Power Forward : My Presidential Education (9781476763361)

by Love, Reggie

  Though my duties altered in scope, I knew I retained value in the President’s eyes, if for no other reason than familiarity. The White House was not an unknown just to me, but also to him. And no matter what, he knew he could trust me. Beyond that, I was the only other brother working on the first floor of the West Wing, in the bubble every day.

  All told, we’d won. We had bested the campaign’s challenges, delivered a new and unfamiliar message, and we were finally in a position to start making good on promises.

  What I hadn’t fully realized was that the win was only the beginning. It wasn’t the summit, but the start of an even more arduous climb. We’d pushed ourselves to the limit to achieve this amazing goal, but once we did, the clouds cleared and all you could see was more mountains still to climb. There would be no relaxing, no victory dance. In actuality, the job was just beginning. The campaign had been historic, but what it had bought was the opportunity to make history. Every day.

  21

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  CHARACTER COUNTS IN LARGE AMOUNTS

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  Working in the Outer Oval was a true honor. It also came with a fair amount of absurdity. Unlike in sports, where stats and wins are clear and measurable, with politics, the wins are often intangible. That ambiguity leads to an institution-wide insecurity. People find themselves battling for recognition and measuring their self-worth by whether or not they get invited to a holiday party, or are acknowledged in a speech, or given a birthday card, or asked to watch a basketball game.

  In D.C., those goofy social arrangements have an impact on how people view you, and how people view your relationship with them. Forget fame—in Washington, people chase power. And some people grow jealous if they see others ascending along the road of perceived influence faster than themselves.

  I’d been conditioned to the sports world, where if you’re the squeaky wheel, you get cut. But more often than not in politics, the squeaky wheel gets greased. There are, of course, politics and outsized personalities off the court in sports, but for a team to win consistently, those issues become distant concerns after tip-off. Washington, however, has no such clearly marked lines, and the politics bled into everything. Merit is far from the only reason people get anything of perceived value. All of this was a big unfamiliar lesson for me, and watching the skill with which Obama navigated it was an education.

  The President, while adept at handling that culture of insincerity and political maneuvering, was never a part of it. He came in as an outsider—he ran and won on that difference—and as such, he was able to stay above the fray. I was not always as successful.

  Even before we got to Washington, I remember riding in the car when the candidate got off the phone with then President Bush. Bush was trying to round up Democrats in Congress to get TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed. We were in a motorcade in San Francisco, and after the senator hung up, I said, “I know it isn’t my place to comment on this, but why would you support this? The Republicans would never help the Democrats in a situation like this. And doesn’t it make your chances of winning better if the Republicans are shown to be totally out of control?”

  Senator Obama looked me in the eye and said, “What’s most important are the people who are going to be most affected by having a lack of access to capital, small businesses unable to make payroll or to have working capital to fill orders. The people responsible for this mess won’t suffer nearly as bad as the people least responsible for it.”

  He wasn’t trying to calculate the benefit the financial crisis might have on his campaign. He was pained for the Americans he knew would endure hardship. That was the problem crying out for a solution; if he could help, he would, and he did. Unlike many of the Republicans today and during that first term, Obama didn’t believe in being an obstructionist. This was a philosophy he adhered to even as a junior senator from Illinois, where he advised the Democrats not to filibuster the confirmation of Judge Alito or, despite his public misgivings about it, the reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

  “Give it an up or down vote. Don’t take advantage of the process,” he said.

  This was a real lesson for me as someone who had always focused on scores and rankings—who was up, who was down, who lost, who won. As an athlete, I thought I knew what victory looked like. But in a great many domains, I learned that sometimes you win by losing. Or in Obama’s case, that it was worth the risk of forfeiting a temporary political opportunity to serve the greater good.

  I’ll admit, the post-election power grab by every Tom, Dick, and Harry made me a bit nuts. I soon learned that for many people clamoring to get appointments, face time with the President was more valuable than actually doing their job. When you meet people in Washington, the first thing they want to know is what you do and who you know. Everyone wants to see who can pee the farthest.

  This always struck me as silly. Having spent time with several triumphant athletic franchises, and a few struggling ones, and been a part of a groundbreaking grassroots presidential campaign, I had learned time and again that every player and every play matters. In any organization, every piece has value. A house won’t stay standing without a sturdy foundation. Or to use a sports metaphor: one man can’t do it all and can’t play every position on the court; you need an entire team to win.

  This wisdom seemed scarce in ball-hogging Washington, where certain people derived value from being able to say their job was important. It was as if they stopped at passion and forgot about performance, confused being on a winning team with actually contributing to its success. Often times, it seemed to me that in government, no one loved you until they thought you could do something for them. It reminded me of being back in high school, where the pretty girl ignores you until you make the team, and then suddenly she wants you to take her to prom.

  POTUS handled the nonsense with grace. He was used to standing tall in the face of small-minded people. Me? I had to learn. Though I wasn’t explicitly told my new responsibilities, I sussed out in the face of this new interpersonal Oval dynamic that one of them was to be the guy who said “No.” I was the opposite of a yes man. I was the no man. I would be respectful, polite, accommodating. I would respond in a timely, gracious fashion. But in the end, on the majority of asks that poured in like ants to a pile of sugar, I had to offer an apologetic “No.”

  Not only was I the no man, I had to make the people I said no to feel as if they had been told yes. The social interaction needed to be pleasant. And that required a mastery of tact—not, I concede, my strongest suit going into my new position.

  There was one guy whose only reason for being seemed to be to play a round of golf with the President. And he would email me weekly to remind me of that fact. I responded, courteously, that though the President was flattered, playing golf with this clearly sincere admirer currently was not a possibility for the commander in chief. Then this man began sending emails about how he read that Obama was playing golf with other people, and if he had time to do that, he should have time to play with him. His emails became more and more audacious, but I could only thank him for his support and friendship. Those were the rules. He could cross a line. I could not.

  The only thing worse than saying no was saying yes. When I granted a request, I needed to have done as much vetting of the person and the appeal as humanly possible. Was there precedence for this request? Was this something we could actually accommodate? What were the implications if we did? How would saying yes to this look to the outside world? I needed to avoid anything that suggested special treatment, because if I said yes to one thing, you could bet several dozen people would file right behind wanting the same consideration. Any yes opened the floodgates to copycat requests.

  When I did grant a request, I would hear complaints such as “I did more for Obama than that person,” or “I’ve known the President longer,” or “Why did they get that option and we didn’t?”

  Playing gatekeeper wasn
’t the most fun I could have in a day. I was yelled at, hung up on, bullied, threatened, flirted with, and propositioned—sometimes all by the same person.

  I would hear all about how when Bill Clinton was president, so and so got to do such and such. And my job was to keep this ridiculousness from reaching the President. I had to stay out in front of the hungry masses. And I needed to keep them happy as much as I could, without burdening his time. Part of my responsibility was making sure people felt like they were heard and appreciated. Making people feel connected was important to me and to the team. I did have some sway, but I used it judiciously, or so I hoped.

  When I first started working in the White House, every time I met people socially, POTUS was, understandably, all anyone wanted to talk about. Whereas on the campaign trail, I was aware that my actions spoke for more than myself, once I was in the employ of the President, I realized that my own identity had been completely subsumed by the President and the Office. Everywhere I went, I became “the guy who plays basketball with the President.” Imagine the questions you get when someone finds out you know, say, Oprah or Kanye West.

  At times it made dating tough, when it was hard to know the motivations of the women who expressed interest. (On the plus side, I had the best “get out of jail” card you could invent. “I’d love to go to the ballet, but I’ve gotta work”—most people have no problem being second priority behind the President of the United States.)

  A part of me consistently worried that others were involved with me for the wrong reasons. To have even a semblance of a normal social life, I had to learn how to trust. POTUS helped me to do this in ways he didn’t realize. He showed me what true character looked like.

  When Obama was elected he told me, “I’m commander in chief. I’m responsible for every soldier in our military.” He decided to visit a military hospital every few months. He wanted to put a face on the bigger issues. As he generally did, he chose to humanize the problem, rather than distance himself via statistics or studies. It is possible to forget a detail in a briefing that lands on your desk. It is not so easy to forget the stories and staggering courage of our men and women who serve this great country, once they have told you about their lives and losses eye-to-eye.

  POTUS was never one to shy away from the feelings behind a policy. Just as his mother’s health struggles had fueled his desire to fight for the Affordable Care Act, his one-on-one time with wounded warriors at military hospitals and elsewhere inspired his commitment to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He took initiatives like the Recovery Act (which provided $1.4 billion to improve services for the department) and tax credits, and made a public promise to end veteran homelessness by 2015. Programs, incidentally, that as of 2012, had resulted in a 20 percent decrease in veteran unemployment compared with the prior year, and in 2013 saw a 23.49 percent reduction in veteran homelessness.

  The President would tell me that when it came to our military, words of thanks and promises of help were not enough. He considered the lack of support veterans suffered a source of national shame. He believed they had committed for life and so should we as a country. That was something he and Coach K had in common: an unyielding devotion and gratitude to the men and women who risked everything to serve those of us at home. It remains a humbling touchstone for me as well. Whenever I feel sorry for myself, or begin to take for granted the liberties I have as a citizen, I think back to those times with the President in the patient rooms of Walter Reed, or to the letters and photographs of servicemen and -women that Coach K used to show us at Duke when our team was out of touch with reality.

  “This is what sacrifice looks like,” Coach K would say, holding up pictures of soldiers. And he was right.

  Just as I’d observed Obama do on the campaign, in Washington I aimed to understand the perspectives of all different kinds of people. Every day I intersected with people from various walks of life, and often from far-flung places around the world. In doing so, I soon learned how relative most of our perceptions and beliefs are, and how insignificant a space I actually occupied.

  It was like that feeling you get when you look out your airplane window. The world is big. And you are so small. Being a part of an NCAA Championship team may have carried weight in my former social and professional circles, but to visiting diplomats from South Korea or Japan, my collegiate sports meant nothing. The same was true of my education and background.

  It was a profound lesson to grasp that at the end of the day, the only thing that really defines you is how you conduct yourself human to human. Everything you might think distinguishes your identity—your appearance, your earnings, your lineage, your fame—are all reduced to sand when you intersect with someone from a completely foreign world. No one in Beirut cares that you attended Harvard. No one in the Sudan gives a flip about who your parents are. The only true international currency is character.

  It was the same thing Coach K had drilled into me, and my father, too, since I was old enough to blow my own nose. It was an example Obama had set since the day we met: Character doesn’t just count. It is the password to every code you will ever need to crack.

  22

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  VALUE THE BALL

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  Know this: your world is a fishbowl. So you’d best keep it clean. And not just because it is always safer to assume that everyone eventually sees everything and nothing stays hidden for long. Far less appreciated is another truth: you never know who is going to swim back into your orbit.

  Which brings to my mind December 13, 2007. We were in the thick of the hard, heated days of the early campaign, and I met Gibbs and Axelrod on the tarmac at Washington National to load up ahead of the candidate’s arrival. Our flight attendant’s last name was Stoner, and she was quite proud of her unusual moniker. The timing was comical. The previous day Billy Shaheen, cochair of Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, had publicly and pointedly raised Obama’s youthful indiscretions with drug use, noting that the GOP would use them to destroy the candidate in the general election. Clearly, Shaheen wasn’t going to wait for the GOP to raise the issue. We were all standing outside discussing his press conference as the flight was being readied for takeoff when Huma Abedin, Clinton’s personal aide, walked over to our plane and pulled me aside.

  “My boss wants to talk to your boss,” she said.

  “Ooo-kay,” I answered, reaching to ring the candidate, who, as it turned out, was pulling onto the tarmac at that moment. I told him Senator Clinton wanted a quick word, and he agreed as he exited the car. I joined him and we walked toward her plane. Senator Clinton emerged, reached the tarmac, and intercepted us halfway.

  “I want to apologize for the whole Shaheen thing,” she said. “I want you to know I had nothing to do with it.”

  The candidate very respectfully told her the apology was kind, but largely meaningless, given the emails it was rumored her camp had been sending out labeling him as a Muslim. Before he could finish his sentence, she exploded on Obama. In a matter of seconds, she went from composed to furious. It had not been Obama’s intention to upset her, but he wasn’t going to play the fool either. To all of us watching the spat unfold, it was an obvious turning point in our campaign, and we knew it. Clinton was no less competitive or committed to a cause than Obama, and the electric tension running through both candidates and their respective staffs reflected the understanding that she was no longer the de facto Democratic candidate. Her inevitability had been questioned.

  After the skirmish, we all went back to our respective aircrafts to fly to Des Moines for yet another debate. The press had been forecasting that Senator Clinton was going to go for the throat, since she and Obama’s campaign clashes had been getting national attention. In reality, the debate was dull until the last minute, when Carolyn Washburn, the then editor of the Des Moines Register, asked Senator Obama how he could claim to be an agent of change when he had so many former Clinton advisors on
his foreign policy team.

  Clinton snorted and muttered, “I want to hear that.”

  Obama quickly and sharply responded, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.”

  The crowd exploded in laughter. Senator Clinton fell silent, and Senator Obama finished answering the question. That one line was the only news to come out of the whole event.

  I remember Obama telling me later that day that he knew he was going to win the nomination after that moment on the tarmac, because Clinton had unraveled, and he was still standing and keeping his cool. It was just the confidence boost he needed.

  During the primaries you would hear all these stories about how the HRC campaign was strong-arming people, or making jokes about Obama supporters. Contentious stuff. And yet we’d all be stuck in the same waiting areas and green rooms, so we’d end up talking to each other for hours at a time. There was nowhere else to go, and it seemed silly to stand there in silence pretending to hate each other.

  As it goes in politics, once the senator was officially declared the Democratic nominee, the Clintons became huge assets and eventually friends to the Obamas and the campaign, and as we know, she became a formidable secretary of state.

  After Clinton conceded in the primary, Huma and I went to dinner at this fancy Georgetown restaurant called Cafe Milano. She brought Anthony Weiner, and I brought a friend. The newspapers ended up writing a story about the meal, which was an out-of-body experience for me. I was now tabloid fodder, though it was probably more Anthony and Huma drawing the attention.