Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

by David Litt

I watched President Obama’s monologue, the best he had ever delivered. During the section on Trump, hundreds of Democrats and Republicans joined in bipartisan, mocking laughter. As the crowd applauded the president, the humiliated billionaire turned as red and angry as a blister.

I had never been part of such a raucous celebration, not even on Election Night. But looking from face to face, I didn’t see joy or triumph. I saw relief. For people my age, 9/11 was the formative experience of our formative years. As kids, we were told America could do anything. Then a terrorist attacked our country and murdered thousands of our people, and we couldn’t catch him no matter how hard we tried. For a decade, that failure cast a shadow on the promise we were raised to believe. Now, the shadow had been lifted. America had done what America set out to do.

In my five years at the White House, this was the first and only time my life resembled the television show The West Wing. That was not for lack of interest. Like nearly every Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin. During my freshman year of college, my friends and I watched West Wing DVDs on an endless loop,

But the biggest lie of The West Wing, by far, was the walk-and-talk. In President Bartlet’s White House, staffers strolled side by side, trading barbs about policy while aides scurried in and out of the frame. In the actual West Wing, walking and talking was dangerous. One morning I left Favs’s office and, perhaps distracted by the sewagey smell, nearly tripped over a pair of black leather shoes. I looked up to see who they belonged to: it was a face I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I riffled through options. A new colleague? A B-list celebrity? A contestant on the latest season of Top Chef? Oh, I realized, I know where I’ve seen you before. You’re the president of the United States!

President Obama announced he would cut more than two trillion dollars from the budget, while getting essentially nothing in return. The moment the news broke, Jon Carson, the Office of Public Engagement’s executive director, called a meeting in one of the EEOB’s handsomely decorated conference rooms. Ensconced in leather chairs, surrounded by portraits of severe-looking dead white men, we went over our talking points. Most of the cuts weren’t immediate. Most social safety-net programs had been spared. But was I wrong to think the stern, pasty faces on the walls looked skeptical? As hard as we tried to frame the debate, the most important point was the one that went unsaid: if you have to hold an hour-long meeting about why you won, you didn’t. The debt-ceiling deal did nothing to pacify Republicans in Congress. If anything, the situation grew worse. “It’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming,” declared Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, promising more brinkmanship to come. I longed to wipe the self-satisfied grin from McConnell’s turtlish face. If I was being honest, however, my anger at the Tea Party was nothing compared to my disappointment in the president who caved to its demands. From the moment I laid eyes on my candidate, what drew me to him was not just that he was on the right side of history. It was that he knew how to win. Sure, there would be small setbacks, but when the stakes were highest, Obama would prevail. Not this time. In his biggest fight yet w...

To my credit, the first time I walked into the Oval Office, I did not black out. In front of me I could see a painting of the Statue of Liberty by Norman Rockwell. Behind me, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Emancipation Proclamation. Not a photocopy or poster. The. Emancipation. Proclamation. I didn’t turn to look at the document, but I could feel the message it was sending through the room. “I’m here because I freed the slaves,” it seemed to say. “What are you doing here?” Behind the giant, wooden Resolute desk sat President Obama. Judging from his expression, he, too, might be wondering what I was doing here.

Most helpful of all, Romney was gaffe prone. This was a greater liability than ever, since each verbal stumble now lived forever online. Corporations are people, my friend. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. Taken separately, these comments were mere hiccups. But string them together and they suggested a blind spot where ordinary Americans were concerned, the BMW zooming down the shoulder of the highway, wondering why the rule-following Fords and Hondas are upset. POTUS was still less popular than we would have liked. Romney led in plenty of polls. But between our opponent’s emerging flaws and the fact that a large chunk of McCain’s base had died of old age, Obama wasn’t toast just yet.

simply felt that if the leader of the free world was required to host a comedy night, it ought to be worth his time. Under Jon Lovett’s supervision the previous year, POTUS’s assault on Trump had more than met this standard. The conventional wisdom, which I wholeheartedly subscribed to, was that Obama had “destroyed” the birther king. He had “demolished” him.

I’d often heard senior staff describe President Obama as the smartest guy in the room, but only now did I realize what they meant. He didn’t speak seven languages or know the Latin names of species or multiply large numbers in his head. What he did, more quickly than anyone, was strip away complicated issues to their essence and make the most of the information obtained. No one was better at getting to the point.

After all, when Obama took office, postpartisanship was kind of his thing. On big issues—education, climate change, health care—he borrowed ideas from Republicans. Rather than starting from one extreme and negotiating toward the center, his early proposals often arrived with compromise baked in. A few decades earlier, these gestures might have been reciprocated. But this was the age of the Tea Party. Each time Obama entered new common ground, a kind of white flight occurred.

The most sacred piece of Democratic orthodoxy was that government could improve people’s lives. The most sacred piece of Republican orthodoxy was that it could not. If Obamacare worked the way it was supposed to, the debate would be over. There would be no doubt which was the one true church.

It was only once we arrived in the briefing room that I understood why POTUS might feel deflated. On television, presidents at press conferences appear larger than life. In person they look like goldfish in a bowl. The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—which holds forty-nine seated reporters—is only slightly bigger than your average American garage. The stage has all the height and majesty of a shipping pallet. President Obama wasn’t commanding his audience. He was surrounded by it. Before I continue, I should clarify something: I don’t think most members of the traditional White House press corps are biased toward a political party. That said, they are definitely out to get the president. It’s only natural. Every reporter wants to be Woodward and Bernstein. Setting their sights on anyone but POTUS would be like Captain Ahab chasing a guppy across the high seas. Along with this common dream—uncovering the next Watergate—reporters share a tendency to herd like wildebeests around a single dramatic arc. “What’s the story here?” they ask, as though narratives are distant planets to be discovered rather than frameworks they create. As a consumer of news, I empathize. I count on journalists to help me decide what matters and what does not. But the danger arises when facts start to fit the narrative and not the other way around. Combine reporters’ desire to congeal around a story line with their innate distrust of the powerful, and a presidential comeback is hard to stage. Still...

refused to indulge in clash-of-civilizations rhetoric favored by both right-wing pundits at home and ISIS propagandists abroad. This was almost certainly the right decision. It deprived some of the world’s most sadistic killers of an easy recruiting tool. But at times it put POTUS at odds with the national mood. When the Foley beheading video was released, President Obama was in Martha’s Vineyard; he chose not to cut his vacation short. Also, he referred to ISIS as “ISIL.” While technically accurate, this could come across as tone deaf, like a waiter who explains that it’s wagyu beef, not Kobe, on which you are currently choking. Even our political allies could be frustrated by President Obama’s near-pathological calmness. Still, his message to the public was simple, never directly stated but always easy to infer. Don’t freak out.

Each of his PowerPoint slides was bleaker than the last. Too many independents were sick of us. Too many Democrats were tired of us. This wasn’t as bad as 2010. It was worse.

2014 Midterm results

Don’t get me wrong—we’re not happy to see him run. His campaign, only a few months old, is already a national disgrace. What Bush hinted at, and Palin masked with a smile, Trump bellows at the top of his lungs. Dog whistles have become primal screams: Mexicans are murderers and rapists. Illegals are stealing our jobs. Obama founded ISIS. Vladimir Putin is a role model. Journalists are the enemy. White supremacists are just fine.

it’s worth noting: the party of Ronald Reagan died with Donald Trump. For years, Republicans like Paul Ryan pretended their voters cared about conservative ideology: tax cuts for rich people; widespread deregulation; manly chins. Trump exposed all that as nonsense. More than anything, he realized, the Republican base was motivated by a kind of equal-opportunity resentment. To the question, “Who’s screwing you over?” Trump’s answer was simple. Everyone. He attacked undocumented immigrants one minute, Wall Street bankers the next. He was buoyed by fears of global elites and racial minorities alike. And he guessed, correctly, that many Americans felt democracy was a luxury we could no longer afford. “I alone can fix it!” he announced in his convention speech. In the hall, the audience cheered. On our gray Martha Stewart Living couch, Jacqui and I stared at our TV in shock. “There’s no way voters will actually go for that, right?” I asked. “No,” Jacqui said. “No way.” But her voice lacked confidence.

Change comes from people who set a worthy goal, put themselves in position to achieve it, and keep working long after the warm and fuzzy feelings disappear. Barack Obama’s election was a triumph of hope. But his presidency was a triumph of persistence.

here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the single most valuable lesson I learned in public service: There are no grown-ups, at least not in the way I imagined as a kid. Once you reach a certain age, the world has no more parents. But it contains a truly shocking number of children. These children come in all ages, in all sizes, from every walk of life and every corner of the political map. And this is the reason I’m most grateful for my time in Obamaworld. For eight formative years, often against my will, I was forced to act like an adult. 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. I didn’t always understand this. One night in 2011, during the first month Jacqui and I were dating, I had a few too many Island Juleps and began to ramble. “The problem,” I announced, “is that there’s not enough love in our politics.” In hindsight, I had no clue what I was talking about. If you’re a certain type of young person in Washington, this is simply what you say to someone you hope will sleep with you. I consider myself lucky it worked. But if pressed, I suppose I would have admitted that by love I meant something more like infatuation. It was the way I felt the very first time I saw that freshman senator from Illinois. He’s flawless! He gets m...