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by
Dan Pfeiffer
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August 3 - August 11, 2020
And finally, it’s not a “tell all” filled with gossipy scoops about the Obama White House, because I’m not an asshole.
The emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter that reward the loudest voices and penalize thoughtfulness and analysis
The idea of Trump and his coterie of Internet trolls, self-dealing Wall Street tycoons, and unrepentant racists wandering the halls of the White House doing dumb, mean shit is hard to stomach. Not a day has gone by since the 2016 election when I haven’t been angry about the result and sad for the country.
was to work harder and care more than everyone else.
Many—actually most—people who seek the presidency do it out of a desire to fill some insatiable internal need for approval and adoration or to work out some deep-seated psychological issue dating back to childhood. Obama was different. He was incredibly comfortable in his own skin and had done the hard work of self-discovery and self-actualization as a young man grappling with his identity and the father he never really knew.
The candidate least afraid of losing normally wins.
If the person at the top of any organization does not reflect the values you want in the culture of that organization, it won’t work.17
With that undeniably fair caveat, let me be very clear—the way politics is being covered, consumed, tweeted, and Facebooked is royally fucking up America. Full Stop.
Politics is covered like a game, but politics is not a game. It’s a noble pursuit, even if it is sometimes pursued ignobly. The decisions made by politicians have dramatic—and sometimes life-and-death—consequences for the public. Those decisions and the process to pick the decision makers deserve coverage worthy of the stakes.
How do you get booked on cable news or get a lot of retweets and followers? Say something and do something more outrageous than everyone else. Push the envelope on decency. Throw a temper tantrum on the floor of the Senate. Here’s what won’t get you attention: thoughtful public policy, bipartisan compromise, or basic governing.
Trump understood that there were no rules and referees and that a good story was much more valuable than an accurate one. Trump’s main media experiences are the absurdity of reality television and the no-holds-barred world of Big Apple tabloid journalism. Sadly, these were the perfect experiences to compete for president in 2016.
But like so much with Trump, it’s easy to forget that Trump is a symptom, not the disease that affects the body politic.
It’s hard to overstate how dumb a discrepancy this is, but it is also hard to overstate how dumb the Far Right of the Republican Party can be.
Whenever we spent the night in Chicago, the president would stay at his house. He would often say that his Chicago home was frozen in time from the moment right before he took office. On his desk was the mail that came in January 2009 before they moved to DC. Whenever he was home, often alone, he would root through all his stuff. On this particular trip, he was going through a box and found what he believed was his birth certificate. To this day, it isn’t clear whether he stumbled upon this document or went looking for it. I have always suspected the latter.
This was a classic Barack Obama move. He had a natural tendency to want to address the elephant in the room, even if it took him off whatever we thought was the best message.
In other words, they wanted weaponized racial animus stoked by people like Trump without being called a racist.
Obama’s response was pretty simple: “What’s the point of amassing political capital if you aren’t willing to use it to help people?”
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.
Sarah Palin knew exactly what she was doing by posting the death panel theory on Facebook. She would have been laughed off the set if she had done it on Meet the Press or Good Morning America. But on Facebook, the outrageous is rewarded.
The American system of government operates on a set of norms, and if one party decides to regularly violate those norms in order to acquire more power, it cripples the ability to respond to disasters like hurricanes, threats like North Korea, and existential challenges like climate change.
The next election will be fought on Facebook.
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.
millennials are going to save us from ourselves.
The millennial generation is about to become the most powerful force in politics, and they are equal parts Internet savvy and skeptical. They were raised on the Internet. They have a natural and well-earned skepticism about what they read online, as well as the skills to verify or debunk anything. As millennials become a larger part of the electorate, the propaganda tactics of the Right are going to be less and less effective.
We all looked at Obama and waited for his assessment. What did he think of Kanye? Was he annoyed that we made him sit through it? Obama had a serious look on his face. I prepared myself to try to explain how the president, who had very important work to do, had ended up in this room with rappers and movie stars. And then Obama broke into a huge grin. “‘That shit cray,’” Obama said in reference to a famous Kanye line, proving once again that he is and always will be our coolest president.
Fox News is one of the most insidious and dangerous forces in American politics, and much of what ails our civil discourse today can be traced back to Fox and its successors.
There is no doubt that this ideological bias bleeds into coverage and commentary. But it’s important to separate the difference between ideological bias and political bias.
Simply put, Fox News is not a news outlet. It is a Republican propaganda machine masquerading as a news outlet that exists to elect Republican politicians and promote their positions—whatever they are at the time.
We need to combat Fox News by going around Fox News to communicate with their viewers through interviews on local television and interactions on Facebook, and Democrats can and must campaign in those rural areas.
We cannot—and should not—get in the propaganda business, because that is about nullifying the idea of an objective media, and if we want to continue winning arguments based on facts, we need independent arbiters of truth.
Barack Obama hates to lose and he really hates to lose to Mitch McConnell,1 the Republican leader of the Senate. McConnell is smart, diabolical, and basically a robot sent from the future to destroy the progressive agenda. He is the most cynical person in politics and cares about nothing other than the accumulation of power.
In other words, Barack Obama drove the Republicans insane. So insane that the Republicans nominated and America elected Donald Trump. When I think about how the first African American president was replaced by a man whose election caused white supremacists to come out from behind their Pepe the Frog4 Twitter avatars to dance in the street, I think back to this conversation with Obama on the helicopter. When I watch Paul Ryan and McConnell bend the knee to a man they know to be dangerously unfit for the presidency, I hear Obama’s observation in my head. The modern Republican Party is dead. It
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The Republicans did not want to be seen breaking bread with Obama because it would upset their voters. They were petrified of being tossed out in a primary challenge if they were photographed treating Barack Obama like a human being. There you have it, the simplest explanation for why Republicans couldn’t and wouldn’t work with Obama. Their voters hated Obama so much that it paralyzed the Republican Party. Now these Republicans should have had the courage to stand up to the rabid fringe of their party that believed Obama was a secret Muslim Manchurian candidate. That failure is how we ended up
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The fact of the matter is that this Republican Party is incapable of working with Democrats. Their rabid base will not allow it. This is not what the framers intended, but until the defeat of the cancer at the heart of the Republican Party, confrontation is the only option. Bipartisanship is dead. The Republicans killed it.
All that’s left are Donald Trump, Breitbart, and a bunch of mini-Trumps. Even the Republican politicians who argued against Trump’s racism, mysogny, and indecency have fallen in line and become avatars of Trumpism (I’m talking to you, Paul Ryan). It’s a party based on the idea of white victimization and trolling for the sake of trolling.
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.
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.
It is simply not an option for Democrats to remain silent on issues of racism and misogyny, particularly when those repugnant views are emanating from the Oval Office. We have a moral and political obligation to be a bulwark against Trump’s hateful rhetoric.
The country that I saw traveling with Barack Obama bears no resemblance to the one that Trump describes. The American people are good and decent and want the best for one another and the country. Are there exceptions? Of course. President Trump is one of them.
The path back for Democrats is pretty clear and it doesn’t mean becoming more like Trump. Hate worked for him; it won’t work for us.
“The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history, that we are masters of our fate,” he said. “The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.”
I said it because it happened to be true. I’m not going to play the game where I edit what I say because I am afraid of Republican attacks. That’s their game. If we play their game, we lose. We have to change the game.”
“Maybe I am just looking for a silver lining, but I am hopeful that this will be the clarifying event that will show the public the two different visions for the country.”
I was legitimately fearful of what was to come if the Democrats didn’t take control of the House of Representatives. Imagine what would happen if after all the controversy, corruption, and incompetence the voters rewarded the Republicans with more power.
The lesson is clear. Trump’s political superpower is turning the conversation to the topics that help Republicans and hurt Democrats. It helps Trump when all we talk about is Trump. In 2020 the Democratic nominee is going to need to tell a compelling and inspirational story about an America in which Trump is not the main star.