Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

by Dan Pfeiffer

There is a famous story in my family about a seven-year-old me finding out that Santa wasn’t real and turning it into a debate about the existence of God. I stand by my view then that if Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy—all magical entities, never seen by people—were fake, I was right to ask the question. My mom disagreed.

Any internship, even one in the White House, boils down to copying, filing, and getting coffee for the people who get coffee for other people. Mine was no different. None of it is rocket science, and there is no real way to distinguish yourself from other interns as long as you show up on time and don’t still smell like the previous night’s party. For the first couple of weeks, I was assigned to do the “clips,” which in those days meant actually cutting articles out of the newspaper, gluing them to pieces of paper, and then copying them for the staff.

No leaks. Our 2008 campaign was famously leak-free. So leak-free that no one, not even David Plouffe or David Axelrod, spoke to reporters without the communications department knowing about it in advance. I can think of only one time in the entire campaign that I read an anonymous quote from an Obama campaign official in a story and couldn’t identify the person who had said it. And we found that person, and even then, it was an innocent mistake.

In 2008, the media gave Obama a journalistic colonoscopy. Every few days on the campaign, I would get an e-mail from someone in Obama’s distant past saying some reporter had called them raising questions about some aspect of Obama’s story. My favorite of this genre was the New York Times digging deep into Obama’s drug use in high school, something he fully admitted in his memoir. After weeks of interviewing everyone they could find in his native Hawaii, the Times ran a story saying that they couldn’t find definitive evidence that Obama had used cocaine as much as he claimed in his own memoir. We laughed our asses off about this one at campaign headquarters. The media was so hell-bent on playing “gotcha” that they went after Obama for not doing enough cocaine.

Obama by his own admission knew very little about NASCAR. Obama had read the detailed briefing, which we had outsourced to the biggest NASCAR fan we could find on staff, which was hard to find—validating every stereotype about NASCAR and Democrats.

After Martha shared her latest research with me and asked me some questions about communications strategy, she got up to leave. As she was walking out the door, she turned back toward me: “Did you know that historically White House communications directors get fired and go to jail more often than any position other than the White House counsel?”

As of early 2018, Hope Hicks, who replaced the “Mooch” as communications director, has done more interviews with the FBI than the media.

I wasn’t super worried about jail since, unlike Trump, Obama wasn’t running a low-rent criminal conspiracy out of the West Wing.

She soon quit, presumably to have more time to meet with the grand jury.

The media responded to the release of the birth certificate with the professionalism of a pack of rabid hyenas. All the cable news switched to nonstop coverage.

“Now, normally I would not comment on something like this…But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate…But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.”

The release of the birth certificate shut up Trump to the extent that was possible.

In 2009, during the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” we saw the first example of mainstream figures utilizing fake news or a false conspiracy theory to advance a specific policy goal.

We prepared for some of the obvious criticisms of any health care bill: Is it a government takeover of health care? Will it raise your taxes? Will it raise your premiums? Etc. Here’s one we didn’t prepare for: Obamacare will kill you.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Palin was referring to a provision in the law that provided Medicare funding for voluntary consultations with doctors about hospice and other “end of life” care options. This was an innocuous policy that had previously received bipartisan support. Now, in hindsight, using the term “end of life” was a terrible idea, but in a world where facts and truth reigned supreme, it would be impossible to turn this into forced euthanasia for the elderly.

Unlike the birther controversy, Republicans leaders didn’t stay away. They jumped at the opportunity to score political points. The Republican leader of the House, John Boehner, issued a statement a few weeks later that said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.”

Boehner knew that what he was saying was complete bullshit. He just didn’t care. He saw an opportunity to cynically exploit people’s fears and went for it.

Six years after the law was passed, 29 percent of voters (nearly all Republican) still believed that the law included death panels. One would have hoped that after the law was passed and no death panels had convened, people would come around to the truth. Not a chance.

First, distrust in the media sowed by generations of Republican politicians screaming liberal bias has reduced the ability of the press to serve as referees in factual disputes. For many conservative voters, the New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Post stating a fact is actually proof positive that said fact is not true.

It’s alarming that Russia was willing to be so aggressive, but it is even more alarming that such an absurd strategy worked. The Russians were pushing on an open door. Even if the government was able to stop the Russians from ever doing this again, we now have a conspiracy theorist in chief in the Oval Office. Pure propaganda is the official strategy of the Republican Party, and if Democrats don’t figure out how to combat it, we will be relegated to the opposition for years to come while Republicans flush the country down the toilet.

The stories written by the mainstream media or the campaign-authored posts that debunk these stories receive exponentially less engagement and are therefore seen by exponentially fewer people. Facebook has pledged to fix this problem and I think they are very sincere in that pledge. But this is a little like the NFL’s pledge to deal with concussions, when to do so would fundamentally change a very successful business. So, it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Play a different game. Ultimately the Right’s strategy is to nullify the idea of objective truth. On issues such as climate change, health care, and tax policy, Republicans simply can’t win an argument on the facts. So instead of changing their policy, they try to change the facts.

His stump speech often included the story of when he went to speak before the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, and pitched his idea for merit pay, an anathema to the union. In Obama’s telling, you could “hear a pin drop” during his speech.

Fox declared war on Barack Obama from the first day he was in office. Right from the outset, Fox made a strategic decision to position itself as the opposition to Obama. Its top talking heads—Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck—became the point of the spear in channeling the conservative angst over the new black president.

That same year, in response to the election of Obama and the financial crisis, the conservative antigovernment Tea Party was born. The grassroots movement named after the Revolutionary War–era Boston Tea Party rapidly became a cause célèbre on Fox. The movement was a real and powerful force in politics, shifting the ideological terrain of the Republican Party and the overall dynamics in Congress. It was an important news story worthy of coverage and scrutiny. But Fox didn’t cover the Tea Party, they celebrated them—promoting their events and regaling them as heroes fighting back against an oppressive government.

Gibbs was sent to call the Fox bureau chief and broker peace. Axelrod went to break bread with Ailes, with whom he had a relationship that went back to the days when Ailes was a Republican political consultant. Fox handled this rapprochement with the decorum of the immature frat boys we would later learn they were when much of the company resigned in multiple sexual harassment scandals. They immediately went out and declared victory.

I expected Fox to abide by the normal rules of journalism. But Fox isn’t in the journalism business. Fox is not a conservative version of CNN or MSNBC. Fox is a Republican propaganda outlet with a specific political agenda.

Fox News is notable as the most famous part of the pro-Trump propaganda army, but they are not alone. Fox proved that there was real money to be made in laundering Republican talking points through performance art masquerading as journalism.

At the end of the Obama era, our approach to Fox was one of strategic ambivalence. Our White House continued to provide them access to all the briefings and press conferences. The president would periodically take questions from their reporters. We did all this not because we thought they deserved this sort of respect and fair treatment. Well, I certainly didn’t. Like any media outlet, they were able to cover the White House without interference, but we treated them like a normal media outlet because it was the path of least resistance. It wasn’t worth the headache of making a martyr of Fox. Instead we mostly ignored them; we didn’t get worked up about what was on Fox. We didn’t respond to their silliness. This starved them of the reaction they so craved. Not worrying about Fox made our lives more efficient and certainly more pleasant. In the White House, you simply have too much shit to do to spend any energy on things you can’t affect. Fox was one of those things.

Crooked Media, the media company started by my Pod Save America cohosts, is the model for how progressives can erase the Right’s substantial media advantage. Jon, Jon, and Tommy started Crooked Media in the weeks after the 2016 election to inform, entertain, and engage. Pod Save America and the rest of the Crooked Media empire of podcasts are unique in the progressive media space because they are building an engaged audience and helping that audience find ways to channel their energy into action. Come for the witty banter; stay for the activism.

I call this ignorance by osmosis.

The president said that it was inevitable that the country would have a president of color, but the unique circumstances of his candidacy caused this to happen much sooner than would have otherwise occurred. He went on to explain that we were living in a period of massive, disruptive economic, cultural, and technological change. And that having a black president with the middle name Hussein as the face of that change had real political and cultural consequences. In other words, Barack Obama drove the Republicans insane. So insane that the Republicans nominated and America elected Donald Trump.

When the president took off for his annual holiday trip to Hawaii, his frustration with the state of affairs was palpable

Trump is a symptom of the plague that has infected the Grand Old Party, but he is not the disease itself. Trump didn’t take over the party; he is the end result of a party that weaponized racial anxiety to motivate their base during the Obama era. The good news is that this is not a sustainable strategy in a country that is getting more diverse by the minute. Obama’s America is the future. Trump’s America is the last throes of a bygone era. But we have to survive it.

After the 2016 election, whenever I would appear on some post-election panel, I’d give the audience an exercise. First, I would ask them, “What was Donald Trump’s positive argument for himself?” The audience would unanimously shout back, “Make America Great Again.” Then I would ask them if they knew what Trump’s argument against Hillary was. The audience would respond by saying, “Crooked Hillary” and “Lock Her Up.” Next, I would do the same exercise for Hillary. “What was her argument against Trump?” The audience would respond with a cacophony of responses: unfit, racist, sexist, liar, thief, bully, and on and on. When I’d ask the audience about Hillary’s argument for herself, it would be near silence. A few would murmur “experience” or “qualified,” but without much conviction or enthusiasm.

During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama’s success—campaigns are about telling the American people a story—a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It’s a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.

In the modern era, political campaigns are high-tech affairs that use highly sophisticated data analytics to understand the political environment and craft strategies and messages. Campaigns are now more science than art. Yet they are covered by English majors who treat campaigns like Shakespearean dramas with dramatic plot twists.