Fore!
As president, Bill Clinton liked to golf a lot, too, but he made better use of the game, politically, than Obama who, pool reports would note, on Saturdays or Sundays spent many of his rounds with old chums and young aides filling out his foursome. In February 1995, with Clinton still bruising from the humiliating midterm elections in which the Democrats lost both the House and Senate, we accompanied the president on Air Force One en route to Indian Wells, California, for a rendezvous on the desert links with former presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.
Ford and Bush offered powerful political cover from a prior era, even though some bristled at the image of the president engaging so publicly in what might be seen as an elitist sport with senior statesmen of the Republican Party. “One day after blistering congressional Republicans for messing with his education and crime proposals,” wrote John Broder in the Los Angeles Times, “President Clinton apparently threw in the golf towel and became—at least temporarily—one of them.”1 Alongside his predecessors, Clinton could be pictured, however briefly, above the fray that raged inside the Beltway.
Giants of American pop culture like Hope and Billy Graham have served as a human bridge between presidencies. Two years into Clinton’s first term, it was Hope’s turn to convene three members of the exclusive club. The rare foursome allowed political rivals to begin to heal the wounds of 1992 and forge a friendship that would endure for decades. There would be casualties from the round, even though Ford warned the gallery before tee-off: “I would advise people they should stay behind us.”2 Bystander Norma Early was hit in the nose by a Bush slice on the first hole and needed ten stitches. Geraldine Grommesh took an errant Ford drive on 17 that clipped her index finger, and John Rynd of Chula Vista was struck on the buttock by a Bush shot on 14. “No blood, no problem,” Rynd quipped, taking home the golf ball, signed by the forty-first president, as a souvenir.3 Notwithstanding the wayward hooks and slices, the powerful, widely run optics of the three presidents standing shoulder to shoulder, with Clinton in the middle, made the four hours in the desert time well spent.
In many ways, that two-day trip to the Coachella Valley of California provided visual evidence that Clinton was ascending to a different plateau as a national leader, less of a partisan Democrat and more a custodian of the nation’s highest office. His dinner on the evening before the golf game at Sunnylands, the midcentury modern residence of Walter and Lenore Annenberg (Ambassador Annenberg had been Richard Nixon’s envoy to the Court of St. James’s), offered old-school atmospherics that put the president in a rarified setting styled more for Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower than Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson.
Clinton needed to make that pivot. The early months of 1995 had marked a low point in his presidency. The swooning feeling I felt in the West Wing, expressed in meetings in the Roosevelt Room or in off hours at Lauriol Plaza, a popular Mexican eatery in DuPont Circle, was palpable. The new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, rode cockily into office against the backdrop of the Contract with America, co-opting our brand of photo op with a scene that put him on a pedestal. On every news show and magazine, I couldn’t hide from that picture: three words—“Contract with America”—in raised white lettering plastered to a blue map of the United States erected behind Gingrich. He was surrounded by fellow GOP lawmakers, some of them waving American flags to fill the frame. After a long absence, Republican stagecraft was once again Reaganesque.
On April 18, Clinton held a formal East Room news conference, requiring us to lay on all the trappings of production. He was asked if his voice could still be heard in a town where the Senate was once again under GOP control and the House of Representatives had fallen from Democratic hands for the first time in forty years. “The Constitution gives me relevance,” Clinton rebutted. “The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The record we have built up over the last two years and the things we’re trying to do to implement it give it relevance.”4 Clinton had convinced himself of this, but others weren’t sure.
Amazing Grace
The next day Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a brew of 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, 1,200 pounds of liquid nitromethane and 300 pounds of Tovex in a Ryder truck in front of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
The explosion left much of the building in rubble, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700 more, many of them federal workers. Among the dead were nineteen babies and children who had been playing in the Murrah day-care center. A bank employee, Charles Porter, photographed firefighter Chris Fields cradling an infant named Baylee Almon, who later succumbed to her injuries. The heart-wrenching image, which filled front pages of newspapers worldwide, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.
Watching coverage of children being pulled from the rubble, Clinton said he wanted to “put his fist through the television”5 and immediately marshaled his administration to respond on all fronts, including ministering to children affected by the horror.
At that moment, less than twenty-four hours after being forced to defend his relevance, only the president had the power to speak for the nation. “The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens,” Clinton said. “It was an act of cowardice and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it, and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards.”6 The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people, opened eyes anew to terrorism aimed at Americans, but from that day in Oklahoma City forward, the role of the president as defender of the homeland and consoler in chief ascended to a singular level of relevance.
Nearly a year later, on April 6, 1996, President Clinton returned to Oklahoma City to lay a wreath at the site of the bombing and dedicate a new day-care center replacing the one that was destroyed. As part of the choreography, he and the first lady would escort six children who had survived the blast to the hallowed place where their playmates died. The wreath stood ready to receive the Clintons, the children, and their accompanying parents. I had arrived a few days before to work with the advance team on the final arrangements. When all of our plans were in place, we added one more fixture to the scene: three bagpipers positioned high atop the remains of the Murrah Building.
The pool cameras tracked the hushed procession as they made their way from the motorcade to the awaiting wreath. Once there, the president adjusted its ribbons while Mrs. Clinton held the hand of four-year-old Brandon Denny, who had been severely injured in the explosion, and helped him leave a teddy bear amid the flowers. At that moment, the bagpipers stepped into view and began a rendition of “Amazing Grace” that broke the solemn silence. A few minutes later, at the day-care center dedication, the president reflected on what had just occurred.
“This is, after all, Good Friday,” he said, “a day for those of us who are Christians that marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption. In a way, that is the lesson of this little walk we just took with these children and their parents, from a place where we mourn lives cut so brutally short to this place where, thanks to you and all of those who helped, we can truly celebrate new beginnings.”7 For Bill Clinton, Oklahoma City was a new beginning as well, the beginning of the rest of his life, really, when the world’s lonely eyes turned to him for consolation. If Clinton’s administration had an anthem, it would be “Amazing Grace.”
I had heard “Amazing Grace” played in the presence of presidents a number of times in the decades since the Oklahoma City bombing, but never so meaningfully as when Barack Obama sang it as the finale to his eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney at the College of Charleston on the afternoon of June 26, 2015. The stage had been designed to emulate the pulpit of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, where Pinckney and eight others were senselessly murdered by a gunman nine days earlier. There was no presidential lectern for the service. It was replaced by a podium bearing the purple draping of the AME church, with Obama surrounded during his remarks by seated church elders and Reverend Pinckney’s rose-draped casket below.
For all but the final paragraphs of his thirty-seven-minute eulogy, the elders and the audience expressed their accord with Obama’s words through murmured concurrence and sporadic applause, but they remained respectfully seated during the span of his remarks. At the thirty-five-minute mark, Obama honed in on the idea of “that reservoir of goodness” that resides inside every person, the “open heart” that he had witnessed that week by the people in Charleston. Every person’s essential goodness, he preached, “must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past—how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world.”8
The eulogy was nearing its conclusion. It was a beautifully written speech, earning instant comparisons among those simultaneously watching and tweeting to “A More Perfect Union,” the name of his March 2008 address on race at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. But it hadn’t yet reached its crescendo. “If we could find that grace,” Obama added, “anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”9 Waiting for the crowd to hush, he uttered the words “Amazing Grace” twice, standing silently after that for fourteen long seconds, allowing his vision for a better world to percolate among the assembled audience. The next sounds from his mouth were not words, but notes, singing a cappella the first lines of the centuries-old hymn.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
As the song came from his lips, the elders, audience and choir rose in unison to their feet to join in.
The Charleston eulogy, accompanied by “Amazing Grace,” coming in the middle of Obama’s seventh year as president, marked, as with Clinton, a turning point in his time in office that began at his 2009 inauguration with the words of Poet Laureate Elizabeth Alexander’s recital of “Praise Song for the Day.” In the long years in between, the journey had odd detours, such as the Beer Summit, and weird images, such as the photo released of him shooting skeet at Camp David as he lobbied for gun control legislation. When Obama came to Charleston, Americans saw him at his best—as a teacher—rather than a man who had to maneuver out of a rhetorical corner by participating in “a teachable moment.”
Charleston marked a turning point, but it was part of a long arc that began in 2015 instead of a sharp curve. In March, on the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” Obama spoke movingly along the banks of the Alabama River in front of a deserted Edmund Pettus Bridge, a steel span named for a Confederate general that became a symbol of the Civil Rights struggle. When he finished, he led many of the 20,000 gathered for the ceremony across the bridge, including a number of the original “foot soldiers” from 1965, and even his predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush. Just as Clinton had stood with President Bush’s father in Indian Wells, visually burying the hatchet from earlier partisan rivalry, the scene in Selma elevated Obama in a new way and signaled his entry into the rarefied club where ex-presidents have their successor’s back and put the nation’s principles ahead of politics.
In June, after the Charleston shootings and the eventual removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the South Carolina Capitol, after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare subsidies by a six-to-three vote, and after the Court made same-sex marriage a national right, the corps of print and broadcast pundits finally rendered a collective verdict on Obama’s presidency as “consequential.” Obama’s “Best Week,” as many called it,10 paved the way for historians to vault him, eventually, into the top tier of national leaders.
With the theater of the 2016 campaign beginning to take over the national stage, the week also opened the door, gently, to a waning presidency, when a lame duck slowly makes way for a new flock taking flight. But even as the race to succeed him heated up, powerful symbolism doesn’t abandon the sitting POTUS until he flies home on Inauguration Day aboard the famous blue-and-white Boeing 747 with all of its usual trappings, except the call sign “Air Force One.”
On Friday, June 26, at the end of that illustrious week, Obama allowed his home to be bathed in rainbow lighting to commemorate the Court’s landmark decision on same-sex marriage. It was an idea hatched months earlier by Jeff Tiller, a former press advance man who was part of my team on the Port of Spain trip. Tiller spent that Friday night on a lawn chair gazing at the North Portico, along with large crowds beyond the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. When asked about the powerful symbolic gesture at a Monday news conference, Obama said it was “a moment worth savoring,” twice repeating, “That was a good thing.”11 Embracing, at long last, the theater of his job, which he confessed to Chuck Todd six months earlier was something that didn’t come naturally to him, stagecraft finally turned from foe to friend.
WTF
When Barack Obama was seven years old, in 1968, living with his mother in Jakarta, Indonesia, it’s doubtful he saw any of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions held that summer in Miami Beach and Chicago. What the future president missed was a new strain of televised content born from ABC’s struggle to make its mark on broadcast news. The perennial third-place network hired William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal to appear in ten one-on-one debates to enliven its convention coverage. Both men, one an ardent conservative, the other a flaming liberal, were dazzling thinkers and writers, but their on-screen battles drove ratings not because of the power of their ideas, but because live TV turned their ideological conflict into an addictive visual spectacle.
Nearly half a century after Buckley and Vidal’s summer of sparring, a documentary film, Best of Enemies, reminded a new generation of viewers how television first turned political disagreement into hypnotic entertainment. Some memorable segments of the verbal brawls were not, in hindsight, either man’s finest hour (Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”; Buckley retorts, calling Vidal a “queer”).12 At the closing curtain of their last debate, however, they seem to have a sense of what they wrought.
“I think these great debates are absolutely nonsense,” Vidal says into the camera. “The way they’re set up there’s almost no interchange of ideas, very little, even of personality.” Then, putting on the hat of a TV critic, the prolific author of every sort of written word adds, “There’s also a terrible thing about this medium that hardly anyone listens. They sort of get an impression of somebody and they think they figured out just what he’s like by seeing him on television.” No one listens, they only get an impression.
For his part, the loquacious Buckley succinctly addresses the cultural conundrum that would distort public discourse for the five decades that followed. “Does television run America?” Buckley asks rhetorically. “There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating,” he adds.13
The Buckley-Vidal verbal one-upmanship spawned a dubious progeny of cheap-to-produce programming serving as viewer catnip to digest along with their TV dinners. Like the two-chair, two-man setup of Buckley-Vidal, they started raw and simple, with the “Point-Counterpoint” segments between James J. Kilpatrick and Shayna Alexander on CBS’s 60 Minutes and Ted Koppel’s interviews of boxed-in guests on ABC’s Nightline. Crossfire showed up on CNN in 1982 and, by the end of the next decade, MSNBC and Fox News Channel began to fill their prime-time hours with nonstop ideological ping pong matches, the balance tipped on either side depending on the channel’s slant.
As the productions became more slickly produced, the role of the advance person made Vidal and Buckley’s warnings more prescient. Catering to declining viewer attention spans, producers in their control rooms unmoored their cameras from their in-studio guests and began to feed B-roll of the day’s political events onto the screen while the talking heads prattled on. If it was hard to “listen” in Vidal’s day, it was getting impossible in the new century as Buckley’s “highly viewable” content trumped that which was “highly illuminating” every night. The cable networks had an insatiable appetite for fresh footage, the kind that advance teams manufactured, and TV crews gathered to feed the advertising-supported product that the networks put onto the air. Veteran correspondents might have turned up their noses at the choreographed imagery and photo-ops staged on the road, but their bosses kept airing it just the same.
Sometimes, the B-roll occupied its own superimposed box as hosts and debaters mixed it up in the main frame, and sometimes the footage took over the whole screen, the voices becoming a trifling soundtrack. A viewer’s brain had the tough task of descrambling the words and images and making sense of the audio and visual stew that the shows served up. With all of these empty calories consuming so many hours of airtime, the media landscape cried out for a new medium.
I took my own stab at creating something different by removing the visual from the mix. In January 2011, I joined Adam Belmar, a former ABC News producer and later a White House aide who did for George W. Bush what I did for Clinton, in launching a weekly hour-long radio show for SiriusXM’s “POTUS” channel called Polioptics, a made-up word that mashed up “politics” and “optics.” The mash-up captured the essential mission of the advance man, my passionate on-and-off vocation since my first trip for Senator Paul Simon right out of college in 1987. The show lasted 159 episodes, ending in 2014. Though Polioptics never earned me a dime—with a day job, I didn’t have the time or need to commercialize it—the series was a labor of love.
Each weekend, after the show aired on SiriusXM, I uploaded the MP3 file to Polioptics.com and posted it to iTunes as a podcast. I had become enamored of the audio medium long before shows like Serial catapulted podcasts to mainstream popularity. The opportunity to sit in a soundproofed, air-conditioned studio and talk with interesting guests from government, the media and Hollywood and “shine a light on the theater of politics,” as our announcer said, was a joy. Mixing our conversations with archival sound from the span of White House history gave Polioptics a theatrical quality that maybe even Buckley and Vidal would have enjoyed listening to with high-end headphones.
It wasn’t a unique discovery, but I found that by stripping the visual out of a broadcast, even one that was focused on political theater, gave the listener a richer appreciation of a guest’s perspective. There was no lighting or makeup, no interruptions for commercial breaks, and no hostile grandstanding among guests in the manner that Vidal unleashed on Buckley. The audience streaming a podcast, by the very nature of that act, opted in to focus intently on what was said rather than have their attention distracted by B-roll, pharmaceutical ads and the preening voices of on-air talent. Listening to other podcasts by far more accomplished performers, I was coming to think that the most effective form of communication for a new age might have no image at all.
One show on my regular iPhone podcast listings was Marc Maron’s WTF, which launched about a year before mine debuted and owed its title to the Internet slang for “What the Fuck?” The earnest, earthy, often profane host was a stand-up comedian in real life, but has increasingly earned his notoriety from the twice-a-week show he produces in a makeshift studio in the one-car garage of his Highland Park, California home.
To appreciate the unique manner in which Maron engages his guests, you have to leapfrog his expletive-laced opening monologues, but at least you’re spared the incessant commercials for erectile dysfunction you get on TV. WTF is an entertaining listen while you do the dishes, but as much as I enjoyed it, I didn’t expect the homespun podcast to be the kind of production that a president of the United States would drop into. But this was the summer of 2015, at the trailing end of the pivot of Obama’s presidency, and a man who made himself at home on the set of Between Two Ferns might be willing to take a flyer on WTF if it meant reaching an audience desensitized to cable donnybrooks.
On the morning of Friday, June 19, 2015, that’s exactly what he did, flying on Marine One from his overnight stay in Beverly Hills to Highland Park for an appointment in Maron’s garage. Listening to Obama chat with Maron for an hour was to appreciate the president in a new way and, for many, to really hear him for the first time.14 In the show, which was posted on the following Monday, he talked candidly about his parents, his college years at nearby Occidental, raising his kids and managing his presidency. Obama spoke with an intimacy and authenticity that couldn’t be conveyed in edited TV interviews or long-form magazine articles, and certainly not in two-minute packaged news reports on his stream of daily events. From Roosevelt’s fireside chats to Reagan’s rallies to Clinton’s town halls, Obama’s encounter in Maron’s garage gave those who downloaded the conversation—close to 3 million by the end of that summer—a front-row seat to the newest and, in many ways, best approach to understanding a president’s vision for the country he leads. All you had to do was listen.
In sixty minutes of back-and-forth, Maron and Obama covered his frustrations over gun control, his vision for addressing poverty, his ideas about combating terrorism, his skirmishes with Congress and, in the wake of Charleston, the nation’s ongoing struggle with racism. It was here that Obama made “news,” though to reduce the visit to Maron’s garage to the president using the “N-word” was to miss how WTF transcended staged events, speeches and news reports emanating from the White House.
“Racism,” Obama said about halfway through the podcast, “we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”15 That was interesting, but it only occupied one minute of an “illuminating,” to use William F. Buckley’s word, hourlong journey that Maron and Obama took together when the microphones were turned on and the cameras remained off.
The visit to Highland Park, enabled by the Secret Service shutting down a residential block in Los Angeles and Maron banishing his litter of cats that usually comprise his live audience to a remote room in his house, went down as Dan Pfeiffer hinted it might, with the White House “breaking convention” to connect with a new audience in new ways. Everything about how the booking went down was out of the ordinary. The communications office reached out to Maron, not through high-level channels, but through a blind inquiry via his website.
On a follow-on podcast recorded a few hours after Obama left the garage, Maron and producer Brendan McDonald detailed the advance work required to allow the encounter to happen. They spoke of counter-snipers on a neighbor’s roof, the bomb sweep of Maron’s house and the tent erected in his driveway to shroud the president’s limo. They didn’t mention the other standard items of the advance checklist, including the secure phone drop for emergency communications with the Situation Room, the counter-assault team on standby to win a firefight should an ambush occur, or the planned evacuation route to the nearest ER if the president took ill, or worse. Even for an event in a one-car garage, moving the president anywhere out of the White House requires that level of planning.
McDonald thought the web inquiry was a fake when it arrived more than a year before the presidential visit actually took place. “It was a vague thing,” McDonald said of the cryptic outreach from the White House, noting that no politician had appeared on the program in its prior 612 episodes. Obama’s people were intrigued by the prospect of doing WTF, and the dialogue with McDonald began. “We would have any guest on,” McDonald said, “as long as they can do the type of interview that we do, which is talk about life and talk about other things and not have a specific promotional agenda.”16
Intent on doing whatever it took to make the interview happen, Maron offered to travel to Washington, cancel a vacation or postpone his stand-up tour to accommodate the president. He thought an Oval Office interview would be cool, but as McDonald reminded him, that option was never on the table. “It is my estimation,” McDonald said, “based on how they work, that they need, whatever they’re doing—promotionally or publicity-wise, media-wise—to be in the context, in the idiom, of that thing.”17
McDonald was right. A conversation in the Oval Office, with two mics instead of a pen and paper, would differ only on the margins from lengthy sit-downs with long-form writers like Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair, David Remnick for the New Yorker or Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic. Those had been done with good effect, the subscribers of the three journals getting their behind-the-scenes sense of the president through the probing writer’s prism. It was time to do something different, to reach a new audience, and a trip to Los Angeles was required to keep it authentic. “It would not have probably looked good,” McDonald guessed, “for them to grant a one-hour interview in the East Room or the Oval Office to you, some non-credentialed guy, comedian, non-journalist, when they have a press corps that doesn’t get that kind of access.”
“That’s insane,” Maron said, still disbelieving what had just happened to him.18
Seven years into his presidency, Obama was finally becoming adept at escaping, however fleetingly, “the bubble” that had become his life. As he told Bear Grylls in 2015 over barbecued bear-gnawed salmon during an episode of the outdoorsman’s NBC reality show Running Wild, which was shot in cinema verite style on an Alaskan glacier, “I was telling your producers that the bubble is so tight. It’s the toughest thing about being president. So every once in a while I’ll go off script, and everybody gets very nervous,” he said with a chuckle.
After the millions of miles traveled, from Springfield, Illinois, in January 2007 to over fifty countries by 2016; after all of the exhaustively planned trips, laboriously written speeches and carefully orchestrated photo ops; after all of the White House–produced video content and comedy-show appearances doubling as news conferences, Barack Obama showed his constituents something new simply by visiting a garage in Highland Park. Later in 2015, he would do it again in conversation with Bill Simmons for Sports Illustrated, with Grylls in Alaska and with Jerry Seinfeld on the South Lawn of the White House, offering compelling evidence that lame ducks could still fly (or at least take a flyer).
By appearing on WTF, allowing his host to take him on a journey through his life and answering Maron’s questions genuinely, even using “the N word” when it felt natural, Obama became something that often eluded him during his era of the Age of Optics. In an hour of unadulterated conversation, he was, in his own unique way, being presidential.