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You may know Dan Pfeiffer as a host of Pod Save America. You may know him as Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. Or you may know him for his book, "Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter and Trump". His new book, coming in February is called "Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again". In this episode he shares how he got into politics and what it's going to take to get America out of the political plight we find ourselves in today. This conversation was recorded on stage, presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley.
TRANSCRIPT. Please note, we do our best on these, please forgive or let us know about errors.
Dan Pfeiffer: Well, I grew up in a household where politics was talked about all the time. My parents had gone to college during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. They had protested themselves. Even though they didn't work in politics, or go to fundraisers, or do anything like that, we talked about it all the time. It was a constant topic of discussion. So, it was always in the background in my life. I went to college in Washington DC. I got a little involved in politics with some local politics involving a dispute about parking, which meant a lot, because we needed a car to get to the grocery store outside of my college house. And did a little volunteering in presidential election. I really viewed politics originally as this very exciting opportunity to do something that I thought would be helpful and delay going to law school for a couple of years. I am 43 years old, and I have not been to law school yet.
Lauren Schiller: But you still have that application sitting on your desk somewhere.
Dan Pfeiffer: I've got several LSAT books. They keep moving from house to house with me.
Lauren Schiller: Well, you have a lot more life experience now. They'll probably let you in. That's Dan Pfeiffer. He may not have gone on to be a lawyer, but you may know him as a host on the wildly popular podcast about politics, Pod Save America, or you may know him as the senior advisor to President Barack Obama. So, do you remember anything in particular from those days growing up that was the most memorable thing your parents took you to, a meeting, or a march, or anything like that?
Dan Pfeiffer: Well, my parents always took us voting. My mom always brought us and would bring some of my friends as well into the voting booth with her. We would get to get off school, which was very notable, because we live in a weird country where election day is not a holiday. I distinctly remember when Ronald Reagan was reelected, because my mom was incredibly upset about it. When I asked her why, it seemed very apocalyptic, and I was very nervous for a long time.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is Inflection Point. Dan Pfeiffer is also the author of Yes, We Still Can and the upcoming book, Un-Trumping America. He and I had a chance to speak on stage December 5, 2019 for an evening presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. We'll be right back.
Lauren Schiller: Lauren Schiller: And we're back with Dan Pfeiffer. The first question that I had when I first learned that I would be joining you here tonight is how do you get to go work for Obama? How did you get involved in politics? You were at Georgetown. How'd you get from there to a very long stint in the White House?
Dan Pfeiffer: So, at Georgetown I moved off campus my junior year, and we had an extra room and a need for someone to pay more of the rent. One of my buddies brought his German partner to live in that room. His German partner was a guy named Chad Griffin, who was from Arkansas. He had gone to a small, Baptist college in Arkansas and had been an intern on the Clinton campaign, Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. He then got a job in the White House when Bill Clinton won, worked for the White House Press Secretary at the time for 18 months, and then went to Georgetown to finish his career.
Dan Pfeiffer: He was the first person I had ever met who had actually had a job in politics. He had worked in the White House. He had traveled the world with Bill Clinton. He had this very cool perspective. He sort of taught me that this was a path you could take. I viewed it as a path that I could take for two years. My vision was I would graduate from college. I would go work on Al Gore's election, which was a year after I graduated. Al Gore would obviously win. If I was lucky, I'd get to work in the White House, like Chad, for a year, and then I would-
Lauren Schiller: Do you find any irony in the fact that this guy's name is Chad? I mean, I just had to ask you.
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. We called him Hanging.
Lauren Schiller: You were hanging with Chad. Okay.
Dan Pfeiffer: Chad is someone some of you may know who he is. He went on to become the president of the Human Rights Campaign and led the fight for marriage equality in this country. He remained very, very successful in politics. And I went to work for Al Gore. He lost. I said, well, I do one more presidential election. Then I'll go to law school, because the Gore election was quite dramatic, considering Al Gore got more votes and did not get to be president. It turns out that that would be a trend in American politics. In 2004, I thought I would work on a presidential campaign. I ended up, for a whole host of reasons, working for Tom Daschle, who was the Senate democratic minority leader, who was running for re-election. We lost that race. I was like, I'm not ready to quit yet. I want to do one more race.
Dan Pfeiffer: Eventually, I went to work for a guy named Evan Bayh. He was a senator from Indiana. He had called me and asked me if I would come work for him, because he was planning on running for president in 2008. He was a very nice guy. He was sort of a rising star in democratic politics. He also was calling me, which was unusual, because I had just helped preside over Tom Daschle becoming the first Senate leader in a half century to lose his race. So, I was appreciative of the interest. I spent two years working for Evan Bayh. We were traveling to Iowa, going to New Hampshire, getting ready to run for president. We were planning it.
Dan Pfeiffer: In the fall of 2006, a guy named Barack Obama teases, as his book is coming out, that he is reconsidering his decision not to run for president, which caused a huge flood of interest. But on the Bayh campaign we were not going to let this get in our way. So, we decided we were going to announce. He was forming an exploratory committee. This was in December of '07, sorry, December of '06. He announces his exploratory committee. We go to Iowa. We have this great visit. We meet all these people. People are interested in him. Then our next stop is to go to New Hampshire.
Dan Pfeiffer: While we're in Iowa, it is announced that Barack Obama is going to deliver the keynote speech at the New Hampshire Democratic Party fundraiser in the middle of our trip. That doesn't seem good for Evan Bayh. We go to New Hampshire. I get to the airport to get on the one flight from the DC area to New Hampshire. There are 700 reporters. One of them comes up to me and says, "Dan, what are you doing here?" I said, "Well, I'm meeting my boss in New Hampshire." They said, "I didn't know you worked for Obama." We get there. Evan Bayh gets very small crowds, but it's still [inaudible 00:08:24] a good event, but there was Obama hysteria happening.
Dan Pfeiffer: On our last event, we're getting ready to go to the airport, and our driver, the staffer who was driving the van that Senator Bayh was in, asked the host, "What's the best way to get to the airport from here?" He's like, "Go out, get on the highway." He's like, "You know what? I would go back roads, because of the traffic from the Obama event." Evan Bayh dropped out of the presidential race three days later, which was very fortuitous for me, because Barack Obama was now planing to run for president and hiring staff. His senate chief of staff had been Tom Daschle's chief of staff, this guy named Pete Rouse. He called me and said, "Come meet with Obama. He's going to run."
Dan Pfeiffer: I had never met him. I had not actually even watched the 2004 convention speech. I didn't watch it in real time. So, in preparation for this meeting I watched the speech and I read his books and was pretty interested in the guy. I walked in there and within an hour I walked out having accepted a job to work on a campaign that did not yet exist. I didn't know how much money I was going to make, and I didn't know when he was going to force me to move to Chicago. It was a very impactful meeting apparently.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. So, you stayed for seven years, which is like ... Do you count working in the White House like people count dog years? You were there for seven years, so how many lives is that?
Dan Pfeiffer: It was a long time. When I left the White House, and that was in March of 2015, when I went to tell President Obama that I had left, at that point I was the last person who had started on the first day of the campaign and worked in the White House the whole time, except one. That person was Barack Obama.
Lauren Schiller: Wow.
Dan Pfeiffer: Which is a fact he pointed out to me when I told him that I was getting tired and it was time to leave. He said he was also tired. I said, "You work above the office, and you have a bed on your plane. I don't."
Lauren Schiller: Right. I believe you compared your hair.
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. Not long before I left we had been in a meeting in the Situation Room. It was not a well attended meeting, which made me the highest ranking White House staffer in the room, which meant that I sat to the president's immediate right at the big table in the Situation Room. This was obviously not a very important meeting. I saw the president looking at me a couple times. I couldn't tell if he was trying to get my attention or something. I didn't really know. Then the next day we were flying somewhere, and so we would get ... I would meet him in the morning, and we would get on Marine One, the presidential helicopter, to fly to get on the plane.
Dan Pfeiffer: The president looks up from his Blackberry, looks at me again, and goes, "Hey, Pfeiffer. I noticed, when we were it the Sit Room the other day, that your hair's getting pretty gray," and I thought to myself, "Really?" I almost responded to point out that my hair was less gray than his, but then I remembered he was the president, and I bit my tongue. But revenge is a dish best served cold, because I put it in my book a few years later.
Lauren Schiller: Which is how I found out. We all have probably seen the West Wing and read the paper and so on, but I'm really curious. I mean, you went through a number of different jobs at the White House. You ultimately were promoted to the role of senior advisor. Can you just explain what that means? What is that job?
Dan Pfeiffer: It's different often based on who the person is, like the person who has that job right now is Jared Kushner. It's so funny that everyone laughed at that. I didn't even make the joke yet. Jared Kushner had that job. David Axelrod had that job. Karl Rove had that job. What it really meant, when I had it, was I technically oversaw communications, politics, and digital strategy and was sort of the liaison to the president's larger political universe, his former campaign staff, the political organizations around him, but what it really was was two things.
Dan Pfeiffer: One was I was sort of a political communications consultant on all projects in the White House. That was my job was to go to the policy meetings, to go to the decision meetings and help people understand the political and communications ramifications of a decision, not to decide what it would be necessarily, but to say, "If you do X, here is what is likely to happen. Republicans in the Congress will freak out. That could mean this thing we're trying to do will not get passed. This will upset the Democrats that we need to vote to preserve the Obamacare or whatever else."
Dan Pfeiffer: But the other thing that I think was the more consequential and important thing was I was one of the few people at that point who had been with the president the longest, and it was sort of my job to help interpret his wishes and desires for others on the staff, to help be able to make decisions based on my experience about what ... take the decisions off his plate. Right? I mean, not on big things, like policy decisions or anything like that, but on ... The question would be like do we have to ask him before we agree to do this? I would know he will be annoyed if we ask, and I would know if he would be annoyed if we don't ask. That was a big part of it.
Dan Pfeiffer: I was sort of an interpreter of presidential moods and someone that he could sort of speak directly to and trust and sort of be someone he could bounce ideas off of, outside of the context of larger meetings. I guess, therefore, I spent a lot of time traveling with, him in and out of his office, receiving late night emails and phone calls. I mean, it was an amazing experience, to be able to sort of see a person like that up close for that period of time.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. So, the time you were in the White House, how old were you?
Dan Pfeiffer: I was ... Let's see. 2008.
Lauren Schiller: 11 years ago.
Dan Pfeiffer: I turned 32 right after Obama was elected. 33. I turned 33 right after Obama was elected.
Lauren Schiller: I can say, because I'm older than that now, and so are you, that that's pretty young. I mean, you were a young guy doing a really, really important job. So, were you in situations where you had to take an opposing view to somebody who had much more experience than you? Okay. You're looking at me like the answer is yes. So, how did you approach that?
Dan Pfeiffer: It was really hard in the beginning. I think I probably overcompensated by being a little more aggressive or louder than, in hindsight, was probably appropriate. It was challenging. There were a lot of really big personalities. You would have to have sometimes vigorous discussions with cabinet secretaries who wanted to do things that the president does not want them to do, and it would be your job to tell them that. There was a moment, and I write about this in my first book, Yes, We Still Can, where I had sort of been the point person on helping figure out the politics around this budget deal.
Dan Pfeiffer: The vice president, who is ... I am from Delaware, so my entire life, until three years ago, Joe Biden was either my vice president or my senator. He's a legendary figure in my state. He would speak at my high school, a very big deal. There was a situation where the president ... We were in the vice president's office. Large portions of the cabinet were there. The vice president had struck a deal with Senator McConnell about resolving this tax dispute. We were talking to the president of the United States on the speaker phone.
Dan Pfeiffer: I believed that the deal was not favorable enough to the president to protect his politics. I had this moment to decide, am I going to say that now, because I know how the vice president feels about it. I know how the treasury secretary feels about it. I know how the commerce secretary feels about it, and they're all in the room. I made the decision in the moment, which, in hindsight, was insane, but to tell the vice president that I disagreed. He was not mean about it, but he was displeased with me. No one came to my defense, except Barack Obama.
Lauren Schiller: Well, that is ... I mean, I can imagine that was a both very exciting time and a very stressful time.
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. It was quite stressful. I look younger now than I did then.
Lauren Schiller: You do. We'll go back and look at pictures. One of the things that I've been thinking about is we're on the cusp of this new election coming up. It seems like a ripe opportunity for some more hope and change. I'm wondering what you've been thinking about in terms of the similarities between this upcoming 2020 election and 2008.
Dan Pfeiffer: I've been trying to find similarities, but there's been so much change in that brief period of time in American life, in politics, what issues are popular, what aren't, and how people get their information. You just think about it this way. When Barack Obama started running for president, the smartphone had not been invented. You did not watch videos on your phone. You got your news on the television or in a newspaper most likely. Facebook was something used by college students. Twitter was something used by people in Silicon Valley. Instagram didn't exist. Snapchat didn't exist. It was a very different world. But I was thinking about the difference between the Democratic primary electorate then and now.
Dan Pfeiffer: I think the biggest thing now, and this is because this is a reelection to choose our candidate running against Trump, that people are afraid in ways they were not afraid in 2008. Hope wasn't just Obama's message. It was that people were hopeful for a better future. We had had eight years of Bush, Iraq, Katrina, and all of the tax cuts for the rich, all of that. [inaudible 00:19:17] it was pre-financial crisis and was this hope for a better future. Now, the primary driving emotion is fear, because we've had three years now of this, and it is almost impossible to fathom what another five would look like. That is really I think changing how the candidates are acting, and it's really changing how the voters are acting.
Lauren Schiller: What do you think the winning slogan is going to be then? I was really banking on hope, but now I just feel depressed.
Dan Pfeiffer: I have been thinking a lot about this question, because I still believe the American people would like to find a leader who will unite them, not divide them. Right? That we as a country can be better than our politics is right now and that someone who can speak to those aspirations can be the most powerful candidate we have against Trump, but it has to be tempered by everything we've learned since the day Barack Obama was elected. Right? That the Republicans in Congress are not going to have an epiphany and come around, that our country is ... which has always had an imperfect democracy, but in terms of our democracy, it's been heading in the wrong direction for the last decade, that the rich and powerful have more power and the people have less.
Dan Pfeiffer: So, I think it has to be an aspiration of a realistic message. The way I have come to describe that is sort of the domestic, political version of how John F. Kennedy thought about foreign policy, which is we have to be idealists without illusions. We can speak to people's better angels, but we have to do it with full understanding of what we're up against, both Trump and everything that created an opportunity for Trump to be president of the United States.
Lauren Schiller: In terms of how that message gets out there ... By the way, we are going to get to the impeachment thing. I just want to say that out loud, because this has been a crazy week on that. But I feel like it's important just to think about how these mindsets have been solidified over time to put us in such polarized camps. It feels to me like social media has played a huge part in that and its ability to create camps and tribes and incite outrage, and the things that create the most outrage are the things that get the most shared. Therefore, you end up, even if you completely disagree with the message, you end up sharing it anyway, and so you continue to amplify it, but yet when you first started out in this business we'll call it, Twitter was this thing, this weird thing, where you would tell people what you were doing. Who cares?
Lauren Schiller: Now, of course, it's completely blown up and has become the new bully pulpit. We're now at this point where there's a lot of talk around, well, should the technology platforms be banning advertising, and how bad are they making it for us in a multitude of ways beyond that? What are your thoughts on how we can use social media for good I guess really is the point of this question.
Dan Pfeiffer: I think a couple points. I mean, long before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook or the folks who created Twitter created Twitter, America had been on an inexorable path of polarization. Every president has been more polarizing than the previous one, dating back to the 60s. That has to do with a whole variety of sociological things, how people are moving, homogenous viewpoints among people of similar generations, or races, education, a whole host of things. What I think Facebook in particular and social media in general has done is catalyzed this process to the point that it has made it easy to eliminate the idea of an objective set of facts.
Dan Pfeiffer: We used to be polarized around two different responses to the same set of facts. There is acid rain hitting the earth. What are we going to do about that? Republicans would have one view. Democrats would have another view. Sometimes there would be some consensus in the middle around it. Or the economy is doing poorly. Democrats would say invest in the economy. Republicans would say cut taxes. But it was the same set of facts. Now, we are operating on completely different universes, which makes consensus nearly impossible. By creating filter bubbles to allow people to avoid learning things and by destroying the economic model of objective journalism, social media has taken out sort of the equilibrium that was holding us together.
Dan Pfeiffer: Now, on the question of advertising, so there's been this debate about should Twitter ban political advertising? Google limited it. There's been this pressure on Facebook to eliminate political advertising. Instead, their current plan is that politicians can lie and not be fact checked, which seems suboptimal to me and possibly advantageous to one side that may be less factual than the other. So, there's been this pressure on the left to say let's get Facebook to agree to also ban political advertising. I am deeply concerned about that, as someone who's been involved in campaigns, because Trump has a three year headstart on using Facebook to get data on his voters and potential voters. Our Democrats have not done any of that. They have spent all their time focusing on raising money among guaranteed Democratic voters.
Dan Pfeiffer: If Facebook were to make the decision to ban political advertising, which a lot of progressives want them to do, it would give Trump a mass advantage in 2020, but even more importantly, it would really hurt progressive challengers. Right? When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running against Joe Crowely, she didn't have money to spend on TV. TV is quite expensive. You can run small, cheap, digital advertising campaigns on platforms like Facebook. So, ultimately I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to push Facebook in that direction, because it seems on the surface like it would hurt Trump. It would actually hurt us more, which is probably why we're pushing for it, because that's a very on brand thing to do.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. What about truth in advertising? I feel like I should know the answer to this question, but in the advertising world, when you're advertising a product, let's say pancakes, you pretty much have to say the truth about the pancakes, but when you're advertising a candidate on TV, does the same standard apply? Then is it an even lower standard when it comes to social media, because no one's actually checking?
Dan Pfeiffer: It does apply on TV. It is a quite high bar, and it's left in the hands of the TV stations. I think that they have some concerns about in the end FEC accountability. On social media there are no rules, because we stopped legislating before Facebook was inventing, so we have no ... There are lots of bills that would apply these similar standards. None of them have passed, because it's not in the interest of one party to pass such laws. Yeah. It's not great.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. What about the mainstream media? I mean, a lot of your job was spent trying to figure out how to get the best press in the mainstream media, before social media became as big as it was. Clearly, perceptions of that have been changing, well, on both sides.
Dan Pfeiffer: This past couple years is the first time in my 20 years in politics where attacking the media was good politics for Democrats, probably because they've been doing this for years, liberal bias, et cetera. That's why Fox News exists. It has been their strategy for a long time. There's a lot of anger among progressives for how the media, and the New York Times in particular, covered Hillary Clinton in 2016. There was a lot of frustration among democratic voters that we have someone that they view as a racist liar in the White House and most mainstream media are unwilling to call him either a racist or a liar. But I think the fundamental frustration among Democrats with the media is that we misunderstand it.
Dan Pfeiffer: We live in this world where we think that well coiffed investigative reporters who look like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are going to take down presidents, that that is their job to do that. That is not their job. They don't view it as their job. It's sort of this all the presidents men view of politics. In Democrats, we love the media. We describe to newspapers, listen to NPR. I think generally we like to believe in a world where facts matter and referees can blow the whistle on lies, but the problem we have is the media does not view that as their job. The media is ultimately a business. I think most reporters do a very good job at what they do, but ultimately their job is not to help defeat Trump. Their job is to tell people things.
Dan Pfeiffer: As Democrats, we have not adjusted our campaign strategies to reflect the way that media works now. So, I think most campaigns, and this was particularly true in 2016, were very focused on what ... The way you get your message out in a campaign would be I'm going to run a television ad, or I'm going to tell the media things, and then the media will tell voters, but now we live in this super hyperactive media environment where people have a million choices. They can watch Netflix. They can watch things on their own time. They don't have to watch the news and read newspapers. So, it's much harder to get information from the candidate's mouth into the mind of voters.
Dan Pfeiffer: So, Democrats need to think not about what we tell the media, but how we get the information from the media into the minds of voters we care about. That is a very different communication strategy we've ever had before, and it really requires us almost disabusing ourselves of these romantic notions about the role of the media as the fourth estate, as these guardians of democracy, because despite the slogans in the TV ads they run to get us to subscribe to the media, that's not what they do. That's not a critique of them. It is just the fact of it's understanding who they are, the role they play, and how the media environment has changed.
Lauren Schiller: Well, I think part of the frustration, if that's the right word, is that there's no equivalent to Fox News on the other side.
Dan Pfeiffer: Are you familiar with Pod Save America? I'm kidding. We are not like that.
Lauren Schiller: Except for this podcast, Pod Save America. Has anyone listened to it? Well, in a way that is true, because you guys, you speak your mind. You have an opinion. Well, I mean, I guess the right would consider you a propaganda machine, but when I listen to it, that's not how I think about it, but maybe a viewer of Fox News doesn't think of them as a propaganda machine. Do you think they do?
Dan Pfeiffer: I don't know. No. Probably not. I think they have been convinced that all other media is biased and this is the one true source of information. In my 20 years in politics, I have been to at least one million meetings where someone said, "How do we get the democratic Fox News. It's incredibly challenging, because Pew, the research foundation, does these studies I think it's every year or two years about the media habits of the American people. Republics list ... They ask them like, "Where do you get your news?" It is overwhelmingly Fox News, the Drudge Report, and then Breitbart, these other things, but they live on a conservative media diet. Democrats are like CNN, NBC, the New York Times. They have a wide media diet that includes some progressive outlets who are ... I don't know. Progressive's not even the right word. They have some outlets, like NPR, that I think cover ... They're objective, but they often cover issues of interest to more liberal voters.
Dan Pfeiffer: I think this is a huge failing on the democratic part, because when Donald Trump says something, he has Fox News, he has Rush Limbaugh, he has Breitbart, he has the Daily Caller all pushing his message into the social media conversation in America. When Democrats do say something, we have no one doing that. I think a world in which the majority of media is, quote unquote, traditional, objective media is long gone. We really live in a world of information warfare right now, and we have no soldiers on the field. So, we need a gazillion more Crooked Medias, the company that created Pod Save America. We need lots of progressive voices helping shape the conversation in this country. Propaganda would not work as a democratic strategy because of the media diets of our voters. You would know we're telling you lies.
Dan Pfeiffer: So, it should be factual. It should be based in reality, but it should be progressive. It should draw attention to our issues, because there is this financial incentive for the traditional media, which depends on Facebook for a lot of their advertising revenue, to write things that are about what Trump is talking about, because that's what gets clicks, which is what gets advertising dollars. What Democrats have to do is create this alternative media ecosystem that is not dependent on the Trump media economics, but that relentlessly pushes out democratic media. This is a place where I hope our cadre of billionaires, and entrepreneurs, and business types will invest in progressive media outlets who will help carry the message out.
Lauren Schiller: Have you laid that challenge down?
Dan Pfeiffer: So many times, and no one responds.
Lauren Schiller: Come on, people. Is anyone out there that might be able to take that on?
Dan Pfeiffer: If you're a billionaire, we'll talk.
Lauren Schiller: All right. Meet us in the hallway.
Dan Pfeiffer: Even a millionaire.
Lauren Schiller: Well, one of the other things I've been thinking about is just how the messages get distilled on the right, simplified to such, I don't know, simplified to such simplistic terms. I'm trying to think of more adjectives here. I'm preparing for a conversation about the Green New Deal. I'm reading about what the opposition is to it. What I'm hearing is that these people who want to put forward the Green New Deal want to take away your ice cream and hamburgers. That's because they want to limit the number of cows that get slaughtered basically and how agriculture is done. But there's a much more complicated story behind it, but yet they've got this total knack for just simplifying it. They want to take away this or that from you.
Lauren Schiller: I ran across this piece of research that talked about if progressives could figure out how to talk about their ideas in the terms that might be used for more conservative values, that they might get more done or they might get more people on-board with that idea. Can we do that? I mean, can we talk in shorter sentences? I obviously can't right now, but ...
Dan Pfeiffer: I think there's two different issues here. One is can we communicate complicated ideas in easily understood fashion? Democrats must be better at that for sure. Most politicians are very bad at it, which makes you wonder how they won, but it is true. It is not a natural skillset. The Republicans can get away with some of this, because they're communicating through friendly media outlets to a friendly audience. Right? The hamburger and airplane thing, the ice cream thing, whatever [inaudible 00:35:47], particularly the Green New Deal, is complete BS. You could never have that conversation with a non-propaganda based reporter. If Nancy Pelosi stood before the Capitol Hill Press Corp and made an argument that ridiculous, they would savage her, and she would care about that, because she is a person who cares about truth. If you don't care about truth and you're only talking to Fox, you can say whatever you want.
Dan Pfeiffer: Now, I am very suspicious of this sort of linguistic silver bullet discussion. Right? Whenever Democrats have trouble and we're not winning elections, or whatever it is, we bring in linguists, and we're like ... Do you guys know who Frank Luntz is? He's this Republican pollster who famously made a lot of terrible things sound less terrible. People are always like, "Who's our Frank Luntz?" I am less concerned about the specific wording of the message, although it should be clear and inspiring, than the broader story we are telling. Right?
Dan Pfeiffer: Obama's great success as a politician is not that he had some amazing slogan, although yes, we can was a great slogan. It was that everything he did told a broader story about where the country was, where he wanted to take it, and why he was the right person to take it there. When we try to reverse engineer our ideas from what we think is most appealing to people is when we lose the forest for the trees. I am a big advocate in figure out your story first and your bumper sticker second. Right? It is almost impossible to come up with a brilliant, pithy, 280 character rationale for your candidacy if you can't give a 30 minute speech about why you're running for president. Right? Story first. Slogan second.
Lauren Schiller: Well, there was this piece of research done around if progressives talked in terms of more conservative values, that they'd get more done. If they talked about the things they want to advance in terms of family values and using some of the terms that you hear more on the right than you hear on the left, that those ideas that seem more progressive and to the left would be more adopted by people on the right.
Dan Pfeiffer: I mean, I've seen the research. I have some skepticism about it. What I do think is very true is in order to communicate any idea to persuade people to things, it has to resonate emotionally. Right? You have to be able to draw a connection to a set of values, because all policy discussion in politics in campaign season are largely about ... they are a proxy conversation for the values and character of the person you're electing. Right? It's not that I love their plan. It's that I trust them to stick to this plan, or if they have to change the plan, to make the right decision, because I trust who they are. Right? That is really important.
Dan Pfeiffer: It's also important to remember that Democrats and Republicans have two different strategies. Republicans win elections when fewer people turn out. They want to motivate a committed base of certain Republican voters to vote, people who vote regularly, and they want to persuade people in the middle or who are non-voters that all politics is terrible. It's a lesser of two evils. Don't bother. Right? Cynicism is their friend. So, fear works for them. For Democrats, our math is very different. We have to persuade some people in the middle, but we also have to convince people who vote infrequently or have never voted before to get involved in the process. So, where fear works for them, inspiration and hope works for us. So, we're often going to be operating playing two completely different games in order to achieve the same outcome, which is winning elections.
Dan Pfeiffer: Sounds nice.
Lauren Schiller: Does anyone here want to win an election in 2020? Okay. Actually, this idea of what motivates you, is it fear or is it hope, I mean, do you feel like we have people on the democratic slate who are raising their hand to run for president right now that are extremely motivating and are going to have what it takes to get people excited about turning out to the polls?
Dan Pfeiffer: I do. I do. I think we have a tremendous field of candidates. I was obviously disappointed that Senator Harris ended her campaign, because I thought she was someone who had perhaps the greatest potential of anyone running to replicate an updated version of the Obama Coalition. This is a hard time in the process. The primary process is about exposing the warts of all the candidates. You basically have to spend a year, year and a half engaged in this sort of absurd Kabuki theater before a single person casts a vote. We're very focused on what folks are not good at or where they might fail or why they might lose at this point in the process. Most people start voting and you get the validation of the electorate than I think they always ... I remember someone saying to me, when we were getting ready to run again Mitt Romney, and he was looking ridiculous, in 2012, and this person who had worked in politics before said, "As soon as you win the nomination, they put an S on your chest, because you have just accomplished an amazing feat." So, I think that will happen with our nominee as well.
Lauren Schiller: When you look at what happened with Kamala Harris' campaign, what are your thoughts on that? I was so sad to see it, and it felt like it happened so suddenly.
Dan Pfeiffer: Right at the time that I saw the news I was in my head crafting a column I was going to write about how this could be her moment for a comeback. Fortunately, I had procrastinated on Monday, so I hadn't-
Lauren Schiller: Dan.
Dan Pfeiffer: ... put in any words ... Well, it wasn't going to get out there. I don't think the deciding factor was my column on Crooked.com. They're just like waiting. When is that coming? Hitting refresh over and over again. They're like, "I guess we'll mail it in." Because I thought she had been through this very rough patch. If she could make a few changes, there would be an opportunity for, because I think she's a tremendously talented politician, for a comeback narrative. There's still 60 days until Iowa. When John Kerry won the democratic nomination in '04, his campaign was in the toilet and he rose up. John McCain, when he won in 2008, his campaign was in the toilet. All the stories that you've read about Kamala Harris' campaign were also written about those. I was like this could be she has potential here.
Dan Pfeiffer: But ultimately I think two things happened to that campaign. One is it was an imperfect campaign. They made mistakes. She was never fully able to articulate, despite how talented a communicator she is, articulate a specific rationale for why she was running, other than she thought she would beat Trump. I find that compelling. There was the famous Roger Mudd question of Ted Kennedy, which is, "Why are you running for president?" That's a thing you should be able to answer before you get in. But, having said that, I think it also speaks to the fact that Kamala Harris, senator from California, who had 20,000 people show up at her announcement not very far from here, raised a bunch of money, had this amazing, viral moment, like with Bill Barr, and with Brett Kavanaugh, and on the debate stage with Joe Biden, left the race two months before a single vote was cast. I think that says so much about the racial and gender prejudices that go into the concept of electability, which is we are so ...
Dan Pfeiffer: All of us are so scared of losing to Trump. This is the difference between 2008. According to every poll, any person you talk to, the single thing we care about most is who is most likely to beat Trump. We're reviewing the prism of the best way to beat Trump entirely through who can persuade some group of white men in Wisconsin to vote for a Democrat. That has provided a tremendous advantage to white candidates and white, male candidates in particular, because what happened to Kamala Harris was she made some mistakes and then she lost the perception that she could win and the bottom fell out. Now, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg have all made mistakes of equivalent level to the ones that Kamala Harris made in her campaign, and they are doing fine, because they are bolstered by this idea that is incorrect that the best way to win is to persuade white voters in the mid-west and that the best person to persuade white voters in the mid-west is a white person and a white male in particular.
Dan Pfeiffer: Now, I would note that we had a president recently who won Wisconsin by 14 points, won Michigan by almost 20 points, won Pennsylvania by a bunch, won Florida, won Indiana once, won North Carolina once, won Virginia twice. That person was not some white governor from the mid-west. That was Barack Hussein Obama from the South Side of Chicago, from Hawaii via Indonesia with a father from Kenya. I'm deeply concerned about the fact that we are going to most likely have a debate stage in November that has seven candidates on it, all white, five white men, two white women. I think that is going to disadvantage the conversation, because Kamala Harris had started this conversation in the last debate, which I think is so important, which is persuading white men in Wisconsin is not enough. You do have to do that. That's what the math is, because we have an electoral college. But you also have to turnout communities of color. We need a candidate who can do both those things, and we have to view it through the prism of both of those things.
Dan Pfeiffer: I think it's really problematic that the facts that are influencing the race most are polls from Iowa, the state I love, because Barack Obama would not be president without Iowa. They gave him a tremendous gift and show of support, but it is a state that is very white. Those polls are influencing everything. They're influencing donations. They're influencing media coverage. They're influencing the polls in more diverse states, like South Carolina. If nothing dramatic happens here, we as Democrats, need to fundamentally rethink our primary process. As a larger political conversation in the media, social media, pundits, all of us as voters have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the best way to win is to nominate a white man. We know this, because we won twice with a black man, and we took the House in 2018 by running women of all races all across this country. We have to remember the most recent lessons of history.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. I have one more question, and then I really want to talk about what's happening with the impeachment, which is there's this famous moment, and you do talk about it in your book, Yes, We Still Can, about how you got Obama on the set of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. Does anyone remember that? Yeah. What I didn't remember at the time was that he was really there to plug Obamacare, Healthcare.gov. Right?
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes.
Lauren Schiller: But I'm wondering if there is a candidate on the democratic slate that you could see, if Between Two Ferns was still a thing, sitting there doing that. The charisma test basically. Right?
Dan Pfeiffer: What's that?
Lauren Schiller: It's the charisma test basically. Can you-
Dan Pfeiffer: I think every candidate has to run a strategy that is authentic to them. What would work for Barack Obama would not work for Hillary Clinton. What worked for Barack Obama would not work for Joe Biden, or Elizabeth Warren, or whatever else. Obama I think had a particularly natural sense of comedic timing. His correspondent dinner speeches were quite funny. He riffed, despite the many hours spent editing, and trimming down, and making essentially appropriate the Between Two Ferns script, the president basically tossed it out and did his own thing. The very mean jokes about Zach Galifianakis not being Bradley Cooper were all Barack Obama.
Lauren Schiller: Wait. Did you go to school with Bradley Cooper? Is that [crosstalk 00:49:25]?
Dan Pfeiffer: We didn't hang out. He was a couple years ahead at me at Georgetown. I did not know him to be Bradley Cooper. I knew him to be the guy that many of the women that I knew were particularly fond of. He was famous on campus, because he had very long locks in a ponytail, and he kind of had a European satchel he wore, and everyone called him Fabio. Years later, someone was like, "Fabio was in this movie called the Hangover." Look. I think the candidates this time have been very ... Elizabeth Warren just did an escape room with Desus & Mero on Showtime.
Lauren Schiller: I missed that. Okay.
Dan Pfeiffer: It is quite good. They almost didn't get out, which would have been devastating for the candidate with a plan I think, but they made it. Bernie Sanders was also on Desus & Mero and was really funny. I think Bernie Sanders could do a lot of this stuff. Elizabeth Warren showed a lot of chops there. Pete Buttigieg has done every media outlet humanly possible and succeeded on all of them. I don't think it could be just like Obama, but the candidates, because it's so hard to get attention in this environment, are doing a lot of really interesting things. So, I hope they continue that as president.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. All right. Did anyone listen to any of the impeachment hearings? Yeah. I'm fascinated by ... I was under the impression that the Democrats were trying to slow walk this, and now suddenly it seems like it's going really fast and that the articles of impeachment will be filed before Christmas, which is just in a few weeks. What are your thoughts about how this is unfolding, why it's unfolding at that pace? If there any chance anything is going to go differently than we might expect along party lines?
Dan Pfeiffer: I have been an advocate for a long time that the Democrats should impeach Trump and that it should be a wide-ranging inquiry that looks at not just Ukraine and the things at the heart of the Mueller Report, but the fact that all of our tax dollars are going to his pocket via his hotels. There is a textbook example of an impeachable offense that comes out every day. We just discovered he gave a $400 million no-bid contract to a donor in North Dakota to build part of the fake wall. There is crimes everywhere, and we should investigate them.
Dan Pfeiffer: But I have to say, as I sit here now, that the way Adam Schiff has handled these hearings today was so flawless, and the evidence is so ... The fact that that man never once raised his voice at Jim Jordan, if we could nominate him for a Nobel Prize, I would do it. But the evidence is so overwhelming of what Trump did. The fact that what Trump did is literally the most obvious example of an impeachable offense that any constitutional scholar could conjure is that I think we should proceed at this pace, because what has benefited Democrats in this argument thus far is the facts are on our side, and the media's on our side. But I think, knowing Democrats as I do, and no one knows them as well as Nancy Pelosi does, if it lingers too long, we're going to start getting these moderate Democrats in purple districts calling Politico and venting their concerns to the media, instead of using an inner monologue like they should. We'll start to look divided. I think our unity is on our side. We should proceed as we do.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. That's to get it through the House. Then when it goes over to the Senate, is there any chance of it going ...? We can all guess that they're going to have some discussion, and then they're going to decide that they don't agree. Do you think it's going to go any differently than that?
Dan Pfeiffer: No. I think that's how it's going to go. There's actually something that's really interesting about this. I was accidentally watching CNN the other day. Joe Lockhart, who was the White House press secretary when Bill Clinton was being impeached, was talking about the differences between then and now. Even though that both of these were mostly partisan affairs, what Joe said that I thought was really interesting was that Democrats back in '98 criticized Clinton's conduct and the things he did, but decided it didn't rise to the level of impeachment.
Dan Pfeiffer: What is different now is the Republicans won't even criticize what Trump did. They cannot even admit the fact that ... it is a credible-ish argument to say, "Look. It's probably inappropriate what the president did. Rudy Giuliani was running off on his own. He seems like kind of a loon. The White House is not particularly well-run. But we have an election in 11 months, and you shouldn't remove our president from office for that." But they can't even admit that what the president did was wrong, because there must be a complete fealty to Trump and this Republican administration. The other thing I just want to say about impeachment is ... I don't know. Did you guys watch the hearing with the law professors?
Lauren Schiller: Yeah.
Dan Pfeiffer: There are two things I took from that hearing. One was the look on all the three professors' faces the Democrats invited as they're getting asked these questions, it's like if they in their constitutional law class asked a student to give them an example of an impeachable offense and they wrote out what Trump did, they would penalize that student for not being creative enough, because it was so obvious. They're just sitting there like ... You look and they're just like, "What are you people talking about? Of course it's impeachable. It's exactly what the founders meant is you can't try to extort foreign countries for political benefit. That's why we have it."
Dan Pfeiffer: The other thing that I thought was notable was the Republicans kept saying, "Look. Impeachments should not be partisan. They should be bipartisan affairs." I'm sitting there saying, "Well, you know who could change that? You." In fact, it is bipartisan, because Justin Amash, a Republican congressman from Michigan, supports impeaching Trump. What do the Republicans do? They kicked him out of the party. Sorry. I get very frustrated watching television.
Lauren Schiller: Do you have any thoughts on how it will affect the election outcome?
Dan Pfeiffer: If you were to ask me is it more likely to be positive for Democrats, negative for Democrats, or neutral, the answer is probably neutral, because we live in this terrible memory hole, where it was only two months ago that Trump used a Sharpie to alter a hurricane map in order to reverse engineer a tweet to truth, which is a federal crime. You are not allowed to alter weather maps.
Lauren Schiller: Is that true, that's a federal crime?
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. Yes.
Lauren Schiller: Why isn't that in the ...? Do you think maybe that'll be in the articles?
Dan Pfeiffer: We could be here for years doing the various crimes. I don't know that people remember it. I do know, from some of the polling that we've done at Pod Save America, that one of the things that most annoys the voters that Trump needs to persuade, people who voted for Trump in 2016, but disapprove of him now, people who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 instead of Trump, these sort of middle of the road, moderate Republicans or independents, the tweeting and the crazy, the chaos is a real problem for them. They're becoming exhausted by it. So, there has been this political advantage of keeping Trump at an 11 for the last few months. Right? Where he's having temper tantrums at NATO. He's going home with his tail between his legs.
Dan Pfeiffer: In working for Obama, like I mentioned this earlier, that in August of 2001, Obama's poll numbers were basically what Trump's are, not good. That is not a good thing. As the Republican primary was heating up and true giants of public life, like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann, were debating on stage, we had this very specific plan to focus Obama as a president, focus on the economy, all these things. Between Labor Day of 2011 and New years, Obama's approval rating went from 39 to 49. On election day in 2012, Obama's approval rating was 49. So, we basically won that election in the fall of 2011. This is the moment where Trump should be gaining strength and undoing the damage that's been done. By doing impeachment, Democrats have kept him occupied, and he is on trajectory to end this year at the same place he was in the summer, and that is a problem for him.
Lauren Schiller: You have a new book coming out called Un-Trumping America, A Plan To Make America A Democracy Again. Give us some scoop. What are we going to get out of that book?
Dan Pfeiffer: The book is based on the idea that Trump did not break our democracy. We have Trump, because our democracy is broken. Don't get me wrong. There is nothing more important than beating Trump in 2020, but that is not going to be enough. Democrats have to engage in an aggressive, proactive, strategic strategy to fix our democracy. We have to fix our problems in the Senate. We have to eliminate the filibuster. We have to make DC and potentially other places a state. We have to take on fixing our courts.
Dan Pfeiffer: We have to make ourselves the party that fights for democracy, because on the current path, even if Trump loses in 2020, on the current path America is on, because of voter suppression, gerrymandering, stolen Supreme Court seats, we are in a world where a growing progressive, diverse majority of Americans will be governed by a shrinking conservative minority of mostly white Americans. That is an unsustainable situation for our country over the longterm. Democrats have to take that on, because if you care about Medicare For All, Green New Deal, gun safety legislation, none of them will happen if we don't fix our democracy. There is not going to be a world where Mitch McConnell is going to all of a sudden give 10 votes for a true gun control proposal, or for Medicare For All, or Medicare For Some, or Medicare for one additional person. So, we have to recognize who the Republicans are, what they've done to our democracy, and we have to be the ones who fix it. That's what my book is about.
Lauren Schiller: All right. Is there a plan in there?
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. Every chapter is an item of sorts.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. That comes out in-
Dan Pfeiffer: February 18th next year.
Lauren Schiller: And you can pre-order it?
Dan Pfeiffer: You can pre-order it now.
Lauren Schiller: Are you still donating?
Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. Thank you. You're doing such a great job of this.
Lauren Schiller: You're welcome.
Dan Pfeiffer: I am a naturally terrible book hocker.
Lauren Schiller: I was in marketing.
Dan Pfeiffer: You're great. What are you doing around February? I could use you for a month.
Lauren Schiller: We'll talk.
Dan Pfeiffer: In the presale period, between now and February 18th, I'm going to donate a portion of the proceeds from every book sold to Fair Fight, which is Stacey Abram's organization, to protect the right to vote. Thank you for that just-
Lauren Schiller: You're so welcome. I think it's great you're doing that. What would you like to leave everyone here with in terms of where they should most focus their energy, be engaged to make a difference for Democrats?
Dan Pfeiffer: I want to just say first that in my time in politics, I have never seen a wave of activism like I've seen since election day 2016. We have people, as Barack Obama would call them, young people and the young at heart, marching, knocking on doors, canvasing, voting, getting involved. That is why Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House. That is why Obamacare is still the law of this land. It is why we have been able to stop a lot of the worst things that Trump wants to do is that people got involved in politics. They saw what happened in 2016, and they saw that you cannot ... that citizen is a full-time job in America. You do not get to take a day off. You have to fight every single day for your rights, for your community, for what happens.
Dan Pfeiffer: If I could encourage anyone to do anything, whatever time you have, full-time, part-time, while you're waiting in line at the grocery store, to hook up with an organization like Swing Left or Indivisible. Go work for a candidate. Volunteer your time. Register people to vote. Find five friends of yours on Facebook who preferably live in Wisconsin, and register them to vote. Use your social media platforms, if you have them, to push back on Republican lies. The ell democratic stories. Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, whatever about the candidate you care about, because Republicans are always doing that.
Dan Pfeiffer: Just get involved in any way you can that's comfortable for you, because if we do that, if all of you do that and we win this election in 2020, we keep the House, we take the Senate, we send Donald Trump packing to whatever federal institution he's going to spend his retirement, then I ... If we do that and then everyone stays involved, I think it would be such a beautiful irony if the election of the worst citizen in our country activated a generation of citizenship that extends well beyond this presidency. So, anything you can do to get involved will help.
Lauren Schiller: Thank you. That was Dan Pfeiffer. Our conversation was presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. Dan is a host of Pod Save America, former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, and author of the book, Yes, We Still Can. As you heard, he has a new book on the horizon called Un-Trumping America. I'll put a link to both books on my website, InflectionPointRadio.org, where you can find future events by clicking on the events tab. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.
Lauren Schiller: Today's episode was made possible by the generous support of the Harnish Foundation. That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NRP one, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible, monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at InflectionPointRadio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society. Our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions. Follow me on Twitter at LASchiller.
Lauren Schiller: To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, InflectionPointRadio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller. Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.
Dan Pfeiffer: From PRX.
