by Pat Cunnane
As the sun went down, the stakes went up.
Returns rushed in. I met Bobby, who took a few days off from the White House to volunteer for the final days of the campaign in Chicago. On Election Day, his primary task was finding the pool dinner, making him the most overqualified pizza boy on the planet. I met him to help carry the boxes. But when we arrived at the pizza shop, it was closed. The pool was hungry. And it was beginning to rain. Jeff had a backup plan and had food delivered directly to our bus. As we got back, damp from the deluge, word came down that the numbers looked good. Jeff, Marie, and I celebrated. Then my mom called: she won her first reelection to the Pennsylvania State House. One more thing to celebrate. As the night wore on, and the numbers continued to add up to what we thought would be a big win, the motorcade made its way to McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America, and the site of the reelection speech as well as what seemed like the biggest party North America had ever seen. Music blared; we kept our eyes glued to our BlackBerrys. When would they call the election?
Just before ten fifteen local Chicago time, it happened. The election was called for President Obama. We had a party on the party bus, and waited some more. The president couldn’t speak until after Romney had called and conceded. Jon Favreau sent the text of the reelection victory speech with a fitting all-caps subject line. Eventually we rushed into McCormick Place like we had so many times and so many places before—snaking backstage, beyond the drapes and into the event site, where we were met by massive blue drapes, countless waving American flags, and the most overjoyed, optimistic people you could cram into a convention center.
The president took the stage with his family as Stevie Wonder’s celebratory “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours” blared. As his family dispersed to cheers and Stevie’s last refrain concluded, the crowd erupted, chanting “Four more years!” so powerfully that the president needed to delay his start. The crowd was in control until Obama took over:
“Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you.”
I turned around in the buffer, looked out at the sea of people behind me and thought back to four years before—a world away—watching a similar scene from the Atlantic Ocean. I knew the president meant what he said. Everyone—staffers, volunteers, voters—had a say in moving America forward.
“For the United States of America, the best is yet to come . . . No matter what you do or where you go from here, you will carry the memory of the history we made together.”
I didn’t know what was next for me or where I’d wind up following life on the campaign trail, but I knew he was right. I would never forget this moment. This moment when politics seemed so big.
“The arguments we had are a mark of our liberty,” the president continued. “Progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path.” That much, as we would learn firsthand, was all too true. But there was no time to worry over that. We were focused on, as President Obama said, “what makes America great.”
“I have never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America, and I ask you to sustain that hope.” His wasn’t a call for blind optimism, it was a belief in “that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”
And just like that, he was finished. The campaign was officially over. And confetti rained down. Backstage, Marie, Jeff, and I bumped into the president and First Lady after the speech. He gave me a hug. I worried for an instant that maybe none of this was real. It was all going too well. But then the First Lady came up to me and sort of shimmied to the music, and I didn’t know whether to sort of shimmy back, and so I just stood there like a moron. And I felt super awkward, which is when I knew it wasn’t a dream. This was real life, though not the life I could have envisioned four years prior—and a world away—looking out with Stephanie over the vast, blue Atlantic.
• • •
The Blue Room of the White House is, well, blue. Sandwiched between the equally aptly named Red and Green rooms, the Blue Room was known best by members of our White House staff as the spot with the largest Christmas tree come December. During the marathon of holiday receptions, it was the place to meet on the crowded State Floor for some of the White House’s infamous boozy eggnog, which was made by melting ice cream before pouring in too many types of alcohol to list. It was known to get the better of guests and staffers alike.
We planned to use the Blue Room for a slightly more presidential purpose on January 20, 2013.
Tradition holds that if the new president’s swearing-in falls on a Sunday, it is to be handled as a small, private ceremony. The spectacle of the public inauguration is meant to follow the next day, Monday. Marie, Antoinette, Brian, and I had been working on the logistics for weeks. The oath taking would require only moments, but the timing had to be right. The US Constitution dictates it. More importantly for our purposes, the TV executives demand it. Every network planned to break in to its special programming and take the oath live.
We had to hit the mark.
For these most sensitive events and big moments, we brought in an atomic clock: sturdy with red, digital numbers blinking the time. Atomic clocks are the most accurate timekeepers in existence, some with an uncertainty of just one second in thirty million years. That made us more comfortable. We knew that if our timing was off, then the schedules for the military’s global positioning systems were wrong, too. I’m not sure why that made us feel better, but it did. Something about thirty million years and being in this together. So we liked our chances of hitting the mark at 11:55:00—five minutes prior to the Constitution’s noon deadline.
The Friday before inauguration weekend, we got word that the president wanted to do a practice run. Stephanie and I hadn’t noticed this on our Atlantic Ocean feed four years before, but I learned later that Chief Justice Roberts had fumbled the oath at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. In fact, he had to visit the White House the next day for a do-over in the Map Room, just to be sure America’s president was, in fact, president. We wanted to guard against similar problems the second time around. The First Lady couldn’t make it to the practice, so we needed a stand-in. Somebody chose Marie. Now we just needed a book.
I had a copy of the comedian Sinbad’s 1998 bestseller Sinbad’s Guide to Life (Because I Know Everything) on my desk. Our go-getter of an intern Michael had just submitted an impressive book reportIII to me on what he’d learned from the book. Even though it might have been my bible, Sinbad’s smash paperback was too thin to be a credible replacement for the real deal. So Marie ran down to Lower Press and grabbed a more substantial stand-in, snatching the first of two books she spotted resting against the base of her desk. Then she ran upstairs to the Blue Room to pretend to be the First Lady. As our pretend chief justice got under way, she held out the book for the president to rest his right hand.
He gave her a quizzical look. “Hmm . . .”
Marie gasped. Had she accidentally grabbed Fifty Shades of Grey?
“Life of Pi?” Obama asked. He placed his hand on the cover and, before getting on with the practice run, gave his approval: “Good book.”
Friday’s rehearsal was a success. We spent most of Sunday morning prepping the Blue Room. The camera crew set up gear, and then did final sound and lighting checks. The residence staff removed the marble-topped wooden table in the center of the room. Marie and I waited, worried, and wondered how it would all play out. We answered the same questions over and over:
“Yes, we’re still on time.”
“Yep, the whole First Family will stand with him.”
As the clock hit 11:30:00, the room began to fill: the pool was in place, and a few lucky members of the president’s extend
ed family filtered in. There were just a few staffers in the room. Marie and I eagerly anticipated the official start to the second term.
At 11:53:00, I gave a two-minute warning to the producer standing next to me. I triple-checked that my phone was muted. It was. Remembering that it had gone off the week before, interrupting our meeting in the Roosevelt Room, I quadruple-checked. I didn’t think the lighthearted, ineffectual whimsy of the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song would play well over the president’s oath of office.
Two minutes later, the president hit his mark, the oath went off without a hitch, and Barack Obama’s second term officially began.
It was difficult to wrap my head around the idea that I was in the room—a few paces away—on the periphery of history. I did my best to take it in.
To not let it slip by for granted.
To stretch it as long as I could.
I knew firsthand what this moment in the Blue Room meant to folks a world away.
* * *
I. All staffers were legally allowed to take part in the campaign in their personal capacity.
II. For years, a headshot of David Cameron hung above my desk, alongside one of network news anchor Brian Williams. I wasn’t afraid to admit the man crush.
III. Michael’s book report was optional. He wanted to do it. Relax.
5
* * *
Office Politics
I padded the book immensely. I probably would eliminate chapter five and gone straight to six. I wrote it because you have to have five to get to six.
—SINBAD IN THE 1995 FILM HOUSEGUEST
After the election, things around the West Wing fell into a familiar rhythm. They went back to normal—at least, as normal as the White House allows—and presidential politics gave way to office politics.
Before the White House, it hadn’t occurred to me that there were so many ways to read—or write—an email that said the same thing. Consider a quick note of gratitude: “Thank you!” in your in-box is a good thing. “Thanks very much” is a very good thing. “Thank you” is genuine. “Thanks” is fine and likely well intentioned, too. “Ty” and “Thx” are more inscrutable. But around the West Wing, throw a period at the end of the shorter “Thanks,” and some introspection is in order. Thanks. Maybe you were late getting your coworker what he needed, or the news is not as she’d hoped. Perhaps your colleague isn’t feeling well, or the Navy Mess burnt his English muffin. It’s also possible that whoever is writing “Thanks” with a period just doesn’t like you. It’s all part of the language—the nuance—of the place.
In that way, I suppose the White House is like any office. Cliques formed. Rivalries developed. People read too much into the meaning of otherwise straightforward emails; we sometimes pawned off work or passed the buck. We dealt with the boss’s pets. We tried to raise our profiles at work, speaking up and offering insights in front of the chief of staff or finagling an invite to a senior staff meeting, taking on an additional task or two. But we in the Press Office had the unique opportunity to raise our profiles beyond the office and out in the world as well—to “build our brand.”
Playbook, Politico’s pervasive morning tip sheet, which was emailed to everybody inside the Beltway before sunrise, was a good way to start. Did your birthday make Playbook? If so, was it in the headline or just the body? These were some of the gross questions upon which DC social life, which exists only as a function of DC work life, is built. Somehow, attention from hometown papers seemed of a different, less gross sort. A variation on “Local Kid Hits It Big in the White House” was a common headline written about everybody, from the media monitor to major administration players in papers from Arkansas to Alaska. We all came from somewhere. Everybody had a story to tell. Some were no-brainers; some were a stretch.
Schultz had a knack for the art of the stretch. I remember one day he had been lingering around Upper Press, something clearly on his mind. And I knew that if he wasn’t spinning a story in service of the president, he was surely working an angle at self-promotion. So this had to be good, fruitful ground for mocking. Josh was by now the press secretary. Same great hair and clean jokes, just with a bigger office and bit of fame even beyond the Beltway.
“Josh!” Schultz called, sensing an opening as Josh departed his office. “Do you have any flags with me placing Louie in Doggie Du Jour Magazine? It’s for their Washington Power Player Pets edition.”
This gave new meaning to the term “pet project,” I thought.
“Would you be in the article, too?” Josh asked.
Schultz gave him a look that indicated the whole point was so that he would be included. He was the power player in this equation, after all. He produced the outlet’s metrics, inexplicably had them at the ready: circulation of 230,000 and 3 million online subscribers.
“I definitely think you need to do this. It would be nice for Louie,” Josh offered generously.
“Totes,” Schultz said with his signature swivel, smile, and quick watch check.I
Self-promotion didn’t always run like clockwork, though. In fact, the Hill’s infamous “50 Most Beautiful” list could get downright ugly. Nominations poured in anonymously to the Hill, one of DC’s most popular publications. And each spring, it was time to whittle down the fifty best looking people in the city, to be named and profiled in the summer for the Hill’s yearly exercise in self-aware superficiality. Staffers began jockeying for position. Feelings could be hurt and egos bruised. It was a nasty process, and I was in charge of it when I wasn’t tied up with stories about White House varmints. Although, you could say I was dealing with a different sort of White House fox.II
It was up to me, when the nominations for White House staffers came in, to send each nominee a note that somebody thought they were hot and had submitted them for consideration—the height of awkward. “Are you willing to participate? To get your photo taken? Oh, and by the way, the Hill will judge, based on your photos, whether you actually make the cut.” They hesitated, but most who were nominated took part.
Still, the process was better than I thought initially. The first time I was put in charge of the story, a coworker and I were under the impression that it was our duty to determine who among our coworkers were the most handsome and most beautiful, and to report back to the Hill with options. Now, that was an uncomfortable brainstorming session.
Eventually we took our list of comely coworkers to Josh. Somewhat aghast, he said that it wasn’t the White House’s responsibility to choose who should go on the list. Instead, like the holiday receptions, we just managed those who had been tapped to participate. I recognized immediately the error of our ways, but looking at Josh, I couldn’t help noticing his rolling brown locks. That hair, I thought. What an oversight.
In truth, I didn’t need to worry about making nominations, because folks were more than willing to do that themselves. I had to flag for a coworker that he was trending on a popular gossip website because his interns had been misusing official resources, busily sending out solicitations via prominent White House email lists asking hundreds of friends of the administration—many of them quite high profile—to vote for him. It was not a good look, but I was pleased that my intern’s Sinbad book report had now been supplanted as the least productive use of a White House intern’s time since the Clinton years.
Still, I wasn’t innocent in all of this; I did my fair share of self-promotion. I had my wedding announcement in the New York Times and looked for my name in Playbook many mornings. I even asked—okay, pleaded with—Keith, a regional spokesperson in charge of press in the Northeast, to pitch me to the Philadelphia Inquirer. No dice on the Inquirer, but I did, in my final year, take part in the “50 Most Beautiful” list. I did not crack the top 10.III
• • •
Like many offices, we obsessed over lunch, wondered how early was too early to start asking about plans or what was on the mess menu. The White House Mess is a West Wing mainstay, a focal point for countless discussions and rend
ezvous as well as a source of much aggravation. Staffers called down from their desks and placed an order for pickup one level below. But they didn’t do delivery for anyone not named Barack or Joe.
The mess is located in the basement of the West Wing. A quick trip down the stairs at the entrance to Upper Press, past the chief speechwriter’s office and the suite of national security offices and cubicles Just beyond Pete Souza’s nook (which used to be the White House barbershop), you turn down a narrow, nautically themed hallway toward our collective watering hole. There’s the formal dining area for special guests and senior staff that I mentioned with regards to the UK State Dinner, but the real mess is the pickup window, flanked by two TVs, one set to ESPN and the other to the news. A line forms down the hall to the small window.
Thursdays served as “Mexican Day,” which always prompted a longer-than-usual line, because the reliably wonderful chips and queso were a real crowd pleaser. Most Mexican Days, to ensure I got a hot batch of queso, I’d monitor the bottom right corner of my computer screen. The earliest you could call for lunch was 11:30. So at 11:28, 11:29, I would ready my hand at the phone, eager to dial the number I knew by heart: 71535.
The mess would occasionally bring in celebrity guest chefs—from José Andrés to Guy Fieri—to cook us some of their favorites. It was a highlight, usually months in the making. Thing is, on the mornings-of, I had a tendency to forget about the guest chef. As I would announce to my coworkers in Upper Press that I was headed to Subway for a crummy sandwich, Velz and Desiree would snicker but fail to save me from myself. “Enjoy your Five Dollar Footlong,” they’d crack.
