Rebuild the Dream (5 page)

I repeated the words. “That's it. Four words. Everything we do, every day, should be an effort to set him up to give a speech that concise.”

One of my older co-workers started to get it, and she slowly started to nod. “You mean, he would be standing in front of a big screen or something? Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Huge screen. It's showing some God-awful, ugly image from 2008, right? The president walks out onto stage in front of the screen, holding a clicker in his hand. He looks up at the screen and says, ‘Before.' Hits click. ‘After.'
Bam
—there is a new image. Same neighborhood. But now it looks ten times better. Then he does it again. Shows some kid in all kinds of trouble.
Bam
—now the kid is working at a green job, taking care of his family, maybe even launching a green company or something.”

Heads started nodding around the room. Someone offered, “Maybe he could show some degraded land that has been restored.”

“Exactly!” I said, feeling the team warming to the idea. “And he just goes on, showing remarkable improvement after remarkable improvement, over and over again. It is all right there, visible on the screen, on issue after issue. That's the whole speech. Then at the end, he just says, ‘Thank you.' And he walks off stage. Then
boom!
Standing ovation.”

An experienced agency hand warned, “Well, some of his successes may be hard to show with just a photograph. What if the screen could show a negative statistic, like how few solar panels we had up in the United States in 2008. Then he clicks it, and the number accelerates to some astronomical number.”

“Yeah, that could work,” I agreed. “But I do want for us to think of images and scenes that people could see, smell, and touch in the real world. Let's figure out where we can help agencies and departments coordinate better, to produce and track their visible, tangible results.”

One team member pointed down at the reams of papers, reports, and proposals in front of him. “At the end of the day,” he said, “all of this stuff should speak for itself.”

I had high hopes. What if we helped multiple departments and agencies coordinate with the Appalachian Regional Commission to stimulate green jobs in distressed rural communities? What if we created a project to accelerate clean energy development on Native
American land? What if we worked to create market demand in U.S. states for wind turbines manufactured in places like Michigan and Indiana? What if we focused multiple federal departments on the goal of creating a new market that could refit 100 million American homes so that they wasted less energy?

I was excited when the “Recovery Through Retrofit” plan and an exploration of green jobs in Appalachia gained early approvals. In the time that I worked there, few of my other ideas got beyond the earliest conceptual stages. But I was in the ideal position to explore different notions and begin developing them as recommendations for my superiors. If I had been a step lower in the hierarchy, I would not have had the authority to shape such highly creative, outside-the-box proposals. If I had been a step higher, I probably would not have had the time to do so given the crushing, daily burdens shouldered by the top guns in the White House. I was in the ideal spot, and I was beginning to find my groove.

I WAS PROUD OF WHAT WE WERE TRYING TO DO
, and I took great joy in defending and promoting the president's green agenda in the press. Once a week, our team would work with the Department of Energy to identify cities where green stimulus dollars were going. Then I would get booked onto local radio programs, to make sure that listeners knew about the disbursements. I saw it as a great way to advance the administration's agenda, while keeping myself steeped in grassroots questions and concerns. Local audiences were usually interested in different topics than those that were obsessing the Washington, DC, media.

I would specifically ask to get plugged into radio stations that carried Rush Limbaugh's program; that was the easiest way to identify the conservative stations in the heartland. In keeping with
our bipartisan aspirations, I thought it was important that we make our case to those who were the most skeptical. As a Southerner and a Christian, I knew how to communicate with those audiences.

At that time, I had a fair chance to make my case; the backlashers had not yet tried to turn me into a boogeyman. Usually, a conservative radio personality would heap scorn on the president's clean energy agenda, right off the bat—either through sarcasm or sometimes by launching a withering, contemptuous polemic. I learned to fire right back: “Hold on a second, what I want to know is this: Why do you want the jobs of tomorrow to be in every other country—except our own? Why do you want China to have the next generation in energy technology? What kind of patriot are you?”

I would not let up, “Here is the real danger: we are about to go from importing dirty energy from the Middle East, to importing clean energy technology from Asia—skipping all the good jobs for Americans in between. We have a president who wants the United States to be number one in the next generation of energy technology, the same way we are number one in Internet technology. You might settle for having the USA barely making it into the top ten. But President Obama wants us to dominate that field.”

It was fun. They expected me to come on the air and start pontificating about polar bears and air pollution, but I was speaking with passion about competition, innovation, and national pride.

I looked forward to those weekly workouts. Often, the producers would call back to say they thought I had done a great job, even though they disagreed with my views. They said they appreciated that a progressive was willing to come on the air, take some abuse, and exchange substantive ideas. I hoped to become someone who could help the administration bridge the divide between left and right on the green jobs agenda.

Alas, it was not to be.

ONE SUMMER NIGHT
, my personal Blackberry buzzed. When I looked at the incoming email, my heart almost stopped. An African American organization that I had cofounded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Color of Change, was calling for advertisers to boycott the Glenn Beck show on
Fox News
.

Beck had called President Obama a racist. He had also singled me out to be the target of stupid skits, calling me a felon and a communist. The charges were false, and the tomfoolery was annoying. But life in the White House requires a thick skin and a laser-like focus on the tasks at hand. We were not in the business of getting distracted by silly TV personalities.

Nonetheless, I called my Color of Change cofounder, James Rucker, at home and fussed at him. “What are you guys doing over there? Do you know that my name is still on your website from Hurricane Katrina days? Someone is going to think that I am behind this boycott. Or that the White House is behind it, through me.”

My old friend doubted I had reason for concern. “Everyone can see that Beck is out of control. I don't think any national TV host has ever called a sitting U.S. president a racist—not even Reagan or Dubya. The guy needs to be off the air.”

I told him, “Look, I get all of that. But the people I work with don't care what Glenn Beck says. He has zero influence here in Washington. The few people who do know who he is think he is some kind of jokester. But a boycott will just make him crazier. Beck's people may think you are doing this as payback for Beck razzing me.”

Rucker sounded sheepish: “Beck said something bad about you, too?” I related the gist of some of his recent rants. My friend
confessed, “Well, I didn't know about all of that. I mean: it is not like I sit around watching his show every day.”

I felt uneasy about Color of Change poking at a rattlesnake. But there was nothing I could do about it, and I took some comfort in the fact that advertiser boycotts almost never work. Companies generally ignore complaints from social justice groups and keep right on placing their ads on popular shows. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the whole thing would fade away.

Not a chance. Color of Change's crusade to rid the national airwaves of Beck was destined to become one of the most successful pushes for an advertiser boycott in the history of American media. Hundreds of top national advertisers deserted the show and never came back.
Fox News
could make very little money on the highly watched program—because only marginal companies were willing to risk being associated with Beck.

To retaliate, Beck launched a jihad.

I was an easy target. Beck and his minions could dig up a photo of me in my angry young man phase, with my dreadlocks and combat boots and Black Panther book bag. They could prove that I'd studied Marxism. They could find a more recent video in which I had used a vulgarity to describe the GOP, just before I joined the administration.

Also, they proved they could just make up stuff.

The lies and libels were endless. Beck said that I was a self-avowed communist, in the present tense, ignoring the obvious evolution of my views. He said dozens of times that I was a convicted felon, because I had been detained for a few hours at a peaceful protest. My former employer wrote a long essay, obliterating every charge. (See
appendix
for a comprehensive refutation of Beck's crazy claims.)

Still, the White House decided that the best course was to simply ignore him. No other serious news outlets were repeating his
claims, not even other right-wingers on
Fox News
. Responding might be seen as rewarding his nutty behavior. Beck could have continued his crusade forever, and neither the White House nor I would have ever responded.

Then the bottom fell out. Someone ran a story that said I had signed a petition blaming George W. Bush for planning the 9/11 terror attacks. The very suggestion was abhorrent, and the specific language was vile and ridiculous. I knew that I would never have added my name to something like that. Even in my most radical days, I was not a conspiracy theorist. I racked my brain, trying to understand how my name wound up on the website. Maybe an Ella Baker Center staffer had added my name to the petition without my permission? Maybe someone tricked me into signing something, without showing me all of the language? I told my superiors that if I had ever signed something like that, I had not done so knowingly.

While I tried to sort out the truth, every news outlet ran with the story. Unless you have been at the center of a media firestorm, it is almost impossible to describe how unreal it is. There is a face on television, and it is yours. But the commentary around that face is so distorted that it may as well be the visage of another person. One day, you are a three-dimensional person, known to your friends and colleagues in all your complexity, good and bad. The next day, you are a flattened out, two-dimensional, billboard-sized caricature of yourself on your worst day. Your name is everywhere, but you no longer exist.

The disconnect between your inflated televised image and the logistics of your practical life is particularly disorienting. You still live in the same house. No limo appears to take you anywhere, just because your face is on television. You still have to run down the street in the rain to catch the bus and the train. The makers of
Blackberry do not send anyone to your home to help you handle the spike in phone calls and e-mails.

No “fame fairies” show up to do your chores for you. You still have to walk to the store for toilet paper when you run out. Nobody is assigned to read the kids bedtime stories, change diapers at 3 a.m., and help little ones get dressed in the morning. (I promise you, children don't care what the national press is saying about you; they still want you to help them find their special, rainbow pencil before they go off to school.) Real life goes on, beneath the ever-widening mushroom cloud of the surreal.