USA TODAY International Edition
ADVICE FOR GIRLS
Former Obama aide Mastromonaco writes book, marches on the White House
NEW YORK Alyssa Mastromonaco, one of Barack Obama’s first campaign hires and a deputy White House chief of staff in his administration, didn’t expect to be back at the White House so soon after the boss had moved out.
Yet a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, during the Women’s March on Washington, she found herself protesting in front of the place she had worked for years.
Mastromonaco says she had every intention of fading into the background to make way for the new team in town. “I mean, who hates the hangers- on that leave the White House and leave politics and there’s a new administration and you are second- guessing everything?” she told Capital Download. “But after the election, to myself I thought, ‘ We have to do something.’ ”
What she’s done is written a chatty memoir of her own rapid rise, packed with advice for ambitious young women interested in politics and other male- dominated professions.
The 245- page book, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House, is being published Tuesday by Twelve.
What’s more, she says she and others who worked for Obama are stepping up for more active political roles than they had planned because of concern about Trump’s leadership.
After stints working for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Mastromonaco hadn’t expected to get involved in another presidential campaign. Now she tells USA TODAY’s video newsmaker series that she might pitch in to help a Democrat opposing Trump for re- election in 2020, especially if the contender is a woman. “If Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand decided to run or dip a toe in the water, I’d have a really hard time sitting on my hands,” she says.
But the larger political roles by his former aides aren’t likely to include Obama himself, she says, despite the suspicion by Rep. Mike Kelly, R- Pa., that Obama is staying in Washington to run a “shadow government” undermining Trump. “Is he running a covert operation in his basement in Chicago or in D. C.?” Mastromonaco asks mockingly. “He’s not.”
She does expect Obama to become an active and sought- after campaigner for Democrats in the midterm elections next year.
Mastromonaco is all too familiar with the stumbles that can catch a candidate and a president, but she sees Trump’s missteps as reflecting more fundamental and troubling attitudes.
“Coming into the White House, it took us a minute and a half to deeply sympathize with the Bush administration in a hundred different ways,” she says. “What makes it hard to sympathize with the troubles that they have had ( in the Trump White House) is that I just don’t think that they’re taking the governing and the weight of the office as seriously as anybody in history has taken it, and I think that’s disheartening.”
She cites Trump’s provocative tweets (“it’s not presidential”), his prickly encounters with foreign leaders and his dismissal of ca- reer governmental employees. She has been offended by Trump’s repeated insistence — without evidence and at odds with the bipartisan leadership of the congressional Intelligence committees — that Obama ordered wiretapping of Trump Tower during the campaign.
“It was laughable,” she says, “but it was also devastating.”
When Obama would ask the question quoted in the title of Mastromonaco’s book — Who thought this was a good idea? — it typically wasn’t because he wanted to praise whomever had come up with some brilliant plan.
Case in point: “President Obama does not like the cold,” she says, but in the final week of the 2008 campaign she and other aides decided to go ahead with a rally in Pennsylvania despite worsening winter weather.
“He ended up standing on the stage in Chester, being pelted in the face by sleet,” she recalls. Even before going on stage, he had sent a “Who thought this was a good idea?” email. He seemed upbeat enough when he told the crowd, “A little bit of rain never hurt anybody!” but she was wincing as she watched on cable TV as he was being drenched.
“At the very end of the event, we saw him put his hand out and Reggie ( Love, his traveling aide) put the phone in and then my phone rang about 30 seconds later. He said, ‘ Alyssa, it’s Obama.’ I said, ‘ Yes, sir!’ I said, ‘ Great, great, great event!’ He said, ‘ Where are you?’ I said, ‘ I’m at my desk.’ And he said, ‘ Must be nice,’ and he hung up.”
Mastromonaco left the White House in 2014 for jobs at VICE Media and now A+ E Networks.
In a job with long hours and high stress, she writes about dealing with the complications of irritable bowel syndrome, including a close call during a presidential visit to the Vatican. Caught without her suitcase, she ended up visiting Buckingham Palace and Queen Elizabeth II wearing jeans, then accidentally lifted the queen’s copy of Tattler magazine when she left.
At 41, Mastromonaco is energetic, blunt and unpretentious.
Her advice to young women is more about approach than appearance: “Hard work and a good attitude can take you further than you could ever dream.”