Free The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim

paycheck.
    The editorialists, momentarily exercised about the NGA scandal, soon forgot about it. At one point the opposition party was said to be preparing a hard-hitting advertisement excoriating the governor for improper use of state money, but it never happened. Why? Not because some independent body rendered a decision and settled the matter in the governor’s favor or because the governor’s public explanationswere persuasive, but because it wasn’t titillating enough to expand into a real scandal. I had done my little part to ensure that it blew over. I’m glad I did, really. Anything said to be an outrage by the egregious buffoon Jake Knotts deserves a full pardon. But it bothered me a little that I had done my part simply because it was my job.

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    THE ART OF SAYING NO
    T he governor could sense that most of us were just bureaucrats: we weren’t deeply or emotionally invested in the administration’s successes or in the governor’s political ambitions, but in our income and career and families; we didn’t care much how history would treat him. So it was easy to put off assignments or to do them without great attention to detail. His leadership style, if that’s what it was, was to counteract this tendency with erratic bouts of rage. Without notice, he would storm into the office and walk from room to room, a stack of papers in one hand, like notes for a lecture, berating the staff for laziness and incompetence. “Again,” he would say, “I can’t be the guy pointing this stuff out. This is your job, and yourjob, and your job”—his finger pointing at various bystanders—“not mine.”
    The one thing consistently neglected by the staff was, as the governor called it, the big board. This was a massive dry-erase board in the conference room adjoining the governor’s office; its purpose was to give him an overarching view of the administration’s aims and strategies. The board was meant to display a list of goals, various dates by which these goals were to be accomplished, the names of legislators who were promoting this or that initiative, and many other items that were vital to know one minute and irrelevant the next. He wanted the big board updated constantly; it should always look completely different from what it had looked like a week before. Nat, who had excellent administrative skills, was in charge of it.
    There were two problems with the big board. The first was that it was useless. There was such a vast array and quantity of items needing to be written on it that a properly updated big board would have required its own full-time staffer. The other problem was that the governor cared about it only infrequently. He wouldn’t bother looking at it or asking about it for months, then suddenly it was all he could think about. He would discern immediately that it hadn’t been altered in a month or two and collapse into a fit of angry inarticulacy. “How am I supposed to know where I am?” he’d say, or “I’m on the road and I’m in a black hole, and I come back here and I look at the big board and it hasn’t been updated and I’m still in a black hole.”
    Sometimes Nat would spend an hour or so on the bigboard when the governor was out of the office. I would sit in the conference room to keep him company; he had the look of a great artist creating a masterwork. He never seemed to have the right kinds of markers—some were the permanent kind, which wouldn’t erase properly; others were out of ink—with the result that the whole thing looked like a great multicolored palimpsest. There were all sorts of categories on the big board: “the week ahead,” “the long view,” “don’t let these die,” and so on. There was one category called “the next 90 days,” and under it I once noticed two items I didn’t recognize. The first was “Real