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

by Dan Pfeiffer

Because if we’re getting the broad direction right, this is a pretty ingenious country, full of ingenious people, and we’ll figure it out. And that’s what I want—is I want everybody to feel like we can figure this out if we just don’t waste a lot of time doing dumb stuff.”

It didn’t matter that I was right on the facts; her message was much more compelling than my policy details. This is a lesson that I would need to relearn many times in my career.

Turns out when you make chicken salad out of chicken shit, it still tastes like shit.

“How often do you get to put your shoulder against the wheel of history and push?”

and had a reputation as being a numbers whiz, incredibly disciplined, and tough as nails. Plouffe was also a bit of an enigma. When he detailed the tragic death of his dog in his memoir of the 2008 campaign, even his closest confidants on the campaign were taken by surprise. We had no idea his dog has died. In fact, we didn’t even know he had a dog.

There are five building blocks for any successful campaign: Attitude Scaling Culture Strategy Branding

He could afford to lose, and this gave us a strategic advantage over Clinton in 2008 (and Romney in 2012). 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.

The message is the story of who the candidate is and why they do what they do.

“I just banned torture. That’s pretty cool, huh,” Obama said.

the true bias of the media is not ideological; it’s a bias for a good story,

“If Obama loved press conferences so much, why did he do so few of them?” The answer is simple. For at least the six years I was there: me.

“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

Nick Shapiro, who was a deputy press secretary on the campaign, was assigned the task of getting up every morning to send out our news of the day at 5:30 a.m. for the network morning shows. Nick did this task without fail or complaint for months. It wasn’t till a year after the campaign when we were both working in the White House that I learned that Nick didn’t have Internet in his apartment, so he was getting up every morning and going to a nearby hotel to steal their Wi-Fi to send out our press releases seated among a group of prostitutes who gathered in the lobby of the hotel at the crack of dawn.

The news cycle is dead; long live the content monster.

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.

We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.”

“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.

Multiple studies show that people are most likely to believe news if it comes from someone they personally know; therefore, there is great power in people sharing on social media the stories and fact-checks that debunk the lies being spread by Trump and his friends in the Republican fringe media.

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.

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.

There is no better example of the intellectual and moral rot fostered by Fox News than Donald Trump.

The modern Republican Party is dead. It has no coherent ideology or policy agenda. It’s a conglomerate of clowns, con men, and racists and those who enable the clowns, con men, and racists.

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.

When the lines between facts and opinions blur, it provides an opening for those who view facts as obstacles and not pillars to an argument.

“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.”

“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.”