West Winging It Read online

  It’s a belief that sometimes set up a clash between the president and his press team. It was our job to pay attention to what the media were doing every minute, while President Obama took a much longer view of the horizon—of politics, the press, and history. It would serve him well, especially toward the end of his second term.

  News of the day rarely riled him up or even particularly interested him; somehow he was more engrossed in intellectual think pieces and deep dives on health care policy than Politico’s latest accounting of who was up and who was down inside the Beltway. Sometimes I hoped he would snap a bit, maybe take a turn as Michael Douglas in The American President, talk about serious problems and serious people, and remind the world, “My name’s Barack Obama, and I am the president.”

  But he was usually too calm, totally collected. Even when his staff was spinning out around him, he was the quiet at the center of the storm. The president’s untroubled, logical demeanor often drew comparisons to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. The big ears probably didn’t hurt that comparison.

  But there were exceptions to the Spock-like practicality when it came to the press, and they were usually personal. In February 2013 the Washington Post Style section ran an article titled “Michelle Obama’s Posterior Again the Subject of a Public Rant.” The story recounted the latest moron to comment on the First Lady’s appearance and then delved into the historical precedent for such chatter and included quotes such as “She looks great for her age.” There was also some butt wordplay. This was an example of a story written in service of an eye-catching headline. Click bait. None of this sat well with the First Lady’s husband.

  He erupted into Upper Press, mad as hell, ready to do a little ranting of his own. I hadn’t seen him like this since I first started in the West Wing. At least I knew what to do this time: look busy, get to typing.

  “It’s totally disrespectful!” POTUS said of the piece to Jennifer Palmieri, who was then the White House communications director. JPalm, as we called her, was a wonderful boss, confident and shrewd and sharp, capable of holding her own in the face of a frustrated president.

  She did her best to quell his temper. You can’t undo the damage of a story with a correction, nor would one be offered, but the White House was equipped to let reporters and their editor bosses know when we thought a story was off base, incorrect, or—in this case—completely out of line and offensive. Still the president didn’t take his annoyance public. There would be no Michael Douglas–like speech in the Briefing Room, no barrage of tweets. He vented privately, he got it off his chest, and he moved on.

  It was, however, good practice for JPalm’s next gig: running communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was precisely the kind of superficial coverage she would deal with every day.

  • • •

  We messed up a lot. We yelled at reporters; we nitpicked their headlines; we sometimes took out our frustrations on them, even when their stories were completely legitimate. And sometimes they were unfair to us, or they broke embargoes, or maybe they lingered a little too long outside our hall, listening in on private conversations.

  But in a broader sense, for eight years, both sides—the president and the press—kept up the American covenant that says our press is free and that the People’s House is theirs, too. As Josh says, “The briefing is about accountability and preserving trust between the White House and the American people.” That trust is fragile. We’ve seen how it can be eroded, how the most powerful person on Earth can use his platform to sow doubt, impugn motives, and make us all a little less free.

  Sure, we preserved the natural tension between the president and the press. But we preserved the trust, too. And an idea of objective truth as a foundation for debate. Josh liked to say that the briefing is a venue to make an argument. But that argument is fruitless without a set of facts from which to work.

  Jay, as a former journalist at Time, knew better than most what it’s like on both sides of the White House podium—and everybody who sat in Upper Press and Lower Press knew that we weren’t the only public servants who came to work every day at the White House. That’s why I was proud of the way Josh and Jay handled their responsibilities as press secretary.VII They prepared for news-of-the-day questions, sure, but they also tried to be ready for whatever was on the minds of the dozens of individuals of varying degrees of aptitude and relevance spread throughout the Briefing Room’s assigned seats and along its periphery. And I was always proud of the way they handled the standing-room-only reporters. Who were we to say who should or shouldn’t come to the People’s House and question us? They were treated with respect, no matter how ludicrous we found their questions.

  The White House Correspondents’ Association pushed us for more access; we pushed back. It’s a conflict that will continue. The president’s press team will always look out for the chief executive and his agenda first, and the press pool wouldn’t be doing its job if it wasn’t advocating constantly for additional access to the president and his team. We embraced our roles fully, but both sides always knew that the other wasn’t the antagonist.

  Still, the members of the press weren’t our partners, either, which is why I suppose it wouldn’t have been appropriate for Chuck Todd to march through the EEOB on Taco Tuesday at Ike’s. It was important to preserve the natural boundaries—a buffer—that exist among the president, his staff, and the press.

  But we knew something that we thought obvious; something we thought never needed to be said, but maybe it does:

  The press is not the enemy of the American people.

  As the vice president’s mom would say: They’re no better than us, and we’re no better than them.

  * * *

  I. A pool spray is a staged opportunity for the press to quickly cover a person or event.

  II. Steering the narrative on Saturday Night Live does not count.

  III. I recognize the same could likely be said of Obama White House staffers.

  IV. The staffer was teasing, of course.

  V. Carol is now with NBC News.

  VI. There is also “quote approval,” meaning the interview is on background, but the reporter can follow up with requests for specific quotes she would like to use.

  VII. Robert Gibbs, Obama’s first press secretary, left shortly before I moved to the West Wing. I didn’t work closely with him, but I think he upheld the same bond that Josh and Jay did.

  COMMON DC STORIES (SO YOU KNOW WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR)

  Think Piece. Often bloated, these deep dives are meant to rise above news of the day but frequently fall into the same daily tropes of Washington. Bad ones are overwrought, asking questions without offering meaningful answers. Good ones make you think about an issue or person in a different way.

  The Obituary. Can refer to a policy proposal or a person; the press loves to declare the end, death, whether by sinking polls or looming scandal.

  The Comeback. A natural companion to the obituary; the press is quick to equate a bounce in the polls or a well-done mea culpa to a full-blown comeback, a masterstroke of political brilliance—back from the brink.

  Counternarrative. The media thrive on plot twists, and if no pivot is on the way, they sometimes manufacture one with a story positing that the opposite of what’s happening is really happening.

  The Oppo-Dump. Slightly repurposed from the research departments at the White House or any number of congressional offices, these are glorified press releases that friendly outlets—progressive and conservative alike—push out in the form of an independent article to further the intended narrative.

  The Profile. From presidential candidates in the Times to White House junior staffers in their hometown papers, these are typically fluff pieces, but profiles can go sideways if not managed properly.

  The Hot Take. Quick analyses, typically in terms of political winners and losers. They are basically tweets that become stories.

  The Flyover Drop-in. Occasionally, coastal reporters wil
l go on location to the middle of the country—“real America”—to highlight a few real people who embody the way Washington perceives America is feeling. Though these can be patronizing and overly general, the White House uses real people, too.

  Stat Stories. Some reporters love stats and write entire stories based on the number of times the president has played golf or traveled on Air Force One, for instance, banking on other outlets to pick up the figures and run with them, often to their own conclusions.

  Faulty Autopsies. Win or lose—debates, policy fights, elections—the media scramble to explain the results, sometimes in an oversimplified and underresearched way.

  Palace Intrigue Pieces. Gossipy look-ins on the people behind the place, usually written when things aren’t going well for the subjects of the article.

  4

  * * *

  2012

  I know ’cause I won both of them.

  —BARACK OBAMA

  I was never farther from the inner workings of Washington than the day in 2009 that Barack Obama was first sworn in: I was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Stephanie, her twin sister, Victoria, and I were on our way to Cadiz, Spain. It was the first leg of a thirteen-country itinerary through a study-abroad program called Semester at Sea. To some, the program is a joke: a forced, curated adventure servicing some sense of “culture.” And I suffered no shortage of Semester at Sea jokes from my White House colleagues; Matt and Bobby particularly like to mention my “cruise.” Of course, their take is partially true. But it’s far from the whole story, at least for my trip, thanks to my future boss.

  As with the previous twenty-three voyages, we on the MV Explorer departed the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet unlike the previous eight years’ worth of semesters, we arrived in our first port of call as Americans with a new leader, President Barack Obama.

  As it turned out, it would make all the difference in the world.

  On the second day of our voyage, January 20, the captain came over the speaker system: “Would everyone please power down their laptops?” It was the only way we could hope to have enough bandwidth to livestream the inauguration. We were hundreds of miles off the Eastern Seaboard, where history was unfolding and the world that we were about to explore was watching. We didn’t want to miss it. This was one of those public occasions—only a handful in a lifetime; good and bad—that you don’t forget. A true where-were-you-then type of deal.

  Stephanie and I shuffled into a shipboard classroom, brimming and buzzing with students and faculty. We spotted an opening on the ground and took a seat. The buzz grew. Anticipation turned to excitement as the large projector screen at the front of the room sputtered to life. We caught glimpses of the pomp and pageantry: armored limousines waiting in front of the North Portico of the White House; Pennsylvania Avenue lined dozens of people deep. The National Mall was so jam-packed that only a high-flying helicopter could give it appropriate scope. We watched the First Families exchange pleasantries. The television reporters walked us through the protocol as the incoming and outgoing presidents began the time-honored and uniquely American tradition of peacefully transitioning the awesome power of the presidency from one person to the next and, in this case, from one party to another.

  We burst into applause as President-Elect Obama stepped through the narrow door framed by the North Portico of the White House. A portal. The point of no return. He was on the way to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. When he returned in just a few hours to the White House, it would be his home.

  On the MV Explorer, we hoped that our bandwidth would hold out as the seemingly endless motorcade made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue. On-air personalities told of the backstage commotion and machinations, the palace intrigue, the Grand Foyer and the East Room, and something called the Blue Room. They focused on the logistics of turning over the world’s most famous home office in just a couple of hours. I couldn’t picture it. In my mind, I had the midseason fine-tuned frenzy of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. The real West Wing was foreign to me.

  But at this very moment, as removed from the goings-on of Washington as I ever would be, my soon-to-be friends, coworkers, and bosses were filling up what I could only imagine was Sorkin’s empty set, streaming into the White House for the first time. A group of young people who bought into that “hope-y change-y” stuff. They traded in their campaign casual wear for suits, their personal phones for heavily encrypted federal government BlackBerrys. They were starting their own voyage. They had arrived. And now it was their job to turn promises into policy as, for the first time, Millennials moved into the West Wing.

  Meanwhile, their boss was making it official in front of the Capitol. On the ship, we held our breath. The feed cut out, which offered an opportunity to look around the room. Many students were already crying; some were barely paying attention; others sneered that their candidate had lost. Yet most were overjoyed. The professors had a different look altogether. They were particularly compelled by the proceedings.

  “Everything’s about to change,” one of them said during the frozen frame.

  The feed popped back to life, eliciting relieved applause, which quickly gave way to raucous celebration when President Obama took his hand off the Bible, thanking Chief Justice John Roberts and stepping to the podium as our new president.

  I didn’t know him. Stephanie didn’t know him. But we felt like we did. That was part of the magic of the 2008 campaign: the candidate’s ability to connect, to strike a nerve. A positive nerve. We felt like we knew what he meant for our country. Like the reverse on several levels of the legendary Franklin Delano Roosevelt story. As historians retell it: At the time of FDR’s funeral procession in April 1945, as the cortege carrying the president’s coffin passed the crowds, one man broke down sobbing. A reporter nearby questioned the man, “Why are you crying so hard? Did you know him?”

  “No,” the man replied, “but he knew me.” This simple comment captured President Roosevelt’s extraordinary ability to understand the struggles of others.

  For us, it was the same, only in the reverse. Not grief, but hope as far as the horizon stretched. And a real sense that this man knew me, knew us, and our hopes, our hurts, and our aspirations.

  As Barack Obama took to the podium, the footage on our projection screen freezing and the audio faltering, our ship rocking and swaying, I swelled with pride. Stephanie did too.

  In his red tie and dark overcoat, he addressed America and provided context for the beginnings of his time in power: “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace.” I glanced out the window. Our waters were far from peaceful. “Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He recounted our current crisis: two wars in the Middle East, an economy in freefall, and a planet in peril.

  But he reminded us of how and why we would get through. “At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents. So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.” As he concluded his inauguration, some of us took to the ship’s stern. Rather than look down at the chop where the water swirled and clapped harshly against the MV Explorer, we focused on the horizon, motionless and peaceful. Hope as far as the eye could see. Stephanie and I couldn’t imagine a cooler spot to watch an inauguration than from the Atlantic Ocean.

  Looking toward our first port of call, somebody shouted, “So, I guess we don’t have to pretend to be Canadian anymore, eh?”

  • • •

  By the end of 2011, I was finally feeling at home in the West Wing—like maybe I wasn’t such an imposter after all. I understood the cadence of the morning hustle and could predict the din of the press Briefing Room as we announced, “Two-minute warning. Thi
s is your two-minute warning for the press briefing.” I’d caught on that two minutes usually meant five or six. I looked forward to the early afternoon lull, memorized when the mess line died down, and learned to always keep an eye tuned to the news. Underneath everything, I knew that any day could shift in an instant. And we began to feel like a family—for better or for worse. Bobby, Schultz, Matt, and Howli; Marie and Antoinette; Josh, Jay, Brian, and Dan—we were spending more time together than with our actual families. Rather than “you” or “the White House,” I started to say “we” and “us.”

  But just as I was learning the ways of the West Wing, America was lurching toward its next presidential election. Before I knew it, the time had come to ramp up for reelection—to prove to the American people why any of us belonged.

  President Obama often joked that he and his family were just renting, and that their lease would soon be up. He sensed the impermanence of it all, even as some of us—especially many of the Millennials—couldn’t grapple with the thought that maybe there would come a time when we weren’t working for this president in this building. It was all my adult self knew. I didn’t want to grow up and enter the real world. At the very least, we had to put it off—for another four years.

  Looking back on the 2012 presidential campaign can be a blur. Everybody knows the top line: Mitt Romney, a seemingly out-of-touch Mormon millionaire, lost badly to President Obama in an election that centered on the economy. If you had asked me on that ship in 2009 about the 2008 election, I probably would have given a similarly concise, overly boiled-down wrap-up of the contest between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. That’s because I didn’t have any idea of the long nights, the seven-day weeks, the many months that go into building those top lines that everyone remembers—and I had not yet felt the sting of the lowlights that everyone else forgets.