The week after the Charleston eulogy, Cody assigned me a speech on criminal justice reform, to be delivered at the national convention of the NAACP. I was excited about the topic, a cause whose time had come. But I could also hear echoes of the immigration address I had so badly bungled. For thousands of NAACP convention-goers, mass incarceration was a moral failing. It left gaping holes in families and neighborhoods, belying America’s ideals. UFGs saw it differently. As far as Karen was concerned, the best argument was economic. Why spend eighty billion dollars a year on prisons when we can spend that money on roads and schools instead?
I sat in my office, knowing I would have to thread a needle and doubting that I could. But to my surprise, something had changed. I felt looser. Instead of writing in risk-averse fits and starts, I let the words and sentences flow: facts, stories, arguments, principles, wrapped around each other like strands strengthening a cord. When I sent the draft to Cody, I was certain it was the best of my career.
And then nothing. Hours passed. I waited for edits. No word. I had been writing speeches long enough to know what was happening. Cody was making major changes. When my draft came back, it would be soaked in red. Finally, long after I had abandoned hope, the light on my BlackBerry blinked. Eyes downcast, I opened my boss’s reply.
Great job, bro! You really found the muse on this one.
I wasn’t sure if Cody had only recently begun believing in muses, or if he had always believed in them and I had only now discovered mine. It didn’t matter. I practically levitated.
The next day, Ferial Govashiri, the president’s personal assistant, asked if I could swing by the Oval. For the first time in my four years working for Barack Obama, it was just me and POTUS in the room. We went through his notes, along with the paragraphs he had written by hand on a yellow legal pad. I returned to my office and made his edits. The next day we flew to Philadelphia, where, waiting backstage for the president, the board of the NAACP broke into a spontaneous rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
During my time at the White House, it must be said that I wrote some truly bad speeches. Some were overly technical. Some were boring. A few were not just flawed but embarrassing, like poems you write in high school and find years later in a drawer. But on this particular afternoon, four years after my first remarks for the president, POTUS stood before a packed convention hall and delivered a perfect speech. The audience gasped when he described the scope of the problem. They applauded as he spoke of actions he would take. He went through cost-benefit analysis and detailed policy proposals without ever losing sight of his big moral case.
“Any system that allows us to turn a blind eye to hopelessness and despair, that’s not a justice system, it is an injustice system.”
It was the kind of line I never would have written a year earlier. It was too aggressive, too sweeping, too at risk of being labeled a sound bite. But now, in my own fourth quarter, I didn’t care. Bucket. Why not?
President Obama finished the speech with an RP story. Born in Philadelphia, Jeff Copeland was arrested six times before age thirty-eight. To pass the time, Jeff used to spend hours jogging in place in his cell. Fellow inmates dubbed him “The Running Man.”
Then one day, for reasons even he couldn’t explain, Jeff decided to turn his life around. He got sober. He graduated summa cum laude from community college, with a 3.95 GPA. He found a job.
“Just two years ago,” President Obama told the crowd, “the Running Man ran his first marathon—because he’s going somewhere now.”
There was a giant round of applause. Then POTUS continued:
“We are not perfect, but we have the capacity to be more perfect. Mile after mile; step after step. And they pile up, one after the other, and pretty soon that finish line starts getting into sight, and we are not where we were. We’re in a better place.”
“We are not where we were.” My life was about as different from Jeff Copeland’s as it is possible to imagine. And yet what applied to him also applied, in its own way, to me. I thought about the January night I first found my candidate, or the days I spent at the Crisis Hut, playing Minesweeper like it was my job. I was so far from the place where I had started. Now, my finish line was in sight.
I DIDN’T GO IMMEDIATELY. I WAS IN THE ROOSEVELT ROOM AT 9 A.M. on November 5, 2015, exactly one year after our post-midterm pep talk, when the door swung open and POTUS appeared. Plenty of folks had counted us out, he reminded us. But look at how far we had come. A nuclear deal with Iran. Millions of new jobs. Higher wages. More clean energy. Countless new protections for consumer rights, and civil rights, and women’s rights, and workers’ rights. I clapped as enthusiastically as anyone, knowing it was the last time I’d be in this kind of room with the president of the United States.
Cody and I decided on a date for my departure: Friday, January 22, 2016. As it drew nearer, everything about the building began to seem more specific, more place-y. The EEOB basement was at its murderiest. The grease smell outside Ike’s smelled greasier than ever before.
No less acutely, I began to realize all the things I would miss. The perfume of flowers in the Rose Garden. The floor-tile fossils. The impressive-yet-humble men’s room. The weighty significance of the door to the senior staff gym. It was a cliché, but a true one, that I would miss my coworkers more than any job perk. There are simply not many places where 95 percent of the people—even the ones who drive you crazy—are really, really good at their jobs.
What I would miss most of all, however, was power. I know I’m not supposed to say that. It makes me sound like a Bond villain. But I don’t care. For a person who hopes to make things better, wanting power is no different than a singer craving a microphone, or an actor yearning for a stage. For five years, whatever gifts I possessed were amplified a millionfold by the eighteen acres where I worked. If I had a stroke of insight, or a dalliance with a muse, my entire country was in some small way better for it. Who wouldn’t want a taste of power like that?
AS MY FINAL WEEK OF WORK BEGAN, A PART OF ME HOPED FOR A last-minute summons to the Oval.
“Litt! You can’t leave. The country will fall apart without you.”
No such summons ever came, of course. Instead of postponing my departure to take on an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse, I spent my last week in the White House filling out a dazzling array of forms. It was a scavenger hunt in reverse. Had I dropped off my gym key at the athletic office? Had my computer and BlackBerry been handed over to operations? Had I returned the library’s FDR biography, the one I renewed no fewer than nineteen times? These questions took up most of Monday and Tuesday.