Reggie Love: On being Obama's 'surrogate son' and more
WASHINGTON — Reggie Love says his job as "body man" for Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign and at the White House required him to be constantly ready but never intrusive — "like a child in Victorian England, if that child were 6-foot-5 and carrying a Tide stain remover pen."
Also, if that child had "365" tattooed on one bicep and "332" on the other — the number of electoral votes Obama carried in 2008 and 2012.
For five years, Love was the 20-something assistant by Obama's side, an experience he details in Power Forward: My Presidential Education, published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. "I was his DJ, his Kindle, his travel agent, his daughters' basketball coach, his messenger, his punching bag, his alarm clock, his vending machine, his chief of stuff ...his surrogate son."
The book is no tell-all, but it does make it clear what a grind it is to run for president unless you already are president — 2016 hopefuls, take note — and it provides some behind-the-scenes insights of Obama's views on race. That's a topic the president has been willing to discuss publicly only occasionally despite his standing as the nation's groundbreaking African-American president.
One bond between Obama and Love was their mutual obsession with basketball. Another were the lessons Obama taught Love about negotiating a largely white world as a black man.
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
"I always said to the president, the candidate, 'You had more exposure to it than I did because your mom's white. You're half-white, so you're one step ahead of me," Love, now 32, told Capital Download. "The one thing he said to me was, 'When people look at me, they don't see a mixed guy. They see a black man.' "
Once in the White House, Love says, race was one reason the president continued to lean on him. "No matter what, he knew he could trust me," he writes. "Beyond that, I was the only other brother working on the first floor of the West Wing, in the bubble every day." Given the demographics of the country's most powerful places, he says, it was hardly surprising there were no other black men in the inner White House circle.
When they were on the road, many people "assumed I was the security guy," Love writes. "He's tall. He's black. He must be security. ... I always responded with some variation of 'No, you want the old, white, Clint Eastwood-looking dude over there,' " directing them to the nearest Secret Service agent.
Politics was not Love's passion. Sports was. He played forward for and was captain of the Duke Blue Devils basketball team, leading the team to the NCAA national championship in 2001. After graduation, he had hoped to land a contract in the NBA or the NFL.
When that didn't work out, and after hanging out at his parents' North Carolina home for a while, he was hired as a $28,000-a-year assistant in Obama's Senate office — working nights as a bouncer to make ends meet. Two years later, when Obama decided to make a run for the White House, Love became his body man, one of those peculiar but pivotal jobs in a presidential campaign.
After the campaign and three years in the same role at the White House, Love left in 2011 to earn an MBA at the Wharton School of Business, a program he says surely wouldn't have admitted him except for his letter of recommendation from the president. He's now often back on the road, working as a partner and vice president of a young, diversified financial holding company called Transatlantic Holdings.
Being Obama's constant shadow during the campaign gave Love a bird's-eye view of an unexpected and critical encounter with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In December 2007, Billy Shaheen, co-chair of Clinton's New Hampshire campaign and the husband of now-Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, told a reporter that Obama's admission of youthful drug use would open the door to Republican attacks and questions, including over whether he had ever sold drugs.
Soon afterward, their private planes were parked side by side at Reagan National Airport, and Clinton asked to speak privately with him on the tarmac. She apologized. He replied that the apology was largely meaningless given the e-mails her camp was rumored to be sending out labeling him as a Muslim.
"I saw Clinton very animated," Love recalls, while Obama was "very cool and very calm." It reminded him of a combative weigh-in between two boxers before a match. Later that day, Obama told him "he knew he was going to win the nomination after that moment on the tarmac, because Clinton had unraveled."
On the campaign trail and as president, Obama often was handed good-luck charms. "Everything from military badges to poker chips to special rocks to handmade dream catchers," Love says. He would thrust them in his pocket or hand them off to Love to carry — but he says Obama kept them all, and at times even now finds "silent encouragement" from them.
Some are collected in a small bowl in the White House Treaty Room, he says. "When you're in this insular world and there's fences and security and Secret Service," he says, they provide "a very good grounding ... and a good reminder to him of all the people he's met along the way and all the people he hasn't met that have a lot of their hopes and dreams sort of tied into his leadership."
And it was Love who introduced Obama to the music of Jay Z.
On the 2008 campaign trail, they had met the rapper and entrepreneur, and Obama asked Love to upload some of his songs to his phone, to listen to when he worked out the next morning. He liked them and asked for more.
Fast-forward to last month, when Mike Huckabee, a potential 2016 GOP contender, blasted the president and first lady for allowing their daughters to listen to the sexually suggestive lyrics of Jay Z and Beyoncé songs.
"Mike Huckabee must not have the Internet," Love asked incredulously. "How are you going to keep your kids from listening to anything? You can't shelter your kids from everything. It's just impossible." Earlier, asked what Americans don't fully understand about Obama, he cited how devoted a father he is.
The 6:30 family dinner on the White House schedule each evening was treated "like a meeting in the Situation Room," he says. "There was a hard stop before that dinner."