I first met the Governor in his office with Rick, his Chief of Staff. I introduced myself; he said, “A pleasure”; and we sat down. For a few long seconds he said nothing. Then it seemed he wanted to speak. His mouth formed a circle, as if whatever he wanted to say began with a w.
“Wwwww,” he said, staring upward. Then he fixed his eyes on Rick. “Wwwwwha.”
Rick seemed ready to interject, but at last the Governor said, “Www. What are we doing here?”
Rick introduced me. “He’s here to talk about joining us in the press office. He’s a writer.”
“Oh, the writer.” Now engaged, the Governor looked at me and asked if I knew some name or other. I said I didn’t. He said this guy had had the job before me, that he’d been a writer at the State (a newspaper published in Columbia, South Carolina). He was a good guy. But he’d had to tell him it wasn’t working out and he needed to find something else. The Governor hadn’t kicked him out on to the streets, he said, just told him he needed to find something else. “He couldn’t find my voice.”
The Governor was “very interested in this larger idea of a brand,” he said. Every written product with his name on it had to be in the same style and have the same “cadence”; people should be able to read it and know it was his, whether or not they agreed with it. He mentioned the name of a famous politician and the name of his speechwriter. “Every speech he gives, every op-ed or whatever, sounds the same. Not the same, like boring the same. From the same source, consistent. I like that. It’s about consistency. You always know what you’re getting.”
I said consistency was a good thing in a politician. It suggested reliability. I thought I’d blundered in using the word politician, but he said, “Reliability. That’s a good word for it.”
He had seen some articles and reviews I’d written and conceded I must be “erudite” but wondered whether I could write in a way that “the mechanic in Greenwood can understand.” (Greenwood is a small town in the western part of the state). He told me to “take a stab” at an op-ed on the folly of carving out special tax breaks for “green energy” companies or something like that and get it to Rick by the next morning.
A few days later the Governor called me. He said something about pay, but so shocked and flattered was I by receiving a call from a sitting Governor that I couldn’t gather my thoughts sufficiently to negotiate a salary. When I hung up the phone, I was very pleased with myself.
When I started working for the Governor, I didn’t do any writing for a week or two. Mainly I just sat behind my desk trying to look busy. At some point the Press Secretary, Aaron, told me to read through the “op-ed book.” This was a giant three-ring binder of photocopies of the Governor’s published writing over the first four years of his administration. (His second term had begun just a month or two earlier). Reading the op-ed book would help me get used to the Governor’s “voice,” Aaron told me.
I spent a few hours reading these pieces. It worried me that I didn’t hear much of a voice. What I heard was more like a cough. Or the humming of a bad melody, with most of the notes sharp. One sentence stands out in my memory: “This is important not only because I think it ought to be a first order of business, but because it makes common sense.”
At that time there were four of us in the press shop or, to speak more correctly, the communications office. Aaron sat at the big desk. He had been a reporter for one of the regional papers during the boss’s first run for Governor. He had asked the candidate relentlessly difficult questions and seemed to enjoy it. Aaron’s fearlessness, together with his smoking habit, love of rap music, slovenly attire, and youth—he was only 25 during that first campaign—all suggested the kind of scorch-and-burn libertarianism that became the Governor’s brand. The Governor-elect (as he became in the fall of 2002) hired Aaron as a speechwriter. That didn’t go well. One of Aaron’s first contributions was to insert into one of the Governor’s speeches a glowing reference to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an allusion that enraged the State’s considerable Armenian population. Aaron was far better at talking than writing, and by the time I came on he was the Governor’s spokesman. He enjoyed arguing for its own sake and did it with a weird combination of conviction and phlegmatic composure. He would get into heated exchanges with other staffers over policy issues, and the whole time his eyes would stay half closed, as if he found the conversation slightly disappointing. Sometimes he would contend with reporters over the phone, the receiver clutched between his head and shoulder, and play video games at the same time. Aaron couldn’t be shaken or hurt; he could endure the Governor’s cruellest and most irrational criticisms as if he’d barely heard them.
There were three other guys in the press office: me, Nat and an alternating member, which at that time was Mack. Mack was from the Department of Commerce, a cabinet agency. Commerce was on the 15th floor of a sleek downtown building adjacent to the State House. The Governor had “borrowed” him from Commerce, which was his way of keeping operating costs for the office at about half of what it had been under the previous governor. Mack, who was from Nebraska or one of the Dakotas, seemed angry about being moved from the crisp, spacious offices of the Commerce Department to the Governor’s cluttered press office. He generally sat with his face sullenly fixed on his computer screen. I believe he had made the understandable but fatal error of interpreting the Governor’s criticisms of his writing as personal animus. Anyhow he moved on a few months later, and a myth grew up that he had been on the verge of killing someone.
Nat was a Michigander who had found himself in the south through some complicated set of circumstances involving a scholarship. He had a wife and two daughters, as I did, but a fiercer drive to succeed. Nat would usually arrive earlier and stay later than I did, and he was naturally inclined to become more emotionally invested in performing his job well than was healthy. There was a certain dry midwestern intensity about Nat: he laughed without smiling and always seemed to know something you didn’t. Later the Governor would put him in charge of operations, which meant he was always telling you to do something the Governor wanted you to do. He seemed uncomfortable giving direct orders, perhaps because this was the south and southerners don’t always say things directly. So he would tell you to do things in awkwardly courteous ways.
“Barton,” he might say, trying hard to sound relaxed and friendly, “uh, two questions for you. One, how’s your family?”
“They’re fine,” I would say. “What’s the second thing?”
The second thing would of course be the command, which Nat always put in the form of a question: “The Hibernian Society dinner is next month. Could you draft a few toasts for the Governor?”
"The tags on the first family’s cars were the ordinary ones, and when the Governor went to a catered banquet, you’d see him putting boiled shrimp or a couple of deviled eggs into a napkin and stuffing it into his jacket pocket so he wouldn’t have to buy dinner"The Governor had just won re-election to a second four-year term. He had routed his opponent, a gigantic man with an oafish grin who had criticised the Governor for failing to “get things done.” There was an element of truth in that criticism. The joke about the Governor was that he didn’t play well with others. Most of the state’s legislators hated him; they overrode his vetoes by huge margins. The contrast between him and them was extreme. They spoke with heavy accents; he spoke with a relaxed, somehow aristocratic lilt. They came across as warm and jolly; he was charming but aloof. They were mostly overweight, a few severely so, and physically unprepossessing; he was thin, six feet tall, with deer-like features and sad eyes. They had wives back home and, in many cases, girlfriends in the capital; the Governor’s wife had a natural, unflashy beauty, and their four well-adjusted young sons lent the family an appearance of decency and strength other politicians long for. The legislators had little regard for ideological differences; apart from the Rs and Ds after their names, their voting patterns were largely indistinguishable; the majority party exercised near total control of the legislature, and the opposition offered only an occasional squeak in protest, so desperate were its members to hold on to what power and prestige they had. The Governor, by contrast, spoke endlessly about ideological differences; again and again he denounced the majority party’s—his own party’s—reluctance to act on its supposed principles. Their staffers wore seersucker suits with pastel bow ties in the summer and high-quality wool suits the rest of the year; they drove gigantic SUVs and paid for them with six-figure salaries.
The Governor’s staffers were paid little and looked it. Members of the General Assembly enjoyed the perquisites of office and the visible trappings of authority: the catered banquets, the special car tags, the fawning female lobbyists. The tags on the first family’s cars were the ordinary ones, and when the Governor went to a catered banquet, you’d see him putting boiled shrimp or a couple of deviled eggs into a napkin and stuffing it into his jacket pocket so he wouldn’t have to buy dinner on the way home. They named roads and interchanges after themselves; one of the main routes from the capital to the coast, for example, reads like a roll call in the Senate. There were never any plans to name anything after the Governor.
The Governor was famous for his frugality; it was part of the brand. His father, though well off by most standards—he was a heart surgeon in the state’s Low country—had prevented his children from enjoying much in the way of luxury. The Governor had inherited some wealth, and he’d had a post-collegiate stint at Goldman Sachs and learned to make a good deal more (how I’m not sure). But he inherited his father’s parsimonious ways. There were legends about how he had slept on a futon during his days in Congress (he had won his first election in 1994 and served three terms) in order to return his housing allowance to the US Treasury; about how, despite the millions he made in real estate, he had driven the same old Honda for years. In politics, legends are always just legends, and enterprising reporters were always trying to upend those of the Governor’s frugality. But these attempts usually ended up reinforcing as much of the legend as they contradicted. He hadn’t slept on a futon every night, a reporter discovered; often he slept in a Georgetown apartment owned by a friend. But this only emphasised the fact that he had in fact slept on a futon in his office.
The remarkable thing about his reputation for cheapness is that it was true. Most of his clothing was in a deplorable state. He would not consent to have it dry-cleaned; his staff, and his wife, would occasionally have his shirts and trousers cleaned without his knowledge. He wore only one coat, a navy blazer with one or two missing sleeve buttons, and one pair of trousers, charcoal grey. Both had so many stains that, had they been of a lighter colour, their filth would have been revolting. Once I saw inside the collar of one of his white button-up shirts; it was solid brown. Another time he wore the same white shirt, an ink stain on the sleeve, for almost two weeks straight.
The Governor’s neurotic cheapness had bigger consequences. One was that most of the staff were under 30 years old. He wanted a tiny staff, paid poorly and prepared to work long hours, which in practice meant young people, mostly unmarried. Sometimes it seemed like a band of kids were in charge of the state. Once, when some of the senior staff were absent, Rick, the Chief of Staff, remarked that it looked like “Bring Your Kids to Work Day, only without the parents.” Another consequence was that you knew you could be let go. It wasn’t a typical government job in which you could get lost in the process. There were only about 25 of us in the office—half the size of administrations in other small states—and poor performance was obvious to everybody. There was nowhere to hide, no way to settle at the bottom. This was probably a good thing in most respects, but there was something indecent in the way some of us strove, like prisoners in a gulag, to become useful to the master.
I began to think this way after just a few weeks. A month or two in, there were signs that I might not be the writer the Governor wanted. Almost certainly wasn’t. He hadn’t liked any of my op-eds. During those first few months Laura, my wife, told me several times that I needed to start writing badly—badly like him, with clumsy, meandering sentences and openings that seemed calculated to make you stop reading. But I couldn’t bring myself to try it.
I don’t claim that my writing was brilliant, but the objections he raised were mystifying to me and sometimes totally unreasonable. He would quibble with a harmless phrase and, instead of saying simply that he didn’t like it and having me change it or changing it himself, he would fulminate about it and rewrite the entire piece in a fit of irritation. It was almost as if he was afraid that if somebody started writing precisely what he wanted, he’d have no control over what was written. Expressing constant dissatisfaction was perhaps his way of maintaining control. Once, he stormed into the press office, paper in hand, incensed that I had written the words “towns of Lee County.” He thought it should have been “towns in Lee County.” He walked around to various offices—legislative, policy, law—asking staffers if they thought it sounded right to say “towns of” or “towns in” Lee County.
I tried writing some letters for him. This seemed to go slightly, though only slightly, better.
Every great politician has a special discipline, and the Governor’s was letter writing. The rule was, if anybody said anything favourable about him in the press or anywhere else, that person would get a personal letter from the Governor. Not a form letter: the words had to make it clear that this letter was to this person for this reason. The press office was also tasked with drafting “happy letters”—letters to people who had done something heroic, received awards, or done or achieved something otherwise noteworthy.
One of the first happy letters I wrote was to a soldier who had been awarded a Purple Heart. I drafted a letter of moderate length written in an informal style with modestly stately diction: not flowery but sufficiently laudatory. I showed him the letter.
“Again,” he said, gesturing in a way that signified dissatisfaction. “What did this guy do to get a Purple Heart?”
“He defused roadside bombs.”
“I need—you know—something thoughtful, something moving. Just give me something else.”
There were several more exchanges between the Governor and me over this letter, and they all went about the same way. At last he approved a draft, making only one change. I had written, “the fact that you’ve risked your life for your country”; he altered it to “risked your life in the service of national duty.”
It’s impossible to attain much success in politics if you’re the sort of person who can’t abide disingenuousness. This isn’t to say politics is full of lies and liars; it has no more liars than other fields do. Actually one hears very few proper lies in politics. Using vague, slippery, or just meaningless language is not the same as lying: it’s not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing.
"This is the kind of statement Aaron would need: one that said something without saying anything"Sometimes, for instance, there would be a matter the Governor didn’t want to discuss in public, but we knew he’d be asked about it at his next public appearance, or in any case Aaron would be asked about it. Let’s say the head of a cabinet agency had been accused by a state senator of running a cockfighting ring. His behaviour would fall within executive purview, but since he had not been indicted or even legally accused, he couldn’t be fired or forced to resign. Aaron knew the Governor would be asked about it at a press conference, so our office would issue a statement to any member of the press who asked about it. “[The Senator’s] remarks have raised some troubling questions,” the statement might say, “and we’re looking closely at the situation in an effort to determine whether it merits further investigation by state or local law enforcement. At the same time, we want to avoid rushing to judgement, and we hope all concerned will likewise avoid making accusations in the absence of evidence.”
This is the kind of statement Aaron would need: one that said something without saying anything. It would get the Governor on record without committing him to any course of action. Hence the rhetorical dead weight: “state or local law enforcement” instead of just “law enforcement”; all that about “rushing to judgement” and “making accusations in the absence of evidence,” as if anybody needed to be told that. If a reporter asked the Governor about it, he could avoid talking about it without having to use that self-incriminating phrase “No comment.” “I’d go back to what we’ve already said on this,” he might say, and repeat the gaseous phrases of the statement. Many people take this as evidence of duplicity or cynicism. But they don’t know what it’s like to be expected to make comments, almost every working day, on things of which they have little or no reliable knowledge or about which they just don’t care. They don’t appreciate the sheer number of things on which a politician is expected to have a position. Issues on which the Governor had no strong opinions, events over which he had no control, situations on which it served no useful purpose for him to comment—all required some kind of remark from our office.
On a typical day Aaron might be asked to comment on the indictment of a local school board chairman, the ongoing drought in the Upstate, a dispute between a power company and the state’s environmental regulatory agency and a study concluding that some supposedly crucial state agency had been underfunded for a decade. Then there were the things the Governor actually cared about: a senate committee’s passage of a bill on land use, a decision by the State Supreme Court on legislation applying to only one county, a public university’s decision to raise tuition by 12 per cent. Commenting on that many things is unnatural, and sometimes it was impossible to sound sincere. There was no way around it, though. Journalists would ask our office about anything having remotely to do with the Governor’s sphere of authority, and you could give only so many minimalist responses before you began to sound disengaged or ignorant or dishonest. And the necessity of having to manufacture so many views on so many subjects, day after day, fosters a sense that you don’t have to believe your own words. You get comfortable with insincerity. It affected all of us, not just the boss. Sometimes I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.
It was our job to generate supplies of “language.” Once the Governor was comfortable with a certain argument or a certain way of stating a position, that became our “language.” Language fell under the press office’s purview. “Do we have anything on the cigarette tax?” someone from the policy office would ask. “Yeah, we’ve got language on that.” Every week, sometimes every day, some new dispute would have all the attention—tax incentives for corporate retailers, exorbitant tuition hikes at public universities, a bill forcing businesses to verify the immigration status of all their employees—and language was needed for each one. Sometimes you got the feeling that all these fights over policies didn’t amount to much more than a lot of words. It was Foucault who held that political power structures were really just a matter of “competing discourses.” There’s something to that idea, only in my experience nobody controlled anything, and certainly not discourse. Nobody ever won. It felt like a long pitched battle in which there were no victors and only occasional casualties.
Once, when the Governor had angered the public education establishment over a funding issue, the office received a barrage of calls chastising him for his “arrogance.” Almost all the callers, we began to notice, used that word. Then we realised that most of them were just reading a statement given to them by some advocacy group. I was sitting next to June, the Deputy Chief of Staff, when she took one of these calls. She had heard the statement recited many times already and knew it ended with the words “Please tell the Governor to stop his political posturing. We, the voters, are watching.” Evidently this caller had stumbled over the phrase “political posturing” and lost her place in the script. So June helpfully added, “You, the voters, are watching?”
“Yes,” the caller said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” June answered, chewing gum and playing Brick Breaker on her computer. “I’ll pass along your message to the Governor.”
From "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics" by Barton Swaim. Copyright (c) 2015 by Barton Swaim. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc
