Partisanship and the Big Picture: An Interview with DNC Communications Director, Mo Elleithee

Mo Elleithee has been a Democratic Party strategist for more than 15 years. In addition to being an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Elleithee became the Democratic National Committee’s communications director in August. With four presidential campaigns and several Senate races under his belt, Elleithee sat down with Executive Interview Editor Cristina Lopez G. to discuss politics in the digital era, the challenges he faces as he shifts from campaign communicator to party message man, and the policy battles that will define the 2014 elections.

 

GPPReview (GPPR): You are a campaign veteran. How does being in charge of communications in something as temporary as a campaign compare to being in charge of party communications? How does the difference in timeline affect your messages?

Elleithee: There are some similarities. I believe that political communications is about telling a story. And whether you’re working for a campaign or for party infrastructure, it’s about giving voters a sense of who you are and of who the other guy is. The difference is in the fact that a political campaign is a one-day sale. You’re starting a small business, and it’s all geared towards a one-day sale, and after that, you go out of business.

[Communicating for the party] is about something bigger. I see this job as an opportunity to really tell a story about what it means to be a Democrat, and what it means if the Republicans are in charge. [The difference is] telling that story in a bigger picture, as opposed to a campaign where it’s about two individuals, two competing points of view, one particular office at a specific moment in history. This is much more atmospheric—it’s trying to tell a story about the Democratic brand when it is diverse. It means something different to be a Democrat in Virginia than it does in Arkansas or New York, so what are those common themes that tie us all together as Democrats? And what does it mean for you if Democrats are in charge, regardless of where you live, and what it would mean to you if Republicans were in charge?

GPPR: What are the biggest challenges you expect to encounter in your new position?

Elleithee: Again, when you’re in a campaign it is a little bit easier to break through because everyone is focused on day-to-day combat between the two candidates. In here, it isn’t about hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes it is easy to get sucked into that. Sometimes it is easy to get involved in a back-and-forth Twitter war with my counterpart over at the RNC and to get caught up in the news cycle. [The challenge is] keeping it elevated, keeping it about something bigger, both on the positive and the negative side…Telling a different story is a recalibration for me, but I do think there is an appetite for it.

The other big challenge is that we are living in the Twitter age. There is a fascinating study done by Peter Hamby from CNN for Harvard—it came out just last week—about whether Twitter killed reporting as we know it. I’m on Twitter all the time, but it is hard to have a meaningful conversation in 140 characters or less.

In an era where communications are instantaneous, gone are the days where you had all day to formulate a story and pitch it to a reporter before the deadline. Now it’s happening in real time, in 140 characters or less. And I’m not only referring to Twitter, it’s the entire digitalization of news consumption. It’s really changed the way people do business in this town. And so the challenge is, how do I tell a complex story about what it means to be a Democrat to the country, and what would it mean if the Republicans are in charge? How do I tell that story in this new age where things are moving so fast, in rapid-fire. People’s and reporters’ attention spans are so short, and everything is a lot snarkier. How do we remain thoughtful and contribute to a thoughtful debate? I think that would be the biggest challenge.

GPPR: You were a veteran of Hillary’s 2008 electoral camp. The entire world is abuzz with her potential 2016 run. What would make 2016 different from 2008?

Elleithee: I don’t know. I don’t know because I’m not thinking about it. I’m a big Hillary Clinton fan, working for her was one of the highlights of my career. I think she is a tremendous public figure, was a tremendous Senator, a tremendous First Lady, and a tremendous Secretary of State. I think she is thinking about it, but I don’t know what she is going to decide. That is not why I’m here. I’m here because there is a lot of work to do first in 2013 and in 2014, and there is a bigger story to tell. I have long been a Clinton person, but I was a Democrat before I was a Clinton person.

GPPR: Could you talk about how the speed of modern political communications and the 24-hour news cycle interacts with policy? How much does it shape policy design or hinder policy implementation?

Elleithee: I have said this before, and I’m not a policy person: there are smarter people than I to talk about how policy is crafted. I have always seen my goal as trying to get those smarter people elected, so they can save the world. But I think a lot of the same challenges we discussed—the way instantaneous digital news impacts political communications—aren’t dissimilar from the way it impacts policy making. People are too willing to negotiate via Twitter. Gone are the days of the two sides getting together after hours, over drinks, to try to hammer out and negotiate the deal. Personal interaction is being replaced by retweets. And I think that is a problem—it is helping to create an air of polarization that forces people to dig their heels and pick a side before they even have an opportunity to talk to the other side. And it is hard to find common ground when the battle lines are drawn before the conversation even begins.

I think giving people a tool to interact with their leaders is a good thing, but Twitter can give a false sense of what the people are thinking—it isn’t necessarily representative of everybody. A vehicle like Twitter gives a platform to the loudest out there and skews what our leaders hear—the loudest aren’t always the majority. And most people are not asking politicians or elected officials to refuse compromise. There are some issues where they do want their leaders to take principled stances, but even then there is an opportunity to find common ground.

I think that there is one party that has been more open to that than the other. I think that the Tea Party crew who has taken over the Republican Party would be fine shutting down the government and letting us default on our obligations in order to make a political point. That is why I think you see the Tea Party’s approval ratings plummet nationally and Congressional Republicans falling into the low teens. But they also do not care—all they are doing is listening to an echo chamber, and they don’t believe the polls. If they don’t cater to that loud Tea Party crowd then someone is going to challenge them from the right. Now, when you see some conservative members of Congress—someone like Mitch McConnell, who was Tea Party before the Tea Party was cool—getting challenged from the right, it explains why he is moving even further to the right. So I think, in part because of the redistricting and in part because of the modern communications tools, there is an impact in policy, campaign, debates and dialogues, making us more polarized.

GPPR: Following up on the previous question, how is the democratization of information through social media changing political messages and the way politicians interact with voters?

Elleithee: The story isn’t any different. How it is consumed is what’s different now. There are some people that play to that and some people who will change their message to make it snarkier because they know it will get retweeted. But, I think that does a disservice to the debate. And so, I’m focused on how to tell the bigger story given the current political environment and given the current media environment. That’s a lot to try to figure out.

GPPR: Despite the many uncertainties, hypothetically, what policy triumphs could define the 2014 elections, and for which side?

Elleithee: I think the bigger questions asked by voters are less about the specifics of a policy and more about, “Who is looking out for me? Who gets me? Who understands me?” So the big issues being fought link back to the central questions voters are asking, and when you look at them there is going to be obviously another showdown over the budget, over the debt ceiling.

There will be a huge refocus on health care as we head into the open enrollment period on October 1^st and Republicans continue to throw “Defund Obamacare” rallies. You have the Rand Pauls and the Ted Cruz-es of the world advocating the shut down of the government or hold the debt ceiling hostage if you don’t defund Obamacare.

Obviously immigration reform is on the horizon. Next spring there is going to be a big push by the administration to increase the minimum wage. There is continued struggle over women’s health care issues. And each of these, if you think about it, kind of fits into the same pattern: one party is trying to increase opportunities for more people, and another party is trying to increase opportunities for some even at the expense of others. If that is how it plays out, I’m glad we are having all these fights. I think politically they are good for my party, because at every single one of them the question about “Who is looking out for me?” is pretty clear. People are tired of obstructionism. They are tired of the gridlock. They are tired of the fights. They are tired of the “If I don’t get my way, I’m going to take my ball and go home” approach that the other side is pushing. And, the more they push that approach, the better I think we’ll do. I’m bullish about 2014. I feel pretty good.

GPPR: Though probably not a very accurate comparison, some pundits have mentioned how a faction like the Tea Party is emerging within the Democratic Party. Some party members are not too comfortable with the centrist or pragmatic stances that President Obama has taken on health care, the economy, and even foreign policy. How does this faction of more liberal Democrats, on issues like Syria, for example, affect the general message? Is this a challenge for the party?

Elleithee: I don’t see it. I don’t see here the same sort of ideological highjacking happening in the Republican Party by the extreme fringe—they are dragging the entire party with them. There is no fringe that has highjacked the Democratic Party. What we have is healthy debate within the party on some issues. For the most part, we are unified on a lot of issues, ranging from economic justice, to marriage equality, to combating climate change, to protecting women’s rights. We may have different approaches on the edges, but on the fundamentals, we are there.

There are obviously exceptions, but all of these are issues where Democrats are fairly unified and in the mainstream. On every single one of these issues, if you poll the American public, they are in agreement with the Democratic Party’s position. We will have our moments of disagreement…

GPPR: But Syria, for example?

Elleithee: Yes, but this is an issue where the division hasn’t been partisan. You’ve got members on both sides of the aisle on both sides of the issue. So this has been a remarkably non-partisan discussion, which makes sense. On national security issues you would hate to see it fall entirely along partisan lines…

GPPR: How about the recent NSA scandal?

Elleithee: Again, I think most Democrats are generally on the same side. It is okay to have some issues where there is disagreement and debate within a party, but again, my point is the Republican Party has been very different. There is an ideological struggle within the Republican Party, and one side has clearly won because they are dragging the entire party with it. It is not a Republican Civil War, the war is over—one side won and is pulling the rest of the party with it. I don’t see that on our side.

GPPR: It’s impossible to talk to you and not discuss the other side. What do you think are the biggest communication challenges the GOP currently faces?

Elleithee: They are the party of some. They are a party that will occasionally pay lip service to the notion that they need to appeal to more, but every one of their actions…A couple weeks ago the RNC had its summer meeting in Boston. They previewed the summer meeting like we were going to see a new Republican Party that was serious about outreach and was serious about talking to more people and appealing to more people. The two big pieces of news that came out of it were: one, they were going to cut off CNN and NBC from holding any debates in the Republican primary. That includes CNN en Español and Telemundo. That is not something you do if you were trying to speak to more people. You don’t cut off entire networks because you disagree with some of their programming decisions.

The second thing is that they passed a resolution saying they support comprehensive immigration reform. In that same resolution they rejected a pathway to citizenship. They are routinely showing that they are openly hostile to entire groups. You cannot say you are going to reach out to women while advocating to restrict women’s choices. You cannot say you are going to be opening your outreach to Hispanics if you are restricting opportunities to Hispanics. You cannot say you are going to be for more than just the top 1% if you are restricting economic opportunities for the 99%. It doesn’t work that way. And so, their communications problem is rooted in an ideological problem and that is that they are restrictive, they are insular, they are not reaching out to more. And that is going to continue to be a problem for them moving forward.

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This interview was conducted on Monday, September 9^th, 2013 at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.