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Obama's Communications Director on Diet Coke, Pundits, and What's Next
Q: Damn you. [Laughs.]
I think that would continue in whatever comes next for Barack Obama.
Q: Yeah, I expect so. What’s been the most annoying thing about this election to you?
Um…[silence]
Q: Oh, surely you have some things.
Oh, it wasn’t a question of finding what than picking what. I think that the uh—how, one of the most annoying things has been how much of the punditry has been so wrong so often.
Q: Yeah. Anything in particular? I mean, there’s a whole host of things that you could name but—
Because the punditry largely lives near Washington D.C. and New York City and rarely leaves those two places, they never had a sense of what was actually happening on the ground for Barack Obama, either in the primary or the general, and this is an election that takes place in states and is decided by voters and what voters were doing and thinking in a given moment was rarely factored in by the punditry. And I actually had one other one. The abundance of polling, public polling, and the over analysis of it was a tremendous annoyance, I’m sure, to both campaigns.
Q: Who would you say is your opposite on the McCain team?
My opposite?
Q: The person you correspond to. I did an interview with Nicole Wallace and she’s always kind of paired up with Gibbs.
I don’t know enough of their organization to know who the exact opposite is. It’s my understanding, I believe, that Jill Hazelbaker has the same title I do, but I don’t know if we do the same job.
Q: They are very different organizations, that’s for sure.
I think that’s probably the case.
Q: Again, speaking entirely hypothetically, because we’re not gonna jinx anyone or anything—
I’m knocking on wood as we speak.
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