by Love, Reggie
I arrived April 2005. To play defense, I put on twenty-five pounds to get to 250, and learned yet another position. I felt sick most of the time, trying to keep the weight on while running around sweating it out in 110-degree heat. I was not built for that position, and eventually we all agreed on that point, and I was released in September.
Long story short: everyone can’t play, but everyone can play it out. I think life is about windows of opportunity, and while sometimes they open for you, other times they don’t. What football provided me with was a world class education at Duke, and it also taught me endurance and helped me to better understand what it meant to persevere. It taught me toughness. This came into play in the most unlikely of places: Iowa.
“I don’t know how anybody does that stuff,” Obama said when I described the practices to him.
“For some people they don’t know any other option,” I answered. “Besides, when you want something bad enough, you go after it.”
He nodded. That he understood. And soon enough I came to see just how much. Obama was not a man who gave up on his dreams. Once in office, he got the budgets passed. He repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But he couldn’t win them all. And when he was thwarted, he would say, “We didn’t win today, but eventually this will right itself. It’s inevitable.”
Never did that feel more true than the night the Affordable Care Act passed. The President had believed in making the principles of the ACA a reality since before he was elected U.S. senator.
During the campaign, the candidate would always say how he wanted to be the type of president who “gets things done.” He didn’t want to be the type of leader who worried about reelection or the polls or what people thought he owed them. He wanted to do what was best for the American people.
I remember, shortly after I’d begun working as his personal aide, the first time the senator told me how he’d lost his mother to ovarian cancer. He said, “The reason health care is an important thing to me is because my mom passed away at fifty-two years old. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs, and she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses, because they might consider this a preexisting condition.” His voice filled with fresh agitation when he spoke about her passing. Health care was not a campaign “issue,” but rather a mission sprung straight from his heart.
A couple of times on the road, he suddenly said, “We are going to get this done.” Once he was president, even when people on our team intimated that the party should be focusing on other issues, he never flinched. Like the night of his debate with candidate Romney, when the governor was snarlingly labeling the ACA “Obamacare,” and Obama calmly responded, “Go ahead, I like that, because I do care. Obama cares.”
The night the ACA passed, the feeling I most remember is “whew.” The votes went back and forth until the last minute and required a ton of political capital. Phil Schiliro and his legislative affairs team were working for votes up until the final seconds.
We had reason to believe the act was going to pass, but we were all still really nervous. It was a late night, and the President stayed in the residence until the vote officially commenced. Then he came down and joined the entire staff, which had now assembled in the Roosevelt Room to watch C-SPAN together.
The President still had folks on the floor whipping up votes, and we were tracking the progress, but we weren’t ahead of the news. When the outcome was final, we shared the excitement and thrill and pride. He’d done it. Right at the buzzer. People thought it couldn’t be passed; they bet against him. But he proved them wrong. Just as he had in the primaries. Just as he will no doubt continue to do over and over throughout his tenure in the White House.
If Obama had given credence to the noise he heard, not just about health care, but about the countless other thorny issues that popped up daily, he would have never achieved anything of lasting value. He would have been stuck in neutral, a tire spinning in mud.
To watch the journey that something as improbable as the ACA took from presumed fruitlessness to commonplace reality showed me that anything is possible if you put your back into it. The whole world can give you one message—about yourself, about your dreams, about your potential—and you can choose to politely tell the world that you aren’t listening, that, in fact, you hear a different tune, and that you intend to dance to the music in your head, not theirs.
19
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YOU CAN’T BUY MOMENTUM
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I call it “mo.”
Momentum. You can’t order it from Amazon. You can’t turn it on or off like a light switch. But sometimes, if you are lucky, you put yourself in a position to happen upon it. And when mo sweeps you up, you ride the wave and let it take you where it wants you to go.
Mo happened during the championship season at Duke my freshman year. Mo took over my AAU team when we won the state championship and beat King’s Mountain at the buzzer. And, as the world witnessed in 2008, mo most definitely happened with the Obama for America campaign a few weeks after he was declared the official Democratic candidate. David Axelrod said it reminded him of Jordan going for 69 against the 1990 Cleveland Cavaliers.
Obama always had swag. Even when the campaign was hitting rough patches, we still saw record turnouts and had folks fainting after a hug or a handshake. Supporters would hang off the sides of buildings, angling to get a glimpse of the candidate, which I was sure was going to end in tragedy, but, thank God, never did.
Sometimes people would burst into tears. They’d get on their phones and call everyone they knew. “It’s Obama! It’s Obama!” I cannot remember how many times I held my breath as someone hoisted up a baby and leaned dangerously over a line of strangers to make sure the candidate spied parent and child. We once stopped near the Golden Gate Bridge so the candidate could take in the view on a sunny day, and people literally abandoned their cars on the street to stop and take a photo with him. Everyone wanted a hug. That was a thing. Kids would hug his leg. Women would hug everywhere. And then there were the trinkets. People wanted to give him a lucky charm. Poker chips. Patches from their military service. Rosaries. Thimbles with sayings carved on them. Rocks from the beach. Hankies from their grandmothers. Obama kept them all. He stored these collected charms and trinkets in a bowl, and he would turn to them for silent encouragement on dark days. But once the mo merged with his innate swag, there was no stopping him.
I remember one flight to Cedar Rapids when the weather was causing wicked turbulence. As we were being tossed around, a superstitious mind might have thought: This is not the most auspicious start to our rural rollout in Iowa. Except, none of that mattered. The day fired on all cylinders. When we got back to the airport to fly to the next stop that evening, the senator told Gibbs he wanted to watch Bullworth and The Candidate on the flight home.
“I thought we were making calls on the plane,” I interjected.
“Relax, Reggie,” Obama playfully shot back. It was the first time he’d ever told me that.
Before the mo, things on the campaign were tough. People would tend to be a little on edge about mundane stuff like having to make calls during drive times when they just wanted to nap, or small mistakes in scheduling. If there was ever a sharp response back to me, the candidate always apologized if he felt he’d been unfair. I usually explained that I had heard worse. Between playing college football and basketball, I’d certainly heard tougher and more vivid descriptions/comparisons of myself and my family members from my coaches in their attempt to motivate. Besides, I knew Obama wasn’t really pissed at me. He was upset by the beating he was weathering in the media and the presumptive halo Hillary Clinton was enjoying from the Democratic Party and the pundits. During one visit in November to the offices of the New York Times, a reporter asked the candidate, “Is the only reason you’re in the race because you g
ave a really good convention speech?”
Obama didn’t waste a second responding.
“That’s like you asking Hillary if she’s only running because she was married to Bill.”
As I said, you position yourself to benefit from momentum, and that means working for it. Nothing is going to happen if you don’t show up, and the odds of something good happening when you do is increased when you show up prepared. You don’t manufacture mo, but you sure can earn it.
Obama is as competitive as any person I’ve met. I’ve seen him win pull-up contests at fundraisers. Tennis, bowling, darts, skeet shooting—he wanted to master everything. Later, when he prepared to throw the first pitch for the MLB all-star game, he practiced his technique in the Rose Garden, marking off the correct distance from a major-league pitching mound to home plate. If the staff ever needed the candidate to do something he loathed, all we had to say was, “Do you want to win this campaign or not?” Without fail, whatever the onerous task was, he’d step up to the plate and perform.
Toward the end of the campaign, the mo made things easier. The process became more systematic. The candidate was firing on all cylinders. Which made it easier for me to do the same. The more he got into his groove, the easier he was to read and understand. It was also a function of repetition. He trusted me now. And he realized he could count on me.
Of necessity, I eventually learned how be effective at my job. During the campaign we juggled photo lines, meet and greets, sit-down meetings, meal meetings, meetings over drinks, coffees, and interviews. Interviews could include print, television, and radio, which we would either do all together or in twenty different combos. Sometimes we did them in person, other times over the phone or via satellite. For most satellite interviews, the network would get a sat truck, and the candidate would sit in a chair in front of a camera and have a live communication feed with the interviewer, usually a local newscaster from a battleground state. Everyone wanted the candidate or an event to look a certain way. Campaign staff had opinions for “messaging purposes.” Media had opinions mostly for self-interested purposes. Our colleagues and supporters in the local markets also had ideas of how they wanted the candidate to interact with their neighbors and friends. It was a constant push and pull. And, of course, Obama had an opinion, too.
In Iowa, the debate swirled around the use of podiums. No one liked them, particularly the Iowa team. They looked impersonal. But it was hard to tack on specialized remarks for a given appearance without a podium to put the notes on. Expecting the candidate to rapidly memorize an additional half hour of facts about a complicated issue like biofuel or GMOs was a big ask. And so it became my job to master the balancing act.
I would tell our local teams, “All right, if you want the candidate to do extraneous or specific remarks, they have to be this length, or we’re pulling out the podium.” (Rick Siger, our Iowa lead advance person, always kept the podium in the trunk of one of the cars.) Otherwise, the plan was to revert back to the stump speech, which the candidate had crafted himself and by then committed to memory.
People didn’t always listen to me, of course. Particularly not in Iowa, where the podium was seen as a vote killer because it put a barrier between the senator and the caucus-goer. It wasn’t “warm.” My pointing out that “warm” was a relative matter, what with it being wintertime in Iowa, didn’t help.
To make sure the candidate didn’t struggle over pronunciations, names, or fun facts about each town, we made sure he had a card with this information written on it, or perhaps the names of the locals he needed to acknowledge. Those cards were as contentious as the podium. Everyone possessed a theory about who he should or shouldn’t mention and why. It was much ado about the tiniest details. But the candidate liked acknowledging the locals. As a former state senator, he understood how much the gesture of being acknowledged meant. The rest of the team, not so much. They hated the shout-outs because they ate up the opening moments of an event, when the majority of the media coverage occurred.
“Sir, the acknowledgments are not working,” Axelrod told the candidate after one event.
Obama pushed back. “We need to recognize people in the local communities so that they feel empowered. Then they’ll go out and support our message and become champions for us. Besides, it’s the right thing to do.”
Acknowledgments continued even though the powers that be wanted them dead. In my opinion, those personal call-outs motivated people on our behalf far more than a national press sound bite did. It made them feel like they were part of Obama’s team, and as such, they wanted to do their best to secure his victory.
On the campaign, thousands of people were working insane hours for what amounted to peanuts in salaried wages. They were there for a cause bigger than themselves or their bank accounts. Obama’s passion created a culture people longed to be a part of. His belief made us able to believe. It wasn’t phony. True enthusiasm and commitment cannot be faked. They cannot guarantee you the gift of momentum. Commitment, belief, and effort are the fuels that make mo explosive.
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Soon enough, the town halls began to overflow. There would be seven hundred confirmed attendees, with a capacity for twenty-five hundred, and then six thousand voters would show up for an opportunity to hear Obama speak. Once we gained traction and the ball was rolling, the senator really harnessed that energy. He inspired the crowds, taking question after question, ignoring our signals to stop. I remember watching him work his magic at one of the later town halls and thinking, We may actually pull this off. It wasn’t a thought I usually had—I preferred to keep my head down and plow ahead. But the message of hope and change was contagious, and I had been infected.
When Election Day finally arrived, I almost couldn’t grasp the finality of the moment. We’d been running nonstop for almost two years. And just like that, it was going to end. There was no gradual slowdown, no easing out of the race.
We’d had three events the day before, and then we landed in Chicago at 1 A.M. The lease for the plane ended the next day, so I stayed behind to clean it out; it was filled with briefing books, changes of clothes, gifts, and loads of other trinkets. I checked into a hotel at 2:30 A.M. and set my alarm for 5 A.M. so I could meet Obama at his house for the last official day of the campaign. He went to vote as soon as the polls opened at 6 A.M., a powerful image for all Americans to see bright and early on what would be a historical Election Day. Then we flew to Indiana to do an event with union organizers, came back to Chicago, and of course, played basketball.
We ran up and down for a couple hours with the senator’s Chicago friends and other supporters who’d flown in for Election Day.
Obama was always tough attacking the basket, and he possessed a dominant mid-range jump shot. Mostly, he craved a good run, and wanted to play with folks with a high basketball IQ, people who wouldn’t end up hurting the candidate. In my opinion, Obama’s most defining on-court quality was that he was a very unselfish teammate. He cared more about winning the game than maximizing his own points and shot attempts. And so it was with his politics as well.
After our Election Day game, as a part of a last get-out-the-vote effort, the candidate had to do radio interviews—something that most politicians hate to do. The disc jockeys made him crazy, but the message was important. He was reminding people to vote. We finished by three in the afternoon, and then because the results had not yet started trickling in, he went back home to wait until it was time to leave for the watch party.
Around 6 P.M. the candidate made his way over to the Grand Hyatt on Michigan Avenue. The whole evening was surreal. The temperature had been unseasonably warm—seventy degrees in November in Chicago. It was either El Niño–related or the city knew something special was happening. People had been out on the streets, soaking up the sun like it was a spring day, and the mood seemed almost too perfect. I’d felt anxious, the way I used to feel on game day in college. I remember lying down on my hotel bed after a quick shower and feeling hal
f-asleep and half-awake, suspended between the two states, not sure which direction I wanted to go.
That twilight stasis eerily mirrored how I felt about the election. It became clear by 5:30 CT, with the call on Pennsylvania and Ohio, that we were going to win. Barack Obama was going to be the next president. I was overjoyed. But I had also decided that I was not going to go to the White House. Marvin had been trying to change my mind for weeks.
Working in the executive branch was never my dream. Who wants to work for “The Man”? I’m joking, but the sentiment was real. Being a government employee was never on my bucket list. My father had worked for the Social Security office since he was twenty-five years old, and I’d seen how the job’s built-in compromises could chip away at a person. I didn’t want to be a part of a bureaucracy and its inefficiency.
At the hotel, I told Marvin I was thrilled for him, but that I would be charting a new course on my own. He said I was nuts. Maybe I was, but I was tired of the travel and was already looking into law schools and had spent time studying for the LSAT while crisscrossing the country with Marvin and the candidate.
“Good luck with that,” he answered with trademark sarcasm. “Can’t you see how this is the best opportunity in the world?” he pressed, shaking his head.
I shrugged. “What’s so great about it?”
“Well, you get to see the world. You get to be close to power. You have a front row seat watching the most critical decisions affecting our planet being made, you know, shit like that, Reggie.” Marvin sighed. “Everybody wants to work in the White House, dumbass.”
