In a couple of years, you’ll be planning a young leaders’ roundtable for the president during a visit to Davenport, Iowa. You’re going to remember that energetic kid named Romen Borsellino, who put together Senator Obama’s first-ever high school surrogate event during the campaign. You’ll want to tap him to help with this meeting.
So, you’ll send Romen’s name and vitals to Liz for vetting, and she will email you a couple of days later:
From: Liz Jarvis-Shean
To: Kalpen Modi
Subject: Romen Borsellino
In the middle of vetting for your Davenport event. Can you please have Romen Borsellino delete the tweet pasted below?
You’ll stare dumbfounded at your computer screen, trying to come up with the words to reply, when the phone at your desk will ring. It’s going to be Liz, and besides the cum thesis problem, she’ll bring up something Romen has on his Facebook wall that needs to be taken down too. She’ll email it to you:
When she sends you this photo, you’re going to laugh your face off. Then you’ll send Romen a cryptic message, asking if he can talk “about something important.” You’ll catch him on a drive from Des Moines to Davenport, and he’ll be nervous, wondering what you’re calling about. My advice? Play this up. Do not let on that you think any of this is funny. Make him sweat a little. For example:
ME: I just got part of your vetting report back. There are a few problems. I need you to take down a Facebook photo… the one with the dildo.
Silence
ME: Hello?
ROMEN: Yeah.
ME: You have to take down the photo you have on your Facebook wall. The one with the dildo.
Silence
ME: Can you hear me? On your Facebook page, there’s a photo of you with a giant dil—
ROMEN: —Yeah. Will do.
ME: There’s also a tweet. About somebody getting cum on his thesis.
ROMEN: Oh, God… just so you know, that means cum laude. My friend Nihal got cum laude on his thesis. It was a congratulatory tweet.
（He’s trying to negotiate with us?!）
ROMEN: So, can I leave that one up?
ME: If a journalist asks, can you and Nihal prove that he got cum laude on his thesis, and that it happened right before you posted that tweet?
ROMEN: Yes.
ME: Okay, so I guess you can leave that one up.2
Keep things professional. Try not to laugh. Politely thank him and end the call. Having successfully “cleaned up his digital footprint,”3 Romen will be cleared to attend the meeting. It’ll be a few more years before you find out that he had the dildo in his dorm because he was a student health educator who used it to teach students how to properly apply a condom. Or so he claims.
Anyway, congratulations. With Liz’s team taking the lead, you’ve successfully avoided a Fox News headline like MUSLIM “PRESIDENT” HUSSEIN-OBAMA MEETS WITH DILDO-MANUFACTURING, CUM-TWEETING TERRORIST.
Don’t let them make your boss the butt of a dildo joke. See what I did there? Future you has still got it.
* * *
Working in DC can be frustrating sometimes, even with my tips. And it can almost make you sympathetic to people who malign the government, who treat it as a big, bad, faraway entity that taxes them too much, does too little, and should get out of the way.
But you have a choice: You can dwell on the negative, letting it get to you until there’s nothing left of your soul. Or you can focus instead on the vast majority of people who entered public service—career staff and political appointees alike—because they （like you） are proud of our country and want to help it succeed. You are a patriotic American who took a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Choose the latter. Keep your head down and do good work. Don’t eat the vending machine sandwiches if you can avoid them.
Remember that it’s the non-sexy-sounding, non-headline-making work on outreach around environmental rules, bureaucracy that impacts human rights issues, or improving people’s ability to access education and health care where government can shine. That’s the stuff that happens when you believe in what you’re doing. You got this!
Kisses,
Kal
PS—If President Obama asks your advice on whether he should wear a blue or a tan suit to his August press briefing, for the love of God don’t say, “Tan seems kinda fun.”
1?It’s fine to use it here.
2?It’s still up.
3?A fancy, political way of saying “deleting dick pics.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN YOU DOWN WITH OPE?
The real power in the US government rests with the White House Office of Public Engagement （OPE）， where I worked. Okay, I acknowledge that maybe the president has a role to play in running the government. I get that he has the nuclear codes and yes, he is the final word on every bit of policy… Okay, fine, I’m agreeing with you, the president of the United States is an important job with huge responsibilities. I guess what I’m actually trying to say is that a lot of the day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts work of running the country is done by junior and midlevel aides in offices like mine.
Oh, before this book you’d never heard of the Office of Public Engagement? You’re not down with OPE? Well, you will be in a moment. OPE wasn’t as well known as the communications or press offices. We weren’t the social media, policy, or digital strategy teams, even though people often thought we did that work. We were the outreach team, the proverbial front door to the White House: a place that executed one of Obama’s central campaign themes—that every community has a voice and that every American should have a seat at the table. Nobody should fall through the cracks.
If you wanted your voice heard in a previous White House, you’d usually need to follow tradition and hire elite, well-paid lobbyists. If you didn’t have the money, you may not have reached the right places. To Obama, that was crazy,1 so he restructured the boring-sounding Office of Public Liaison and turned it into OPE, making it more accessible in the process.
At OPE, we proactively established direct relationships with community leaders and advocacy organizations. We invited them to the White House to listen to their concerns and build support for policy changes. Each OPE staffer was in charge of several issue-group and demographic-group portfolios: Jewish Americans, African Americans, Energy and Environment, Athletics and Fitness, Rural Americans, Irish Americans—you name it, someone was there to open that proverbial front door from the inside. The president would lean on us when it came to these groups, and the outside groups in turn leaned on us when it came to sharing their respective communities’ priorities with the president.
Need to know about Obama’s stance on LGBT issues? Call his LGBT point person, Brian Bond. Immigration or Latinx issues? Email my office mate Stephanie Valencia. Disability policy? Hit up Kareem Dale. Bringing Osama bin Laden to justice? Ask bin Laden himself… OH WAIT.
Some issues （like national security） affect everybody pretty much the same, while others disproportionately impact certain communities—like LGBT folks when it comes to workplace discrimination, or young Americans when it comes to student loans—so a multifaceted dialogue was important to have.
Of course, people don’t just care about issues related to their identities; they care about a wide range of things. In prior administrations, the traditional approach to politics often merely included specific communities when it came time to check some sort of box—“May is Asian American Heritage Month, let’s make sure there’s an Asian American event.” While that sort of thing is important in a country whose textbooks still don’t integrate the full range of American communities’ contributions, Obama wanted to make sure that Muslim Americans were at the table for conversations about the Affordable Care Act, Jewish Americans were at the table for meetings about clean energy, the LGBT community was at the table for sessions on student loans. You get the point. He wanted the intersectionality and patriotism of the campaign to be part of his White House and governance.