Power Forward : My Presidential Education (9781476763361)

by Love, Reggie

  Although he is undeniably a self-possessed, detail-oriented man, the senator did not necessarily start his political odyssey worrying too much about his attire. He could even be, at times, sartorially challenged. Axelrod and Plouffe had to wean him off wearing his BlackBerry on his belt like a beeper. He had a fondness for donning the same pair of dress shoes for every event.

  There was this one particular suit folks on the staff hated. It was the suit without any love, except from the candidate. Until the day it sort of got “left behind” in New Hampshire.

  We were at a house event, and the senator was engaging the focused crowd as he always did, passions running high. The room grew warm, so he removed his suit jacket, whereupon the host of the event hung it in her coat closet. Where it stayed. For a couple of days.

  Of course the candidate noticed immediately that the jacket was MIA. But no one knew where it had gone. Or at least they weren’t saying they did. There was a lot of: “Where’s the jacket?” “I think Marvin must have taken it.” “I thought you had the jacket.” “Do you have the jacket?” It was like an SNL “Really!?!” skit. We were all hoping the jacket would never materialize, no one more than Robert Gibbs, who had teased the candidate about evolving his look.

  By the time the jacket was reunited with its pants, I think the senator had gotten the message about the suit.

  Unlike other campaigns, our candidate didn’t have a wardrobe consultant or stylist. More often than not, that job fell to me. He would dress, and then ask my opinion. I think this was less because he valued my take on fashion and more because I was the only person around. There was really no one else to ask.

  “Looking sharp,” I’d say, or, “Your tie’s a little off.” And if this was ahead of a debate or a major speech, we’d fist bump before he hit the stage.

  I also filled the role of traveling valet. During the March primaries we made a stop at Penn State, where the candidate spoke in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand potential voters and a few cows. Before the candidate went to the rally site for the speech, the plan was to stop and visit the agriculture facilities on campus (fancy way of saying let’s go visit a farm). We were in Central Pennsylvania and it would have been a shame to come all that way and not visit a dairy farm or two. We were advised to be prepared, and so I had been put in charge of procuring boots for the candidate.

  The challenge was that the stop had been added to the schedule after the Sunday night stop in Chicago—where the candidate would replenish and refresh his wardrobe. Which meant when he packed for the week, no one had factored in pasture-appropriate footwear. As usual, the senator had an idea of how he wanted to look for the event, so as we headed into town, I phoned several shops, ordering a bunch of pairs in different sizes, 11, 11.5, trying to find the perfect boot with the perfect fit and look. Anytime the wardrobe changed from the typical slacks or suits with the black Kenneth Coles, he and the senior staff would quickly say, “We don’t need any Dukakis moments,” referring to the time presidential candidate Michael Dukakis wore an oddly sized soldier’s helmet, resulting in a photograph that was used to ridicule him as soft on defense.

  Shoes were always the biggest challenge for the senator. Shoes and ties, but mostly shoes. The man was particular about his feet. He wouldn’t just throw on any old pair of mukluks. They had to look a certain way, feel a certain way. Anytime he couldn’t wear his favored dress flats, it was an issue. (In certain photographs you can see that those shoes practically have holes in the soles from all the campaigning he did in them.) Throughout the campaign, I was always trying to scratch and scrounge to procure the ideal footwear. I’d send screenshots to the advance teams and say, “Find these!” Also, “Buy wool socks!” When I finally did find a pair of boots for Penn State that he loved—light brown Timberland steel-toes—I kept them on the plane for the duration of the campaign, just in case any surprise farm visits managed to find their way onto the schedule.

  In the case of both myself and the senator, the clothes didn’t necessarily make the man, but they did make a vital and intractable impression. We both had to learn how to dress the part. Because the impression we made could mean the difference between a yes or a no vote. Between respect and dismissal.

  The same is true in any job.

  You may not be representing your country, but you are representing your brand, your parents, your people. So shave. Shine your shoes. Iron your suit. Clean your face. You don’t have to be Drake courtside with the lint roller, but by all means, control what can be controlled, so when things go awry, you at least look like you have it together. Good manners and self-respect will take you places money never can.

  12

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  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME (COURT)

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  In January of 2004, at the age of twenty-one, I took remote classes and an independent study so that I could leave Duke for the winter/spring semester and train with Tom Shaw in New Orleans in preparation for my NFL Pro Day. I decided I needed to find out once and for all if I could ever have a serious football career, and I committed those months to getting into draft-day shape.

  I booked a one-way flight to Louisiana alone. I packed only a few changes of clothes. When I landed, I went straight to Walmart, where I bought a cheap bike that I could use to get around. This wasn’t because I loved cycling so much. I just didn’t have the funds to buy, insure, and fuel a car, period. Most of what money I had was going toward room, board, and training. Mine was to be a focused, frugal existence. It would also be the first time I lived by myself in a city where I only knew one other person.

  I trained four hours a day—two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. The rest of my time was my own. The freedom was eye-opening. When you are a college-level athlete, your day is not only full, but also monitored. Between meals, meetings, classes, and workouts, virtually every hour of my time at Duke had been structured. In New Orleans, though, I was the master of my schedule.

  I did some schoolwork. I walked the city. I explored every inch of the Metairie suburb of New Orleans. I would bike to the Esplanade Mall and go to the movies alone in the afternoon. I taught myself to cook. Chicken and potatoes, mostly. I ate crawfish. I watched Mardi Gras parades. I soaked up the live music, dancing alone.

  I still had my apartment in Durham. My roommates would phone and say I was missing this great night or a blowout party. I’d say I wished I was there too. But I really didn’t. I kind of enjoyed being away. It taught me I could do things on my own. It made me sit with myself and think. Who did I want to be? What did I want to do? What really made me happy and fulfilled? What happens if and when you make it? What happens if you don’t? Questions I had never been forced to consider before, as I was always on to the next practice or game.

  In New Orleans, I experienced life at a different pace. I had gone to test my affection and ability for a life in the NFL, but what I uncovered was far deeper than that. I discovered myself.

  Then, toward the end of my tenure at the combine training clinic, my grandmother Elise passed away from complications due to Alzheimer’s. My mother called to give me the news. She was sobbing.

  I had spent every summer of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. I’d always remembered it as the most carefree time of my youth. My grandmother loved her soaps. She worshipped the Atlanta Braves. She could cook anything. Okra soup. Pistachio cakes. Gumbo.

  She and her husband, John Wesley Jackson, began their married life in New Jersey, and raised my mother and her two brothers in Chicago. My grandfather loved my grandmother, but he also loved the bottle, and when he drank he became abusive. Soon enough Elise—“Leasee” to those beneath the Mason-Dixon Line—got fed up and decided making it on her own was less terrifying than dealing with her unpredictable spouse. She left her husband behind and moved south to be a single parent in Mount Pleasant.

  She would go on to become the first A
frican-American woman ever to work for the Social Security Office in Charleston. My grandmother was a tough, fearless advocate for African-Americans and for women, and she reared my mother to be the same. Elise believed in doing everything for herself. She saw dependence as a trap. She cut her own grass. She cooked all her meals from scratch. There was nothing she couldn’t do, and she was good at everything. She was also kind and loving, leaving an open door to anyone. To me, she was Superwoman. Superwoman who could bake a pound cake that tasted like heaven. The bar she set was high.

  I remember when I was a child, during one of my summers with her, she had this fake plant on her dining room table, and one afternoon I was playing with matches and the decoration caught on fire faster than hair dipped in kerosene. My grandmother didn’t panic. She just rushed in, like, “I got this,” extinguished the fire, then set her sights on me. All these years, she’d kept the table, burn mark and all. She simply bought another plant to cover it up and went on with her life.

  My grandmother was eighty-three years old when she passed away. I rented a car and drove eleven hours from New Orleans to Mount Pleasant for the funeral. As I watched my mother break down, I too started to weep.

  The trip forced me to consider my roots, the legacy I was inheriting. I came from a long line of strength. Family members who had sacrificed so much more than I ever would. How could I ever repay that debt?

  I wondered too, would I be ready when my own parents passed away? Can you ever be ready?

  My father, Richard, was one of nine children. There were more Love kids in his hometown of Valentine, Virginia, than there were traffic lights. My dad played high school basketball and wanted to play college, but that dream was out of reach. My grandparents didn’t have the money or the time to travel. They were too busy working to provide for their family.

  My father met my mother, Lynette, on the University of North Carolina Central campus. He spotted her and Leasee trying to get a massive trunk up to the fifth floor of the freshman dorm (no elevators) and offered to help them carry the load. Sparks flew. They were married before graduation.

  My mother was the first in her family to attend college. My father was only the second in his, after his older sister. The opportunity was hard-won on both counts, and because of that, both of my parents recognized the value of an education and making the most of their time at school. They had witnessed what their family had done without so they could attend a university, something that was still very rare for African-Americans in those days. They expected the same conscientiousness and pride of place from me.

  I can still hear my dad drumming in my ear, “Stand up straight. Look people in the eye. Speak up.” My father was never a loud guy, but he had a strong physical presence. I remember when I was in grade school, when he left for work before sunrise, he would leave a belt on the doorknob of my bedroom as a reminder of what was waiting for me if I misbehaved at school.

  Like me, my dad was a competitor. There wasn’t much he loved more than winning. Basketball, cards, Jeopardy, pool, mowing the lawn. Whatever it was, he wanted to do it best. Including beating me in hoops.

  We’d slug it out on our small, slanted driveway nestled in the rural neighborhood of Autumn Wood. Hot or cold, rain or shine, we played. Every bricked shot, the ball would roll down the hill into a creek, and I would gladly chase after it, so elated to be shooting baskets with my dad. It was without question a crappy court compared to Cameron Indoor Stadium or the other college and professional arenas I had a chance to play in, but it is also the court I miss the most.

  There was no greater victory than beating my dad at home in a game of H-O-R-S-E. And just like the President, my father was fluent in trash talk. It didn’t matter if it was a blowout or he won by one point; if he defeated you, he’d slyly let you and everyone in the house know about it, usually over the kitchen table or on the car ride to church. The message was always the same: I’m not that old yet. He would never let you forget it when he beat you at anything. No matter how old my father was, he kept competing, he never quit.

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  After my grandmother’s service, there were still a couple of weeks left on combine training. But I decided not to return to the Big Easy. I stayed in North Carolina with my mom and dad.

  I had been trained enough. I was ready to be home.

  13

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  AT LEAST IT’S NOT FRIED WALLEYE

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  A big part of being a bodyman was making sure the candidate was fed. A hungry candidate (or President) was an underperforming one. During my time as personal aide on the campaign, I was responsible for planning a minimum of two meals a day, six days a week, in ten to twelve different cities. The challenge for any bodyman is finding the desired food at crazy hours, in far-flung locations, while the whole team is on the move.

  Usually, I would start by emailing or calling someone on the ground. What was available? Where were the restaurants located? Were they open? How far were they from the event? Would the food be warm by the time the candidate was ready to eat? Then I’d select items off the menus. Often, I’d have to guess what the sure-to-be-starving candidate wanted to eat. That part was easy. Grilled fish. Grilled chicken. As healthy as he could get on the road. He liked ranch dressing or vinaigrette. He liked sandwiches and fruit (Gala apples)—anything you could eat in a moving car or cramped airplane seat. If it dripped, forget it. If it started cold, all the better, because it was probably going to end up that way anyhow.

  For the most part, the senator was relaxed about his meals. But there were days when he specifically wanted X. And Lord help me if he’d made his mind up about what he wanted and I delivered the wrong thing. Or if it came with mayo. Or was undercooked. Or soggy. If there was one thing you didn’t want to watch, it was the time-pressed candidate scraping a gooey, loathed condiment off the only food he was going to eat for the next seven hours.

  That happened a lot.

  Sometimes he’d mutter, “This was the thirty minutes I had to myself, and now I can’t even enjoy my meal.”

  All I could do was apologize. “I should have gotten this right.” I understood. It wasn’t about the food so much as that mealtime was his only reprieve from the stress of the day. He needed to refuel, physically and mentally. Especially during the primaries.

  The strategy in Iowa was ninety counties in eighty-nine days. In Iowa, the caucus-goers have ideas. They feel their power, and they wield it like a Game of Thrones sword.

  My memories of Iowa begin very fondly. I’d been there once before, in 1996, when I was fourteen and my AAU team, the Charlotte Royals, played in the 15 and Under National tournament at Drake University in Des Moines. I was there for a week, and at the time, it felt like a Hawaiian vacation. We ate a bunch of meals at the Old Country Buffet; we slept at the Embassy Suites. They had free breakfast! And HBO! And there was a casino nearby that my dad would go to after the games.

  And then I went back for the primaries.

  More than in any other state, the voters in Iowa have come to expect to be engaged (New Hampshire voters run a pretty close second). During the election season, they wanted to meet the candidate not once, but five times. They wanted him to come wash their car. They wanted him to phone their daughter and sing “Happy Birthday.” They’d say, “Stop by for a barbecue and then maybe I’ll give you my support.” And then sometimes they wouldn’t.

  Obama gamely did almost everything the caucus-goers requested. For me, it was sometimes hard to watch. I appreciated that they had a very important role as the gatekeepers to American elections. But to my mind, it was always a bit weird that this selection happened in a state with an African-American population of around 2.9 percent. There were days on the campaign in Iowa when I used to joke with Marvin that I should stay in the car so I didn’t cost us votes.

  Don’t get me wrong, the people in Iowa were nice. And the staff that we had on the ground there pulled together an ama
zing team. Paul Tewes, the state director, and Emily Parcels, the political director, assembled a motivated lineup of young people, mostly imports who came from all over the world to be field organizers for a cause and a movement.

  They would knock on every door. “Are you registered to caucus? Who are you caucusing for? Do you know where you’re going? Well, you should caucus for Obama.” They were single-minded, flooding the neighborhoods, getting the word out.

  We on the traveling team canvassed by plane. If we could land a plane someplace, we did. Mason City, Sioux City, Omaha (which is really Council Bluffs), Des Moines, Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque. We’d fly in, then get into a car and drive, stopping in every hamlet for events along the way—a town hall or maybe a sit-down meal. Then we’d get back on the road, drive another hour, and do another town hall, eat another meal. We’d do as many events in twenty-four hours as we could pack in, then find a Super 8 or a Merrick Inn and bunk with the entire staff until the next morning; then rise, rinse, and repeat.

  The pace was inhumane. But it was what we needed to do to have any chance of getting a W. Along with a schedule that was bursting at the seams, there were the unique Iowa concessions. One in particular is seared into my mind like a cattle brand: the Maid-Rite Sandwich Shop.

  As I mentioned, the candidate was particular about what he ate.

  For the uninitiated, the Maid-Rite Sandwich Shop was famous in most rural parts of Iowa for its loose meat sandwich, a heap of coarsely boiled ground beef bigger than your average Chihuahua that is served spilling out of a platter-sized, fluffy white bun. With all due respect to the loose meat chefs, the sandwich is not what one would call a photogenic plate of food. I didn’t order one myself, and I’ll eat chicken wings and pork rinds from a gas station. The candidate, however, was aware that people in Iowa loved their loose meat sandwiches, and so down it went.