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WORK TITLE: Thanks Obama
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1986
WEBSITE:
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1986 in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Funny or Die, Washington DC office, head writer/producer. Worked formerly as a field organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, working in crisis communications, and as special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter, 2011-16.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Onion, McSweeney’s, Internet Tendency, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and New York Times.
SIDELIGHTS
David Litt is a comedy writer and former special assistant and senior presidential speechwriter to Barack Obama. Litt was born in New York in 1986 to a Jewish family. He attended Dalton School, a preparatory school, on the Upper West Side and attended college at Yale University. While at Yale, he was a member of Yale Ex!t Players, an improv comedy group, and editor-in-chief of the Yale Record.
Litt began working at the White House in 2011, when he was twenty-four years old. He was hired as a speechwriter, and he started out as a senior presidential speechwriter to Presidential Advisor Valerie Jarrett and then to White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley. Ultimately, Litt worked directly for President Obama. Over the course of his four years working in the White House, he was promoted to special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter. This job included undertaking the responsibility of writing jokes for the short comedy routine Obama performed each year at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinners.
After his four year contract was over, Litt began working for Funny or Die’s office in Washington, DC. He is currently the head writer/producer for the Washington, DC office. Litt has also written for the Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and the New York Times. He lives in Washington, DC with his fiancee, Jacqui.
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, Litt’s first book, documents his time working at the White House. Litt documents his journey from field organizer and recent college graduate to senior presidential speechwriter. Litt’s first job with the Obama administration as a field organizer granted him nothing beyond a ticket to the inauguration ceremony. The section he was seated in was closed down before the president even took oath, so he watched the event he had worked so hard for from a TV in a nearby bar. After Obama’s inauguration, Litt was out a job, so he accepted a position in crisis communications. Unhappy in this dead-end role, he landed an internship at a writing firm, and soon thereafter was offered a writing position for Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
In the book Litt addresses both the excitement and the monotony of the job. He highlights the moments in which he screwed up, and how these missteps affected the Obama administration. Instead of focusing merely on the White House and the big names that lead it, Litt discusses his experiences as an organizer working with ordinary American citizens. In describing his time organizing in Ohio, Litt emphasizes his conviction that the policies Obama would put into place would make real, documentable differences in the lives of people living there.
He also includes stories about his experiences with individuals who were directly affected by Obama’s policies, such as Stacey Lihn, a speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Lihn’s daughter, Zoe, was born with a congenital heart defect and needed three major surgeries before the age of five. By the time she was six-months-old, she had reached halfway to her lifetime health insurance coverage cap. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, that cap was lifted and Zoe could continue to receive care. Litt worked with Lihn to develop her National Convention speech, and writes about this experience as an example of Obama policies making real impact on real lives.
Jeff Nussbaum in Washington Monthly described the book as “a funny and unexpectedly moving reflection,” while a contributor to USA Today wrote Litt “delivers a thoughtful and funny account of life as a minnow surrounded by Washington’s self-important whales.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted, “for every White House men’s room anecdote or gee-whiz moment, Litt offers piercing assessments of the nature of our politics.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Litt manages to present a voice that is “not (too) privileged or self-important, candidly recollecting some of his biggest gaffes as a White House speechwriter.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years.
Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2017, review of Thanks, Obama, p. 80.
USA Today, September 19, 2017, “Speechwriter Delivers a Fun, Insidery ‘Thanks, Obama,’” p. 01D.
Washington Monthly, November-December, 2017, Jeff Nussbaum, “Pen and Tell: The First Memoir by an Obama Speechwriter Adds to a Stoned Genre while Avoiding its Usual Cynicism,” p. 66.
ONLINE
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (September 29, 2017), Katy Waldman, review of Thanks, Obama.
David Litt (speechwriter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Litt is an American political speechwriter and author of the comedic memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years.[1] He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die’s office in Washington, D.C.[2]
Biography
Born to a Jewish family[3] in New York City where he attended the Dalton School, Litt attended Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Ex!t Players and editor-in-chief of the Yale Record[4]. He entered the White House in 2011, at the age of 24, and for four years served as a senior presidential speechwriter first to Presidential Advisor Valerie Jarrett, White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley, and ultimately to President Barack Obama, including as the lead writer on four White House Correspondents' Association dinner presentations.[5] Litt has also written for The Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.[6]
Bibliography
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years (Ecco Press) ISBN 978-0-0625684-5-8[1][7]
References
Litt, David. "Thanks, Obama - David Litt - Hardcover". HarperCollins US. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
Johnson, Ted (24 February 2016). "Funny or Die Hires President Obama's Former Speechwriter David Litt". Variety.com. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
David Litt tells true story as part of My So Called Jewish Life, Vimeo.com, December 20, 2010
Clifford, Catherine (26 June 2017). "Former Obama speechwriter: This is the one question you have to ask to be an effective communicator". Cnbc.com. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
Deb, Sopan (1 September 2017). "David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who Wants No Credit". Nytimes.com. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
Moraes, Lisa de (24 February 2016). "Obama Speechwriter David Litt Joins Funny Or Die Washington Office". Deadline.com. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
Waldman, Katy (September 2017). "Thanks, Obama". Slate. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
David Litt
David Litt
Biography
David Litt entered the White House in 2011 and left in 2016 as a special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter. Described as the “comic muse for the president,” David was the lead writer on four White House Correspondents’ Dinner presentations and has contributed jokes to President Obama’s speeches since 2009. He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die’s office in Washington, DC. David has also written for The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. He lives in Washington with his girlfriend and their two goldfish, Humphrey and Camille.
A Former Speechwriter Looks Back On His 'Hopey, Changey' Years With Obama
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September 25, 20173:55 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Terry Gross square 2017
TERRY GROSS
Fresh Air
President Barack Obama speaks at the 2014 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington, D.C. Speechwriter David Litt, who helped craft the president's comedy routine that night, says, "Some of the joke is always that it's the president telling a joke."
Olivier Douliery/Getty Images
David Litt was 24 years old and just a few years out of college when he landed a job writing speeches for President Barack Obama — an experience he calls "surreal and completely terrifying."
Though he was initially assigned the speeches no one else wanted to write, Litt eventually became a special assistant to the president and senior presidential speechwriter. His duties included writing jokes for the short comedy routine Obama performed annually at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinners.
Litt says a lot of those jokes worked because they were coming from the president. "As I retell them, I often am reminded of this, because people give me a look like, 'Really? That was funny?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, you have to hear the president tell it.' "
Other speeches led to unintentional political controversy. When Litt wrote Obama a Thanksgiving address that neglected to mention God, conservative media criticized the president for the omission. The blowback taught Litt a valuable lesson. "Your job as a speechwriter is not just to write good speeches," he says. "Your job is to keep in the back of your mind the fact that there's a whole industry of people trying to take your words out of context — and that's politics."
Litt's new memoir is Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years.
Interview Highlights
Thanks, Obama
Thanks, Obama
My Hopey, Changey White House Years
by David Litt
Hardcover, 310 pages purchase
On meeting Obama for the first time
I was about two years out of college, maybe three. I graduated in 2008 and I started writing at the White House in 2011. ...
I remember the first time I met the president. He asked me a question — "How's it going?" — and I literally blacked out. I don't know what I said to him, because I was so afraid to meet this person who had had such an impact on my life already — and also, by the way, was the president of the United States.. .. I had exactly one thought in that moment which was, "I did not realize we were going to have to answer questions." ...
I think that ability to function normally [while] under intense pressure, that's actually the hardest part of a White House job. It's not being brilliant all the time. It's being competent, even though there's all these incredibly difficult, high-stakes things happening around you.
On the ground rules for writing jokes for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
It's not like there was a memo written, but there was just a sense of who the president is and what he would feel comfortable with. The jokes were always trying to make sure that we were getting at some truth that was important, and also if we were kind of targeting someone with a joke, that it was someone who deserved it and [told] in a way that they deserved it.
Larry Wilmore On 'Breaking Taboos' At The White House Correspondents' Dinner
POLITICS & POP CULTURE
Larry Wilmore On 'Breaking Taboos' At The White House Correspondents' Dinner
I mean, every year we would get pitched jokes, and this was totally fine. It's everyone's job to pitch everything that they think of. But you'd get jokes making fun of, let's say Chris Christie's size, and we never would use that in a speech because that's not the thing about Gov. Chris Christie that is worthy of mockery. ... We would make sure that it was about the political, not about the personal, [which] I think was important. I will say that President Obama was often the one pushing us. His words were, "Can we make this sharper? Can we make this edgier?"
On Trump declining to attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
At Al Smith Dinner, Donald Trump Turns Friendly Roast Into 3-Alarm Fire
POLITICS
At Al Smith Dinner, Donald Trump Turns Friendly Roast Into 3-Alarm Fire
I was not surprised that he didn't go, because I had watched him at the Al Smith Dinner, which is kind of the Correspondents' Dinner of the presidential campaign, and he got booed during that dinner — and it is more or less impossible to get booed during a dinner like that. I mean, politeness is kind of the core virtue of a society like the Al Smith Dinner, and he still managed to do it, so I think he understood that it wasn't going to go well if he came. He just does not have the ability to deliver the kind of jokes that presidents are supposed to, and that people appreciate from their presidents.
I was still disappointed that he didn't give it a shot and he didn't try to meet the standard that has been set. Not in terms of comedy, but just in terms of self-deprecation. In terms of acknowledging that you're only human. You may be the president of the United States, but you're also just a person and you have flaws and you make mistakes. And there's a way of using those jokes to acknowledge them through comedy, and I think that is an important democratic tradition in its own way. I wish that President Trump realized that and he was willing to participate in it. I'm sadly not surprised he was not.
On President Trump's inaugural address
When I think about Trump's speeches, I honestly wish that my biggest concern was the rhetoric or the words that he's using. And it's impossible to get past the thoughts that he's conveying and the argument that he's making.
The line [in the inaugural address] ... about "American carnage" is a perfect example. It seems to me that that's a departure from all previous presidents who have tried to be optimistic, who have tried to say, "This is the best of what America can be." And Donald Trump, because of his style as a candidate, he needs you to believe that America is falling apart because his argument is, "I alone can fix it."
And so at every moment he is saying these things that are not at all in keeping [with] what we would think of as presidential — they're trying to make America seem worse than it actually is, rather than make us realize that America could be better than it's ever been before. And so it's not a speechwriting concern, it's not a matter of rhetoric — it's a matter of what this person is trying to express. And I find it disturbing as a speechwriter, but even more disturbing as an American.
On leaving the Obama White House in 2016 because of burnout
It was sad. It was bittersweet knowing I somehow was in a position where I got to regularly interact with the president of the United States and that wasn't going to happen again.
'I Basically Ran On Adrenaline': A Staffer Remembers Obama's White House
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
'I Basically Ran On Adrenaline': A Staffer Remembers Obama's White House
But it also seemed so surreal and so much luckier than I ever could've imagined that I got to do that at all, that I didn't find myself saying, "Oh I have to do this another two or three times." It was like winning the lottery. It was this moment of saying, "I got unbelievably lucky and I'm just going to enjoy that." ...
I miss being a part of something that's so big, and I miss helping people — not the president, but Americans. I miss highlighting their stories and bringing them to national attention. That was a special thing.
Sam Briger and Therese Madden produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the Web.
4/23/2018 David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who Wants No Credit - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/books/david-litt-speechwriter-thanks-obama-my-hopey-changey-white-house-years.html 1/4
https://nyti.ms/2wWWL5o
BOOKS
David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who
Wants No Credit
By SOPAN DEB SEPT. 1, 2017
Washington is filled with political operatives who inflate their importance and take
credit, oftentimes where it might not be due.
David Litt, who landed a dream job as a speechwriter for the Obama
administration at just 24 years old, is not that kind of operative. His new book,
“Thanks Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years,” is an amusing, honest
and self-deprecating look at being a less-heralded staffer in the White House. While
others might exaggerate their access to the president, Mr. Litt, now a head writer at
Funny or Die, writes about how former President Barack Obama didn’t even know
his name until his second term.
“‘Speechwriter to the president’ suggested access and influence,” Mr. Litt writes
in his book, due Sept. 19. “In reality I was a kind of rhetorical handyman, keeping
our stump speech up to code.”
He started as a speechwriter for Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama,
and other high-level officials, including the chief of staff, William M. Daley.
Eventually, Mr. Litt found himself writing low-profile remarks for Mr. Obama and by
4the second term, became one of his top speechwriters, especially marshaling his
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4/23/2018 David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who Wants No Credit - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/books/david-litt-speechwriter-thanks-obama-my-hopey-changey-white-house-years.html 2/4
comedic side as the lead writer for multiple White House Correspondents’
Association dinners.
He discussed his book over coffee and explained how in “The West Wing”
parlance, he was not the one in the walk and talks, but the one handing the papers to
those walking and talking.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What are the differences between your life in the West Wing and the
show, “The West Wing”?
Being introduced to politics by “The West Wing” is like being introduced to sex
by “Debbie Does Dallas.” The real thing is more satisfying, but also it doesn’t live up
to the fantasy in certain ways. The thing about “The West Wing” was that everybody
was extraordinarily clever all the time, and everything leads to a satisfying
conclusion at the end of every week. And there’s only like five people in the entire
building. I wouldn’t have been in the walk and talk.
I was one of the people giving a piece of paper to someone in the walk and talk
and then scurrying out of the frame. And I got to the White House and realized that
the White House, in addition to being the most important office building in the
world, is also an office building. A lot of your day is spent trying to figure out how to
get people to stop replying all to every email or how to make sure everyone is on the
conference call at the same time. Somehow, this was never in an episode.
Functionally, why were you not Toby Ziegler or Sam Seaborn (two
fictional speechwriters on “The West Wing” and top advisers to the
president)?
What was exciting about writing a book was that I was not in the inner circle, so
that was kind of liberating. I didn’t have to write about all those moments I made
history because I didn’t make a ton of history, and that’s totally fine. And most
people who work at the White House don’t, and they still do good work and it
matters.
4/23/2018 David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who Wants No Credit - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/books/david-litt-speechwriter-thanks-obama-my-hopey-changey-white-house-years.html 3/4
Not every speech is going in the history books. Some of the speeches are a video
recording saying “Happy Birthday!” to one of the president’s friends in Chicago, or a
sports team is coming to the White House and you’re making some jokes about it,
and that was a big part of the day to day of the president’s calendar.
You write in your book that “speechwriters are more like personal
trainers than puppet masters.” What do you mean?
They can help you present the best, most attractive version of yourself to the
world. They can’t turn you into someone you’re not. And that, by the way, gives you
more confidence in the role of speechwriters.
Did you ever write a speech in which you disagreed with the content?
That’s a question I get a lot, and I kind of got lucky. There might be stuff where
if I really look into it, a policy detail, but, A., I don’t really know because I’m not a
policy person and B., on the big picture issues, there was never a moment where I sat
down and thought, “I totally disagree with this.” When I wrote in the private sector,
this would happen sometimes.
You write about how little influence you had in the White House.
What was your most concrete accomplishment?
The way that I always phrase it is that “American history would have been
totally the same without me, except for a couple of jokes.” And I am very proud of
those jokes. There were lots of people involved in this. Jon Lovett ran the jokewriting
process while he was at the White House. A lot of comedy people from Los
Angeles.
I think I was part of using comedy and humor in a way that it hadn’t been used
before to get the president’s message across. So when we had Keegan-Michael Key
come in as Luther the Anger Translator [at the 2015 White House Correspondents
Dinner] to do something that was ultimately a chance for the president to really get
angry about climate-change deniers in a way he never could have done in a serious
speech and in a way that didn’t get bogged down in the political process because it
was comedy.
4/23/2018 David Litt, an Obama Speechwriter Who Wants No Credit - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/books/david-litt-speechwriter-thanks-obama-my-hopey-changey-white-house-years.html 4/4
A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Punching Up Jokes for Obama.
© 2018 The New York Times Company
THE SECRET TO PRESIDENTIAL HUMOR: LESSONS FROM OBAMA'S FUNNIEST SPEECHWRITER
A conversation with David Litt about the Obama White House, his new book, and the funniest joke that Obama never delivered.
MORGAN BASKINSEP 19, 2017
45
SHARES
Luther Keegan-Michael Key President Barack Obama speaks at the annual White House Correspondent's Association Gala
(Photo: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)
In a nostalgic retrospective of President Barack Obama's best jokes, the Washington Post's Emily Heil wrote in April of 2016 that Obama was the country's "first alt-comedy president." The former president tended to add "meta, deadpan flourish[es]" to his punchlines, Heil wrote, while his style was "defined by irony, self-awareness, and quirky topical references."
At the time, David Litt, a speechwriter who helped shape Obama's monologue material for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, told the Post that those flourishes—the stuff that made Obama's speeches truly funny—all came from the president. "He would make these little, small changes, but they would make such a difference, [punctuating] the joke in a way that made it work better," Litt told Heil.
Since he left the White House in 2016, Litt's penchant for telling self-deprecating anecdotes has not changed.
In Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years, an accessible and highly entertaining memoir out today via Ecco Press, Litt chronicles his life orbiting Obama, from the 2008 presidential campaign, when Litt worked as a field organizer in Ohio, to his ascent as speechwriter for a cadre of senior advisers—and, finally, for the president himself.
While it would be easy for a cynic to write off Litt's effort as an over-earnest love letter to the former president, the book is much more than a scrapbook of Beltway gossip and Obama idolatry. Litt discusses what he wrote, to be sure—he scripted the president's 2015 address at the NAACP's national convention and spearheaded Obama's iconic "anger translator" bit during that year's White House Correspondents' Dinner—but he's also frank about losing hope, at times, in both American politics, and in the president he clearly adores.
Litt spoke recently with Pacific Standard to discuss the role of political comedy in Obama's administration, and in government today.
section-break
The book is very funny but it also has these incredibly sober moments that grapple with some of the more emotional periods of Obama's time in office. There's a point where you talk about standing outside the White House the night the Supreme Court ruled on same-sex marriage, and how special it was for those who lived in the city.
It's funny to think about, especially now—a lot of the coverage of the book has been about its humor, but I also did want to get moments like that in, where every so often in D.C. [there are] these sort of amazing public experiences where everyone is taking part in something that's part of the national life together. And it happens sort of organically—and D.C. gets a bad rap, but it was a very cool moment to be here.
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years.
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years.
(Photo: HarperCollins)
One of my favorite passages in the book is in the epilogue, where you reach the conclusion that "once you reach a certain age, the world has no more parents." I'm wondering at what point in the Obama administration you came to that realization.
I think, for me, it was a gradual process. It sort of started the first day, when I'd always assumed that people who worked in the White House are smarter and less mistake-prone than I was. And then, the moment I walked into the White House I was like, "uh oh, [we're] the same." And I remember very early on in a speechwriting meeting, sitting with all of the president's speechwriters, who I'd looked up to from outside the White House. And I think it was Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter, who was talking about a speech [we were about to write] said, "All right, so what should [the president] say?" And I was thinking, there's not an answer here? It's not something everybody already knows?
Even just walking through the White House in the first few months, you start to get the sense that, wait a second, these are some of the best people I will ever work with, but they're still just people. And I think, over time, and especially around the first debate with Mitt Romney [during the 2012 presidential election cycle], which really did not go well [for Obama], I started to think that President Obama—who's really an extraordinary person, and that is an understatement—he's a person. And I didn't feel like that was disappointing to me, in the end. I felt like it was liberating.
Let me put it this way: If there isn't a perfect person who can save us, then it means that all of us have the ability to do something to solve all of the problems that we're facing. And all of us have the responsibility to try. That's something that I hope people will take away from the book.
That seems to be a recurring idea. Pretty early on you talk about the "Obamabot"—the staffer that is totally enamored with everything the president says and does, and can see no wrong in his actions. But partway through the book you describe a moment where you're sitting in a speechwriting meeting and Obama walks in unexpectedly and gives staffers a pep talk. You say you realize that the president has become more human to you, and that you no longer see him as without flaws.
So I will say about that meeting—I wanted to describe a really low point, where I genuinely wasn't sure that everything that the president had done and everything that we had done on his team was going to be enough. And, in fact, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be enough. And I'm happy to say I was wrong, but I did want to talk about how that felt, in part because I think that it's pretty likely that in the future there will be young White House staffers who are trying to make their own small contribution to America.
I found one of your characterizations of Obama's humor interesting: That he didn't necessarily like self-deprecation, but understood that it gave him leeway in attacking his more vocal critics. Did he usually expect his speechwriters to make that trade-off in his remarks?
I think he understood pretty clearly that, when you're the president of the United States, you'll end up punching down unless you're very, very careful. He didn't believe in doing that. So whether that was throwing in a little self-deprecating humor before doing some truth-telling about some people we felt deserved it, or, sometimes, going after bullies. That's one thing that President Obama consistently did, whether it was through a joke, or through policy, or through an off-the-cuff remark or a big speech. I think over the course of his career you see a person who really can't stand it when people are taking advantage of the less powerful. So that was an exception. But I think he understood that, if you're the president, and you're trying to punch up with your humor, that's a challenge. It's something he was aware of.
There's a scene from the 2012 Al Smith dinner that highlights that point, I think. You describe Obama's reticence to aggressively roast Romney in public, and refer to this thinking as "playing the long game." Is there ever a time for outrageous, potentially offensive comedy?
I think different political moments call for different political tones. I do think that's something that just about every good president is capable of doing, of switching between attitudes. Because the audience is different, the moment is different. And I will say that, when it comes to a presidential speech, not a joke, I always think about these as a means, not an end. So you start with the outcome that you're hoping to achieve and work backwards. If we had a major joke that would get a big laugh but would jeopardize something important, then we wouldn't use it in the speech.
I talk about writing a joke [for the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner] that includes Osama bin Laden in the punchline, and seeing bin Laden get cut [from the monologue], and then the next day the bin Laden raid happened. And I suddenly had that moment when I realized exactly how careful you have to be when you're writing a president's jokes.
Is there a joke of yours that never made it into one of Obama's speeches that you still vociferously defend?
So ... yes. It would have been for the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner. The joke was: Washington just legalized marijuana and already we're seeing the results. For example, Rand Paul just delivered a 13-hour filibuster on whether or not the Taco Bell is still open.
President Obama did not get that joke, and, to be fair, most of the people I talk to don't think it's particularly funny. But I'm privately convinced that it's actually really funny, even if nobody believes me.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
TAGSCULTURE FEATURESTHE CULTURE PAGESDAVID LITTBOOKSSOCIAL JUSTICEBARACK OBAMA
BY MORGAN BASKIN
Obama speechwriter David Litt on the jokes the president can and can’t tell
“The most important thing about the president telling any joke is it’s the president telling a joke. That’s where the comedy comes from.”
By Todd VanDerWerff@tvotitodd@vox.com Mar 21, 2018, 12:10pm EDT
SHARE
President Barack Obama appears at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Keegan-Michael Key in character as Obama’s anger translator “Luther,” a bit David Litt helped facilitate. Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images
How do you write a joke for the president of the United States? How do you come up with something that will seem perfectly cutting but not too cruel, silly but not stupid? How do you not denigrate the highest office in the land with — sniff — comedy?
Those were all questions David Litt, a speechwriter for President Obama and one of the folks most instrumental to Obama’s comedy monologues at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, had to face when he worked in the White House.
And after he left, he wrote his memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, a whole book about his time working for the president, complete with lots of advice on how to write jokes for the commander in chief.
Litt joined me for the most recent episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting, and I wanted to ask him not just about his book but about the process of writing comedy for the most powerful person on earth. Is it possible to tell jokes that punch up — the comedy term for jokes that make fun of those more powerful than the comedian — when the person delivering the joke is the president? And what sorts of jokes can’t the president tell?
Litt’s responses to those questions, lightly edited for length and clarity, follow.
Todd VanDerWerff
The bulk of your book is about your time working in the Obama White House, but a lot of it is about writing comedy for the president, which seems like a really tricky needle to thread. Not even just Obama, but with any president, what’s a joke you can or can’t tell with someone that powerful?
David Litt
There’s two different questions there. One is, what can you not do because it’s inappropriate? The other is, what can you not do because it’s just not funny if a president does it? The most important thing about the president telling any joke is that it’s the president telling a joke. That’s where most of the comedy comes from. That means that the bar of what’s edgy, what’s out there, is a lot lower than it would be if I was writing jokes for a comedian.
2017 Moth Ball: A Moth Summer Night's Dream
David Litt. Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for The Moth
Different presidents have been approaching this in different ways. Ronald Reagan was very funny, but in the much more classic, like, “Let me tell you a story about a cow, a farmer, and a sheepdog,” kind of thing. And he told good jokes like that. With President Obama, it was definitely not those kind of story, setup, punchline jokes, but more like observation and then a punchline to it.
To try to answer your question a little more succinctly, I think that the No. 1 topic that we would not joke about was national security. That was important to us, because one of the things about writing jokes for a president is if you have the joke and it’s totally in good taste, but then a week later, something happens — there’s a tragedy, there’s a shooting, there’s a terrorist attack — the joke can become retroactively in bad taste. That was an important thing for us. We didn’t want anything to end up in a campaign ad, and we also didn’t want to do anything that was insensitive and diminished the office.
The other thing was it was important that the jokes were an extension of who President Obama was the rest of the time. An example is every year, I would get pitched jokes — and this was totally fine, because our goal was to get pitched everything — about Chris Christie where the butt of the joke was that he was a big guy. We just didn’t want to make jokes about someone’s physical appearance. We made fun of him for Bridgegate, for shutting down traffic and all of that, the scandal and the arrogance and all of those things. That was fair game.
But when President Obama made fun of Trump, which he did frequently, he didn’t make jokes about his hands or he didn’t say, like, “Oh, he’s orange.” This was stuff that was focused on who this person is politically and the choices they’ve made, rather than their physical appearance. That’s a reflection of who President Obama is.
Todd VanDerWerff
There’s this theory in comedy of punching up versus punching down — trying to make jokes about people who either are on sort of the same level as you or have more power than you. But the president, theoretically, has the most power of anyone in the world, unless you’re joking about God; that’s the only way to punch up. So how do you find ways to tell those jokes without coming off as mean?
David Litt
There were two approaches. One is, yes, the president is, by definition, rarely punching up, in terms of just who has more power. Who can order a drone strike on who? The president’s going to come out on top of that conversation most of the time.
I do think self-deprecating humor is a way to even out that a little bit. For example, usually in one of the president’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologues, the first couple of jokes and then throughout, we would sprinkle some jokes where he’s making fun of himself. We tried to make those as real as possible. They were legitimate jokes where he was taking himself down a peg, in part I think because he enjoyed that and saw the value of it, but more than that, or in addition to that, there was a sense that that gives you the license to then talk about people who really bug you a little bit.
I think what we would have said was we weren’t punching so much as truth-telling. That was the euphemism that we used, but there was some truth to it.
In politics, you so rarely get outside the back-and-forth, where you say something and then someone else says the opposite, and regardless of who’s right, it gets covered as a controversy or a debate rather than a statement. Jokes were a way around that.
For example, when President Obama was making fun of something Mitch McConnell did, or making fun of Ted Cruz for having a big ego, I don’t think that those were moments where he’s punching down. I wouldn’t say he’s punching up, exactly, but he’s kind of lifting the lid on something that everyone in Washington knows and thinks about, but we’re not allowed to say because of the conventions of DC — or at least pre-Trump conventions of DC.
For much more with David Litt, on the strengths and limitations of political comedy, the joke he wrote for Obama that he’s most proud of, and the similarities between working at the White House and his new gig at Funny or Die, listen to the full episode.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Litt entered the White House in 2011 and left in 2016 as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter. Described as "the comic muse for the president," Litt began contributing jokes to President Obama's speeches in 2009 and was the lead writer on four White House Correspondents' Dinners. He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny or Die's office in Washington, D.C. Litt has also written for The Onion, McSweeney's, Internet Tendency, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his fiancee, Jacqui, and their two goldfish, Florence and Duane.
Pen and Tell: The first memoir by an Obama speechwriter adds to a stoned genre while avoiding its usual cynicism
Jeff Nussbaum
Washington Monthly. 49.11-12 (November-December 2017): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Full Text:
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years
by David Litt
Ecco, 320 pp.
Political speechwriters accept a basic bargain. You get to be heard: by the powerful people for whom you write, by the crowds who listen to them, by the reporters who cover them. In return, you don't get to be heard from. Speechwriters toil in anonymity, with bylines and glory denied. Among this small fraternity (and it still is, too often, a fraternity) it's considered gauche to take or seek credit for a novel argument or memorable line.
But when the principal leaves office, all bets are off. So they were for Sam Rosenman (Franklin Roosevelt) and William Safire (Richard Nixon), for Peggy Noonan (Ronald Reagan), Michael Waldman (Bill Clinton), and Matt Latimer (George W. Bush).
Now to this well-populated genre comes the first entrant from the Obama White House, David Litt's Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, a funny and unexpectedly moving reflection on Litt's journey from unpaid organizer in Ohio to speechwriter and in-house humorist for President Obama.
It should be noted that what it means to be a "speechwriter" has changed a great deal since the days of Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., when speechwriters tended to be policymakers first, poets second; thought partners, rather than ghostwriters (or "scribes," as my old boss AI Gore once bellowed from his office to summon my colleagues and me). Richard Nixon put an end to that. He created the first White House communications office, modeled on Madison Avenue advertising agencies; moved the whole operation across the street from the West Wing; and made his speechwriters--an impressive bunch that included William Safire and Pat Buchanan--subordinate to the communications director. Most modern speechwriting offices fit the description that the journalist D. T. Max used during the George W. Bush administration: "Policy and prose work their way on separate tracks at the White House, only meeting at higher levels."
Thus, most of these memoirs embrace the diminishment of the role, creating a recurring series of stories that can be summarized as "Gee whiz, look at little ol' me here in the White House!" Typically, as that sense of awe diminishes, so do the writer's enthusiasm and idealism, ultimately concluding somewhere on the spectrum of cynicism. While Litt doesn't quite break this mold, he modifies it enough to create a narrative that illuminates the challenges and triumphs of those whose roles are tightly circumscribed, whether that's as a campaign organizer or as a presidential speechwriter. And he provides a rare window onto how a president's jokes get written and chosen for the increasing number of platforms that demand that, along with everything else, our leaders also be funny.
After Obama's victory in 2008, Litt's contributions as a field organizer got him nothing beyond a ticket to the inauguration in a section that was closed down before the president ever took the oath. He watched the moment he had toiled for on TV at a bar. He then took a soul-deadening job in crisis communications, ultimately finding his way to an internship at a writing firm (disclosure: I'm a partner in that firm, and Litt mentions me in the book). From there he took a job as a writer for Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, which ultimately allowed him to make the jump to the president's team.
Litt, by his own admission and by government designation during the 2013 shutdown, was "nonessential." ("I would have preferred to be called 'valued,'" he quips.) This frees him from the responsibility of chronicling the fraught moments at which decisions of import were made, and instead allows him to muse on the contributions of those on the margins of power.
Often, Litt frames that contribution in the negative: Look how screwed up things get if I make a mistake. There was the Thanksgiving video message that failed to mention God, which led to a day of hyperventilation on Fox News. And, in a demonstration that a Kenya fixation didn't only afflict Republicans, there was the line in the 2013 Gridiron Dinner speech when Litt attempted to pay tribute to intrepid journalists: "They've risked everything to bring us stories from places like Syria and Kenya, stories that need to be told." That led to a small diplomatic kerfuffle, given that Kenya has press freedom enshrined in its constitution.
And then there are the sillier episodes: a failed attempt to try to change outfits in the coat closet of Air Force One, or the discovery of an untouched salmon fillet in a White House toilet that becomes an extended metaphor for the mystery, magic, and ultimate mundanity of a White House job.
Litt expertly captures the series of realizations made by every White House staffer. Whether it's the simple fact that upon arriving in the White House "unchanged abilities [are] pitted against drastically heightened expectations," or the need to explain to friends and family that not everybody gets to talk to the president all the time ("Just because Darth Vader is the public face of the organization doesn't mean that every storm trooper gets oneon-one time").
He relives the paranoia that's uncomfortably familiar to the small universe of those who have experienced it. The fear of receiving an email that will send you into a frenzy of rewrites. The fear of not receiving an email. The battle with the White House factcheckers (back when those existed). The knowledge that the boss will inevitably ask the one question to which you do not have the answer.
Litt, who recently told the New York Times that "American history would have been totally the same without me, except for a couple of jokes," freely admits that he wielded little actual power. Yet he was able to use his role as in-house humor writer to achieve more than laughs. It helped that he served a president who was particularly deft at wielding humor to amplify serious points. Consider how a joke that Litt added to Obama's 2013 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner exquisitely skewered both Republicans' lack of diversity and their obstructionism: "One thing Republicans can all agree on after 2012 is that they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities. Call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with."
Humor has the ability to resonate in the way that policy proclamations can't. In one illustrative example, a health care speech Litt wrote for the president received 10,000 views on YouTube, while Obama's appearance on comedian Zach Galifianakis's intentionally uncomfortable online talk show Between Two Ferns was viewed by eleven million people the day it was released and increased traffic to Healthcare, gov by 40 percent.
Litt's humor and self-deprecation serve as spoonfuls of sugar that help a significant dose of analysis go down. He offers some frank diagnoses of the failures of the Obama policymaking apparatus: "On big issues---education, climate change, health care--he borrowed ideas from Republicans. Rather than starting from one extreme and negotiating toward the center, his early proposals often arrived with the compromise baked in.... Each time Obama entered new common ground, a kind of white flight occurred."
Ultimately, what differentiates this memoir from so many is that Litt began his political life as an organizer. He refuses to forget the ordinary people in Ohio who joined in the political process because they had a real need, and felt that the act of working to elect Barack Obama would have a meaningful and tangible impact on their lives.
Perhaps the most powerful speech delivered at the 2012 Democratic National Convention was by Stacey Lihn, whose daughter Zoe was born with a congenital heart defect and required three surgeries before the age of five. By six months of age, Zoe was halfway to her lifetime health insurance coverage cap. Mitt Romney had said at his convention speech that the most exciting day for Obama supporters was the day they voted for him, and that it had been downhill from there. At the Democratic convention, Stacey Lihn took the stage, with Zoe in her father's arms behind her, and declared that the most exciting days for them were the day Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law and the one shortly thereafter when their insurance company told them that Zoes lifetime cap had been lifted. Litt worked with Lihn on that speech, and he returns to Zoes story, and the stories of the organizers with whom he worked in Ohio, throughout the book.
Litt's White House journey took him a world away from their lives. But in remembering them throughout his time in the White House, and returning to them in his book, he offers a powerful reminder that true fulfillment can come from wielding even the smallest bit of influence on behalf of those who have none. In this way, Litt refuses to succumb to cynicism--and might just help the rest of us overcome ours.
Jeff Nussbaum is a partner in the speechwriting and strategy firm West Wing Writers. He managed the speechwriting operation at the 2012 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nussbaum, Jeff. "Pen and Tell: The first memoir by an Obama speechwriter adds to a stoned genre while avoiding its usual cynicism." Washington Monthly, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515578393/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=341cf77b. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515578393
Speechwriter delivers a fun, insidery 'Thanks, Obama'
USA Today. (Sept. 19, 2017): Lifestyle: p01D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Full Text:
David Litt, a speechwriter on the staff of President Obama, thought the president had nailed it as he gave a speech at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
It was there that Obama, just hours from watching Osama bin Laden get taken out by Seal Team 6, delivered the devastating jokes that were supposed to have banished then-reality TV star and real estate developer Donald Trump, who had been badgering Obama about his birth certificate, to political oblivion.
"And from the back of the room, I watched President Obama's monologue, the best he had ever delivered," Litt writes in his new book. "During the section on Trump, hundreds of Democrats and Republicans joined in bipartisan, mocking laughter. As the crowd applauded the president, the humiliated billionaire turned as red and angry as a blister. Well, I remember thinking, that's the end of Donald Trump."
Or not.
Litt taps into the collective angst felt by the millions of Americans who supported Obama and Hillary Clinton when Trump was elected last November. This is the target audience for Litt's Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years (Ecco, 320 pp., ***1/2 out of four), an account of his five years as a member of the president's speechwriting team.
If they not too busy reading Clinton's What Happened or setting their DVRs for Alec Baldwin's next Trump impression, they will find friendly reading here.
Litt joined Obama's 2008 campaign while an undergraduate at Yale and then moved into the White House in 2011 as the lowest man on the speechwriting depth chart, where he wrote short speeches for the president about infrastructure and post office openings.
He eventually ascended to handling Obama's jokes for the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the annual ritual of Washington insiderdom that normally features a speech and jokes from the president.
Litt, while obviously a fan of the former president, does more than just shower affection on Obama and gaze longingly at his Shepard Fairey poster. He delivers a thoughtful and funny account of life as a minnow surrounded by Washington's self-important whales.
Litt took his job seriously, but never himself, and that makes for enjoyable reading. While his account should appeal to those of all political persuasions interested in what happens inside the White House, it's hard to see many on the right embracing his view of the 44th president.
Still, Litt captures the grind of official Washington and how a glamorous-sounding job can turn into drudgery or kill one's social life.
"A White House job, it must be said, was not always conducive to romance," Litt writes. "There's a reason Marvin Gaye never sang about getting an e-mail from his boss's assistant and abruptly canceling dinner plans."
Litt's book ranks with classics from former White House speechwriters, such as Peggy Noonan's What I Saw at the Revolution about the Reagan administration. It's worth a read, even if Litt's revolution wasn't one you agreed with.
As for those pining for Obama's return, that's as unlikely as the late Gaye singing about email.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Speechwriter delivers a fun, insidery 'Thanks, Obama'." USA Today, 19 Sept. 2017, p. 01D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505702032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b1d3066. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505702032
Litt, David: THANKS, OBAMA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Litt, David THANKS, OBAMA Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 9, 19 ISBN: 978-0-06-
256845-8
President Barack Obama's speechwriter offers his take on an extraordinary tenure inside the White
House.There's an interesting subcategory of memoirs emerging from the Obama years. Unlike the heavy
hitters from the Cabinet, we're hearing from the young professionals who propelled the senator to power
and bore witness to his legacy. They also happen to be some of the funniest workplace comedies on the
shelves. In a memoir following closely on the heels of former Deputy Chief of Staff Alyssa Mastromonaco's
book, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? (2017), Litt, one of the youngest speechwriters in the history of
the White House, delivers a fast, funny ride through the halls of power. Haunted by the specter of Sarah
Palin ("So, how's that whole hopey, changey thing workin' out for ya?"), the author offers a stark contrast in
leadership between then and now. Working first for senior adviser Valerie Jarrett before becoming senior
presidential speechwriter, Litt admits his impressions were colored by The West Wing: "Like every
Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin." He reveals what it's like to
write four White House Correspondents' Association dinner speeches for the president, and he chronicles
some strange encounters with the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Weinstein, and the comedy duo Key
& Peele. But for every White House men's room anecdote or gee-whiz moment ("Air Force One is exactly
as cool as you would expect"), Litt offers piercing assessments of the nature of our politics. "Gridlock is an
accident, an inconvenience," he writes. "What happened on Capitol Hill was a strategy, and its architect was
Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell." His final thoughts, written as the next administration begins its reign,
are telling: "But here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the single most valuable lesson I learned in public
service: There are no grown-ups, at least not in the way I imagined as a kid." President Obama's running
question to Litt was, "so, are we funny?" Yes, they are--and insightful, too.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Litt, David: THANKS, OBAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b9972ae.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572679
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524515075165 2/2
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey
White House Years
Publishers Weekly.
264.31 (July 31, 2017): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years
David Litt. Ecco, $27.99 (320p) ISBN 978-006-256845-8
In this entertaining memoir, Litt recounts becoming, in 2011, one of eight speechwriters for President
Obama. Two years later, he held the title "special assistant to the president" and was Obama's go-to guy for
funny lines, with an ever-larger role in the president's remarks for the annual Correspondents' Dinner. His
career culminated in 2015 with the famous Correspondents' Dinner featuring "Obama's Anger Translator,"
Keegan-Michael Key's sketch-comedy character. Litt's tale shares a starry-eyed sensibility and gratification
in personal good fortune--in his case, landing a dream job soon after graduating from Yale--with other
accounts published by former Obama staffers. However, he manages to come off as not (too) privileged or
self-important, candidly recollecting some of his biggest gaffes as a White House speechwriter (for
instance, gravely offending the government and people of Kenya with a single, thoughtlessly written line.)
He also does an excellent job describing the genesis and performance of several of Obama's most powerful
speeches, including one made following the Charleston church shootings in 2015: "Then, without warning,
he paused, looked down, and shook his head.... Then, softly, the most powerful person on earth began to
sing." Veering between tragedy and comedy, between self-doubt and hubris, Litt vividly recreates a period
during which he saw his words sometimes become the words of a nation. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years." Publishers Weekly, 31 July 2017, p. 80.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499863474/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0028dc27. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499863474
Thanks, Obama
This memoir by a former White House speechwriter (and joke writer) is irresistibly charming. It also feels like the setup for a grim cosmic punch line.
By Katy Waldman
AFP_A4610
President Barack Obama speaks at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington on April 30, 2016.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Thanks, Obama is the “hopey, changey” memoir of senior White House speechwriter David Litt, who at 24 was catapulted into the inner sanctum of American democracy to pen jokes for the president and his aides. Not just jokes—Litt also crafted remarks about criminal justice reform, immigration, climate change, Betty White’s 90th birthday, and more. But his coup de grace was masterminding Obama’s stand-up performances at multiple White House Correspondents’ dinners, including the one featuring Keegan-Michael Key as Luther the Anger Translator. Litt writes that his eight years at the White House—he left in January of 2016—impressed him with the importance of values like service, purpose, and respect; taking a front-row seat to the legalization of gay marriage, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the oratorical and personal bravery of the nation’s first black president convinced him that the arc of the universe, however long, does bend toward justice.
Katy Waldman
KATY WALDMAN
Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer.
Well, good thing Litt likes jokes, because from the universe’s perspective Thanks, Obama is the object of a particularly cruel one. His memoir is a heartfelt ode to an America on the wane, a nation we trusted to slide glacially in the right direction, except that all the while, unbeknownst to us, the glacier was melting. (Disclaimer: I went to college with Litt, and we are passing acquaintances, but not close enough that it would affect my experience of the book.) Thanks, Obama is a compendium of patriotic lessons that may or may not endure; it feels like a time capsule or a magical portal to a republic turned to smoke. It can be disorienting, as when the author describes Donald Trump’s comeuppance—and, it was then presumed, political annihilation—at Obama’s hands during the 2011 nerd prom: “As the crowd applauded the president, the humiliated billionaire turned as red and angry as a blister. Well, I remember thinking, that’s the end of Donald Trump.”
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Like an editor at the world’s most misanthropic humor magazine, history took Litt’s manuscript and punched it up, ironizing his earnestness and lifting the stakes of his private soul-searching: Can those who love this country really change it? I consumed Thanks, Obama as a eulogy, a call to action, and a fervent rearticulation of first principles. But it’s hard not to also experience it as the setup for a terrible cosmic punch line.
170929_BOOKS_ThanksObama-cover
Of course, none of this is the book’s fault! The book itself is immensely appealing. In addition to Litt’s warm and engaging prose, it benefits from the inherent charm of its premise: the little guy brushing shoulders with the unthinkably powerful. Litt paints himself as starry-eyed and semi-hapless, an ingénue who blacks out the first time Obama addresses him and identifies with anonymous storm troopers aboard the Death Star. He is self-deprecating, gracious, and, of course, funny, with a gift for puncturing Oval Office glamor in ways that ultimately reinforce the dignity and decency of his workplace. (Remember when we all laughed about Obama reaching over the sneezeguard at Chipotle? That’s the kind of brutal critique 44 and his staff come in for.)
Certainly, there is a bit of elision here: Litt, a white male Ivy League graduate, is not quite the zero his comedic/fairy-tale setup needs him to be. But you never doubt that he feels like one—nor is it a stretch to imagine that riding in a helicopter alongside the Beretta-toting Counter-Assault Team (“If something bad happens, Secret Service gets the president out of trouble. The CAT team finds the trouble and kills it”) might elicit awe and insecurity. Plus, Litt acknowledges his privilege head-on, expressing pride in the success of his immigrant grandparents while also lightly roasting White House bro culture. (“If chest bumping had been permitted in the Oval, we would have gone for it.”)
Like an editor at the world’s most misanthropic humor magazine, history took Litt’s manuscript and punched it up, ironizing his earnestness.
You expect a White House speechwriter with a comedy specialty to deliver flowing sentences that also make you laugh. Litt’s wonderful descriptions, heavy on self-consciously goofy analogies, are one of the book’s joys, especially when he’s initiating D.C. outsiders into the institutions and lore of the Beltway. About one campaign tradition, the author writes, “Imagine if, with five minutes left in the Super Bowl, the opposing quarterbacks rushed to the fifty-yard line to sing ‘I Will Always Love You’ in a karaoke duet. Now imagine if, in addition to playing for opposing teams, each quarterback loathed everything the other stood for. Welcome to the Al Smith.” And Thanks, Obama also supplies the dishy anecdotes that are political memoir’s bread and butter: tales told from a reader-surrogate’s perspective about the foibles of the rich, influential, and amply body-guarded. In one scene, Litt recalls getting chewed out by Harvey Weinstein while trying desperately to adapt a Scarlett Johansson speech to the time constraints of the Democratic National Convention. In another, circumstances conspire to force him to inform the president that a photograph makes him look like Hitler. In yet another, he finds a grilled salmon fillet floating in a White House toilet and fears some sort of security breach. The best of these stories double as primers on the curious, whispered rituals of the West Wing, its coded self-assertions and exclusionary argot. We learn that the subject line “My edits” from a senior speechwriter translates to “Unmitigated disaster. Pure garbage. Rewrite.” And that the cool kids call POTUS “P.”
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But Thanks, Obama distinguishes itself as a feat of thinking, not just telling. Litt’s years in the White House have given him insight into the political moment: He can explain why the president’s “pathological calmness” might have alienated Americans who “were experiencing less violence than almost any generation in human history,” yet, thanks to social media, “witnessing more violence than ever before.” He beautifully observes that in a polarized country “day-to-day governing was like choosing the right words,” and “elections were like choosing a language.”
And the book can serve as a sneakily illuminating chronicle of workplace dysfunction. When, during a video-taping, the plastic lid on a diva light by Obama’s head begins to smolder, “releasing a curl of toxic smoke just a few inches from the president’s left ear,” Litt remembers how he and the other staffers were too scared to extinguish it. He diagnoses the problem: “What we needed was someone in charge of making sure the president’s head was not incinerated. But no such person existed. … And in Obamaworld, straying outside your lane was a mortal sin.”
The humility and the grind of being a staffer takes its toll on Litt, as does the cognitive dissonance of stoking a population’s hopes while wrestling with your own uncertainty. “I was living not one dream,” he says, “but two. In the first, I flew around on Barack Obama’s private jet while he helped me score brownie points with my girlfriend’s parents. … But the second dream was more fevered, more troubling. I was hovering midair. … The pilots were flying blind.”
Top Comment
I want someone from the Ivy League (Ok, and let's be more accurate it's more of a Columbia-Princeton-Yale-Harvard crowd at that) to be like, "Yup, we were there, we did some good things -- sane diplomacy, trade agreements, expansion of... More...
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At play here is something deeper than self-deprecation. You could argue that Trump has realized the memoir’s central, nagging worry: that Litt got lost in dreamland, hitched too much meaning to a fallible president and a flawed country, and was betrayed. Ultimately, your verdict on the viability of Thanks, Obama as a truthful reflection of what America is—not just what it was, or what we fantasized it was—probably depends on your temperament. In 2017, do you still think people are good? Can those who love a country change it?
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In my reading, at least, Litt makes room for pessimism without succumbing to it. The book, with its high-tide-low-tide rhythm of hope and disillusionment, is a bildungsroman mapped onto a political career. It narrates the shading of the author’s “great expectations,” but, as with most coming-of-age tales, what survives the onslaught of maturity has an earned resonance. “POTUS was brilliant,” Litt decides. “He was talented. He was on the right side of history.” He is also “just a guy.” In fact, though, Barack Obama is the guy—the one this memoir devotes its title to thanking, through the repurposing of a sarcastic meme. Litt minted his star converting world affairs into jokes. The translation of satire back to sincerity is trickier to pull off, and lands with its own undeniable grace.
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Thanks, Obama, by David Litt. Ecco.