October 6, 2016 | No Comments
Hillary Clinton’s regular crew of operatives, lead by veteran Washington insider and campaign chairman John Podesta, arrived in Farmville, Virginia, Tuesday to deliver the expected “Tim Kaine did his job” line to the hundreds of reporters on the scene covering the vice presidential debate.
But the real spin was unfolding online, where a far more entertaining, far more aggressive version of the exercise was unfolding. “It is jarring watching a debate where both candidates can speak about issues in full sentences,” former White House speechwriter Jon Favreau, 35, tweeted, seeking to undermine Donald Trump.
President Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer followed with his own spin of Kaine’s B+ performance: “A narrative that Pence won the debate at the expense of Trump is a gift to Democrats whose daily goal is to provoke Trump to act crazy.”
The two former presidential aides, alongside fellow young White House alums Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett, are known as the quintessential “Obama bros” — and they have become a unique and seemingly ubiquitous clique this election, manning their own bomb-throwing spin room for Clinton. With massive followings on Twitter and a popular political podcast, “Keepin it 1600,” as their platforms, these former White House aides have become a loose-lipped, anti-Donald Trump, Clinton-boosting spin machine.
The group includes longtime Clinton holdouts, like Pfeiffer, who are now fully on board with the former secretary of state. As Clinton works to maximize her support among millennials — the Bernie Sanders voters who have been more reluctant to embrace her message of incremental change — the youngish foursome from Obama world, venting about Trump and beating the drum for Clinton, have been an unexpected boon to her operatives toiling away in Brooklyn.
“Imagine if the Times ran a story that said Bill and Hillary Clinton may not have paid federal income tax for two decades,” Lovett, an Obama speechwriter-turned-screenwriter, tweeted during the debate. Highlighting a double-standard is a favorite activity inside Clinton’s Brooklyn HQ, but it’s an observation that feels less whiny when voiced by someone outside the bunker.
The Obama bros’ freedom comes from being untethered to a campaign or the current administration; their megaphone and credibility come from having previously been central to both of those things for a onetime Clinton rival.
Pfeiffer, Vietor and Favreau worked on the 2008 campaign and stayed on in the White House well into his second term. (Lovett, who worked for Clinton that year, was a later arrival and earlier departure, but is now a card-carrying member of the Obama crew.) Their longtime connections to Obama make them inside-the-Beltway famous, even if they have all subsequently tried to escape politics by moving across the country to California.
And people are listening to them, for better or for worse. In May, for instance, Favreau tweeted that Trump “is a dick,” saying that the Manhattan mogul cheered for the housing crisis and profited off of 9/11. The sentiment was retweeted 4,500 times and multiple news organizations (including POLITICO) wrote a story about the profane tweet.
“If it was Hillary and Jeb right now, I would be voting for Hillary, but I wouldn’t be as crazy as I am,” Favreau, who now lives in Los Angeles and runs a private speechwriting firm, admitted in an interview. “I’m legitimately scared to death of a Donald Trump presidency. Watching this election unfold, there was no way I could shut up about it.”
Vietor, his best friend, who worked as an Obama spokesman for close to a decade before co-founding Fenway Strategies with Favreau, laughed when asked how he defines his role this cycle. “Random private citizen screaming into a hurricane,” he said. “I’m one of the huddled masses terrified of what this man is doing to this country. I don’t have a role.”
But whether intended or not, Vietor and his former White House buddies are playing a rather significant one. Their podcast often gets upwards of 300,000 listens per episode. Together, they have amassed close to 400,000 Twitter followers.
And Clinton campaign officials credit them with having a huge hand in shaping the narrative of the race. “Most of it is organic, these guys are guerrilla,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “I watch for what they’re saying to see where a story line will be going. It’s reassuring to me, because they are no bedwetters, and the rare times they say, ‘I’m not so sure,’ I take notice of that more so than from anyone else.”
Palmieri said the campaign’s most effective messengers are converts to the cause, and that the support from a group of Democratic operatives who tried to defeat Clinton eight years ago is helpful “in terms of our own morale. To have people who have been through it before, pulling you up and beating back the haters — that has been a big help to all of us.”
She credits the Obama bros for elevating a story about Trump giving a campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi while she was deciding whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. “I remember seeing Pfeiffer just losing his mind,” Palmieri recalled. “He said, ‘If this were the Clintons, it would be leading every network.’ They were all tweeting about it and by Monday, this thing was getting enough oxygen to lead TV news.”
A week later she actively turned to the group to ask for help drumming up attention for a story about a Trump adviser, Carter Page, meeting with the Kremlin. They happily complied. “They have a lot of influence,” she said. “It really matters because on the Democratic side, people are prone to panicking and second-guessing. It’s been our nature, but it’s frustrating when you are me.”
From the Clinton perspective, they are also the antidote to David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior strategist who has been quick to point out flaws and give unsolicited public advice about when he thinks the campaign is veering off course.
For Favreau, at least, there is some penance driving him, in addition to his gut-level fear of Trump. “I started off my political career not liking her very much at all,” he said of Clinton. “I developed a very different view of her in the White House, and thought we might have helped contribute, during the 2008 race, to the caricature of her that so many people have right now.” Today, he calls her “an extraordinarily talented, brilliant public servant who should be president.”
While they are helpful to campaign operatives like Palmieri, their following comes from the fact that they don’t sound like they are spewing bland Brooklyn-approved talking points (you’ll never hear them, for instance, jumping up and down about the fact that Clinton didn’t go to work for “a big fancy law firm” after law school, but “took a job with the Children’s Defense Fund instead”).
And while Clinton has some young operatives on her team, such as campaign manager Robby Mook, 36, they tend to be more cautious and guarded, like their candidate.
Most of the Obama bro commentary is saved for just blasting Trump in a way that the Clinton campaign, and current White House officials, would never feel comfortable doing.
“If a friend was behaving this way, you’d pull him aside and say he needs help and to talk to someone, trying to be firm but without judgment,” Lovett tweeted in response to Donald Trump’s post-debate meltdown about his broken microphone. He added, “He doesn’t have a strategy. He has an undiagnosed personality disorder.”
On Sept. 30, Vietor tweeted, “Trump is days away from shaving his head and attacking a car with an umbrella,” Britney Spears–style.
Members of the group also amplify one another and act as a clique even off-line. Vietor and Favreau founded a company that works mostly with tech firms; Lovett lives across the street from Favreau in Los Angeles. Pfeiffer lives in San Francisco, where he works for GoFundMe and co-hosts the podcast with Favreau.
“We all made a decision to leave the White House and to leave Washington, D.C., to leave the East Coast to escape politics,” Vietor said. “But then Trump came along and he turned our political process into a fiery car crash on the highway and no one can look away.”
They’re not the only Obama alumni activating themselves in the endgame of the election. Former White House officials Alyssa Mastromonaco and Nancy-Ann DeParle hosted a fundraising breakfast for Clinton on Wednesday morning in Manhattan.
Obama’s former campaign manage,r David Plouffe, who also now lives in San Francisco and works for Über, has advised the Clinton campaign on strategy, speaks regularly Mook, and served as part of the Clinton campaign’s official debate war room at Hofstra University.
But the appeal of the Obama bros is that they seem to just be doing their own, unsupervised thing.
Favreau, who left the White House in 2013, has been, in some ways, connected to this election from the beginning: He helped write Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast of Trump, which is now credited with spurring a humiliated Trump to run for president. In a recent PBS “Frontline” special, former “Apprentice” contestant and Trump supporter Omarosa Manigault said of Obama’s speech that night in 2011: “It just kept going and going, and he just kept hammering him. And I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.’”
Her comment sent a cold chill down Favreau’s spine. “I texted Lovett,” he said, “and I said, ‘OK, maybe we did do something bad here.’”