“Okay, what are we doin’?”
We began with the health care plug, a victory we had secured after hours of intense back-and-forth. As Kori predicted, starting with the serious stuff gave POTUS license to enjoy everything that came after. The basketball shot; the selfie stick; getting frustrated and saying, “Thanks, Obama,” sarcastically: everything ran smoothly, almost eerily so. When our director indicated he was finished, POTUS invited the BuzzFeed Motion Pictures team to join him for a photo. Hope Hall dropped to one knee to film POTUS as he joked around with the crew. My jaw finally unclenched.
And then, just when I thought it was over, Manbun stepped forward. Reaching into his pants pocket, he retrieved a bright orange business card. Then he placed it in Barack Obama’s hand.
“Here you go, Mr. President. Just in case you ever need more filming done.”
I was stunned. Under any circumstance, Manbun’s sales pitch would have been presumptuous. But with Hope kneeling right there on the floor, recording the entire exchange? It was unspeakably rude. From the corner of the room where I stood with other White House staffers, a small, collective gasp could be heard. President Obama merely smiled. He began heading for the door. I thought he would simply leave.
But he didn’t. Instead, POTUS paused and turned directly toward his staff. When he spoke it was in a stage whisper, each word overflowing with disdain.
“Great,” he said, gesturing with the orange card. “Maybe I’ll put this in my Rolodex.”
It is impossible, on the page, to capture the beauty of that moment. In fact, that’s part of the beauty. Plausible deniability was preserved. But to those watching, there was absolutely no doubt what the president had done. It was the rhetorical equivalent of a body slam.
Nor was President Obama finished. Walking out the door, he turned to Marv, his aide.
“Man,” he said loudly, shaking his head, “I just love it when people give me their cards.”
Not all good presidents are good people. LBJ created Medicare and signed the Civil Rights Act while conducting his private life in a manner that would make a gorilla blush. But Barack Obama was the kind of person who noticed when a member of his staff was being insulted, and refused to walk away. He used his power to defend the dignity of others. He didn’t have to do that. But he did.
I think this basic decency was reflected in President Obama’s policies. I know for certain it’s what convinced so many people to join his team, and remain there, even when times were hard. I still wasn’t sure if POTUS could recover from the 2014 elections. I was only slowly rebuilding my trust. But as he left that library, with Hope Hall trailing behind him, a part of me loved Barack Obama more fiercely than ever before.
(Also, I have it on good authority that later, off the record, he made fun of Manbun’s hair.)
GIVE BUZZFEED MOTION PICTURES CREDIT: THEY DID INDEED BREAK the Internet. Their video received tens of millions of views. By the end of spring, thanks to Obamacare, sixteen million more Americans were insured.
That wasn’t all. The unemployment rate, 9.3 percent when POTUS took office, was down to 5.5 percent. Deficits were shrinking. Dependence on foreign oil was falling. We moved forward on new climate rules. We began to normalize relations with Cuba, untangling one of the last vestigial conflicts of the Cold War. President Obama was through waiting around for Congress. He was getting things done.
Americans took notice. Our approval ratings, thirteen points underwater on Election Day, were by April back to an even split. This was not supposed to happen. According to the narrative, Obama’s White House was in its final throes. Instead, we defied political gravity every day.
“What’s the mood like over there?” people asked.
“Everyone’s feeling great!” I said. And this time I was being completely honest. There is nothing more exhilarating than being part of something meaningful as it rises from the dead. It animates your present. No less important, it justifies your past. All the vacations skipped, weddings or birthday parties not attended, lucrative job offers turned down. Everything suddenly makes sense. I had never been so happy in the White House.
Nor, as March turned to April, had I ever been so excited for a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. As the big day drew closer, a comedy-writer friend from college, Andrew Law, captured the moment perfectly with a joke.
After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, “Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?” And I told them, well, I have something that rhymes with “bucket list.”
Take action on immigration? Bucket. Let’s go for it.
New climate regs? Bucket. Why not?
I wondered if POTUS would cut the joke. Swearing in public, even in pun form, was risky. Besides, I could still remember that Biden “big stick” line from 2012. But this was the fourth quarter, and President Obama made only one change. In the very last sentence, he crossed out the words Why not?
Bucket, read the new version. It’s the right thing to do.
The rest of POTUS’s edits were no less fourth-quartery. Next to a joke about the Koch brothers, he’d written in the margin: Something sharper—tougher? Another setup referenced a recent comment from Dick Cheney. The former VP had said Obama was the worst president of his lifetime. When I tried a singe-don’t-burn punch line—“And here I thought we were friends!”—POTUS was unimpressed. We should come up with something sharper and more cutting here, he wrote. Then, for emphasis, he added:
It’s Cheney!
The president’s energy was contagious. Jokes seemed to flow naturally that year. But that didn’t mean the process was easy. We struggled to find a set piece, an unmistakable highlight of the night. How could we meet the moment? What could we do that we hadn’t done before? I was on the verge of giving up when I remembered a holiday party.
Staffers like me crashed White House parties with two main objectives: stealing food and stalking celebrities. One night in 2014, I accomplished both. After pursuing my quarry past the eggnog and gingerbread houses, I cornered him between the lamb chops and the cauliflower mac and cheese.
“I write jokes for the president,” I said. “And I’m a huge fan of Key and Peele.”
I was lucky. Keegan-Michael Key was not just a star of Comedy Central’s most popular sketch show. He was also the most extroverted person I had ever met.
“Wow, thanks for saying hi!” he said, in a tone that suggested he actually meant it.