[ad_1]
Jen Psaki, a CNN political commentator, was the White House communications director and State Department spokeswoman during the Obama administration.
I have been through election weeks on campaigns many times before.
As the traveling press secretary twice for President Obama’s presidential campaigns, as one of the spokespeople for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee when we won back the House in 2006, as a junior press staffer on John Kerry’s losing presidential bid, and in Iowa during the successful re-elections of both former Governor Vilsack and former Senator Harkin in 2002.
I always thought I knew what victory, and loss, felt like.
When you win, it is a feeling of elation, often followed by extreme fatigue. When you lose, it is disappointment and second-guessing, followed by extreme fatigue. I am far from the first person to say that 2016 was different. I wasn’t a part of the campaign, but I was in the White House working for President Obama as his communications director.
Yes, we had missed something, along with nearly every other political prognosticator on both sides of the aisle, about the anger and dissatisfaction of large swaths of white America who had long voted for Democrats. Yes, Russia had intervened, and the dire impact of the propaganda campaign run effectively online by the Kremlin was still unknown, and its full extent still even is today. And yes, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
But it was supposed to be a shellacking, a win strong enough to carry the Electoral College. In part, our confidence stemmed from an assumption that the fight against racism, misogyny and bigotry would win out. That as a country we had made tremendous progress. That we had, all together as Americans, “bent the moral arc toward justice.” That even if Donald Trump was a more effective campaigner than his opponent, there was no way the country could vote for him. And we were dead wrong.
Read more from Jen Psaki here.
[ad_2]
Source link