I FIGURED FINDING MY PLACE IN OBAMA’S WASHINGTON WOULD BE quick and straightforward, like learning your house at Hogwarts. But just to be on the safe side, I found an internship with a crisis communications firm while I waited for the sorting to begin. This was a boutique agency, the kind that boasted former lawmakers on the board. It was also the kind of place that makes you sign an agreement prohibiting future use of its real name.
“You’ll love the Crisis Hut,” my interviewer promised over the phone. She knew I came from the Obama campaign, and she assured me her own organization was no less devoted to hope and change.
“One of our clients is a company that manufactures cribs. When a crib collapsed and killed a baby, we helped them get a second chance!”
I accepted her offer, confident I would be a Crisis Hut employee for no more than a few weeks. I was a former organizer with outstanding numbers. How long could finding something take?
But Obama had hired more field staff than any campaign in history. There simply weren’t enough jobs to go around. The Ohio campaign team held regular check-in conference calls. Listening to them was like reading logs from an Arctic expedition as it slowly realizes it’s doomed.
January 21: Fired up! Ready to go!
February 9: Stay positive. Positions take a long time to fill.
March 16: Ask yourself: Am I setting my sights too high?
April 3: Remember, it’s okay not to get a job.
It was during these months that I realized the phrase Before Iowa was being used in Washington the way Before Christ was once used in Galilee. It seemed only fair that those who joined the campaign BI, like Steph Speirs, got first pick of jobs. But other hiring decisions were harder to swallow. Miranda, the inaugural ball line cutter, joined the campaign after I did, yet she landed a coveted administration post just weeks after arriving in D.C.
By that time I was frustrated, but not surprised. Even the new Washington, it seemed, rewarded a particular set of skills. A talent for flattery. An unshakable sense of entitlement. A sense of confidence out of proportion to one’s achievements. I don’t mean to imply that 2009 was an endless series of House of Cards sex-murders in a desperate climb to the top. All else being equal, however, a slight inclination toward sex-murder didn’t hurt.
Nor was I above playing the game. A friend of a friend was twenty-six years old, a bona fide professional working in health care policy, and I was thrilled when he agreed to meet me for coffee. For thirty minutes, I tried desperately to soak in his wisdom. He saved the best for last.
“Remember,” he proclaimed, “networking is only bullshit if you’re bullshit.” Then he headed for the door, tossed his paper cup in the recycling, and never replied to my e-mails again.
After the Obama campaign, working at the Crisis Hut felt like joining the marketing department of Soylent Green. Our clients included a Wall Street bank that helped wreck the economy, a coal company that considered worker safety a form of socialism, and a gold magnate whose mining process involved small lakes full of cyanide. Facebook updates from former coworkers were like postcards from a country where my visa had been denied. “We got the stimulus!” posted one former Ohio colleague, now a White House staffer. I was happy to see President Obama’s economic package pass Congress. Still, I winced. This was a new kind of we. I wasn’t included. My movement was moving on.
Things only got worse. By March, friends who had yet to land a job began slinking out of D.C. like baboons rejected by the troop. This was around the time I informed Gertrude, my Crisis Hut supervisor, that our mining magnate’s profits were threatened by jewelers using reclaimed gold.
“Stupid environmentalists,” she replied, in a tone that struck me as oddly personal. “Always trying to be green, am I right?”
Looking back, I had reached what campaign organizers refer to as a “choice point.” On one hand, I could ditch the Crisis Hut, abandon the job search, and return to a life of Manhattan planktonism. On the other hand I could stay, making my peace with disaster-prone coal companies and cyanide-filled lakes. But both paths felt like surrender. I wasn’t ready to choose. Instead, with my work life spiraling downward and my dreams of changing Washington unfulfilled, I did what every D.C. intern dreams of doing. I went rogue.
It started with the dress code. I began wearing shirts I’d bought during a study-abroad program in China, a collection whose dominant theme was “polyester.” Next I brought my laptop from home, abandoned my cubicle, and set up shop in the break room. If the economy hadn’t been shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, perhaps my coworkers would have complained. But preoccupied by weightier concerns, they let me go about my business.
More and more often, my business was a euphemism for playing Minesweeper. It was one of two free games that shipped with my laptop, and I began by clicking through the easy grids, ten by ten. Soon, however, I was playing six to eight hours a day, and had advanced all the way to a hundred by a hundred. When even this failed to attract notice, I came up with my boldest act of rebellion yet: answering questions exclusively in analogies to the game of Minesweeper I was currently playing.
“David, did you finish that report on infrastructure investment?” Gertrude might ask.
“Almost,” I’d reply. “But you know how when you’re playing Minesweeper? And you’re on the highest difficulty setting? And you only have one mine left but it’s taking you a long time to decide where to click? It’s kind of like that.” I’d drum my fingers on the keyboard, hard at imaginary work.
“I might not be done for a while.”
I congratulated myself on my cunning. But I was an intern Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Late one morning, straggling to work and draped in synthetic fabric, I heard a voice behind me. It was Bill, Gertrude’s angular, shark-faced boss.
“My office. Now.”
Less than three years later, I’d meet with White House interns hungry for advice. How had I managed to land a dream job? I would play my part, furrowing my brow and mumbling something about doing what you love. But in those moments, what I really thought about was the way my shoes sank into the beige carpet as I walked to Bill’s corner office. From a burnished wood picture frame, his wife and son stared at me accusingly. Once seated at his desk, my boss’s boss leaned backward, shark eyes flashing with a mix of anger and bewilderment. In the break room, I had felt defiant and alive. Now I just felt childish.
I learned something about myself that day: I am not above begging for forgiveness.