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How The Man Of Change Changed (Volume 2)

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Winter 2011

WASHINGTON—White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was all set to TP the White House.

He vowed to do it if Auburn won the BCS Championship. Gibbs had a deal all worked out with the Secret Service: they would leave a couple rolls in an undisclosed location and he would unfurl them over the White House roof or maybe a tree out front.

Life was good in the house of Obama Phi. They balled hard in guys-only basketball games. Everyone was a “dude” or a “bro”. They did fist-pumps, not handshakes. Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel dropped f-bombs left and right, and during White House press meetings Robert Gibbs never met a sports analogy he didn’t like. Even staff elder Lawrence Summers would doze off during economy briefings. White House interns learned early on to be careful rounding West Wing corners lest they find Barack and Michelle canoodling.

But the president was missing something.

* * *

KAILUA, HI—The president had to get something off his chest.

Winter vacation in Hawaii. Sometime after a shaved ice, sometime after putting the girls to bed. He pulled close friend/senior adviser Valerie Jarrett aside and confided his biggest regret as president: He was spending too much time in Washington.

Obama missed being out and about. The man who cut his teeth organizing on the South Side of Chicago was weary of months in cloistered West Wing meeting rooms. He was done hearing what the people wanted via glossy PowerPoint decks rather than in-person.

He acknowledged he had to stay put. The economy, Greece…the global financial system that teetered on the brink back in January 2009. He spent every waking moment speed-dialing Europe, hobnobbing Senators, doing everything he could to get the stimulus package through. But he missed the town halls. Even those gutter-ball bowling alley photo ops.

Obama’s staff knew his work was not yet finished. Unemployment still hovered in the 9%’s, the Middle East simmered, and a government shutdown (however improbably) loomed. But Obama finally had some breathing room, they felt. He had tied down many of the loose ends of his predecessor’s legacy and could now begin to mint his own.

So do it already, Jarrett chided.

And so Obama did. He challenged the country to another Sputnik moment in January’s State of the Union speech. To shake Washington from its bipartisan slumber and awaken a nation to out-innovate China.

And the next day Obama was out. He toured windswept Wisconsin solar farms helping the U.S. “win the future”. He overdressed in Silicon Valley town-halls, teasing Facebook employees, “My name is Barack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.” 

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President Obama was on the road again and loving it. He was looser at the podium, feistier with reporters. And to Valerie Jarrett, he was remembering why he wanted to be president in the first place.

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TUCSON, AZ—The president was about to cry.

He paused. Five seconds. He clenched the podium. Fifteen seconds. He cleared his throat. Still nothing. “Gabby” (Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) opened her eyes, but that wasn’t what left Obama speechless. It was Christina Taylor Green.

Christina Taylor Green was nine years old when she died. A White House staffer found her in a book dedicated to fifty babies born on September 11, 2001. Three months after Obama’s youngest daughter, Sasha.

The book’s author hoped the fifty babies would someday “jump in rain puddles”. Christina hoped to someday be a politician. Christina Taylor Green was innocence personified, senselessly mowed down in a madman’s rampage.

It wasn’t the first time Obama served as Eulogizer-in-Chief. There was Fort Hood. The West Virginia mine tragedy. But Tucson was the rawest. The nation watched the cerebral president lose it for the first time. The nation watched, some cried, as the president stood slack-jawed at the podium, trying to hold it together.

16 years later, Tucson forced an amped-up nation to take a step back. A frenzied nation soul-searched. After Columbine, America pinned it on gory video games and movies. Parents took away Doom or GoldenEye for Nintendo 64. Blockbuster stopped renting out Natural Born Killers. After Virginia Tech, the state cracked down on gun control. Washington ordered a second opinion on mental health institutions.

And after Tucson, America blamed the media. Talking heads, cross-haired political maps, bellicose campaign speeches. Fair or not, the Tucson massacre became a referendum on a nation’s turbo-charged TV and politics.
Sarah Palin’s jingoistic rhetoric was not just jingoistic rhetoric anymore. Keith Olbermann’s Worst Persons In The World list wasn’t funny anymore. They morphed into supped up, hyper-sensationalized commentary for nudging a lunatic to the brink. Local Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik opined, “I think it’s time that this country take a little introspective look at the [inaudible] crap that comes out on radio and TV.”

And the networks did. Anchors and executives each embraced their own solemn moments of catharsis over the past week. “You can’t outsmart crazy,” Jon Stewart demurred in the first Daily Show after the shooting, “Crazy always finds a way.” FOX News chief Roger Ailes chided his commentators, “Shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann first bitterly accused then apologized to Sarah Palin for the infamous political map with Giffords’ district in cross-hairs.

Obama appreciated the sentiment. But he knew that was not the moral of the Tucson massacre story.

If the Tucson massacre became a referendum on turbo-charged media, Obama confided, all was well and good. If pundits learn that saying something louder doesn’t make it more right, the country was better off for it. If Democrats and Republicans sat together during the State of the Union speech from then on, if they ratcheted down the campaign slogans, it was long overdue.

Mellowed-out rhetoric would be an unintended legacy of the Arizona shootings. An incidental consequence of a madman’s rampage. But that wasn’t the morale of the Tucson shooting, Obama knew. Jared Loughner did not murder six people because of Sarah Palin. Jared Loughner did not watch the news and told friends trees were blue. Jared Loughner murdered six people because he was crazy and could get guns.

Obama sighed. He pressed on. “Terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding”. He bit his lip. “For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack”, and that no one can know “what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind”. 

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He thought about Christina Taylor Green. “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit”.

Bill Clinton’s presidency crystallized in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings. He found himself and then he found the chord to comfort a nation frazzled by corn-fed, white American rage. Perhaps, America wondered, Obama, too, had found himself. The aloof president had backed away from the script. He cried. He too had a nine-year-old daughter.

Republican Mike Huckabee hailed the speech as “easily” the best of Obama’s presidency. “It was his most important speech so far, one that history is going to reflect on,” mused historian Douglas Brinkley. “There was a bit of Dr. King to him. That’s simply been missing in his presidency so far. I was sitting there and I realized, ‘This guy might be a great man.’ I had forgotten about that.”

But President Obama did not care about any of this at the time. He wanted to check on Gabby. He wanted to meet with Christina’s parents. But most of all, he wanted to see Sasha.

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* * *

WASHINGTON—Cam Newton and Auburn did their part in the BCS championship game, but Robert Gibbs backed out.

He couldn’t TP the White House. It didn’t seem tasteful. Not after Arizona. A few short weeks later, Gibbs boxed up his office and headed back to Chicago. President Obama thanked him with an anecdote from the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Obama was nervous that day, but not about the speech. He wandered the convention hall reassuring staffers: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.” But he wasn’t sure which tie to wear. He didn’t like his. No one liked David Axelrod’s. But Obama kind of liked Gibbs’. So minutes before the most important speech of Obama’s life—the speech that would make Barack Obama, well, Barack Obama—Robert Gibbs slipped the tie off his neck and traded with his bro.

Now, six and a half years later, Obama was finally returning the tie. But this time it was framed.

Gibbs hung it up in the Chicago office where he will spearhead Obama’s purported billion-dollar reelection campaign. If Act Three were to go by the script, Obama and Gibbs would have to wait. But they would laugh it up again in early 2017. They would tease each other over their March Madness brackets.

And they would crack jokes about David Axelrod as a Krispy Kreme model. Just like in the good ol’ days in the Winter of 2011 when Auburn ran roughshod over the NCAA, Zuckerberg gave them all Facebook hoodies, and a young president found himself.

Please check back for Part 3: Spring 2011.


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