THERE ARE RARE MOMENTS WHEN EVERYONE IN WASHINGTON flocks to the White House on some unspoken command. The night of the bin Laden raid was one such moment. Friday, June 26, was another. I met Jacqui after work, about a mile north of the building. Without having to discuss it, we joined the throng.
Then we reached Lafayette Park, and we stopped and stared in amazement. The White House was lit up in the colors of the rainbow. Up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, couples of every description were holding hands. They cheered. They laughed. They cried. Mostly they looked up, toward the house where their president lived, lost in something as close as you can get in politics to wonder.
Every legacy needs its defining moment, an image that lives forever in our minds. Barack Obama gave us plenty to choose from. Historians will debate. But on that summer evening, I made my choice. For a part of me, the president will always be singing, almost but not quite on key.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
In that golden, miraculous moment, he looks vulnerable and human. His hair is gray. His heart is breaking. But as he thanks a higher power for the chance at something more than wretchedness, his voice is crystal clear.
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.
In less than two days, Barack Obama had secured his place in history. No, the problems he faced were not solved forever. The Affordable Care Act was still under attack. Race was still a fault line. Discrimination against LGBT Americans remained far too real. But I now lived in a country where health care was a right and not a privilege; where you could marry who you loved; where a black president could go to the heart of the old Confederacy and take all of us, every color and creed, to church.
President Obama had not just fixed an economy. He had not just ended a war. He had made America a better place than the one where I grew up. The country I lived in seven years ago, the country I lived in seven days ago, had been fundamentally transformed.
On January 3, 2008, a freshman senator told me that people who love this country can change it. For the next seven and a half years I hoped that promise was true, and worked to make it true, but never knew for sure. Now, standing outside the iron gates of the rainbow White House, I no longer had to wonder. There was still a long road ahead for people who loved this country. But could they change it?
Yes. We did.
15
THE FINISH LINE
And yet something wasn’t right. The past two days had been a nonstop moment of triumph, an Obamabot’s wildest dream. But I didn’t feel triumphant at all. Earlier that morning, right after the ruling legalizing gay marriage, I ran into our speechwriting intern Chelsea. Chelsea had started at the White House only a few weeks earlier. Now she was grinning ear to ear, basking in the latest piece of history.
“Just so you know,” I heard myself say, “it’s not always like this.”
Uh-oh, I thought. I gotta get out of here.
Burnout. That was the word everyone outside the building used, but it wasn’t quite right. What really took place was a kind of emotional erosion, each intense, thankless workday another drip on the idealistic portion of the soul. I knew plenty of staffers who arrived at the White House awestruck and shiny eyed. Eighteen months later, they sounded like convicts planning to break out of jail.
I was not yet a prisoner of 1600 Pennsylvania. I still loved my job. But I didn’t always like my job, and the more time passed, the larger the unlikable things loomed. I was tired of fighting with fact-checkers over sentences like “These steps are making a difference.” I was tired of arguing with staffers who wanted POTUS to ack them by name at the Hanukkah party. I was tired of explaining that not every set of remarks needs its own, novel-length appendix on the budget process. These frustrations hadn’t grown more numerous. But they had grown more frustrating.
Also, two years before my thirtieth birthday, I felt over-the-hill. “Of course I love The West Wing,” gushed Chelsea the intern. “I watched every episode on Netflix in eighth grade.” This was bad enough. The final straw came a few weeks later, when a young assistant in the real-life West Wing e-mailed me about a draft.
“I don’t think POTUS can say, ‘We’re all in this together,’” he informed me. “That’s a line from High School Musical.”
The benefit of seniority was that I felt no need to respond to such nonsense. I was secure in my knowledge that the concept of teamwork predated 2006. Still, even as I gained authority, I could feel myself losing perspective. Without meaning to, I had added a stop to my West Wing tours, directing guests to a glowing red cube near the Mess.
“This is our new soda machine!” I would announce. “The best part is you can combine flavors. I’m a big fan of raspberry lime ginger ale, but everyone has their favorites.”
“Looks nice,” my guests would murmur, eager to change the subject. “And what’s that over there?”
“Oh, that? That’s the door to the Situation Room.”
SO YES, I WAS FEELING A LITTLE ERODED. EVEN SO, THE END OF THE second term was less than a year and a half away. I could do eighteen months standing on my head. In the end, it was the successes, not the frustrations, that made me feel ready to leave. POTUS himself put it best:
“We haven’t won every battle. We’ve still got a lot more work to do. But when the cynics told us we couldn’t change our country for the better, they were wrong.”
To hear President Obama so firmly declare victory was satisfying beyond belief. But it also marked, as firmly as a graduation day, the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. POTUS still had plenty on his to-do list. So did Cody: a final SOTU, a Democratic Convention speech, a farewell address. But with five first-rate speechwriters working beside me in the EEOB, and plenty more across Washington waiting in the wings, my own role no longer felt so vital. Thanks to the commissioned-officer seal on my business card, I was now essential personnel. But in the best possible way, I felt more nonessential than ever before.
And then a strange thing happened. Once I decided it was time to leave, I got way better at my job. I stopped worrying if drafts would get blown up. If I feared a line might go too far, I wrote it anyway. What were they going to do, fire me?