by Van Jones
For the first time, I fully realized the degree to which all our talk about “change” and “green jobs”—which had intrigued and inspired so many—was terrifying to some. Our guest feared that our vision of a clean energy future excluded him and his family.
Of course, President Obama had no intention of closing America’s coal mines. Renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydro electricity make up less than 2 percent of our nation’s energy portfolio today. In the U.S. Senate, Obama had represented Illinois, a big coal-burning state. The president was looking for better ways to burn coal; the administration had no plans or desire to eliminate it. He had dedicated billions of dollars in stimulus funds to the search for “clean coal” technology.
I didn’t know this mine owner’s particular circumstances, so I had to keep my comments general. But I tried to reassure him by telling him the simple truth. “America is going to be burning coal for a very long time,” I said. “Your family is helping other American families to keep their lights on, every day, all across this country. We aren’t going to turn the lights out on coal any time soon.”
The mine owner looked relieved. He offered me his hard, calloused hand, which I clasped. He looked me squarely in the eyes, and he gave my arm one strong pump. Then he was gone.
One of my co-workers overheard the exchange. She knew I was personally no fan of “clean coal.” She also knew I was heartsick about Big Coal blasting off mountaintops to get more black rock. I was outspoken on such issues.
But as White House officials, we were not there just to push our own agendas. When citizens arrive to petition their government for redress, a White House staffer has a duty to treat them all with equal respect. A staffer must never forget that the commander-in-chief is the president of every American, even those who oppose his policies. Most importantly, staffers are there to represent the president, not themselves.
Facing a spokesman for an industry that I had battled for years, I tried my best to live up to that high standard.
As our visitor left, my fellow staffer gave me a knowing smile.
“Welcome to the White House,” she said.
AS I SETTLED INTO THE NEW ROLE, I began to see more opportunities to make a lasting impact. “I have an idea,” I told my team. “In about eight years, the president will give his last speech. I want us to write that speech—right now.”
My colleagues shuffled a bit, uneasily. I knew what they were thinking. It was not our job to write speeches for the president. We were policy people, not political people. Besides, White House staffers can barely plan a month in advance. Few White House staffers lasted even four years, let alone eight. It made little sense for us to be talking about 2016. My subordinates exchanged glances, wondering who was going have the guts to give the rookie a reality check.
I smiled. I had gotten their attention.
“In his final speech, the president should be able to stand up and say four words—only.” I counted each word on my fingers. “Before. After. Thank you.”
I repeated the words. “That’s it. Four words. Everything we do, every day, should be an effort to set him up to give a speech that concise.”
One of my older co-workers started to get it, and she slowly started to nod. “You mean, he would be standing in front of a big screen or something? Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Huge screen. It’s showing some God-awful, ugly image from 2008, right? The president walks out onto stage in front of the screen, holding a clicker in his hand. He looks up at the screen and says, ‘Before.’ Hits click. ‘After.’ Bam—there is a new image. Same neighborhood. But now it looks ten times better. Then he does it again. Shows some kid in all kinds of trouble. Bam—now the kid is working at a green job, taking care of his family, maybe even launching a green company or something.”
Heads started nodding around the room. Someone offered, “Maybe he could show some degraded land that has been restored.”
“Exactly!” I said, feeling the team warming to the idea. “And he just goes on, showing remarkable improvement after remarkable improvement, over and over again. It is all right there, visible on the screen, on issue after issue. That’s the whole speech. Then at the end, he just says, ‘Thank you.’ And he walks off stage. Then boom! Standing ovation.”
An experienced agency hand warned, “Well, some of his successes may be hard to show with just a photograph. What if the screen could show a negative statistic, like how few solar panels we had up in the United States in 2008. Then he clicks it, and the number accelerates to some astronomical number.”
“Yeah, that could work,” I agreed. “But I do want for us to think of images and scenes that people could see, smell, and touch in the real world. Let’s figure out where we can help agencies and departments coordinate better, to produce and track their visible, tangible results.”
One team member pointed down at the reams of papers, reports, and proposals in front of him. “At the end of the day,” he said, “all of this stuff should speak for itself.”
I had high hopes. What if we helped multiple departments and agencies coordinate with the Appalachian Regional Commission to stimulate green jobs in distressed rural communities? What if we created a project to accelerate clean energy development on Native American land? What if we worked to create market demand in U.S. states for wind turbines manufactured in places like Michigan and Indiana? What if we focused multiple federal departments on the goal of creating a new market that could refit 100 million American homes so that they wasted less energy?
I was excited when the “Recovery Through Retrofit” plan and an exploration of green jobs in Appalachia gained early approvals. In the time that I worked there, few of my other ideas got beyond the earliest conceptual stages. But I was in the ideal position to explore different notions and begin developing them as recommendations for my superiors. If I had been a step lower in the hierarchy, I would not have had the authority to shape such highly creative, outside-the-box proposals. If I had been a step higher, I probably would not have had the time to do so given the crushing, daily burdens shouldered by the top guns in the White House. I was in the ideal spot, and I was beginning to find my groove.
I WAS PROUD OF WHAT WE WERE TRYING TO DO, and I took great joy in defending and promoting the president’s green agenda in the press. Once a week, our team would work with the Department of Energy to identify cities where green stimulus dollars were going. Then I would get booked onto local radio programs, to make sure that listeners knew about the disbursements. I saw it as a great way to advance the administration’s agenda, while keeping myself steeped in grassroots questions and concerns. Local audiences were usually interested in different topics than those that were obsessing the Washington, DC, media.
I would specifically ask to get plugged into radio stations that carried Rush Limbaugh’s program; that was the easiest way to identify the conservative stations in the heartland. In keeping with our bipartisan aspirations, I thought it was important that we make our case to those who were the most skeptical. As a Southerner and a Christian, I knew how to communicate with those audiences.
At that time, I had a fair chance to make my case; the backlashers had not yet tried to turn me into a boogeyman. Usually, a conservative radio personality would heap scorn on the president’s clean energy agenda, right off the bat—either through sarcasm or sometimes by launching a withering, contemptuous polemic. I learned to fire right back: “Hold on a second, what I want to know is this: Why do you want the jobs of tomorrow to be in every other country—except our own? Why do you want China to have the next generation in energy technology? What kind of patriot are you?”
I would not let up, “Here is the real danger: we are about to go from importing dirty energy from the Middle East, to importing clean energy technology from Asia—skipping all the good jobs for Americans in between. We have a president who wants the United States to be number one in the next generation of energy technology, the same way we ar
e number one in Internet technology. You might settle for having the USA barely making it into the top ten. But President Obama wants us to dominate that field.”
It was fun. They expected me to come on the air and start pontificating about polar bears and air pollution, but I was speaking with passion about competition, innovation, and national pride.
I looked forward to those weekly workouts. Often, the producers would call back to say they thought I had done a great job, even though they disagreed with my views. They said they appreciated that a progressive was willing to come on the air, take some abuse, and exchange substantive ideas. I hoped to become someone who could help the administration bridge the divide between left and right on the green jobs agenda.
Alas, it was not to be.
ONE SUMMER NIGHT, my personal Blackberry buzzed. When I looked at the incoming email, my heart almost stopped. An African American organization that I had cofounded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Color of Change, was calling for advertisers to boycott the Glenn Beck show on Fox News.
Beck had called President Obama a racist. He had also singled me out to be the target of stupid skits, calling me a felon and a communist. The charges were false, and the tomfoolery was annoying. But life in the White House requires a thick skin and a laser-like focus on the tasks at hand. We were not in the business of getting distracted by silly TV personalities.
Nonetheless, I called my Color of Change cofounder, James Rucker, at home and fussed at him. “What are you guys doing over there? Do you know that my name is still on your website from Hurricane Katrina days? Someone is going to think that I am behind this boycott. Or that the White House is behind it, through me.”
My old friend doubted I had reason for concern. “Everyone can see that Beck is out of control. I don’t think any national TV host has ever called a sitting U.S. president a racist—not even Reagan or Dubya. The guy needs to be off the air.”
I told him, “Look, I get all of that. But the people I work with don’t care what Glenn Beck says. He has zero influence here in Washington. The few people who do know who he is think he is some kind of jokester. But a boycott will just make him crazier. Beck’s people may think you are doing this as payback for Beck razzing me.”
Rucker sounded sheepish: “Beck said something bad about you, too?” I related the gist of some of his recent rants. My friend confessed, “Well, I didn’t know about all of that. I mean: it is not like I sit around watching his show every day.”
I felt uneasy about Color of Change poking at a rattlesnake. But there was nothing I could do about it, and I took some comfort in the fact that advertiser boycotts almost never work. Companies generally ignore complaints from social justice groups and keep right on placing their ads on popular shows. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the whole thing would fade away.
Not a chance. Color of Change’s crusade to rid the national airwaves of Beck was destined to become one of the most successful pushes for an advertiser boycott in the history of American media. Hundreds of top national advertisers deserted the show and never came back. Fox News could make very little money on the highly watched program—because only marginal companies were willing to risk being associated with Beck.
To retaliate, Beck launched a jihad.
I was an easy target. Beck and his minions could dig up a photo of me in my angry young man phase, with my dreadlocks and combat boots and Black Panther book bag. They could prove that I’d studied Marxism. They could find a more recent video in which I had used a vulgarity to describe the GOP, just before I joined the administration.
Also, they proved they could just make up stuff.
The lies and libels were endless. Beck said that I was a self-avowed communist, in the present tense, ignoring the obvious evolution of my views. He said dozens of times that I was a convicted felon, because I had been detained for a few hours at a peaceful protest. My former employer wrote a long essay, obliterating every charge. (See appendix for a comprehensive refutation of Beck’s crazy claims.)
Still, the White House decided that the best course was to simply ignore him. No other serious news outlets were repeating his claims, not even other right-wingers on Fox News. Responding might be seen as rewarding his nutty behavior. Beck could have continued his crusade forever, and neither the White House nor I would have ever responded.
Then the bottom fell out. Someone ran a story that said I had signed a petition blaming George W. Bush for planning the 9/11 terror attacks. The very suggestion was abhorrent, and the specific language was vile and ridiculous. I knew that I would never have added my name to something like that. Even in my most radical days, I was not a conspiracy theorist. I racked my brain, trying to understand how my name wound up on the website. Maybe an Ella Baker Center staffer had added my name to the petition without my permission? Maybe someone tricked me into signing something, without showing me all of the language? I told my superiors that if I had ever signed something like that, I had not done so knowingly.
While I tried to sort out the truth, every news outlet ran with the story. Unless you have been at the center of a media firestorm, it is almost impossible to describe how unreal it is. There is a face on television, and it is yours. But the commentary around that face is so distorted that it may as well be the visage of another person. One day, you are a three-dimensional person, known to your friends and colleagues in all your complexity, good and bad. The next day, you are a flattened out, two-dimensional, billboard-sized caricature of yourself on your worst day. Your name is everywhere, but you no longer exist.
The disconnect between your inflated televised image and the logistics of your practical life is particularly disorienting. You still live in the same house. No limo appears to take you anywhere, just because your face is on television. You still have to run down the street in the rain to catch the bus and the train. The makers of Blackberry do not send anyone to your home to help you handle the spike in phone calls and e-mails.
No “fame fairies” show up to do your chores for you. You still have to walk to the store for toilet paper when you run out. Nobody is assigned to read the kids bedtime stories, change diapers at 3 a.m., and help little ones get dressed in the morning. (I promise you, children don’t care what the national press is saying about you; they still want you to help them find their special, rainbow pencil before they go off to school.) Real life goes on, beneath the ever-widening mushroom cloud of the surreal.
I sat down and thought about it. Beck’s ravings were one thing. But now the national press was forming its own negative opinion, based on the videotape of me dissing the GOP and these bizarre truther allegations. My life had been interesting, and I had been candid over the years. Who knew what else there was to dig up and sensationalize? All I needed was one more headline and the most fair-minded person in the world would have to ask: Why is this guy in the White House? All of my credentials, which had once seemed so dazzling, suddenly seemed pretty insignificant.
It was September 2009. We were trying to reset the conversation regarding the health care fight. Protesters calling themselves Tea Partiers had spent all of August disrupting Congress’s Town Hall meetings, screaming about death panels, socialism, and czars. I had emerged as the perfect target for all their venom and hatred.
My superiors in the White House assured me they would stand by me. Progressive groups were lining up to launch a huge public fight for me, just after Labor Day. But I had to make a decision. Do we expend our bullets trying to defend, explain, and contextualize everything in my colorful past—day after day, for weeks and possibly months? We knew the president’s opponents were going to keep trying to make “Van Jones” the issue. Or should I quit so the team could put 100 percent of the focus back on fighting for health care for America’s families?
To me, that was a no-brainer. We had the first black president, trying to bring home a victory on health care. I didn’t want to be a banana peel for him. The White House didn’t call me and ask me to resign; I picke
d up the phone and told them I was quitting.
I was not going to allow myself to become a distraction from the long-sought goal of guaranteeing healthcare for everyone. At that stage, fighting back against Fox News would have only fed the fire. I was not about to let that happen. So six months after accepting the honor, I walked away from the best job I ever had.
On September 6, 2009, I released this statement: “I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today. On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls from across the political spectrum, urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future. It has been a great honor to serve my country and my president in this capacity. I thank everyone who has offered support and encouragement. I am proud to have been able to make a contribution to the clean energy future. I will continue to do so in the months and years ahead.”
It is easy to say, “Oh, you should have just fought until the bitter end.” But what if that distraction had cost us the health-care victory? You only have so many battles you can fight, even in the White House—especially in the White House. Politics at that level is like “speed chess” meets “Mortal Kombat.” One has a very narrow timeframe to make decisions—with massive consequences for every single American.