Most political memoirs fall into a few categories. Some exist to build legacies by highlighting (and exaggerating) one’s role in history. Others are meant to settle scores, like former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s case that everything was Barack Obama’s fault. Then there are those that seek to create the conditions by which a politician would ultimately write a book defining his legacy and getting back at his enemies. These are usually written by candidates, with the aim of introducing themselves to voters and hopefully making a bit of scratch along the way.

With very few exceptions—Barack Obama’s two memoirs, Al Franken’s recent Giant of the Senate—these books are awful. They’re usually too functional to be any good, too concerned with cementing a legacy or winning a race or making some money. They rarely form an actual part of one’s legacy, the way Obama’s memoirs partly define him as a writer. Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, for example, made the case that she should be the next president of the United States and also that she didn’t do Benghazi. What will be remembered about Jeff Flake’s recent Conscience of a Conservative is that a Republican senator fired a shot across the bow of the Trump administration—what won’t be remembered is anything about the book itself.



Two recent memoirs by Obama-era White House staffers—deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? and speechwriter David Litt’s Thanks, Obama—chart a different course. These are funny and self-deprecating tributes to an administration and a president that both authors deeply respect, not legacy builders or blueprints for the future. But in their very modesty—the most damaging detail in Mastromonaco’s book is that Obama once wore a mock turtleneck—they serve as a more devastating indictment of the current administration than a campaign-style book ever could.







Both books are cautious about laying blame and are abundant in graciousness, which may have something to do with the fact that both authors are young and have long careers ahead of them. But for the most part they mock the idea of leaving behind a legacy. Mastromonaco jokes her main contribution to American history was the introduction of a tampon dispenser in the White House bathroom. Litt takes a bit more credit, but mostly for similarly modest ends—Thanks, Obama is, for better and for worse, about what it was like being in the front row of the Obama White House’s most viral moments.

Mastromonaco and Litt play the role of what you call audience surrogates in television, offering an everyman look at what it’s like to work at the White House. At their best, these are anti-Game Change books, reminders that there’s more to politics than the Great Men and Women on camera, and all of the gossiping and backstabbing that goes on behind them. These are books about how the sausage of White House politics—speeches, schedules, interviews—is made.