President Barack Obama insists he does not obsess about “the narrative,” the everyday media play-by-play of political Washington. He urges his team to tune out “the noise,” “the echo chamber,” the Beltway obsession with who’s up and who’s down. But in the fall of 2014, he got sick of the narrative of gloom hovering over his White House. Unemployment was dropping and troops were coming home, yet only one in four Americans thought the nation was on the right track—and Democrats worried about the midterm elections were sprinting away from him. He wanted to break through the noise.
Obama’s strategists, led by his longtime political guru David Axelrod, had always warned him against “dancing in the end zone.” Their polling suggested that gloating about the recovery would backfire when so many Americans were still hurting. But Obama thought it was time to spike the football, and in a speech at Northwestern University, he tried to reshape his narrative. If the presidential bully pulpit couldn’t drown out the echo chamber, he figured nothing could.
“Sometimes the noise clutters and, I think, confuses the nature of the reality out there,” Obama said. “Here are the facts.”
The facts were that America had put more people back to work than the rest of the world’s advanced economies combined. High school graduation rates were at an all-time high, while oil imports, the deficit, and the uninsured rate had plunged. The professor-turned-president was even more insistent than usual that he was merely relying on “logic and reason and facts and data,” challenging his critics to do the same. “Those are the facts. It’s not conjecture. It’s not opinion. It’s not partisan rhetoric. I laid out facts.”
The Northwestern speech did reshape the narrative, but not in the way Obama intended. The only line that made news came near the end of his 54-minute address, an observation that while he wouldn’t be on the ballot in the fall midterms, “these policies are on the ballot—every single one of them.” When Obama boarded Air Force One after his speech, his speechwriter, Cody Keenan, told him the Internet had already flagged that line as an idiotic political gaffe.
“What exactly was untrue about it?” Obama asked, a bit incredulous.
Nothing, but Obama’s words couldn’t change the narrative of his unpopularity; they just gave Republicans a new opening to exploit it. They quickly became a staple of campaign ads and stump speeches tying Democrats ball-and-chain to their leader. “Republicans couldn’t have written a better script,” declared The Fix, the Washington Post’s column for political junkies. Even Axelrod called it “a mistake” on Meet the Press. The substance of the speech was ignored, and Keenan still blames himself for letting one off-message phrase eclipse a story of revival, a prelude to the second Republican midterm landslide of the Obama era. “I’m still pissed off about that,” Keenan told me. “Everything he said was true and important, and that one line got turned against him.”
Obama was hailed as a new Great Communicator during his yes-we-can 2008 campaign, but he’s often had a real failure to communicate in office. The narrative began spinning out of his control in the turbulent opening days of his presidency, and he’s never totally recaptured it. His tenure has often felt like an endless series of media frenzies over messaging snafus—from the fizzled “Recovery Summer” to “you didn’t build that” to the Benghazi furor, which is mostly a furor about talking points.
What happened to Obama’s message is not just an inside-baseball question. Perceptions of presidents matter: They can shape an administration’s ability to get things done, and even the way the nation thinks about itself. Obama may resent how “the narrative” judges long-term policies and even historical legacies according to the latest polls, but his struggles to make the case for his record have helped Republicans reclaim both houses of Congress, along with governors’ offices and legislatures nationwide. They also set the tone for this year’s campaign to replace him, with Republicans blasting him as a pure catastrophe while Democrats gingerly try to embrace him without denying the prevailing narrative of hard times.
When Obama himself has been asked about his administration’s failures, he’s harped on communication failures, and it’s been a consistent theme inside his White House. “Our policies are so awesome,” he quipped to a few aides after a 2011 Roosevelt Room meeting. “Why can’t you guys do a better job selling them?” I interviewed more than two dozen current and former administration officials for this article, and at least a dozen told me some version of the internal joke that every problem in Obamaworld is a communications problem.
Like him or not, Obama has had a hugely consequential presidency, transforming America’s approach to foreign and domestic affairs, enacting almost all of his original Change We Can Believe In policy agenda. And credit him or not, America’s trajectory has improved on his watch. Along with the trends he cited at Northwestern, the housing market, gas prices, combat deaths, and other vital statistics have moved in the right direction. So why does only a quarter of the public still think the country is on the right track? Why haven’t his reforms of health care, education, energy and Wall Street been more popular? In short, why hasn’t America gotten his message?
Obama veterans have a slew of theories about what went wrong. They cite the challenges of driving a complex message through the horrific crisis he inherited. They blame the intensifying polarization of the public judging him, with nearly half the electorate reflexively opposing almost anything he does. They recognize the contrast between his pristine campaign vision of change and the change he’s been grinding out in the real world, through the kind of messy Washington sausage-making he used to criticize on the trail. And the White House’s own messaging strategy, a subject of perennially fierce internal debate, has been perennially debatable.
Most of all, they cite the dizzying changes in modern media, where Americans get their news where they choose, where conflict is the click of the realm, where lies travel at the speed of tweet while the truth is still annotating its Medium post. They blame short-attention-span journalism for creating a distorted narrative of a flailing presidency, by freaking out over crises—double-digit unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, the healthcare.gov malfunction, Ebola—and virtually ignoring their resolutions. They think the bully pulpit has lost much of its power in an era of 24-hour cable and social media, though they admit they were slow to adjust to the new realities. When Obama spoke at Northwestern, he didn’t even have presidential Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Then again, political types love to blame bad outcomes on bad communications, and for some of Obama’s problems—chaos in Syria and Libya, the website fiasco, disappointing wage growth—it’s hard to imagine a message that could have spun lemons into lemonade. Some Obama policies are unpopular because they’re not what people want. Some Americans are dissatisfied with the Obama era because they’re not doing well.
The president’s Spock-like, no-drama persona has also complicated his efforts to connect with the public at times when terrorists were beheading innocents and pathogens were on the loose, especially in the new on-demand environment of rapid response and viral content. Obama sees himself as playing a longer game, rising above the tyranny of the news cycle, valuing the verdict of history over the hot take. But the Washington narrative unspools in real time, and to quote one of his favorite TV shows, The Wire, the game is the game.
Obama and his team sometimes claim they simply haven’t tried hard enough to market their policies. “We don’t go out and explain why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Vice President Biden told me. “When we have a good idea, we think it will be self-evident.” The president has delivered 3,300 speeches and remarks, so he’s certainly tried to explain why he’s done what he’s done. But he still suggests he has neglected communications, as if promoting his policies were as forgettable a chore as cleaning the grill. “One thing I need to constantly remind myself and my team is, it’s not enough to build a better mousetrap,” he said after those embarrassing 2014 midterms. “People don’t automatically come beating to your door. We’ve gotta sell it.”
When pressed, though, Obama aides admit their problems have been less about remembering to sell than making the sale. Yes, Republicans have manufactured “death panels,” “apology tours” and other dubious outrages, while Fox News and talk radio portray Obama’s America as a lurid dystopia where Barack grabs your guns and Michelle steals your snacks. Still, myth-busting is part of his job. And plenty of Democrats have criticized Obama as aloof, tone-deaf and seemingly lost in the new media landscape.
At times, Obama has been one of them. He sees himself as a storyteller as well as a policymaker, and by his own admission, he hasn’t always told a persuasive story.
***
One day early in his race for the White House, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, threw a newspaper on the desk of his traveling press secretary, Dan Pfeiffer. It was the inaugural issue of The Politico, a startup dedicated to as-it-breaks, wall-to-wall coverage of politics for an insider audience.
“This,” Plouffe said, “is going to be a problem.”
Along with “cable,” Obama’s dismissive shorthand for TV’s blab-a-thon of talking heads, Politico—the “The” soon disappeared—became Obama’s snide term of art for political coverage that prioritized optics over substance, short-term gamesmanship over long-term consequences, speed over thought. Eventually, his beef became less about Politico than his view that its established competitors seemed to be adopting its up-to-the-second style. He still thinks of most political journalism as superficial theater criticism, although his aides say that partly reflects his contempt for the political theater it chronicles, and they notice he still reads quite a lot of it.
Obama’s 2008 campaign brilliantly navigated this new environment, often bypassing the mainstream media—he calls it “the filter”—to communicate directly with voters. He had a simple message, Change, backed by a high-priced advertising blitz. He had a new-age digital strategy that brought supporters together on Facebook and sent them the scoop on his running mate via text message.
The shift to the White House felt like a journey back to the analog era. In January 2009, Facebook and Twitter were still blocked on West Wing computers. When one press aide checked the New York Times website on his first day of work, the multimedia display crashed his government laptop. After deploying a sophisticated digital operation with scores of staffers on the campaign, the Obama press team inherited a George W. Bush administration staff list with just two “new media” slots, for updating the whitehouse.gov website.
The move into the Washington fishbowl also meant that Obama could no longer pick and choose which events to respond to and which to ignore. The borderline adulatory tone of the news coverage accompanying his quest to become the first African-American president evaporated as well. The veteran reporters of the White House press corps resented and resisted his team’s campaign-style efforts to bypass their filter by keeping them at a distance to try to control his message, and even keeping photographers away to try to control his image.
“It got ugly fast,” recalls Reid Cherlin, a former assistant White House press secretary who has written about the Obama administration’s battles with the media.
What the West Wing saw as gotcha journalism and substance-free sensationalism, the news media saw as long overdue scrutiny and balance. Obama aides complained about the constant media focus on niggling inconsistencies and explicitly political angles; reporters rolled their eyes and noted that their stories happened to be accurate. Both sides came to see the other as arrogant, thin-skinned and annoyingly self-righteous.
There was a telling confrontation on Obama’s third day in office, when he visited the West Wing pressroom to say hi, then bristled when a Politico reporter asked why he had nominated a Raytheon lobbyist to a Pentagon job despite having recently banned lobbyists from top posts in his administration. “I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here,” Obama complained. When the reporter tried again, Obama told him to save his questions for a news conference. Politico’s headline: “Obama Flashes Irritation in the Press Room.” To the president, it was an example of no good deed going unpunished—not just that he was grilled when he was trying to be polite, but that he was grilled over an exception to his rule against hiring lobbyists instead of credited for the groundbreaking rule. To the reporters, it was an early example of Obama feeling entitled to avoid probing questions about matters of public importance. They wouldn’t see much more of him in the press room.
Obama strategist Larry Grisolano liked to say that campaigning is flying on a trapeze, while governing is letting go of the trapeze, and Obama let go at a moment of unimaginable chaos. He had to assemble an enormous economic stimulus bill to contain the vicious downturn, devise a plan to avoid another financial panic, save the dying auto industry, deal with two wars overseas, staff his administration and triage whatever else had gone to hell in the last few minutes. The economy was actually deteriorating even faster than it seemed, which led to an early messaging disaster: a report by Obama’s economists predicting that his stimulus bill would keep unemployment no higher than 8 percent. It promptly soared above 8 percent, which had nothing to do with a stimulus that hadn’t even passed yet, but handed Republicans an enduring talking point.
Obama’s message of change seemed to disintegrate upon contact with Washington. He had pledged to blow up the hyperpartisan, backroom-deal culture of the capital, but within his first week in office, Republicans were already uniting against his stimulus proposal, and his staff was already cutting deals to salvage it. In normal times, the stimulus might have been a messaging dream, an $800 billion gift box of tax cuts, aid to states and families, campaign priorities like clean energy and medical research and much, much more. But that was a mouthful to explain in a crisis, and the GOP settled on a simple message of opposition: Big government, big mess. By the end of his second week, public support for the stimulus had dropped 12 points.
Obama decided to use his new bully pulpit to reclaim the narrative, summoning five network anchors to the Oval Office for one-on-one interviews. This would be his chance to prove the stimulus wasn’t a worthless boatload of pork, to explain to a panicked public how it would create jobs now and growth in the future. But hours before his sit-downs with Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and the other familiar faces of the nightly news, the narrative spun further out of his control, when his confidant Tom Daschle, under fire for unpaid taxes, abruptly withdrew as his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Instead of five opportunities to pitch his rescue bill, Obama endured five cross-examinations over his latest stumble.
The big soundbite: “I screwed up.” Politico’s analysis: “Obama Losing Stimulus Messaging War.”
“When you’re president, events don’t cooperate,” said Pfeiffer, who later led Obama’s White House communications shop. “You can try to tell a story over time, but not every chapter’s going to be pretty.”
Most economists now credit the stimulus with helping to prevent a depression, but Obama lost the messaging war so decisively that he stopped uttering the word “stimulus” in public. In retrospect, his marketers wish they had launched promotional campaigns for some of its little-noticed provisions, from electric vehicles to education reform to middle-class tax cuts, but they didn’t have the bandwidth or the inclination when the economy was imploding at above an 8 percent annual rate. This is the most common excuse they make about those frenetic early days, that there was just too much going on.
“You can’t talk about smoking cessation programs when the world is falling apart,” said Jon Favreau, Obama’s first-term speechwriter. “It would’ve been awesome to spend a week pushing clean energy, but come on.”
Obama himself changed the subject the day after he signed the stimulus into law, announcing a new plan to address the housing crisis. Then he turned to the unpopular auto bailout. His communications team, after two hectic years on the campaign, explored new frontiers in exhaustion spinning his efforts to avoid Armageddon, and it didn’t have a nine-figure ad budget anymore. His first communications director, Ellen Moran, lasted just three months.
“We were rolling out six policies a day,” recalled Jen Psaki, Obama’s current communications director. “We’d get a 30-page fact sheet at midnight for a briefing at 9 a.m. We had no oxygen to sell what we were doing.”
And besides, while the financial earthquake hit before Obama took office, the economic tsunami was just reaching the shore, wiping out nearly 800,000 jobs a month that would be charged to his political account. Meanwhile, his economists warned him the jobless rate was a “lagging indicator,” likely to rise throughout 2009 no matter how terrific a jobs bill he passed—and they didn’t want him to talk about how grim the underlying situation was, for fear of crashing jittery markets. In essence, Obama faced the messaging version of a perfect storm.
“I’m sure we could have done a better job with communications, but I doubt we could have changed that basic narrative of cascading job losses,” said Jay Carney, who was Biden’s communications director and later Obama’s press secretary.
***
Obama’s first official hire was his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic operative turned congressional leader, a down-and-dirty Washington insider who demanded to win every news cycle. The move signaled that after all Obama’s talk about changing Washington, his priority would be getting things done in the Washington that currently existed. Emanuel’s screaming and brawling masked the soul of a deal maker, and he didn’t care if his deals seemed contrary to the lofty spirit of the campaign.
“I’m goddamned sick of hearing about the fucking campaign!” Emanuel once shouted. “We’re trying to solve some problems here!”
Solving problems meant cobbling together filibuster-proof majorities to pass bills. And that meant outsourcing Obama’s message to Capitol Hill, drowning it in subcommittee markups, trading and motions to proceed. After campaigning in poetry, he would have to govern in turgid legislative prose. If passing health reform required a brazen deal with the drug industry, an unsavory (and ultimately doomed) “Cornhusker Kickback” to win a Nebraska senator’s vote, the inclusion of an insurance mandate he opposed during the campaign, and an interminable wait while Senate Democrats fruitlessly sought Republican buy-in, well, Obama was willing to take the hit.
“Congress was toxic. Period,” Pfeiffer said. “For those of us who measured our success by how the public thought of him, it was a problem.”
Obamacare would end up covering 18 million uninsured Americans and reining in medical costs, but the ugly process damaged Obama’s anti-Washington post-partisan brand. GOP leaders shrewdly recognized he couldn’t keep promises of bipartisan cooperation if they refused to cooperate, and on the stimulus, Obamacare, and almost all of Obama’s agenda, they didn’t. Many voters who heard about the same old Washington bickering would wonder what happened to Obama’s grand vision of change.
Some Obama loyalists think he was hurt just as badly by nitpicking from Democrats, who repeatedly criticized the stimulus (too big or small, too many or not enough tax cuts), Obamacare (no public option for insurance) and his aggressive Wall Street reforms (didn’t break up the biggest banks). The result was coverage that made Obama look isolated and his agenda look radioactive. And Obama really was isolated. He’s notoriously unenthusiastic about schmoozing with lawmakers, which helps explain why they’ve been unenthusiastic about pushing his message. “He’s paid a real PR price for his attitude that politics and politicians are mostly awful,” a strategist in the Obama orbit told me.
Generally, Democrats who support Obama’s policies have been the harshest critics of his messaging. “The best communicator in the history of politics got out-communicated as president, and it cost us the House and the Senate,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told me. When I asked for an example, Rendell cited Obama’s branding failures with stimulus-financed road projects. “There should’ve been colorful billboards with a cute mascot,” he said. “People would have said: ‘Oh, there’s a purple billboard with a lavender moose! It’s a stimulus project!’”
White House messaging veterans scoff at this lavender-moose genre of criticism, the idea that a magic word or branding strategy could have spun widely reviled policies into political gold. Their purple billboard was named Barack Obama.
But they did have real fights about what the billboard should say.
***
FDR had his New Deal. Lyndon Johnson had his Great Society. On April 14, 2009, in a speech at Georgetown University, Obama floated the New Foundation.
The slogan came from a parable about two men in the Sermon on the Mount. One built his house on a pile of sand, and it was wiped away by a storm. The other built his house on a foundation of rock, and when storms came, “It fell not.” The U.S. economy, Obama said, had been built on sand. Now that it had been wiped away, the time had come to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity. It would rest on five sturdy pillars: financial reform, education reform, health reform, a clean energy revolution and deficit reduction.
The New Foundation was as close as Obama ever came to a tweetable theory of the case for his agenda. He repeated the phrase in 15 speeches over the next month. His communications director, Anita Dunn, thought about setting up a New Foundation website.
But Obama thinks slogans are cheesy, typical of the Washington artifice he despises; he would later use and discard “we do big things,” “winning the future” and “we can’t wait.” Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told him the New Foundation sounded like a girdle. Emanuel told him his slogan ought to be Jobs, and he ought to shut up about everything else. The New Foundation soon faded away, overshadowed by the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party, an awkwardly timed Nobel Peace Prize and countless other narrative eruptions.
Obama never found another coherent message to tie together his whirlwind of activity. The Republicans had a succinct on-message response to every Job-Killing and Big-Government policy he floated, while the White House was all over the map. For example, there was a never-ending internal battle over the Obamacare message: Should the selling point be extending coverage to the uninsured, improving coverage for the insured or reducing out-of-control costs? The battle was never resolved, so the message ended up being all of the above. Cherlin, the former press aide, says his guidance on health care constantly changed with poll results.
“One month we’d emphasize coverage, the next month cost, the next month taking on the insurers,” Cherlin recalled. “The more polling you do and the more of a beating you take, the more you try different things. And you lose the narrative.”
Complexity is hard to message in a clickbait climate. Obama once spent most of a news conference on health care details, and the big news was his offhand comment that arresting a black Harvard professor on his own front porch seemed stupid.
But the message the White House spent the most time debating was the simple question of how things were going, and it struggled to crack that code, too. By late 2009 and early 2010, America had escaped the Great Recession much faster than other advanced economies, converting massive job losses into modest job gains. Still, Obama’s strategists warned that celebratory rhetoric was politically untenable, because their polls suggested the public wasn’t feeling the recovery. Phrases like “America is back” were banned from speeches.
“That was a constant struggle, how to temper our claims so we didn’t lose people,” Axelrod said. “You wanted to shout: ‘Look what our tough decisions have achieved!’ But you don’t want to impeach yourself. If people don’t feel better, that’s a self-impeaching message.”
Internally, Vice President Biden was the leading voice for more emphasis on the improving economy. It was, after all, improving, or at least getting less awful. Biden argued that if the White House didn’t point that out, no one would believe it, and no one would give Obama credit when the recovery was undeniable.
“Even my own folks say, ‘Jeez, Joe, you got 60-70 percent of the American people [who] think we’re going in the wrong direction, don’t try to buck it,’” Biden said in an interview on Air Force Two. “What do you mean, don’t try to buck it? If everybody doesn’t buck it, guess what, it’s gospel, man. We must have really screwed the pooch.”
Typically, Obama split the difference with on-the-other-hand messaging that satisfied no one: We’re making progress, but not enough, but better days are ahead, but people are hurting, but less than they would be if we hadn’t acted, but there’s much left to do, and so on. In late 2009, Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, who had been Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, convened a meeting to discuss the amateur-hour economic message discipline. “Look, we all know what this is supposed to look like,” he told the Clintonite-heavy team.
Still, every month after the official jobs numbers were released, Obama would go before the cameras to express his ambivalence, and the West Wing would resume its circular debate about how much of the positive to accentuate.
“God, we went around that pole so often: Do things suck or not?” Favreau said.
As they fought over the message, Obama’s aides also fought over how often he should deliver it. Emanuel always wanted the president “out there,” to show the public he was hard at work on their behalf. Axelrod didn’t want to overexpose Obama by making him a play-by-play announcer for the government. As Favreau told agency officials who wanted Obama to air their news, the president is not a PA system.
“You can’t give your star running back the ball on every play,” Axelrod told me. “We used him way too much. It robbed him of his power as the narrator of a larger story.”
But who else could run the ball? Democrats in Congress were frantically distancing themselves from Obama. And the White House didn’t trust its own Cabinet officials as surrogates. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s debut speech had been so unsteady the stock market had tanked while he was talking. Kathleen Sebelius of Health and Human Services got besieged by Tea Party activists at Obamacare events. Biden wasn’t exactly renowned for message discipline either, and the ill-fated “Recovery Summer” campaign during the doldrums of 2010 was a Joe special.
So Obama did a lot of talking. But America wasn’t listening. The days when the network nightly news shows would cover every presidential event for almost all to see had faded with the network nightly news shows. His policy speeches rarely seemed to get much coverage unless he admitted something had gone wrong, promised to do something differently or pointed fingers.
The ultimate example of Obama’s powerlessness over his narrative was the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of April 2010, which was still gushing all over cable news at the start of the misbegotten Recovery Summer. Talking heads blasted him for seeming disengaged in a crisis—some called it “Obama’s Katrina”—and even his 11-year-old daughter asked him when he would plug the hole. Pressure mounted for him to show resolve in an Oval Office address. Obama didn’t want to do a speech, because he had nothing new to say, especially an Oval Office speech, which seemed stagey and melodramatic. But it felt like the narrative would be all about his failure to address the nation until he addressed the nation. So Favreau got to work on the worst speech of his career.
“I knew from the moment I sat down that we’d get panned,” Favreau recalled. “The idea was, a report to the nation. But that’s not what people wanted. They wanted him to fix the hole.”
“Well,” Favreau concluded, offering a decent summary of Obama’s first-term messaging problems, “words weren’t going to fix the hole!”
***
As Air Force One left Charlotte after the 2012 Democratic convention, Obama and his staff grumbled about the buzz that Bill Clinton had outshone him, that America had a new Explainer-in-Chief. Favreau complained a bit longer than the others about the dismissive coverage of a speech he had written, when the actual explainer-in-chief cut him off.
“Hey, man, how do you think I feel? I wake up every day knowing half the country thinks I’m doing a lousy job,” Obama said.
Obama is enough of a human being to get annoyed by the narrative, and enough of a technocrat to try not to let it guide his substantive decisions. He genuinely seems to believe that wise policy will eventually turn out to be wise politics.
“At the end of the day,” he told Favreau, “you’ve got to do your job and let the chips fall where they may.”
In his first two years on the job, that long-game theory did not look prescient. Obama helped end the recession, started winding down two wars, let gays serve openly in the military, put two women on the Supreme Court, and enacted three monumental laws—the stimulus, Obamacare and financial reform. But with unemployment still near 10 percent, the chips fell on Democrats in the midterms. Even the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 became a messaging mess after the White House press briefing misstated details of the raid, prompting then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to propose a new communications strategy: Shut the fuck up.
The narrative did not improve until the 2012 campaign began. With the economy still soft, and the football-spiking ban still in effect, Obama’s message was not inspiring. His slogan was: Forward. He argued that America had crawled out of the 2008 abyss—as Biden put it, bin Laden was dead and General Motors alive—but not that America was in good shape. His main message was that the Republicans were you’re-on-your-own right-wingers who would take America backward, a message Mitt Romney reinforced with an agenda reminiscent of Bush’s and a videotaped suggestion that 47 percent of the country just wanted free stuff. Obama didn’t have much of an agenda beyond staying the course, but he didn’t need one. He was like the guy in the joke who didn’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. As Biden liked to say: Don’t compare us to the Almighty, compare us to the alternative.
But once the campaign was over, there no longer was an alternative. Obama returned to governing mode, with all the familiar Washington messaging problems that entailed, except this time he couldn’t govern. He tried to use his bully pulpit to push a gun safety bill through Congress after the Newtown massacre, to no avail. He used the opposite approach to push immigration reform, remaining quiet so Republicans who considered him toxic could still support a bill, but that didn’t work either. Washington was gridlocked, and the narrative of crisis just got worse.
In 2013, the White House was overwhelmed by media uproars over Benghazi, allegations the IRS had targeted the Tea Party, NSA spying and finally the crash of the Obamacare website, a debacle that seemed to confirm every attack ever leveled at Obama’s competence. The Fix gave him its award for “Worst Year in Washington,” chiding him for “wasting a year torpedoing your legacy.” The only time the narrative broke his way was when Republicans shut down the government, reminding voters of the alternative.
By 2014, the economy was better, and the website was working. But Obama claimed Worst Year in Washington honors yet again. Now his problem was global turmoil—chaos in the Middle East, Russian aggression—and his flaccid responses. When it came to foreign policy, he doubted more muscular responses would produce less intractable situations, and worried they could ratchet up demand for disastrous interventions like the Iraq war. The echo chamber wanted him to show resolve in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and beyond, but to Obama it felt like the Gulf spill on an international scale, a hole he couldn’t plug.
“The problem is the presumption we can fix these places and impose satisfying outcomes,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser.
The criticism of Obama’s passivity peaked after he told reporters his foreign policy doctrine was “Don’t do stupid shit,” which was roundly mocked for its blinkered message about American power. “It says something about the political media that ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ is seen as controversial,” Rhodes told me. “Why would we want to do stupid shit?”
Obama sees most messaging about global conflict as a trap, creating pressure for harsher rhetoric that can backfire down the road, as with his own ill-advised warning that Syria would cross a “red line” if it used chemical weapons. His instinct is to lower the temperature, which can sound lame when terrorists are cutting off heads. “He has a fundamental allergy to cheap rhetoric that gives people a disproportionate sense of risk in their lives,” said former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. That allergy was on display during the hysteria over Ebola, when Obama patiently explained the modest risks and launched an unusually effective multipronged response. Meanwhile, Republican campaign ads screeched that terrorists were smuggling Ebola over the Mexican border. That got more attention.
At that point, Democrats in tight races were practically claiming they didn’t know who Obama was. The West Wing was so desperate to highlight good news that on August 28, when second-quarter growth was revised from 4.0 percent to 4.2 percent, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough urged the president to hold an impromptu news conference. Pfeiffer was vehemently opposed, and argued in the Oval Office that nobody on earth would care about a blip in Q2 GDP. But Obama decided to make a statement and take a few questions.
He wasn’t asked about Q2 GDP. He was asked about ISIL, and observed that “we don’t have a strategy yet,” another gaffe that rocketed directly into Republican talking points. It illustrated the downside of the put-him-out-there approach to messaging; Obama was referring to a not-yet-complete Pentagon review of a possible Syria bombing campaign, but context is not the value-added of insta-news. His only consolation was that the tempest over his gaffe was mild compared to the Internet meltdown over the tan suit he wore, which sparked a firestorm of Twitter memes, from Yes We Tan to the Audacity of Taupe. You never know what’s going to go viral.
Undaunted, Obama went on to spike the football at Northwestern, giving the speech made famous by his “policies on the ballot” gaffe. It went virtually unnoticed that his theme was the New Foundation, a follow-up to his rollout five-and-a-half years earlier at Georgetown. He boasted that the five pillars he had promised in 2009 had all become reality: a wind and solar boom, Obamacare, a two-thirds reduction of the deficit, education reform and Wall Street reform. If the New Foundation had been the narrative of his administration, it might have been big news.
“The New Foundation is now in place,” he declared. “And I will not allow anyone to dismantle this foundation.”
That seemed like the sort of thing Americans should know. After the midterms, Obama wanted to figure out how to tell them.
***
Obama’s time in the public eye has coincided with a communications revolution. Pfeiffer calls it “the greatest change in how people consume and distribute information generally and journalism particularly since the invention of the printing press.” It’s hard to fathom today that it was a big deal in 2009 when Obama called on a Huffington Post reporter at a news conference, a first for a digital publication.
“It was seen as a weird flash in the pan,” says Anita Dunn, the former Obama communication director. “Like, ‘Are they even real press?’”
The Obama campaign was way ahead of the modern-media curve, but his White House was slow to adjust the ancient architecture it inherited—weekly radio address, daily press briefing, website nobody read. The constant focus was a White House press corps that, in that halcyon time before reporters tweeted all day, erupted in protest when the administration announced the delay of a trip via Twitter rather than a news release. There were modest efforts to produce video content, like a series of “whiteboards” explaining policies in plain English. But most White House officials weren’t allowed on social media back then, so it was hard to get their video to go viral. The heart of the communications strategy was the president at his podium.
Obama glimpsed the power of loosening up with his 2014 appearance on the “Funny or Die” show “Between Two Ferns,” in which he traded insults with the actor Zach Galifianakis and plugged healthcare.gov. (“The thing that doesn’t work?” Galifianakis deadpanned.) The president was still the president—a joke about the first couple’s sex life was edited out of the script—but he recognized that unconventional content could reach Americans who didn’t read Politico or watch Sunday shows. His strategists could see the impact of social media in their focus groups, as low-information voters who wouldn’t have heard about something like the IRS scandal in the first term were quoting back GOP talking points from their Facebook feed. And the “Funny or Die” bit worked: Traffic to the Obamacare website jumped by 40 percent.
After the disastrous 2014 midterms, Pfeiffer began a review of the sleepy White House digital operations, meeting with tech types in New York and Silicon Valley, ultimately writing a memo calling for more forward thinking. Some of Pfeiffer’s rivals actually blamed him for some of the earlier stodginess—a few pointed me to an article he wrote predicting the 2016 election would hinge on a flash-in-the-pan app called Meerkat—and he left the White House after his review, the last of the original Obama message mavens to go. He was replaced by Shailagh Murray, a former reporter, while Jason Goldman, a former head of product at Twitter, became chief digital officer. In any case, under the new team, unconventional communications has become the norm. Obama is now reaching Americans on their smartphones through viral videos with Jerry Seinfeld, the cast of Hamilton and a 106-year-old woman who danced for joy when she met him. His team is going around the old school White House press corps to engage new outlets like Mic and the Verge, using new platforms like Snapchat and Vine.
So Obama didn’t just promote his Clean Power Plan to limit climate change from the podium. He took a climate-themed trip to Alaska, where he recorded a video with a selfie stick in front of a receding glacier, then spent a day in the wilderness with the survivalist host of Running Wild With Bear Grylls. It was one thing to talk about criminal justice reform; Obama took the first presidential trip to a federal prison. And when the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality last June, his rainbow-lit White House said more than a speech ever could.
In its fourth quarter, the White House is taking political niche marketing to new extremes. The Centers for Disease Control answered questions about the Zika virus on the pregnancy and parenting advice site Scary Mommy. The drug czar did a Q&A about opioids with a Facebook group called The Addict’s Mom.
Obama’s team is still putting him out there, but often in ways that are kind of, well, out there. The president visited a comic in his Los Angeles garage to tape a podcast called WTF. He sat down with an author he loves, Marilynne Robinson, for a rambling New York Review of Books chat about fiction and history, a hit with the 1 million literati who follow the NYRB on Twitter. Media critics snickered when he spoke with the YouTube star GloZell Green, who wears green lipstick and once ate cereal out of her bathtub. But she asked substantive questions about same-sex marriage and Cuba, although Obama did smirk when she called Michelle “your first wife.” And her channel has 4 million subscribers, numbers Morning Joe can only dream of.
“You’ve got to meet people where they are,” says White House political director David Simas.
Liberated from electoral politics, Obama clearly enjoys this stuff. “That’s going viral,” he crowed after he helped Hamilton star Lin-Manuel Miranda in March with a freestyle rap in the Rose Garden. “This is a childhood dream,” he said as he rode a 1963 Corvette Stingray around the White House grounds with Seinfeld on Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. He’s not too interested in horse-race pundits—it’s no coincidence that Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press, wrote a book about Obama titled The Stranger—but he gave an extended tour of his global thinking to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a long-form foreign affairs journalist.
The message may finally be getting through. Obama’s WTF communications strategy has coincided with a climb in his approval rating to as high as 53 percent, better than just about any other national politician’s. At a time when so many Americans view the world through a partisan prism, that might be near his ceiling.
“If we dug up bin Laden’s corpse and waxed him again, maybe we’d go up to 55,” one senior White House official said.
Of course, Obama’s good numbers might have more to do with a record 73 straight months of job growth and 5 percent unemployment than good messaging. He’s also been getting in the muck with Congress much less and doing much more: the Iran nuclear deal, a global climate pact, the Cuba opening. And he is again avoiding comparisons to the Almighty thanks to the GOP primary, particularly the pouffe-haired alternative musing about nuking Europe and punishing women who have abortions. Obama aides frustrated over their inability to pivot during brutal news cycles admit to flashes of envy at Donald Trump’s ability to change the subject by tweeting a new outrage. But for all his ups and downs, the basic Obama brand hasn’t changed much since his rocky introduction to inside-Washington politics: The haters hate, the lovers love and the approval ratings oscillate within a remarkably narrow band, almost never lower than 40 or higher than they are now.
It’s impossible to pinpoint how much messaging truly drives outcomes, but the African-American named Barack Hussein Obama who won two presidential elections probably didn’t forget how to communicate after the first one. The real communications lesson of the Obama era may be that communications are overrated. The stimulus and Obamacare were unpopular and dubiously messaged, but they were transformative achievements, and they didn’t prevent the president from getting comfortably reelected. His numbers went up a bit after bin Laden, and down a bit after the website humiliation, but nothing he’s said or done has realigned his trajectory. There might be something to Obama’s long-game theory of doing stuff and letting the chips fall where they may.
The chips haven’t always fallen where he wants, and a Republican successor could scatter them. But his legacy will depend more on deeds than words or GIFs or Vines. Good communications can amplify success and mitigate failure, but it rarely changes outcomes.
During Obama’s rare stint behind the wheel with Seinfeld, they decided to see whether a guard would let the president drive off his property. The answer, inevitably, was no.
“I knew that wouldn’t work,” Obama muttered.
But Seinfeld shook his head with a hint of mock disgust.
“You didn’t sell it,” he replied.