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

by Dan Pfeiffer

“Mr. President…you’ve talked a lot about how we’re all trying to get our paragraph right in history. What do you hope that paragraph says about you?” The president replied, “When I think about what will most gratify me, it will be if, twenty years from now, I can look back and I can say, wow, look at all these people who first got involved—maybe even when they were too young to vote—in government, politics, issues, nonprofits, public service, and that wave just kind of—a cleansing wave washes over the country. And if that happens, then the details of how we dealt with climate change, or whether the individual responsibility mandate on the Affordable Care Act was the right approach or not—that becomes less important. 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.” 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. My hope in writing this book is to show that it doesn’t have to be this way. That if we learn the right lessons and, most important, people—especially young people—get involved in politics, ...

While I was trying to explain how Dukakis’s plans were better for the middle class, my opponent was hammering me over the head claiming Dukakis was soft on crime, soft on the Soviet Union, and wanted to raise people’s taxes. I pushed back on those accusations with facts about Dukakis’s plans, but I was on the defensive for much of the debate. 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. After we’d finished, our civics class held a mock election based on what they’d seen in the debate. I lost by a margin not dissimilar to the ass kicking that the real Dukakis received in the real election.

Campaigns are meritocracies of sorts. Sure, some people get their job based on how much money their parents gave to the party or because they went to school with the candidate’s kids, but once you’re in the door, no one gives a shit who you know, where you went to school, or even how old you are. Things are just moving so fast that no one has time to worry about those things; hard work and smarts get rewarded with opportunities to move up to a bigger, better job with more responsibilities.

Whether it was from watching The West Wing on a loop or reading every book ever written about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, I had an unrequited relationship with politics. I desperately wanted to experience a politics that felt more like a cause than a campaign. I had never felt anything resembling what I imagined that historic Kennedy campaign felt like. And I was dying to know what that was like. I could point to playing a role in this fight or that fight that had helped prevent some harm being done to people by the Bush administration, but that’s sort of like feeling good about a couple of defensive plays in a game you lost by three touchdowns. I wanted to be part of something that mattered to the world; something that actually helped people.

Obama made the case that the campaign was worth running because he had something to say that he felt was worth saying. At the end of the conversation, Obama looked me right in the eye and asked, “How often do you get to put your shoulder against the wheel of history and push?” I was in.

In that first interview, Obama told me, “I have a great life. I don’t need this, and if I lose, I will just go back to my life in Chicago.” At the time, I was struck by the confidence in Obama’s voice and saw this sentiment as a real strength in an industry where the overly cautious tend to lose.

But there was an essential truth in that statement. Obama wanted to be president; he didn’t need to be president. 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.

The candidate least afraid of losing normally wins.

at one point came upon a near-physical altercation between a news photographer trying to do his job, an Obama staffer, and a very large George Mason security official who could easily have been mistaken for an NFL linebacker suspended for steroid use. That photographer was Pete Souza, who would go on to be the White House photographer and chronicle all eight years of Obama’s presidency from the inside. Pete did not back down or flinch under the threat of severe violence from this very large man. I would see this toughness many times over the years when foreign governments would try to curtail his access to Obama as we traveled the world with the president. Pete is one of the nicest guys on the planet, but one of the most dangerous places in the world is between Pete and the shot he wants.

Our team eventually became known as “No Drama Obama.” Loyal to one another, total commitment to a cause, empowerment and inclusion, and no leaks. People who didn’t adhere to these principles didn’t get through the door, and the few that did ended up working a backwater field office in a noncompetitive state.16

We didn’t know if we were going to win or lose, but we were going to do it together. 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.

I miss Obama, and here is why.

We had one rule that came from the top: No assholes. We didn’t care about your pedigree or your ability—if you were an asshole, you weren’t getting a job. We were proud of the camaraderie and culture of the early team, and we wanted to do everything to preserve

Whenever there was a leak of a pending policy decision or a detailed readout of some internal deliberations, Obama would ask some version of the question: “Can you imagine being so insecure that you need to call a reporter to show them how influential you are?” We didn’t need or want those people. Now compare that work environment with the Trump White House, whose leaky ship has been a stimulus package for legacy media organizations. There have been leaks about the most sensitive conversations in the Oval Office and mundane but malicious leaks about White House intrigue. In my life in politics, I have never seen a group less loyal to the boss or one another. The fish rots from the head. Trump had never demonstrated loyalty to anyone other than himself, and, therefore, his staff feel they could be fired and publicly embarrassed at any minute so they are playing a version of the Game of Thrones.

matters. Voting is a much bigger pain in the ass than it should be. People won’t vote, let alone do the door knocking and phone calling that fuels campaigns, if they aren’t enthusiastic.

Most campaigns fail. Barack Obama is arguably the best politician in recent history, but if we reran the 2008 campaign 100 times, Obama would probably lose at least 90 times. Campaigns are often victims of circumstances beyond their control. This is often referred to as an October Surprise. The final stretch of the 2008 campaign was rocked by a historic financial crisis sparked by the collapse of major banks such as Lehman Brothers. In 2012, the attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi and Hurricane Sandy upended the final days of the campaign, and in 2016, FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about Clinton’s e-mails may have tipped the race to Trump. A campaign’s ability to survive these events depends on how well they have tended to the things they can control, and ultimately that’s the lesson for campaigns and start-ups. The only way to seize your moment is to take care of the things you can control. We did so in 2008, and that was the difference.

Deputy communications director is a great job. It’s one most people in Washington would kill for, but it’s not the one I wanted. I wanted to be communications director. That was the job I had on the campaign, and that was the job I had on the presidential transition. I was only thirty-three at the time and had never done more than make copies and file documents in the White House, so I knew it was certainly not a guarantee that I would get the top communications job, but I thought I had a shot.

The fact that this conflict existed at all may be a surprise to anyone who watched the 2008 campaign. The press loved Barack Obama in 2008—a sentiment best embodied by MSNBC host Chris Matthews’s statement that a Barack Obama speech sent a “thrill up his leg.” Part of the media love for Obama came from the fact that most journalists are liberal-minded, but the true bias of the media is not ideological; it’s a bias for a good story, and Barack Obama’s candidacy was a great story. Like Trump, Obama was a boon for ratings and clicks. The media’s crush on Obama didn’t mean they didn’t scrutinize every minute of his life. The Republicans loved to say that Obama wasn’t “vetted,” which was nothing more than a crypto-racist attempt to raise questions about his birthplace and religious affiliation.

In contrast to Trump’s addiction to cable news and Twitter, Obama had a much healthier (and thoughtful) media diet. If Obama read something interesting in a magazine, he would tab it and ask his personal assistant to share it with the relevant members of the senior staff. Sometimes these were stories that highlighted an interesting policy problem that he wanted the staff to address, and other times they were just interesting stories he thought we should read, such as a piece by historian Taylor Branch in the Atlantic criticizing college athletics and a piece in the New Yorker about the possible extinction of bees.8 Now, liking journalists and appreciating good journalism did not mean that he didn’t get frustrated with the press coverage of his presidency. This was not unique to Obama. Presidential frustration with the media has been around as long as we have had presidents and a press. Some presidents vent to their aides; others angrily tweet that journalists are the enemies of the American people. Here’s another shocker: Obama also enjoyed press conferences. To me, that’s like declaring that someone really enjoys root canals. But to each their own.

Press conferences are important—even I can admit that9—and most reporters tried to use their rare moments to ask a president a question to inform the public. Reporters were right to push to do more press conferences—that was their job.10 However, the exalted status that press conferences hold in the minds of the media is a vestige of an era long past.

The press isn’t your friend, but it isn’t your enemy either. Liberals tend to make common cause with reporters. We think that we have similar worldviews, and liberals do believe—or at least used to believe before 2016—that the media was a fundamental part of what makes democracy work. Because we like the media—in part to defend them from unfair attacks from conservatives—we are caught off guard when they turn on us like a pack of hungry hyenas. My reaction to this was to fight every story like the future of the Republic depended on it. In addition to being emotionally unhealthy for me, it was also counterproductive for the president. Not every journalistic sin is a mortal one. Reporters make mistakes like everyone else, and we all have to live to fight another day.

The definition of a reporter has changed. For decades, the White House briefing room was filled with people who met the common understanding of what a reporter was—an independent, objective, just-the-facts type who worked for putatively nonideological entities designed to cover the news for a city, a town, a state, and in some cases, the nation. Each of these entities was a business, but making money was a secondary concern to the ideal of journalism. They didn’t have to worry about the business because journalism was a good business. That’s still true, but just much less so. By the time I left the White House, the briefing room was populated by dozens of reporters from digital media entities such as BuzzFeed and VICE, which had barely existed when Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These outlets operated differently than reporters from legacy outlets with different incentives and required a different strategy for engagement. A more troubling trend was the emergence of “reporters” for right-wing political entities masquerading as media companies. I’m, of course, referring to Breitbart, but also the Daily Caller, the Free Beacon, and others. In

One of the hallmarks of President Clinton’s White House was the idea that you should “Win the News Cycle.” At the end of every day, the staff would gather to watch the evening news to decide if they had won or lost the day. Team Obama rejected this idea out of hand. The value of the “news cycle” was dramatically diminished as fewer Americans watched the news and subscribed to the local paper. Barack Obama’s philosophy of communications is about telling a story over time, and chasing the latest headlines could often be a distraction from the larger—and more important—task.

What I didn’t understand at the time, but quickly learned, is that the role of the president is more than to inform or even persuade; it is to comfort.21 Axelrod referred to this as the president’s “pastoral” duties. Even if they disagree with the president every other day of the year, when tragedy or crisis strikes, the American people want to hear from the president. They want to know that the government is on the case.

Alyssa Mastromonaco, who identified this as the question that you don’t want to be asked by Barack Obama and then wrote a kick-ass book with that title.

Someone (not me) could write a very long book on this topic, but let me do the Cliff’s Notes version:7 First, the Internet made it so people could get information without paying for it, which was not good for the newspaper business, which sold ads based on the number of subscribers. Second, the Internet and the smartphone made it so people could get info whenever they wanted wherever they wanted it on their phone, which was not good for the television industry, which sold ads based on the number of people who sat down to watch TV at an appointed time. Third, the 2008 financial crisis crushed the very businesses that bought the ads that funded the media industry. Newspapers were laying off people or closing altogether. The more experienced reporters were being offered buyouts so outlets could replace them with cheaper, younger reporters. You now had fewer reporters with less experience and fewer editors writing more often to meet the never-ending deadline of the Internet. Fourth, while media was weakened by technology and economics, it was also losing its sacred place in American democracy in the eyes of many Americans. By the time Barack Obama had started running for president, the halcyon days of journalism were a distant memory. Public trust in the media declined precipitously, and by the time Trump won the 2016 election, the media was about as popular as Trump himself.8 Some of this decline is part of a general trend of greater skepticism of institutions, but the media ...

There was a lot of excellent journalism during the Obama presidency. Incredible reporting from the front lines of wars, probing investigative pieces that revealed fraud and abuse in government, and masterful feature articles that told the stories of the people who make up the cultural mosaic of our country. While some of these stories made my job harder, we as a country are all the better for them. More importantly, there is even better journalism happening in the Trump presidency. Trump’s attacks on the press that border on the cyber-bullying that his wife has laughingly pledged to stomp out have reignited an appreciation for great journalism among the non-MAGA hat-wearing populace. The New York Times and the Washington Post have entered a new golden era, one-upping each with critical scoops on a daily basis. It is also true, however, that too much of political journalism is about the horse race of campaigns rather than the policy of governing. Polls are like crack to reporters because they love to write about who’s up and who’s down. Coverage tends to conform to the chosen narrative of the moment, which lasts up until the moment the press gets tired of the narrative and looks for the first excuse to shift to a new, more interesting narrative. It’s almost always style over substance. There are great informative pieces of political journalism that tell us about the players involved and the issues, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. Too much of political coverage i...

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.

First, the news cycle is dead in the eyes of the consumers; they want news immediately on demand. They don’t want to wait for the 6:00 p.m. news or the next morning’s paper to be delivered to get the latest news; they want to look at the news on their phone at any hour of the day while killing time in line at the grocery store or sitting on a city bus. This means that reporters are basically working 24/7, updating stories posted earlier and writing new stories as soon as events dictate. Second, digital advertising—the revenue source for most media in the modern era—is a volume game. The more content you create, the more ads you can sell, and with declining print ad sales, you need to make up the difference somewhere. This means we live in a never-ending, always accelerating news cycle, which makes the brutal White House lifestyle more brutal than it has ever been. When we first arrived at the White House, the press staff was informed by the outgoing Bush staff of something called “pager duty,” where one member of the press staff was on duty to take press calls that came in through the White House switchboard while the rest of the team got a little time off.

For most of my time working for Obama, whenever we encountered some Beltway political crisis that dominated cable news, we would ask focus groups of voters if they had heard anything about it. Almost every single time, they had no idea what we were talking about. There were things Washington got worked up about and things the American people cared about and rarely did those things overlap. But something had changed. Suddenly, focus groups knew all about the trivial things that Washington would get worked up over, and they knew about them in great detail. Often reading back to the moderator what sounded just like Republican talking points or a Fox News story—which are actually the same thing. When the moderator asked them where they’d learned this information, the answer was almost always the same: Facebook. By 2016, the media ecosystem of 2008 was impossible to recognize. It was the perfect petri dish for a fungus like Trumpism to grow.

There is also the screaming of “fake news” at any piece of information that one doesn’t like, even (and often) when it is undeniably true. This is in some ways a defense mechanism for our infantile and insecure president, but it has an even more alarming purpose. The point is to signal to Trump’s most diehard supporters to dismiss any piece of news that is bad for Trump, even if it is objectively and obviously true. When it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s oldest son and the Fredo of the Trump clan, was corresponding with someone representing the Russian government about their efforts to help Trump win, Trump’s supporters refused to believe the story and questioned the authenticity of the e-mails, even though they were released by Fredo himself.

Plouffe chimed in to say that the president wanted to go into the White House briefing room and release it himself. “Well, that’s fucking crazy,” I said. Plouffe explained that the president wanted to use this opportunity to take the conversation to a bigger idea beyond the birth certificate. He wanted to talk about the danger of the political conversation getting diverted by these side issues. This was a better idea than simply going before the nation and saying, “Hey, look, I am American. Deal with it.” But I was still horrified by the thought of the president being forced to go before the nation to defend his own legitimacy. It felt beneath him. It felt beneath the Office.

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?” He pointed out to us that if he didn’t try to pass a law to give access to health care to the uninsured on the heels of a landslide election win with huge majorities in Congress, then it would never get done. “If not now, when?” Obama asked. There was only one answer to that question. We knew from the failed efforts that came before that health care policy was uniquely susceptible to demagoguery. Fear of the unknown greatly exceeded the public’s concerns about the present system. This factor was the one that was most concerning to me.

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. They believe—as Donald Trump so disturbingly stated early in his presidency—that the press is the enemy of the American people.

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 Republican approach is one of immense cynicism and utter cowardice, but there is nothing I have seen in twenty years in politics that suggests Republicans are going to change their stripes anytime soon. Russia clearly played a huge role in promoting the conspiracy theories that dominated the conversation in 2016 in order to help Trump win. All of our intelligence agencies agree with this assessment. Congressional Republicans agree with this assessment. Yet somehow this still seems up for debate. Why? Because there is one person in our government who doesn’t agree, Donald Trump, which should tell you everything you need to know.

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. In the meantime, the Democrats must learn the lessons of Obama’s battles with fake news, conspiracy theories, and con men. We cannot expect to win power again until we have figured out how to defeat the propaganda forces that created, elected, and are now propping up Donald Trump. It’s that simple. No pressure, but the fate of the free world (or at least this part of it) is at stake.

The long-running conservative critique of the mainstream media establishment as liberal is not an entirely incorrect one. Most journalists are socially progressive. They believe in climate change and support marriage equality, a woman’s right to choose, and gun control.2 Most reporters don’t vote, but if they did, they would probably vote for a Democrat. There is no doubt that this ideological bias bleeds into coverage and commentary.

The “liberal media” has covered the Clintons with what is at best a ferocious skepticism and at worst a monomaniacal obsession to prove them guilty of something. Despite the liberal leanings of individual reporters, the overriding bias in the mainstream media is not ideological; it’s toward conflict, controversy, clicks, and ratings.

This did not sit well with President Obama. Now to be clear, Obama avoided cable news and he certainly doesn’t watch Fox. He is really more of an ESPN and prestige TV guy—think Game of Thrones, The Wire, and The Americans. But he knew what was happening on Fox. Because this was happening during the effort to pass health care, Obama was spending a lot of time with congressional Democrats from conservative districts who were very concerned about what was happening on the network. At town halls and other events in their districts, their constituents were reading back to them conspiracy theories they had heard on Fox and they were getting worried. In private meetings, Obama was increasingly venting his frustration to us and imploring us to see if there was anything we could do to change Fox’s behavior.

Fox is not a news organization. They are a propaganda outlet with a specific political agenda and do not abide by the traditional norms of a news organization—even a conservative one. The hope was that we could convince the rest of the mainstream media to treat information on Fox with a more appropriate level of skepticism.

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. In the end, picking this fight was a mistake of hubris, but there were two upsides. First, the rest of the media did begin to take the reporting of Fox News with more of a grain of salt. Many of the reporters who rose to Fox’s defense now tell me that they regretted the way it played out because it gave Fox a veneer of objectivity that they didn’t deserve. And years later when Trump declared war on all of the media except Fox, blacklisting some from campaign events and using the White House to attack networks by name, Fox did not reciprocate that loyalty. In fact, they reveled in their new role as the propaganda arm of the Trump White House.

Fox News has created an alternative reality for their viewers that has perverted politics in so many dangerous ways, because it’s not just Republican voters who get their news and their worldview from Fox; it’s Republican politicians and their aides. Fox News has created something I call the Cycle of Bullshit: A piece of false information, a misleading story, or a conspiracy theory shows up somewhere in the dark corners of the Internet. A Fox News show (and often a news show, not just one of the opinion ones) repeats the false story. A Republican politician (often Donald Trump) communicates the false information to the voting public, citing Fox News as the source.

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. Democrats need to give these voters a chance to see them in person instead of getting to know them only through the fun house mirror of Fox. Barack Obama would often say that if he could just meet every person in America, much like how he was able to in Iowa in 2008, it would change the tone of politics. People would see that he is a good, honest person trying to do the right thing. Maybe he wouldn’t get any more votes than he otherwise would have gotten, because there are legitimate, sincere differences of opinion on issues. But people would know the real Obama, not the Fox News caricature of a Muslim socialist intent on destroying American values.

If Democrats do not close the gap soon, we will once again have our message drowned out. With the possible exception of Russian hacking, the right-wing media advantage is the greatest threat to progressivism.

“You know, I was elected about a decade too soon.” 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 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 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. American democracy depends on having two functioning political parties.

Going “low” wouldn’t work in the short term and it would do tremendous damage to the long-term health of the party as tens of millions of millennials are making a decision about whether to get involved in politics. Millennials will decide the future of the country. If and only if they vote. They may never vote for the racism, misogyny, and retrograde thinking that dominates Trump’s Republican Party, but they won’t vote for a Democratic Party that doesn’t aspire to a higher purpose either.

The Republican Party is now the Party of Trump. This may be a painful fact for the Republican lobbyists in expensive suits on K Street who believe in supply-side economics and worship at the altar of Ayn Rand. But it’s fact. The party of Reagan, Romney, and both Bushes is dead. 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. And the Republican establishment let it happen. They actually encouraged this transformation during the Obama era because they wanted to harness the newly found energy of the Tea Party and to placate those in their base who believed the worst lies they peddled about Obama. 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. And I don’t just mean that in the sense that we need to prevent the world from blowing up out of pique or incompetence or both.

Stop the bullying and ban the trolls. Twitter the company has utterly failed to police their own platform. Scroll through the mentions of a woman or a person of color on Twitter and you are bound to be horrified by what you read. There is racism, misogyny, and threats of violence and sexual assault. This problem existed long before Trump, but his rise enabled and empowered far-right hate accounts to be more public. Twitter has even verified some of these hate mongers, giving them the vaunted “blue checkmark.” Twitter has been impossibly slow to act in part because kicking a bunch of people off the platform would exacerbate the problem of anemic user growth. But this is a solvable problem: Enforce their policies against hate speech and bullying with a consistent zero tolerance policy. End the anonymity granted to users. There is no valid reason to let people spew hate anonymously. Much of the hate, abuse, and trolling would immediately disappear if people had to do it for the world to see using their real names. Ban hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I am sympathetic to Twitter’s views about the First Amendment, but the Constitution doesn’t grant people the right to use Twitter for their speech. Stop the bots: With the help of Russia, thousands of automated accounts shifted the conversation on Twitter in ways favorable to Trump. This is probably the easiest problem to solve. Twitter just has to want to do it. OK, so Twitter seems terrible. It reminds...

“Look, I’m not old enough to be your father, but I could be your older brother.” This was how Obama started all of his very valuable life advice to me, just to make it clear that he was only fourteen years older than me. “This is important work, probably the most important work we will ever do, but it’s not everything. You have to think about the rest of your life, too.”

He continued, “Here’s the advice I give everyone about marriage—is she someone you find interesting?” I was initially confused by the question, but I figured he must have a point. “You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things,” Obama continued. “Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mom? Life is long. These are the things that really matter over the long term.”

Campaigns are fueled by money and media attention, and the only candidates who had access to either were the ones donors and members of the media determined were electable. This thinking ultimately affected voter preference—voters in primaries are the most engaged of all voters and they pick only candidates they think can win.