Power Forward : My Presidential Education (9781476763361)

by Love, Reggie

  It was 6 P.M., and we were on our way to the last campaign stop of the day. I called Eric Lesser, who was then doing advance in New Hampshire.

  “Eric, I need my suitcase,” I whispered into the phone as I exited the Suburban and waddled to the town hall event, one hand grasping what was left of my pants together behind me.

  Eric said he’d do his best, but he was busy and I was busy as well, and what that ended up meaning was that I attended the town hall with my butt hanging out.

  This little incident was fodder for jokes until the end of the New Hampshire primary, especially with the senator, who thought it was hilarious. Accidents and gaffes of this nature were no stranger to me throughout my five-year marathon with him.

  Another such blunder occurred after the election, during the transition period. We were flying to Ohio to visit a factory, and then we were going to Philadelphia to meet Vice President Biden. It was piercingly cold outside.

  When you begin a campaign, you usually start without a plane. You are on a United flight out of Concourse A at Reagan National Airport, with peanuts and pretzels if you are lucky. As the campaign gathers steam and funds, and the demands on the candidate’s time increase, you graduate to cramped charter planes. Then you get Secret Service and you need more room and one flight attendant. Then the campaign needs a press pool and you move to a 757 or 747, which has an entire team of flight attendants. Some crew members were with us for months at a time, and we became close friends. Tracy Nuzzo must have traveled with us for almost six consecutive months during the primaries, and then Aiyana Knowles and her team carried the load through the last several months of the general election. I was probably the only person who really had a vested interest in the crew, as they were integral to my coordinating hundreds of in-flight meals, magazines, and newspapers—not to mention convincing the pilots to radio mid-flight to find out the score of the Bulls and Bears game or the NCAA Tournament upsets.

  During the presidential transition, there was a new plane assigned and a whole new crew, which was a bummer, because I loved the familiarity of the old gang. It felt relaxing having folks on board who knew the team and knew the drill—whether we were nappers or nervous fliers or wanted extra lemon in our water, or whatever.

  And so we boarded the plane with the new set of flight attendants, who were working really hard to make a good first impression. Soon enough, they started coming down the aisles, handing out all this food and drink, newspapers, blankets. I explained I didn’t want anything, thank you very much. But they persisted. I repeated, “Really, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Between you and me, I had a thing about eating on planes. I was always afraid I was going to get food poisoning and become violently ill while on some cross-country flight, and for me it just wasn’t worth the risk. I had a couple of colleagues who spent most of a cross-country and then an overseas trip inside a miniscule toilet stall. So, unless I was starving, I never ate on a plane, and if I did eat, I always went with the safe options—bread, cereal, rice, chicken. This meant no fish, no curries, nothing risky.

  Still, the flight attendants kept pushing their meals and snacks on me. I kept turning them down, and I felt like I was coming off as a jerk. They didn’t know me the way the old crew did, or my no-meals-on-flights philosophy. Meanwhile, everyone else on board was happily accepting this and that and otherwise having a grand old chow-down time.

  “They think you don’t like them,” Marvin said in between bites of his lunch.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I answered, sighing.

  He chided me. “Just take something to be polite.”

  By now it was the dessert course. One of the new attendants stopped by my seat and gave me the rundown.

  “We have cheesecake, cookies, fresh fruit, and we have these artisanal popsi—”

  “I’m okay,” I interrupted her.

  Marvin chimed in to the flight attendant, “Tough crowd today,” referring to me and my disinterest in the items being served. “Sometimes Reg is just cranky.”

  “Fine.” I caved. “I’ll have a cherry popsicle.”

  I quickly opened up the wrapper and popped the frozen dessert in my mouth, simultaneously saying, “Mmmm, it’s great, thank you so much,” and making a big show of the popsicle being the tastiest treat I’d ever had in my life—and before the attendant could even roll her cart away, the entire thing had adhered itself to my face and lips.

  You know that idiot kid who sticks his tongue on the flag pole outside in the middle of winter? That was me, only I was on a plane with our team, a press pool, and the president-elect, and let’s not forget, we were on our way to the first public event outside of Chicago since Election Day.

  “Excuse me,” I tried to say through paralyzed lips. “I, I can’t get this thing off me.”

  “Pardon?” the attendant asked, bending down to see. “Oh my God!” she shrieked. “You’re bleeding!”

  The popsicle, and my attempts to pry it free, had ripped patches of skin from my face. So now I was sitting there with a frozen dessert fused to my head and blood beginning to drip down my shirt.

  The White House doctor and nurse were summoned—they were, lucky for me, on the flight—and went to work trying to pop off the popsicle. In the meantime, the rest of the gang, the press pool, the new staff—the president-elect included—were all laughing so hard they nearly wet their collective pants as Dr. Jeff Kuhlman and nurse Shelly Carr started a timely tradition of stitching, stapling, and saving me from myself.

  “Reggie,” Obama asked incredulously, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “I didn’t even want the thing!” I sputtered to Obama, while glaring at Marvin.

  Obama just looked at me like, “Who eats a popsicle in the middle of winter?”

  In the end, it took twenty minutes to remove the popsicle. The doctor tried hot water, glycerin, a whole slew of tactics. I thought they were going to try to pee on it. When it finally loosened its death grip on my skin, I looked like I’d seen the rough end of twelve rounds.

  It should be noted that no one else ate a popsicle. And since then, neither have I. Not that it matters. Till this day I still haven’t been able to live that moment down.

  The old me would have been fatally embarrassed. Sure, it was mortifying—no doubt. But I came to see that being laughed at in the trenches is a part of the process. My humiliations made for good stories. So did everyone else’s. Those human moments reminded us that we weren’t just machines doing a job, that we were real people behind the professional façade.

  Those moments broke down the walls. Not to mention brought down the house.

  25

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  A BUSINESS, MAN

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  The first year I worked in the White House, I was totally lost. I only understood a fraction of what was being talked about in the rooms where I stood. I was always on my BlackBerry, looking stuff up, trying to educate myself. What was H1N1? Why were the Somali pirates so effective? Who was Lech Walesa?

  It would have been simpler to just tune out, but I was curious. And it was oddly helpful to know what I didn’t know. I figured out that just when I wanted to stop listening was exactly the time when I shouldn’t. I was turning myself into a human search engine.

  Another part of my job was managing expectations. I had to give the impression that I was poised and in control, even though there were times when I was neither. So when the team ran late, or notes went missing, or appointments were overbooked, I was first on the line of defense, managing not just POTUS’s expectations, but the expectations of everyone who wanted to intersect with him.

  Ironically, often the best way to do this was to admit I didn’t have all the answers. If I said, “That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer yet,” I could diffuse the situation. It put me in the same boat as the person with the anxiety. It was leveling. And admitting what I didn’t know (but intended to find out) was much more effe
ctive than strutting around and throwing my ego and position in another person’s face. I learned that joining people was better than beating them every time.

  Holidays and special occasions were my worst nightmare. The asks and expectations became a flood. The administration has to acknowledge everything, with the President as either the host or the guest of honor. Every year, he attends something like thirty Christmas parties, Seders, and countless balls and dinners.

  My whole stint at the Oval, I got nervous at every event. I couldn’t help myself. It brought me back to my time at Duke, when Coach K drilled into us that each player represented the school, and each of us consequently had a target on our back for those that wanted to see Duke and the team stumble. It takes an average of six weeks to prepare for a state dinner, and for the first, we wanted it to be executed flawlessly. Sadly, this was not the case.

  When POTUS took office, his first state dinner was for the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. As is well documented, Bravo TV reality vultures and fame-seekers Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashed the event, which led to a lot of bad press. The pair passed through security checkpoints and were able to enter the White House to meet the President and Prime Minister Singh as uninvited guests. The breach led to massive security investigations and legal inquiries for all parties, as well as a lot of heated questioning in the social office about how this could have happened. Even though the Salahis were harmless narcissists looking for their fifteen minutes of notoriety, the breach of protocol and security was viewed as threatening—and also as a PR black eye for the new administration.

  For their part, the Salahis maintained on national television that they had in fact been invited and were not “crashers.” They went so far as to threaten to sue. Their continued press coverage prolonged the headaches. Even the newspapers in India weighed in and wagged their fingers at our perceived incompetence. Finally, after weeks of microscopic scrutiny and intense examination, White House principal deputy counsel Daniel J. Meltzer stated in a letter to the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security on December 23, 2009, “We have found no evidence the Salahis were included on any White House access list or guest list. The Salahis were not on the lists for the State Dinner, the Arrival Ceremony, or any other event scheduled for November 24. Indeed there is no record of the Salahis in the White House visitor access system since the beginning of the Obama Administration. Moreover, we have found no evidence that the Salahis called the White House and asked about the proper dress code for the State Dinner.”

  Needless to say, security was vise-tight from then on out.

  Because of Obama’s unique persona, and his relatively young age, celebrity intersected at an unprecedented level with his candidacy and election. He was viewed as “cool.” Stars wanted to be adjacent to that coolness. One night in Vegas we ordered chips and beers for a card game in the room to celebrate Marvin’s birthday. The candidate was exhausted but trying to rally, when his phone rang. It was Charles Barkley saying, “Hey man, I’m in town for Bill Russell’s fantasy camp. Let’s hang out!” Obama turned to the group of us and said, “Let’s just take tomorrow off and go to the Cheetah Club.”

  He was, of course, joking. I said, “I’m taking a rain check on that the minute you are ex-President.”

  But that’s how it went with Obama: people were drawn to him. On the campaign, I met more famous people than I even knew existed. Some were genuine supporters; others just wanted the association. Hip-hop royalty Jay Z and Beyoncé fell decidedly into the first category. They were on Team Obama from the start, and I remember the day the pair met the future president for the first time.

  The day was September 27, 2007, also known as “the most exhilarating time of my non-sporting life.” The scene was a corner table at the thirty-fifth-floor lobby restaurant of New York City’s swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel. In attendance were Obama, Jay Z, Beyoncé Knowles, and me. I’d grown up experiencing the world through Jay’s songs and stories. When the senator realized I was one of the few people on staff who actually knew a lot about Jay Z, he said, “Just give me the seven best songs,” profoundly ignorant of the scale of the task he had just given me. Only seven? I ended up selecting:

  “Can’t Knock the Hustle”—Reasonable Doubt

  “Some People Hate”—Blueprint 2

  “Renegade”—The Blueprint

  “Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise)”—The Blueprint

  “My 1st Song”—The Black Album

  “Girls, Girls, Girls, pt. 2”—The Blueprint

  “Crazy in Love”—Dangerously in Love (Beyoncé featuring Jay Z)

  Obama gave them a thorough listening his next day at the gym, and the playlist went over well enough that he asked for more and, later, for a different artist, for Lil Wayne. (He always gave me credit for the introduction to Jay’s music, often telling the press his bodyman turned him on to Hova.)

  When we met up in the Mandarin Oriental, Beyoncé was just coming off tour. Obama was discussing how much dancing she did at her concerts, having taken his daughters to a show in Chicago. Beyoncé admitted her feet were killing her.

  Obama joked, “You have to have a masseuse to massage your feet. That must be in the budget for the tour production.”

  And Jay said, “Yeah, so long as it isn’t a man.”

  I quipped, “You’ve seen Pulp Fiction. You never let another man massage your woman’s feet,” after which Jay burst out laughing.

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  After that meeting, Jay Z was actively involved in the campaign, helping to send voters to polling stations, performing for free at voter-drive concerts, and generally spreading the word and communicating the value of Obama’s election to his millions of fans.

  The senator saw Jay as a good guy, smart and hardworking, who he believed would “help shape attitudes in a real positive way.” Which is exactly what came to pass in May 2012, when Jay announced his approval of the President’s support of marriage equality.

  Just as I clued Obama in to facets of youth culture, he did the same for me with cultural history. I remember I was with the senator when Paul Newman passed away. He read the news in the paper and said what a shame it was.

  My response: “The salad dressing guy?”

  The candidate looked at me with something like pity and said, “Cool Hand Luke? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Hud? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Anything?”

  I needed to do my due diligence, a checklist that extended well past Mr. Newman. Our conversations often became mini-research assignments I gave myself: listen to Elvis Costello; watch M*A*S*H; read about JFK, Jimmy Carter. It was a productive exchange. I taught Obama about cloud computing, Dropbox, and his iPad. (The first few times he used it he thought it was broken; I had to explain that the device was in airplane mode.) He enlightened me about Burma, the Ohio Players, and Mormonism.

  Our dynamic was a microcosm of what was happening in my larger life. Now that I was out of North Carolina and not playing on a sports team, I spent all day, every day, with people I would never have hung out with otherwise. The changeover taught me that black, white, male, female, Ivy League, community college, young, old, Republican, Democrat, line cook, President—fundamentally, we’re all the same and we all have something to teach each other, even if it’s only that we have more in common than we’re often willing to acknowledge. We all sometimes find ourselves in crap relationships. We all have issues with our parents. We all regret our haircuts in high school.

  It sounds basic, but when you surround yourself only with people who share your background and interests, you miss out on feeling a part of the larger social fabric. And that ends up limiting you.

  If I’d only ever identified myself as a basketball player and selected a social circle that reflected exclusively that same message, I would have not only been wrong, I would have missed out on the adventure of several lifetimes. I am an athlete. But I am also a stellar organizer, a public speaker, an environmentalist, a world traveler, a decent cook, a sys
tems analyst, a businessman, and in a few years I hope, a business, man. Putting myself in unfamiliar circles, and necessarily exposing myself to criticism and laughs, showed me time and again that there was more to me than even I knew.

  This realization came into full bloom on my twenty-seventh birthday, for which I threw a party in a local dive bar. I wanted to invite all my closest friends, past and present, to come to D.C. The election six months earlier still carried allure with my friends, and many of them desperately wanted a chance to be a part of history being made, by working in a visit to the White House, maybe take pictures in the Oval.

  So I invited grade school buddies, old teammates, family members, college roommates, everyone I had ever worked with on the campaign. Problem was, those guests told other people, and by eight-forty-five the party had swelled from twenty attendees to almost a thousand people. It was a legitimate blowout. Duhon bartended. We all danced to my iPod. The shindig made the Washington Post.

  More vitally to me, the party allowed me to show my appreciation for all the individuals who had helped shape me into the man I was becoming. The President did the same on his own birthdays.

  On his forty-ninth, we organized the now legendary basketball games with four teams including LeBron James, Alonzo Mourning, Shane Battier, Chris Paul, Derrick Rose, and Maya Moore. For his gift, he wanted a highly competitive game. He got one. Obama’s team lost.

  The parties were celebrations in every sense. A way to honor where we’d been, and a light to illuminate where we were going. Both Obama and I wanted to do something nice for the people we loved; to remind ourselves where we’d come from, and how short this journey called life actually is, and to acknowledge—and pay back—the debts we accumulate along the way.

  26

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