Jennifer Close: The Hopefuls

This is what people talk about at an Obama campaign reunion:

· How early they joined the campaign

· What they did on the campaign

· Who they slept with on the campaign

· Good hotels

· Bad hotels

· How many Hilton points they have

· How many frequent flier miles they have

· Who worked for Hillary before joining Obama (This was whispered behind the backs of former Hillary staffers like it was a shameful secret. Sort of like herpes.)

· Inside jokes about lost luggage

· How amazing Iowa was (Usually you’d hear someone say something like “Weren’t you in Iowa? Oh man, you should’ve been there. You missed out. It felt like we were changing the world.” Then you’d brace yourself for about an hour’s worth of Iowa stories.)

We were at a bar near the White House called The Exchange, which had a lot of TVs and smelled like bleach and dirty rags. Matt ordered drinks for us at the bar and then we walked around, stopping every few seconds so he could give someone a handshake or a half hug and say, “Hey man, how’ve you been?” He was more hyper than usual — being around the campaign people made him jumpy like he’d been chugging Red Bull. All that Hope and Change will do that to a person. Every time he introduced me to someone, he’d put his hand on my back and push me forward a little, saying, “This is Beth, my wife.” And when he’d tell me the name of the person I was meeting, he’d always include their job title. “This is Larry, an associate research director at the White House.” Each time, I’d say something like “Wow, that’s great.” I had no idea what any of it meant, but I did my best to look impressed.

Eventually we found ourselves standing in a circle of people listening to this guy, Billy, tell a story about one of the early fund-raising events. He was animated and everyone was hanging on his every word. “So, I was driving the Senator around Minnesota in a rental car,” he said. “A Ford Fiesta, I think. This was sometime in 2007. And we hit a pothole and almost lost a tire.”

Everyone laughed like this was really funny, so I did too, but it gave me kind of a creepy feeling. Billy was telling this story like it was about potholes or Ford Fiestas, but it wasn’t. The real points of the story were:

1. Billy knew Obama when he was a senator and he knew him so well that sometimes he just forgot that he was the president now and still referred to him as the Senator. Such a simple mistake.

2. He joined the campaign so early that there weren’t even drivers yet, which means that Billy drove around Minnesota with Obama in shotgun. How crazy is that? How jealous is everyone?

3. And again, just to repeat it, he joined the campaign early. So early. Earlier than everyone else. Before you, definitely. He always knew Obama would be the nominee. Possibly, he was the first person in the world to know.

As everyone laughed at the hilarious Ford Fiesta story, Matt put his hand on my back and I braced myself to be introduced to someone else, but he just leaned down and whispered, “We can go soon, okay?” I nodded and tried to look like I was having fun, like I loved being at this reunion. (Which by the way was a really weird thing to call it — a reunion — because all of these people lived in DC and most of them worked together. If they wanted to reunite, they could do it over lunch or coffee or running into each other in the hallway.) And so, I just shrugged and said to Matt, “Sure, we can go whenever you want.”

Matt smiled at me like he knew I was lying, which I appreciated. I was making an effort to be positive about moving to DC, but these people didn’t make it easy. Everyone at that happy hour seemed just a little off, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. When I mentioned this to Matt, he said, “It’s all people who work in politics. Nature of the beast, I guess.”

But as we stood there that night, listening to another story about Iowa, I had a realization. All of the people there reminded me of high school student council members, the ones who fought for pizza lunches and dance themes with great passion. They were all so eager. (And borderline annoying.) Was Matt one of them? Had I never noticed? Had he always been this way or just become one of them when I wasn’t paying attention?

—

I’d been in DC for about a week at that point, and I kept waiting for the newness to wear off, for it to feel less strange. Matt had already been there for months by the time I moved — he’d started working for the Presidential Inaugural Committee right after the election — and he seemed to have no trouble fitting in to this new city. I visited him often while he was working on PIC (the horrible acronym everyone used for the committee, which made me think of fingers in noses), and as I met his work friends and walked around the monuments, I tried to imagine what our life would look like there, tried to see the good parts of DC. But each time I left to return to New York, I was relieved. I’d get off the train at Penn Station, breathe in the smell of urine, popcorn, and dirt, and feel like I was coming home.

After the inauguration, Matt was offered a job in the White House counsel’s office and I knew we were really moving to DC. It was what we’d talked about, what we’d planned for. It was the whole reason Matt joined the campaign in the first place. It was too late to back out now.

We found a place just north of Dupont Circle, on a tiny block with five town houses, diagonally across the street from a Hilton. The day we’d gone to look at the apartment, Matt had pointed at the hotel. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“What? The hotel?”

“Yeah, that right there. Look at the doorway. Does it look familiar?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Just look at it for a minute.”

Matt was always doing this, always insisting that I knew things I didn’t. Once, when we were on opposite teams during a Trivial Pursuit game with friends, he refused to let me pass on the question “Who once warned, ‘Never eat more than you can lift’?” I didn’t even have a guess, but Matt wouldn’t let it go. “Come on, Beth, you know this,” he kept saying, as our friends sat there and I got embarrassed and then mad. “I don’t know,” I kept insisting. (The answer was Miss Piggy, and to this day, I have no idea why Matt was sure I knew the answer, but it still remains one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had. We didn’t play Trivial Pursuit for years after that.)

Standing in front of the apartment, I didn’t have the patience to play Matt’s game and guess what was special about the Hilton. “Just tell me,” I said.

“It’s where Reagan was shot,” he said. “It’s the Hinckley Hilton. Look, that’s where he was coming out of the hotel, and right there is where he got shot. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I said. I was tired of walking around and looking at apartments, and knew that my attitude was putting a sourness over the whole afternoon. Matt was just trying to lighten the mood, but it was a little weird to try to cheer me up by showing me the spot of an attempted presidential assassination, wasn’t it? (Although I soon found myself pointing it out to everyone who came to visit. When a friend from college who lived in Brooklyn told me that Sesame Street was filming on her block, I quickly came back with “From our front door, you can see where Reagan was shot.” Take that, Elmo.)