to the president, skittish candidates begged him to hold back until after they won. He held back. They lost anyway. At the press conference the day after the midterms, reporters asked President Obama no fewer than five immigration questions, all of which were essentially the same. “Do you really want to go through with this?”
He did. The White House scheduled an address to the nation for November 20. I asked if I could write the speech. Cody agreed to give me a shot.
It was, by far, the most high-profile set of remarks I had ever written—a prime-time address, carried live on national TV. For the next two weeks, I fluttered about the West Wing: the Domestic Policy Council, the White House Counsel’s Office, the Office of the Chief of Staff. Mostly, however, I poured over reams of survey data compiled by David Simas and his team. Night after night, they surveyed American homes, just as Joel Benenson had during the campaign. But where Joel’s polling asked about a candidate, Simas asked about an issue.
“So, America’s immigration system is broken. How does that make you feel?”
In the weeks before the big address, our research focused on voters we called Up for Grabs, or UFGs. UFGs were not exactly a melting pot. Overwhelmingly white. Politically independent. Predominately female. Typically suburban and middle-aged. It is a generalization, but only a slight one, to apply the name Karen to the entire group.
Karen wasn’t against immigration entirely. That said, she believed in playing by the rules. She bristled at the thought of people who were coming here “the wrong way.” With this in mind, I cast the president’s actions as a kind of tough love. We would surge security along the southern border. We would force five million undocumented immigrants to emerge from the shadows and learn English. We would make them pay back taxes and a fine. Only then would we let them stay. Tough, cold-blooded, and couched in the language of self-interest, my draft was engineered to win UFG support. I sent it to Cody, certain I had earned a boom!
But Cody knew something I didn’t. A regular at the 7:30 A.M. meeting, he had noticed a change in his boss.
“Why don’t we go up and talk to him before he sees this?” he suggested.
POTUS time was scheduled. We arrived in the Oval, taking seats opposite the president at his desk. He reached toward my printed draft. Before he could lay a hand on it, however, Cody jumped in.
“I figured you wanted to focus on values for this one. Make the big, moral case.”
“Exactly,” said POTUS. “Let’s go big here.”
For the next several minutes, President Obama described his vision in terms of sweeping principles, not cost-benefit concerns. A system that left millions of workers unable to earn citizenship was unfair. A system that separated families was unjust. A system designed to reject rather than welcome immigrants was un-American. POTUS reached the end of his outline. Then, almost as an afterthought, he pointed to my draft on the desk.
“So Litt, I assume everything I said is in here?”
“Oh, yeah,” I lied. “Totally.”
We left the Oval, Cody making certain to retrieve my remarks so that POTUS wouldn’t learn the truth. I didn’t need to ask. I was getting bigfooted. A few nights later President Obama stood in the East Room, live on television, to deliver a completely rewritten speech.
“For more than two hundred years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations.
“Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have the chance to get right with the law?
“Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger—we were strangers once, too.”
It’s not fair to say President Obama ignored UFGs entirely. But it is fair to say their short-term preferences commanded less of his attention than ever before. Unlike Karen, a nineteen-year-old born to undocumented parents in Tucson or Reno wasn’t up for grabs. She may not even have voted in 2014. But she was American. Obama was her president, too. And in what he called “the fourth quarter,” he focused on building a country that delivered on its promise for everyone, voter and nonvoter, UFG and non-UFG alike.
The centerpiece of the president’s announcement—a plan to protect five million undocumented immigrants—would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court. But the change in tone was permanent. The 2015 SOTU was less than two months after the immigration address, and as it drew closer, Cody went into full warrior poet mode, cloistering himself in his office for weeks. The day of the speech, I finally saw him. He looked as though he’d been subsisting on a diet of rainwater and Nicorette.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said, exhausted. “You want to?”
Of course I wanted to. That night I loaded into the staff van, and the motorcade raced down Independence Avenue toward the brightly lit Capitol dome.