Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Yes We (Still) Can
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/24/1975
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
Former Senior Advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama for Strategy and Communications. Co-host of Pod Save America.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018080997
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018080997
HEADING: Pfeiffer, Dan
000 00602nz a2200169n 450
001 10778634
005 20180616073142.0
008 180615n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2018080997
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca11399698
040 __ |a IlMpPL |b eng |e rda |c IlMpPL
100 1_ |a Pfeiffer, Dan
370 __ |e San Francisco (Calif.) |2 naf
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Males |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Pfeiffer, Dan. Yes we (still) can, 2018: |b title page (Dan Pfeiffer) jacket flap (Dan Pfeiffer is a cohost of Pod Save America. One of Barack Obama’s longest serving advisor; lives in San Francisco.)
PERSONAL
Born December 25, 1975, in Wilington, DE; son of Gary Malick Pfeiffer and Vivian Lear; married Sarah Elizabeth Feinberg, July 16, 2006 (divorced 2011); married Howli Ledbetter, May 2018; children: Kyla.
EDUCATION:Georgetown University, B.A. (magna cum laude).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Activist, podcaster, political advisor. Community Oriented Policing Services, Clinton Administration, spokesperson; member of communications department, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign for the Presidency; Democratic Governors Association, staff member; worked for U.S. Senators Tim Johnson, Tom Daschle, and Evan Bayh; Obama-Biden Transition team, communications office director, 2008; Obama Administration, Deputy White House Communications Director, later White House Communications Director, 2008-12; Obama Administration, Senior Advisor for Strategy and Communications, 2013-15; Let America Vote, Board of Advisors; Pod Save America podcast, cohost, 2016–; CNN, political contributor, 2015–.
POLITICS: DemocratWRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, Dan Pfeiffer served on the Obama transition team as communications office director, and as Deputy White House Communications Director and later White House Communications Director, from 2008 to 2012. In the second Obama Administration, Pfeiffer was the Senior Advisor for Strategy and Communications from 2013 to 2015, making him one of Obama’s longest-serving advisors. Since leaving the White House, Pfeiffer has become cohost of the podcast, Pod Save America, as well as a CNN political contributor. In 2018, he published a memoir of his time serving in the Obama Administration, Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump.
In Yes We (Still) Can, Pfeiffer gives a behind-the-scenes look at the presidency of Barack Obama, with anecdotes and stories that show how Obama navigated the changing political scene–transformed by Twitter feeds, conspiracy theories, FOX news, and Republican intransigence. The loss of bipartisanship and civility made Obama’s job all the more difficult according to Pfeiffer, but the President was still able to succeed with the passage of programs such as the Affordable Care Act. Pfeiffer experienced it all, along with the Administration, and with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, he determined to tell the inside story of the Obama Administration and how it dealt with the altered political landscape. In so doing, Pfeiffer has noted that he hopes to provide progressive groups with a road map of how to win again.
Writing in the Washington Post Online, Dan Greenberg had a varied assessment, commenting: “Yes We (Still) Can, a breezy memoir by former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer, is a victim of bad timing. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and then built on Obama’s achievements, Pfeiffer’s unspectacular, jokey apologia might have gone down easy–a champagne flute of fizzy recollections. But with so many people waking each day to read the news with fear and loathing, the book’s flamboyantly wacky tone and dearth of interesting disclosures will, I imagine, encourage most readers right now to pass it over.” Similarly, New York Times Online reviewer Matthew Garrahan noted that while Pfeiffer “bills his book as a sort of road map for the future, … I’m not sure he achieves this goal because he doesn’t seem to have grasped the magnitude of the change that swept America in the election of November 2016–a result arguably as radical as the one in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the country’s first black president.” San Francisco Chronicle Online commentator John Diaz also offered a further mixed evaluation, writing: “The problem with “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump,” is that it never quite decides what it wants to be.”
Others had a higher assessment. A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that in Yes We (Still) Can, Pfeiffer comments on the state of the Republican Party: “The current Republican Party is composed of ‘clowns, con men, and racists’ and those who enable them, such as ‘diabolical’ and ‘cynical’ Mitch McConnell. Pfeiffer argues that a new path requires Democrats to be ‘audacious, authentic, and inspirational.'” The critic termed this book a “nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer also had praise, observing: “Those who share Pfeiffer’s admiration of Obama and his hopes for a Democratic resurgence–and, of course, fans of his podcast—will love both the chatty insider anecdotes and the advice.” Likewise, online New York Journal of Books contributor Jonathan Power noted: “The Pfeiffer book is a testament to a great leader. But it is more than that. Pfeiffer, like his ex-boss, believes that there are ‘reasons to believe hope is right ’round the corner’—what Obama would call The Audacity of Hope. There’s no need to believe the Republican rhetoric about Trump being a leader who can keep them in a permanent majority.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump.
Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2018, review of Yes We (Still) Can, p. 60; July 2, 2018, review of Yes We (Still) Can, p. 10.
ONLINE
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (October 21, 2018), Jonathan Power, review of Yes We (Still) Can.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 2, 2018), Matthew Garrahan, review of Yes We (Still) Can.
NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/ (June 16, 2018), Michel Martin, “Dan Pfeiffer Didn’t Plan to Write Yes We (Still) Can–Until Trump Won,” author interview.
San Francisco Chronicle Online, https://www.sfchronicle.com/ (June 15, 2018), John Diaz, review of Yes We (Still) Can.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (July 13, 2018), David Greenberg, review of Yes We (Still) Can.
Daniel Pfeiffer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
Dan Pfeiffer
Daniel Pfeiffer.jpg
Senior Advisor to the President
In office
January 25, 2013 – March 6, 2015
President Barack Obama
Preceded by David Plouffe
Succeeded by Shailagh Murray
White House Communications Director
In office
November 30, 2009 – January 25, 2013
President Barack Obama
Preceded by Anita Dunn (Acting)
Succeeded by Jennifer Palmieri
Personal details
Born Howard Daniel Pfeiffer
December 24, 1975 (age 42)
Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.
Political party Democratic
Spouse(s) Sarah Feinberg
(m. 2006; div. 2011)
Howli Ledbetter (m. 2016)
Children 1
Education Georgetown University (BA)
Howard Daniel Pfeiffer[1] (born December 24, 1975) is an American activist, podcaster, and former Senior Advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama for Strategy and Communications.[2]
Pfeiffer was a long-time aide to Obama, serving in various press and communications roles throughout his 2008 campaign for the Presidency, on his presidential transition team, and in the Obama White House. He co-hosts the Pod Save America podcast with Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor.[3][4] In 2015, Pfeiffer joined CNN as a political contributor.[5]
Contents
1 Early life and career
2 Obama White House
3 Other work
4 Personal life
5 References
6 External links
Early life and career
Pfeiffer was born in Wilmington, Delaware,[6] the son of Vivian Lear (née Strange), a learning specialist, and Gary Malick Pfeiffer, a financial officer for DuPont.[7][8] He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University. He began his career in politics working as a spokesman for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) initiative of the Clinton Administration. In 2000 he joined the communications department of Al Gore's 2000 campaign for the Presidency.[citation needed]
Following the 2000 presidential election, he went to work for the Democratic Governors Association, and later worked for Senators Tim Johnson, Tom Daschle, and Evan Bayh.[9] He served briefly as communications director for Evan Bayh's presidential exploratory committee.[citation needed]
Obama White House
After the 2008 presidential election, Pfeiffer ran the communications office for the Obama-Biden Transition team and was then appointed Deputy White House Communications Director after the inauguration of Barack Obama. Less than a year later, after the departure of Anita Dunn, Pfeiffer was named White House Communications Director. He remained in the role for the entire first term of the Obama presidency.[10] At the start of President Obama's second term, Pfeiffer was promoted to Senior Advisor for Strategy and Communications, taking over most of the portfolio previously managed in the White House by David Axelrod and David Plouffe. He left the White House on March 6th 2015.[11]
Other work
Pfeiffer currently serves on the Board of Advisors of Let America Vote, a voting rights organization founded by fellow Crooked Media host Jason Kander.[12]
Personal life
On July 16, 2006, Pfeiffer married Sarah Elizabeth Feinberg, a senior advisor and spokeswoman for Obama's former Chief of Staff, and current senior advisor and spokeswoman for Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.[7] In 2011, Pfeiffer and Feinberg separated, and later divorced.[13]
In 2016, Pfeiffer married Howli Ledbetter, former director of message planning in the Obama White House.[14][15] In May 2018, Ledbetter gave birth to a daughter, Kyla.[16][17]
References
"Biography: Howard Daniel Pfeiffer". LegiStorm. Retrieved January 27, 2014. (subscription required)
"Pfeiffer takes over for Dunn". Retrieved 2009-12-03.
Rutenberg, Jim. "Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter Trump". The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2017.
"Pod Save America". Crooked Media. January 9, 2017. Retrieved March 29, 2017.
Eric Bradner (June 1, 2015). "Dan Pfeiffer joins CNN as contributor". CNN Politics. Retrieved May 10, 2017.
Rutenberg, Jim. "Times Topics, People". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-10-24.
"Sarah Feinberg, H. Daniel Pfeiffer". The New York Times. 2006-07-16. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
"Who's who in Finance and Industry". google.ca. Retrieved September 19, 2015.
Hulse, Carl (2006-05-31). "A Build-a-Protest Approach to Immigration". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-11-07.
"Dan Pfeiffer: The Next White House Communications Boss". Time. 2009-11-13. Retrieved 2015-04-01.
"Delaware's Dan Pfeiffer: From White House to podcaster". The News Journal. 2016-08-16. Retrieved 2017-06-07.
"Advisors". Let America Vote. Retrieved May 1, 2018.
Dan Pfeiffer and Sarah Feinberg separate", Washington Post; accessed November 18, 2016.
"Former White House aide Dan Pfeiffer engaged to another Obama alum, Howli Ledbetter". The Washington Post. May 18, 2016. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
"Howli Pfeiffer profile". Wearerally.com. Retrieved 2016-11-18.
Schneider, Lindsay (June 21, 2018). ""Democrats Get so Mad": Pod Save America's Dan Pfeiffer on Maggie Haberman, Robert Mueller, and Who Can Beat Trump in 2020". Vanity Fair.
Cormier, Ryan (June 14, 2018). "Former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer, Wilmington native, talks White House adventures in book". Delaware News Journal.
External links
Appearances on C-SPAN
"Daniel Pfeiffer collected news and commentary". The New York Times.
Political offices
Preceded by
Anita Dunn
Acting White House Director of Communications
2009–2013 Succeeded by
Jennifer Palmieri
Preceded by
David Plouffe Senior Advisor to the President
2013–2015
With: Brian Deese
Valerie Jarrett Succeeded by
Shailagh Murray
Dan Pfeiffer Didn't Plan To Write 'Yes We (Still) Can' — Until Trump Won
June 16, 20185:31 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Michel Martin speaks with former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer. His new memoir stories his time in the White House, and prescriptions for the future of the Democratic Party during President Trump.
Michel Martin, HOST:
Let's just say it. These are hard days for many people on the left side of the political aisle, with President Trump in the White House, Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and a conservative majority and control of the Supreme Court. It doesn't take much to find Democrats who say they are angry, depressed, even in despair - and then there are people like Dan Pfeiffer. He was one of the first hired for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential run. He was one of the president's longest serving senior advisers. Now he's the co-host of the wildly popular podcast, "Pod Save America." and he has a memoir coming out early next week about his time working with Obama. It's titled "Yes We Still Can: Politics In The Age Of Obama, Twitter, And Trump." Dan Pfeiffer joined me yesterday from member station KQED in San Francisco, and I started by asking him why he wanted to publish this book now.
DAN PFEIFFER: Well, when I left the White House back in 2015, some people approached me and said, you have any interest in writing a book? And it wasn't until Trump won that I thought back to all the things that I dealt with in the White House and that President Obama dealt with - the political forces, the changes in media and technology, the radicalization of the right.
We were battling on a daily basis the very forces that helped lead to a moment where someone like Donald Trump could get elected. And so I thought that would be an interesting story to tell, but I didn't want to just tell the story, I wanted to dig in and see if there were lessons that could be learned - that could be applied to the future battles for Democrats and progressives going forward.
MARTIN: Give us some of the takeaways. I mean, what do you think are the circumstances that led to the current moment?
PFEIFFER: I think a couple of things that led to this moment are the fundamental changes in media where the ideas of rules and referees and fact checkers became much less important. And the power of the, quote, unquote, "media" to play that referee role has been diminished and allow someone without regard for facts to succeed in a way in which politicians could not before. And another thing that happened was the Republican base had a very strong reaction to Obama's election. It is what the Tea Party movement was about. It was the rise of this racially-based, white-identity politics. It was in its nascent stages in the early parts of Obama's presidency but then blew out into the open after Obama was re-elected.
And the Republican leaders had an opportunity or choice in the early days, which was, will you stand up to that? Will you tell them that there is no room for birthers in this party? There is no room for racists in this party. They chose not to do that. They preferred to get the votes of the birthers and the racists and then try to expel them from the party. You can see that just a year later. Mitt Romney goes to Trump Tower to beg Donald Trump for his endorsement, and so that spoke to the - what the party was willing to do to try to beat Obama.
MARTIN: But what does it say, though, that a majority of white women and a number of middle-class and upper-middle class Americans voted for Donald Trump? That's just a fact. So what's that about?
PFEIFFER: One of the things I look at in this book is this was a very winnable election. Even with all the things that happened, it was still an election that Democrats could have won. And this isn't just about Hillary Clinton. You could sort of throw blame entirely at Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign if Democrats had won everywhere else but she had lost. But we lost very winnable Senate seats. We lost seats in Congress that we should have won.
And so there was a failure to both understand the changes that happened in politics, leverage those changes for the future and tell a compelling story about why this election mattered because too many people did not turn out. And I missed it at the time as well. I was incredibly - I've never been more confident of anything in my life that Hillary Clinton was going to win and Donald Trump would lose by a very large margin.
MARTIN: Is there any part of you that sees any of yourself in some of the people who support Donald Trump who also see it as a cause?
PFEIFFER: I certainly understand the idea of people who are dedicated to what they believe in and willing to work really hard for it. What I am unable to understand with the people who associate themselves with Trump is their willingness to overlook the dishonesty, the indecency, the lack of empathy, to be asked to go out every single day and why. I understand people who - out in the country who support Donald Trump. It's not really something I would do.
But I can understand if you are so frustrated with Washington, if your life did not improve the way you had hoped, if you're angry at the (unintelligible) about something, and to put your hope into a vessel like Donald Trump, I get that. I understand why people would do that. I don't think those people are necessarily racist, or crazy, or anything like that. It is - you're making a bet about what is best for your future. And Donald Trump will have to answer in 2020 whether he made their lives better. But I do really question the people who are willing to subjugate their decency and their morality to serve Trump on a daily basis.
MARTIN: So we're having a very serious grownup discussion. OK, so tell me about that dinner with Kanye.
PFEIFFER: You know, we always say in the Obama world - in the toughest times, you can laugh or you can cry, so you might as well laugh. So in between the serious stuff - the things about Fox News that may make you mad, let's tell some funny stories and let's make it entertaining. And so back in 2014, we went to a fundraiser - a small fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee with Kanye. And everyone was very nervous about this because it was the first time that the president had seen Kanye West in person since he had famously called him a jackass after the Taylor Swift-Beyonce incident, and this is the only thing in the book I was nervous about writing.
And I was like, I hope this doesn't cause some sort of beef between Kanye and Obama after they patched everything together. And in between when I turned in the book and when the book came out, our friend Kanye West decided to put on the red MAGA hat, and I became less worried about that possible consequence of writing it...
MARTIN: OK, but...
PFEIFFER: There was a...
MARTIN: Story. Tell the - so tell the story. So you - the president's going around answering questions, and so apparently Kanye gets the last question and he goes on for like 30 minutes. What does he say?
PFEIFFER: So, he talked - he compared himself to President Obama. He talked about how everyone has opponents - President Obama has the Republicans, Nike has Adidas, Kanye has Drake. And it is crazy, I mean, it's Kanye crazy. And the president has this look on his face - he looks interested and serious. And I'm watching him thinking, what is he going to do? And I can see Kim Kardashian getting pretty uncomfortable as - the more Kanye talks. And when it ends, the president says, Kanye, thank you so much. We'll definitely follow up and get together. And we walk out. We get in the presidential limo. And I think, is he going to be mad at us for putting him in this situation? You know, he just spent 30 minutes listening to Kanye. He's got bigger problems to deal with.
And he just looks at us and says, all I could think about was that [expletive] cray, in reference to the famous Kanye West-Jay Z song. And we laughed all the way to the helicopter we got on, we laughed on the helicopter ride, we laughed on Air Force One the whole way home, and it was - it was so funny because it was just like Obama knew exactly what to say. And he also proved that he truly knew his hip-hop references.
MARTIN: Well, that's encouraging.
PFEIFFER: Yes. Yes.
MARTIN: That's Dan Pfeiffer, former adviser to President Obama. His memoir, "Yes We Still Can: Politics In The Age Of Obama, Twitter, And Trump," is out next week. Dan Pfeiffer, thanks so much for speaking with us.
PFEIFFER: Oh, thank you for having me. It was so much fun.
Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
QUOTE:
The current Republican Party is
composed of "clowns, con men, and racists" and those who enable them, such as "diabolical" and "cynical"
Mitch McConnell. Pfeiffer argues that a new path requires Democrats to be "audacious, authentic, and
inspirational."
A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.
Print Marked Items
Pfeiffer, Dan: YES WE (STILL) CAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pfeiffer, Dan YES WE (STILL) CAN Twelve (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 6, 19 ISBN: 978-1-5387-1171-2
Another Barack Obama staffer reveals his White House experiences.
During his campaign for the presidency and his two terms in office, Obama gathered a cadre of young,
articulate, and apparently tireless men and women to serve him. In his debut memoir, Pfeiffer, now co-host
of the political podcast Pod Save America, recounts his stints as Obama's traveling secretary during the
campaign and later director of communications (2009-2013) and senior adviser (until 2015). The author's
warm, affectionate portrait of Obama and revelations about pre-Trumpian politics complement recent
memoirs by Alyssa Mastromonaco (deputy chief of staff), David Litt (speechwriter), Pat Cunnane (senior
writer), and David Axelrod (political adviser) in what appears to be a growing genre. Pfeiffer, an unabashed
admirer, burnishes a familiar image of Obama as focused, idealistic, pragmatic, funny, caring, shrewd,
savvy, and confidently competitive. "Obama does not like to lose at anything," writes the author, "--golf,
basketball, cards, Scrabble, and most certainly campaigns." The author disputes the notion that Obama was
aloof: "He is a truly decent and empathetic human who genuinely liked being around people (less so
members of Congress angling for a photo and a pork barrel project)." He was challenged, though, by a
Republican Congress determined to thwart every effort and policy decision and from a vicious media
firestorm--eagerly propagated by Fox--over his place of birth. "If you want to know why nativism and
racism are resurgent in the Republican Party," the author writes, "look to Fox News. And if you want to
know how we ended up with Trump as president, yet again just look to Fox News." Part of Pfeiffer's
motivation in writing is to encourage voters--especially millennials--"to knock the GOP upside the head and
convince them that they have to abandon not just Trump but Trumpism." The current Republican Party is
composed of "clowns, con men, and racists" and those who enable them, such as "diabolical" and "cynical"
Mitch McConnell. Pfeiffer argues that a new path requires Democrats to be "audacious, authentic, and
inspirational."
A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pfeiffer, Dan: YES WE (STILL) CAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293996/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=51b8a2c0.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293996
YES WE (STILL) CAN
Publishers Weekly.
265.27 (July 2, 2018): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
YES WE (STILL) CAN
Dan Pfeiffer
#5 Hardcover Nonfiction
Former White House communications director and Pod Save America cohost Pfeiffer offers "an entertaining
work of memoir-cum-political strategy," our review said.
ALL PRINT UNIT SALES PER NPD BOOKSCAN EXCEPT WHERE NOTED
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"YES WE (STILL) CAN." Publishers Weekly, 2 July 2018, p. 10. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546187811/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b87f05f.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
QUOTE:
Those who share Pfeiffer's admiration of
Obama and his hopes for a Democratic resurgence--and, of course, fans of his podcast---will love both the
chatty insider anecdotes and the advice.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546187811
Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of
Obama, Twitter, and Trump
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump
Dan Pfeiffer. Twelve, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-1538711-71-2
Pfeiffer, Pod Save America cohost and former Obama senior adviser, in an entertaining work of memoircum-political
strategy, spells out the strengths of his old boss as campaigner and president and seeks to shed
light on why Donald Trump won in 2016. With the goal of ensuring the liberal cause isn't lost in future
elections, Pfeiffer describes how he was hired by Obama during the 2008 campaign and how for the next six
years he had a front-row seat to the president's triumphs and struggles. Taking a conversational, occasionally
snarky tone, he brings the reader into high-level meetings, such as one over tax cuts held in the vicepresident's
office; a fund-raiser attended by Kanye West; and his own awkward moments (he once split his
pants in the Oval Office while preparing the president for a press conference). Throughout, Pfeiffer offers
advice in bold type, based on the successes of Obama and Trump, on running a winning campaign, using
Twitter, dealing with fake news, and other topics crucial to elections. "The path back for Democrats is pretty
clear," he writes, "and it doesn't mean becoming more like Trump." Those who share Pfeiffer's admiration of
Obama and his hopes for a Democratic resurgence--and, of course, fans of his podcast---will love both the
chatty insider anecdotes and the advice. Agent: David Larabell, Creative Arts Agency. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p.
60. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858722/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a2285ff. Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858722
QUOTE:
“Yes We (Still) Can,” a breezy memoir by former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer, is a victim of bad timing. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and then built on Obama’s achievements, Pfeiffer’s unspectacular, jokey apologia might have gone down easy — a champagne flute of fizzy recollections. But with so many people waking each day to read the news with fear and loathing, the book’s flamboyantly wacky tone and dearth of interesting disclosures will, I imagine, encourage most readers right now to pass it over.
A breezy memoir on White House zaniness and Twitter dangers
By David Greenberg
July 13
After a president leaves office, there’s a certain eagerness to harvest the memoirs of administration officials that sprout like crocuses — or maybe toadstools — in the post-presidential soil. We look forward to the reminiscences and reflections, the disclosures and the dish, the settling of scores and the priming of histories yet to be written. But this season’s spate of Obama look-backs feels oddly joyless. For the roughly 50 percent of America that sorely misses our last president, the ritual exercise of revisiting his rise, struggles, triumphs and failures is more likely to induce discomfort and nausea than smiles and delight. With Donald Trump as president, everything just feels different.
“Yes We (Still) Can,” a breezy memoir by former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer, is a victim of bad timing. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and then built on Obama’s achievements, Pfeiffer’s unspectacular, jokey apologia might have gone down easy — a champagne flute of fizzy recollections. But with so many people waking each day to read the news with fear and loathing, the book’s flamboyantly wacky tone and dearth of interesting disclosures will, I imagine, encourage most readers right now to pass it over.
Fans of Pfeiffer’s podcast, “Pod Save America,” may still revel in the book’s affected sitcom zaniness. He devotes a brief chapter to recounting the time he split his pants in the Oval Office and had to slink out sidewise. The book is full of the standard set pieces of the campaign-memoir genre: the ritual self-deprecation; the lucky breaks and twists of fate; the tales of early flubs, boners and fiascoes that our hero thought would ruin his career but can now be safely recounted. There’s little here, though, that sheds light on an important question lurking within its pages: How did the same country that elected its first black president, a man who reflexively appealed to the better angels of our nature, then proceed to choose its first president without any political experience or commitments, who appeals ceaselessly to our basest selves?
A self-declared “Obama loyalist through and through,” Pfeiffer states up front that he had no wish to write a “history,” an “inside account” or a “tell all” — because, he says, he’s not a jerk (he uses a more colorful synonym). So what has he written instead? Unlike previous generations of spinmeisters dating to Theodore Roosevelt’s time, Pfeiffer and Obama aides such as David Plouffe, Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes never had careers except as operatives; they didn’t come up through local politics, work as journalists, or master policy in universities or think tanks. Born after the dawn of the permanent campaign, they knew how to run campaigns and, once in the White House, worried about winning the week, the day or the hour.
Perhaps as a result, “Yes, We (Still) Can” has the jerry-built feel of a statement from the White House communications shop that Pfeiffer used to run. It’s as if its raison d’etre were decided on by a team of consultants trying to calculate what sort of book would land with the right splash. Pfeiffer writes that he intended the book to be a no-nonsense “conversation about politics in the era of Obama, Trump, and Twitter.” (Again, he uses a colorful synonym for “no-nonsense.”) Although Pfeiffer reminds us that “the cleverest idea in the world won’t work unless it is authentic to the person,” he doesn’t heed his own wisdom. More candor and greater depth would have helped the reader see beyond Pfeiffer’s bro persona and glimpse his authentic self.
One of Pfeiffer’s goals is to explain how recent changes in the media of communication have altered the political landscape. Many of these ideas are familiar by now, such as the challenge presidents face in capturing the public’s attention when viewers have nearly infinite cable and Internet choices. And he notes that by allowing citizens to react immediately to events, Twitter has confounded the spin doctors’ work; he argues — unpersuasively to my mind — that in the 2012 campaign, Obama lost his first debate with Republican Mitt Romney because of bad real-time Twitter reviews from Andrew Sullivan and other pundits. ¬
Pfeiffer is more convincing when he calls Twitter a “high risk, high reward” medium, noting that most politicians are risk-averse in using new tools — and thus failed to exploit it. These included Obama, who, despite having a White House account, never used the new medium effectively. He regarded it, Pfeiffer says, as “some sort of dystopian hellhole.” Trump, in contrast, had nothing to lose and “managed to use the platform to dominate the political conversation.” More important, “Twitter facilitated a coarser, less substantive political culture that significantly benefited Trump, who is at his very core a Twitter troll.”
As for journalists, he argues that Twitter has blurred the time-honored and useful distinctions between reporting, analysis and opinion. When the medium debuted, reporters bound to stick to the facts on the air or in the newspaper would abandon their professionalism on social media. “Reporters opined and even the most junior reporter was free to offer their political analysis of the most complex situations,” ¬Pfeiffer writes. This blurring of lines, he further suggests, “provides an opening for those who view facts as obstacles” — namely “Trump and his MAGA minions.”
“Yes We (Still) Can” won’t take its place with the memoirs of men like Leon Panetta and Robert Gates as vital references for historians of the Obama presidency. But it’s not without its moments. The best ones come from Obama, who may not have been the best president of recent times but was almost certainly the funniest. Toward the end of the book, Pfeiffer, having departed the White House in 2015, returns for a final visit after Trump’s election. Plaintively, he looks at his former boss for a reed of hope to cling to, only to have the president reply, with his well-known deadpan understatement, “Look, this isn’t an ideal situation to say the least.” They both laughed. Sometimes that’s all you can do.
Yes We (Still) Can
Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump
By Dan Pfeiffer
Twelve. 284 pp. $28
QUOTE:
bills his book as a sort of road map for the future,
I’m not sure he achieves this goal because he doesn’t seem to have grasped the magnitude of the change that swept America in the election of November 2016 — a result arguably as radical as the one in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the country’s first black president.
Remembering Obama and Hoping to Win Again
By Matthew Garrahan
• July 2, 2018
YES WE (STILL) CAN
Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump
By Dan Pfeiffer
286 pp. Twelve. $28.
For liberals, progressives and Democrats, the year and a half since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president has been a debilitating emotional roller coaster ride. The president’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the rolling back of environmental regulations, the separation of immigrant families at the border and the detention of children in cages: The litany of outrages has caused anger, sadness and a Trump Tower-size amount of spluttering indignation.
The title of Dan Pfeiffer’s new book about his years as a senior adviser to Barack Obama suggests all may not be lost for those despairing at the current inhabitant of the White House. “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter and Trump” is not a history of the Obama administration, Pfeiffer is at pains to point out, nor is it a juicy “tell all” — because, he says saltily, he is not a terrible person. Instead, he bills his book as a sort of road map for the future, an attempt “to better understand the current state of politics and look at where we go from here.”
Please disable your ad blocker
Advertising helps fund Times journalism.
I’m not sure he achieves this goal because he doesn’t seem to have grasped the magnitude of the change that swept America in the election of November 2016 — a result arguably as radical as the one in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the country’s first black president. Trump’s win by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College (albeit not the popular vote) showed that a large number of Americans had no qualms about voting for someone who had made explicitly misogynistic and racist comments. Indeed, racial divisiveness, whether in talking about banning Muslims or building a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, was central to Trump’s campaign and clearly a draw for many voters.
Image
None of the books I’ve read since the election have considered what this means or says about America in 2018. There have been endless analyses of the campaign itself while the press has devoted its attention to breathless reporting on the possibility of collusion with Russia and the latest sensational developments from Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Go beyond the headlines.
Subscribe to The Times
Yet there has been a tectonic shift in America: The unsayable is now regularly said, and often by the commander in chief himself. If, as expected, Trump runs again in 2020, his opponent will have to find a way to eat into his support if he or she is to retake the White House. Pfeiffer advocates taking the high ground. “Hate worked for him; it won’t work for us,” he writes. “It requires being audacious, authentic and inspirational.” In other words, be like Obama.
Still, he remains optimistic. Democrats, he says, lost sight of the most important aspect of a successful campaign: “No matter how precise the data or advanced the technology, campaigns will always be decided by who tells a more compelling story about America.”
He lists five “building blocks” for a successful campaign — attitude, scaling, culture, strategy and branding — but neglects to mention policy positions. (When did policy become secondary to branding? And did anyone tell Bernie Sanders?)
QUOTE:
The Pfeiffer book is a testament to a great leader. But it is more than that. Pfeiffer, like his ex-boss, believes that there are “reasons to believe hope is right ’round the corner”—what Obama would call The Audacity of Hope. There’s no need to believe the Republican rhetoric about Trump being a leader who can keep them in a permanent majority.
Reviewed by:
Jonathan Power
“Obama was a light. Trump is of the night.”
Politics is a fickle beast. Barack Obama won more votes among blue-collar workers than did his opponent, Senator John McCain. But it was those very blue-collar workers who tipped the scales in Donald Trump’s victory. They weren’t racists or they wouldn’t have voted for Obama in the first place.
But in voting for Trump they voted against their economic interest. Trump hasn’t and won’t help the health of the poorer, nor improve income inequality, nor in the long run give them jobs that now have migrated to China, India, and Europe. What he did give these voters was a sense of pride in being American, as Obama did, but Hilary Clinton couldn’t. “Put America First!” he shouted again and again. Trump blindsided them with talk of dismantling free trade. Even though events and the long run will show he has shot America in the foot, it sounded convincing.
Obama would have won a third term if allowed to run. He had more appeal across the electorate than Trump. It was Mrs. Clinton who lost it.
Obama was the most successful liberal, Democratic, president since Franklin Roosevelt who ushered in the New Deal, a campaign to save the poorest from the Great Depression. Some would say since Lyndon Johnson with his great civil rights and poverty reforms, but he can’t be called liberal after the carnage he inflicted on Southeast Asia. Bill Clinton was a centrist cum conservative and he re-organized welfare so that the poor were badly hit—a policy he now says he regrets. Jimmy Carter was more successful than his many critics allow, but still his great achievements were in foreign not domestic policy.
Many observers are now worrying that Trump will win re-election in three years’ time. But remember 2006 when a book, One Party Country was published. It was about how George W. Bush and Karl Rove, were “on the cusp of building a permanent Republican majority that would rule politics till the end of time.”
So writes Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director, in his fascinating new book, Yes We (Still) Can. He writes that soon after the Bush book was published the Democrats took back the House and the Senate in a landslide. Two years after that Obama won a huge electoral victory, capturing states that no Democrat had won in decades.
The Pfeiffer book is a testament to a great leader. But it is more than that. Pfeiffer, like his ex-boss, believes that there are “reasons to believe hope is right ’round the corner”—what Obama would call The Audacity of Hope. There’s no need to believe the Republican rhetoric about Trump being a leader who can keep them in a permanent majority.
Pfeiffer reminds us of a speech Obama made at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Obama spoke from the very spot where King had made his “I have a Dream” speech. In a masterful sermon Obama slightly re-wrote King: “The arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.” If the next Democratic candidate can learn from Obama’s experience he or she will win the presidency.
Above all it means inspiring young people to vote, and persuading the blue-collar workers who defected to Trump to return to the Democratic fold. And, it means, as Pfeiffer explains so well, mastering the media at a time when Fox News dominates an extremely large audience, not as a traditional bipartisan TV channel but as a 100% propagandistic supporter of the Republican philosophy.
And it means realizing that the media world is “in the midst of a massive, rapid, disruptive transformation that is re-writing all the rules of politics and presidential communications.” A major part of the media—apart from Fox, the New York Times and Washington Post—is floundering because of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis which had the effect of drastically lowering the advertising that is necessary if the media is to be adequately funded.
At the same time the Internet and the smartphone have taken over. Despite all the difficulties of adjusting to the “new media” Obama triumphed over it. But it took a lot of hard and clever work, as Pfeiffer records.
Obama was a light. Trump is of the night. Much of what you need to know for the future is in this book, in particular where the light switch is.
Jonathan Power's most recent book is Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals. He is an author, filmmaker, and has been a foreign affairs columnist for more than 35 years,. He has interviewed 60 of the world's most famous political icons. His columns and articles have included in such publications as the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. One of his documentaries for the BBC won a silver medal at the Venice Film Festival. For 17 years he was a foreign affairs columnist/commentator for the International Herald Tribune.
---
QUOTE:
The problem with “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump,” is that it never quite decides what it wants to be.
‘Yes We (Still) Can,’ by Dan Pfeiffer
John Diaz June 15, 2018 Updated: June 15, 2018 3:26 p.m.
More
The problem with “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump,” is that it never quite decides what it wants to be.
Despite the author’s proximity to Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign to much of his second term, it is not “the inside account of the moments that will fill the history book ... that’s Barack Obama’s story to tell,” Dan Pfeiffer warns readers early on. He allows that he isn’t going to serve up “gossipy scoops about the Obama White House,” and he keeps that vault shut tight.
And despite the title, “Yes We (Still) Can” offers less than an original blueprint for Democrats to return to power after the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, aside from platitudes such as the need to be “audacious, authentic and inspirational.” In other words: less like Trump and more like, well, the president the author lionizes throughout much of his book.
• Unlimited Digital Access for 99¢
• Read more articles like this by subscribing to the San Francisco Chronicle
So even a reader who is fascinated with the machinations of American politics is left wondering what this accounting of the Obama years might offer that a skilled observer with less firsthand knowledge but a less protective instinct about the principals could not.
Yes We (Still) Can
Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump
By Dan Pfeiffer
(Twelve; 284 pages; $28)
Read More
This book is inherently limited by Pfeiffer’s self-imposed restraint. Don’t look here for anecdotes that might cast Obama in an unflattering light, portray Republicans as noble or courageous or reveal staffers in ways that might make them reluctant to work with him in the future.
Don’t look here for graceful prose either. Throughout the book, Pfeiffer — a cohost of “Pod Save America” — seems incapable of finding synonyms for a certain f-word, a-word and s-word. Pfeiffer is 42, but his reliance on profanity projects the bearing an author half his age and a fraction of his stature as a former senior presidential adviser for strategy and communications.
It’s not being prudish to suggest that Pfeiffer’s story would have flowed more elegantly, and more credibly, without all the profanity in his narration, subtitles and, in one case, even a chapter title. Perhaps he is trying to inject an air of authenticity into a book about the inner workings of the political world, where folks with Ivy League degrees often revert to the shorthand of the street. Or perhaps Pfeiffer, a regular CNN commentator, is relishing his liberation from the constraints of cable television.
Pfeiffer’s stream-of-consciousness approach at times resembles a series of long Facebook posts, with a trove of footnotes punctuating or explaining a point, as if he decided to hit the “reply” button after the fact. The footnotes are fun, and often humorous, but no one will ever mistake this as a work of great literature.
“Yes We Still Can” does have its charming moments, especially in showing Obama’s human side amid the pressures of running for president and then ascending to leader of the free world. Pfeiffer recalls his initial meeting with the then-junior senator from Illinois who was contemplating a 2008 run.
“My first clue that Obama was cut from a different cloth was that he didn’t send some eager beaver aide to fetch me for our meeting,” Pfeiffer writes. “At 11:00 on the dot, Obama himself walked out into the lobby with no jacket and his sleeves rolled up, introduced himself as Barack (which is pretty funny in hindsight), and shook my hand. I’d hand hundreds of meetings with politicians and never before had the elected official personally come to grab me for the meeting. This may seem like a small thing — and it is — but it told me that Obama’s huge celebrity had not gone to his head.”
That meeting is interrupted when Obama excuses himself to say hello to a group of mostly African American schoolkids from Illinois who are visiting the nation’s capital. Pfeiffer observes the senator doing “something very rare for a politician” — listening.
Pfeiffer tells himself: “This guy is either very good or very good at faking it.”
The rest of the book suggests Pfeiffer never finds evidence to suggest the latter, all the way into Obama’s second term with the author recovering from a scary medical episode. In a brotherly way, Obama advises one of his most trusted advisers to consider leaving the White House for the sake of his health.
“This is important work, probably the most important work you will ever do, but it’s not everything,” Obama tells Pfeiffer, who soon takes the wise one’s advice. Obama later serves as Pfeiffer’s personal advice columnist, quizzing his adviser on Air Force One about his relationship with a woman he would later marry. “Sounds like she’s the one,” Obama concludes. “Lucky you.”
It’s not giving away the ending to reveal that Pfeiffer concludes by saying of Obama, “I am going to miss him. We are going to miss him.” That point is accentuated in most of the preceding 280 pages, and the many Americans who feel similarly will find nothing in this book to dissuade them.
John Diaz is The Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron