I couldn’t sleep for shit.
Friday night had turned into Saturday morning, and I was staring at the ceiling in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., only blocks from the White House, recovering from my third hot shower of the night. The fever that had developed from an 11-hour Amtrak trip down the East Coast a day earlier hadn’t left my body, and the only way I knew how to deal with the chills was to take hot showers and hope for the best.
But that wasn’t the real reason for my insomnia and this body-zapping panic: I would be speaking to the president of the United States of America in 10 hours. On Air Force One. Before his speech in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march that took place on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
On Monday, I had received an email from the White House offering “a potential opportunity with President Obama in the very near future.” The opportunity was to be a part of a roundtable of five journalists who would have 30 minutes to talk with the president.
As the week progressed, however, the stakes grew. With the date inching closer, the details became clearer. On Friday, the final email:
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, just a sunrise away from that one question, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to ask. I had written one question down, but I wasn’t convinced it was the question. And I was running out of time.
All I could think about was why I was here. Or, more accurately, what brought me here. I knew what I’d wanted to ask for years. I just didn’t know if, when the time came, I’d actually ask it.
I've been chasing Barack Obama for more than a decade. I watched his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention while deep in the throes of college application essays. It was a speech that I needed to hear, a speech that felt as if it were specifically for me. Before I knew it, I was working on Capitol Hill in 2007 as a college intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the then-Senator Obama traveling on the underground monorail from the Senate to the Capitol floor. I reveled in the excitement when he announced his presidency that February. I volunteered for that campaign in 2008 in New Hampshire, taking to the streets of New England with a megaphone following his victory, and hoping to one day be a part of his actual staff. In 2011, looking for a way out of graduate school, I applied for a job as a blogger in his reelection campaign — and I almost got that job, before then not getting that job.
My current job — the second attempt to drop out of graduate school — is a result of not getting a job with the Obama campaign. Living in New York is a result of not getting a job with the Obama administration. And my slow crawl away from politics and toward writing is a direct result of chasing — and never quite catching — the world that surrounds President Obama. The chase has felt never-ending. But in a way, I owe everything to the chase.
The chase was on my mind as I rode in a car to Joint Base Andrews on Saturday morning. It’s what I thought about on the shuttle to Air Force One with the four other journalists, Charles Blow from the New York Times, Zerlina Maxwell from Essence, White House correspondent April Ryan from the American Urban Radio Networks, and DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist and dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. And that chase is what I thought of when we arrived at Andrews and stood before Air Force One. (...)
Air Force One is a plane on PEDs. It rumbles with such force that we were told attempting to record the roundtable on our personal devices would be a challenge, and that the stenographer would have a transcript of proceedings ready for us later that day. In terms of size, it appeared to have swallowed two double-aisled commercial airliners. But it’s still a plane. It has wheels, it has wings, it takes off, and it goes into the air.
There were stairs everywhere, and so many rooms. And many of these rooms had doors. The floor plan felt like a labyrinth of narrow walkways, leading to beige area after beige area. Both times I left my part of the cabin by myself, I got lost. And even though I was never lost for more than 10 seconds, I immediately felt that let-go-of-your-mom’s-hand-at–Six Flags lost, scared that I was either going to get in trouble or never find my way back.
Every now and then, during a break in conversation, I’d retreat to my notebook and stare at my question. I’d written a second one focused on Selma, but it wasn’t right. It was a cop-out question. A question anyone could have asked. So I knew what I had to do. I needed to change a word here, move a sentence there, make it more concise, but I knew it was absolutely the type of question I was asked here to put forward.
Friday night had turned into Saturday morning, and I was staring at the ceiling in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., only blocks from the White House, recovering from my third hot shower of the night. The fever that had developed from an 11-hour Amtrak trip down the East Coast a day earlier hadn’t left my body, and the only way I knew how to deal with the chills was to take hot showers and hope for the best.
But that wasn’t the real reason for my insomnia and this body-zapping panic: I would be speaking to the president of the United States of America in 10 hours. On Air Force One. Before his speech in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march that took place on what became known as Bloody Sunday.On Monday, I had received an email from the White House offering “a potential opportunity with President Obama in the very near future.” The opportunity was to be a part of a roundtable of five journalists who would have 30 minutes to talk with the president.
As the week progressed, however, the stakes grew. With the date inching closer, the details became clearer. On Friday, the final email:
Following brief remarks at the top of the roundtable, the President will take a question from each participant.As in one question. Zero room for error. My editor’s response was as blunt as it was true: “Better make it count.”
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, just a sunrise away from that one question, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to ask. I had written one question down, but I wasn’t convinced it was the question. And I was running out of time.
All I could think about was why I was here. Or, more accurately, what brought me here. I knew what I’d wanted to ask for years. I just didn’t know if, when the time came, I’d actually ask it.
I've been chasing Barack Obama for more than a decade. I watched his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention while deep in the throes of college application essays. It was a speech that I needed to hear, a speech that felt as if it were specifically for me. Before I knew it, I was working on Capitol Hill in 2007 as a college intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the then-Senator Obama traveling on the underground monorail from the Senate to the Capitol floor. I reveled in the excitement when he announced his presidency that February. I volunteered for that campaign in 2008 in New Hampshire, taking to the streets of New England with a megaphone following his victory, and hoping to one day be a part of his actual staff. In 2011, looking for a way out of graduate school, I applied for a job as a blogger in his reelection campaign — and I almost got that job, before then not getting that job.
My current job — the second attempt to drop out of graduate school — is a result of not getting a job with the Obama campaign. Living in New York is a result of not getting a job with the Obama administration. And my slow crawl away from politics and toward writing is a direct result of chasing — and never quite catching — the world that surrounds President Obama. The chase has felt never-ending. But in a way, I owe everything to the chase.
The chase was on my mind as I rode in a car to Joint Base Andrews on Saturday morning. It’s what I thought about on the shuttle to Air Force One with the four other journalists, Charles Blow from the New York Times, Zerlina Maxwell from Essence, White House correspondent April Ryan from the American Urban Radio Networks, and DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist and dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. And that chase is what I thought of when we arrived at Andrews and stood before Air Force One. (...)
Air Force One is a plane on PEDs. It rumbles with such force that we were told attempting to record the roundtable on our personal devices would be a challenge, and that the stenographer would have a transcript of proceedings ready for us later that day. In terms of size, it appeared to have swallowed two double-aisled commercial airliners. But it’s still a plane. It has wheels, it has wings, it takes off, and it goes into the air.
There were stairs everywhere, and so many rooms. And many of these rooms had doors. The floor plan felt like a labyrinth of narrow walkways, leading to beige area after beige area. Both times I left my part of the cabin by myself, I got lost. And even though I was never lost for more than 10 seconds, I immediately felt that let-go-of-your-mom’s-hand-at–Six Flags lost, scared that I was either going to get in trouble or never find my way back.
Every now and then, during a break in conversation, I’d retreat to my notebook and stare at my question. I’d written a second one focused on Selma, but it wasn’t right. It was a cop-out question. A question anyone could have asked. So I knew what I had to do. I needed to change a word here, move a sentence there, make it more concise, but I knew it was absolutely the type of question I was asked here to put forward.
by Rembert Browne, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Rembert Browne
