T

exchanging advice, syncing our schedules, and reviewing every plan. The
president’s advisers in my opinion could be overly fretful about appearances. At
one point several years later, when I decided to get bangs cut into my hair, my
staff would feel the need to first run the idea past Barack’s staff, just to make sure
there wouldn’t be a problem.

With the economy in rough shape, Barack’s team was constantly guarding
against any image coming out of the White House that might be seen as frivolous
or light, given the somberness of the times. This didn’t always sit well with me. I
knew from experience that even during hard times, maybe especially during hard
times, it was still okay to laugh. For the sake of children, in particular, you had to
find ways to have fun. On this front, my team had been wrangling with Barack’s
communications staff over an idea I’d had to host a Halloween party for kids at
the White House. The West Wing—particularly David Axelrod, now a senior
adviser in the administration, and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs—thought it
would be perceived as too showy, too costly, and could potentially alienate
Barack from the public. “The optics are just bad” was how they put it. I
disagreed, arguing that a Halloween party for local kids and military families
who’d never seen the White House before was a perfectly appropriate use for a
tiny slice of the Social Office’s entertaining budget.

Axe and Gibbs never fully consented, but at some point they stopped
fighting us on it. At the end of October, to my great delight, a thousand-pound
pumpkin sat on the White House lawn. A brass band of skeletons played jazz
music, while a giant black spider descended from the North Portico. I stood in
front of the White House, dressed as a leopard—in black pants, a spotted top, and
a pair of cat ears on a headband—as Barack, who was never much of a costume
guy even before optics mattered, stood next to me in a humdrum sweater.
(Gibbs, to his credit, showed up dressed as Darth Vader, ready to have fun.) That
night, we handed out bags of cookies, dried fruits, and M&M’s in a box
emblazoned with the presidential seal as more than two thousand little princesses,
grim reapers, pirates, superheroes, ghosts, and football players traipsed up the lawn
to meet us. As far as I was concerned, the optics were just right.

he garden churned through the seasons, teaching us all sorts of things. We
grew cantaloupes that turned out pale and tasteless. We endured pelting
rainstorms that washed away our topsoil. Birds snacked on our blueberries; beetles