Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

by David Litt

The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price.

People in Washington talk about disillusionment the way people in high school talk about virginity. Your most mature peers have already gone all the way, you’re told. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s only a matter of time.

Left unsaid is that it would be easy, because when it comes to rhetorical styling, 99.9 percent of speeches sound the same. Martin Luther King had a voice. John F. Kennedy had a voice. With all due respect, you probably don’t. What you do have are thoughts. What you need, although you may not know it, is someone to organize them. A good writer can take your ten ideas and turn them into one coherent whole. Where you see two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun, a speechwriter sees a Big Mac.

But if you’re holding the pen, and everything works as it’s supposed to—if you define the forest of an argument without losing sight of the trees—the speaker will be forever grateful for your work.

Some speakers subscribe to an old bit of wisdom: “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, then tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.”

The humorist Will Rogers once declared, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

There’s a saying in Washington: “You campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”

This was part of what first drew me to Obama: he turned grandiosity on its head. For as he told the Knox College graduates, throughout most of human history, your destiny was certain. Your fate was sealed the moment you were born. America changed that. What made us special—what made us exceptional—was the promise that ordinary people could shape the national life. In fact, they were expected to. For 229 years it was our audiences, not our speakers, who made our country great.

(To remove the potential for hurt feelings, the president avoided “Nice to meet you” at all costs.)

We were experiencing less violence than almost any generation in human history. But we were witnessing more violence than ever before.

If day-to-day governing was like choosing the right words, elections were like choosing a language.

“We are not perfect, but we have the capacity to be more perfect. Mile after mile; step after step.”

The secret to solving big problems, I learned, is knowing which little problems to ignore.

Once you reach a certain age, the world has no more parents. But it contains a truly shocking number of children.

Children strive for pleasure; adults for fulfillment. Children demand adoration; adults earn respect. Children find worth in what they acquire; adults find worth in the responsibilities they bear. And more than anything else, what separates adults and children is the way in which they love.

Real love is about fighting for something long after its flaws are laid bare. It’s about caring so deeply, you have no choice but to place another’s well-being above your own. Love is not a feeling. It transcends feelings. Love is what allows us to be disillusioned and to somehow still believe.