How Ben Rhodes is still trying to write the story

This article was previously published in the Claremont Journal of International Relations (vol. 4, issue 9, Spring 2019). It has been republished here with permission of CJIR. The original article can be read on their platform.

Ben Rhodes is talking about his first presidential campaign for President Barack Obama. At forty-one years old, he’s still young for a White House veteran. But he recalls being among the older workers during Obama’s 2008 campaigns. “At the beginning, we had a lot of success in the 2008 campaign and building a narrative around Obama and his candidacy that mobilize a coalition of people that had not been mobilized in American politics,” he said.

He tells it like a story—a well-rehearsed story that he’s clearly thought about again and again. He’s seated at the desk of Pomona professor Mietek Boduszynski, who has lent out his office for our interview. Rhodes is in town for an event at Pomona’s Rose Hill Theatre: “An Evening with Ben Rhodes.” The event was a conversation with Boduszynski and Rhodes regarding his time in the White House and his memoir. It was a packed house with students, professors, and even politically-inclined locals.

But Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor to Obama, keeps circling back to how important the story is. He knows that legacies aren’t decided by the people who make them. He knows that history is written by the winners. Rhodes is just one of several Obama-era alums chasing control of the narrative. His memoir, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, stands next to Dan Pfieffer’s Yes We (Still) Can, David Litt’s Thanks Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years, Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It, and Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was A Good Idea? Those are just a few stand-outs in the multitude of competing voices around the Obama administration. But the number of publications from within the Obama-era administration also reflects the continuing struggle to win their side of the political story.

As an MFA graduate in Creative Writing, foreign policy speechwriter, and later Obama’s advisor, Rhodes’ work has always been about rewriting the narrative. In 2008, Obama’s campaign ran their story on motifs of “Change” and “Yes We Can.” Now, out of the White House, he’s still trying to shape the presidential legacy that it leaves behind.

“Politics is about storytelling,” he states firmly.  But when asked about competing media, even he admits that storytelling has its fractures.

First, there were the broadening sources of media. “You have this situation where the old way of presidents giving speeches and making statements—suddenly people aren’t consuming full speeches or they’re consuming bits and pieces of information on social media,” he said. Twitter grew from 6.0 million users in 2008—the start of Obama’s presidency—to 319 million users by the end in 2016.[1] This April, the app hit 330 million users, but is still considered “struggling to grow.”[2] And Twitter is just one out of many social media companies for millions of American voices. The growing platform of social media makes it harder to get the word out—even for those with the microphone.

“It became harder to reach people,” Rhodes said, “people were decamping to hermetically sealed media environments. There were literally 30 to 40% of Americans that we could not reach.”

It is ironic that Rhodes still chooses to publish his memoir in a book. It’s a traditional medium in the face of the outpour of “hot takes” on the Obama-era online. Articles include: James Risen’s NYT op-ed “If Donald Trump Target Journalists, Thank Obama”; Conor Friedersdorf’s “The Liberal Critique of Obama: Judging the President by His Own Standards” for The Atlantic; Caitlin Johnstone’s “If Progressives Don’t Wake Up to How Awful Obama Was, Their Movement Will Fail” and more. All are easily accessible online. But Rhodes is determined to make his narrative stick.

He emphasized the importance of connecting story to policy, taking aim at President Donald Trump’s administration. “The interesting thing about Trump is that he uses rhetoric that sets himself in opposition to that brand of foreign policy. And yet if you look at his actual policies, he has escalated every single military conflict that he inherited,” Rhodes said. He cites Iran, as an example of growing hostilities and “a real risk of war.”

But Rhodes’ concern of disconnecting brand and policy is also similar to criticism of the Obama administration. In Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson summarizes the left’s frustration of the Obama administration: “Change was largely symbolic rather than substantive, and he failed to stand up for progressive values or fight for serious shifts in U.S. policy.”[3]

Still, Rhodes is determined to view it through the big picture. If there is an answer to the title of his memoir, then Rhodes’s hopeful outlook on “The World As It Is” is a broad, macro-level, wide-sweeping picture. This approach in politics has had its critics. In his first term, Obama was criticized among politicians as “remote,” “distant” and “perfunctory,” according to the New York Times.[4] He seemed untouchable. But Rhodes continues to aspire to that loftiness as a tool for foreign policy.

“You need to see the world as it is, in order to pursue the world as it ought to be,” Rhodes says. “We can’t lose sight of how important is it that our leadership has to be anchored in the example that we provide […] The most powerful thing that America can offer in terms of leadership is our own example. The best policy to promote democracy around the world is the health of our own democracy.”

Rhodes talked about the importance of having a “much broader agenda” for presidential candidates’ foreign policy. But even looking forward to 2020, he circles back to the Obama administration as his viewpoint. “This is what we were focused on the second Obama term where climate change is central to our foreign policy, where we’re using diplomacy to resolve conflicts—as with Iran. We were reaching out to former adversaries like Cuba, and that’s the direction we were trying to set in motion. Obviously, Trump has disrupted that.”

It’s a narrative that seems to have been disrupted again and again. It’s also one that he knows isn’t going to be fixed with a single story—or a single Democratic president. “I don’t think we would immediately recover our world standing. […] It’s not just the fact that Trump is president that concerns people. It’s the fact that we elected Trump president,” Rhodes said. “That doubt will linger because one election won’t put those doubts to rest.”

While there is still competition for control of the narrative at home, Rhodes thinks the stage is still open on the international level. “I think we can recover a lot of our leadership in part because there’s no other country that is seeking to play the role that the United States has played in the world. Even in China, they don’t want to be responsible for all the things that America’s been responsible for over the last several decades. So there’s an opening for us to reclaim, but I think it’ll take longer than one election to win back the intangible trust and credibility,” he said. “Some of it’s healthy. It was kind of artificial for America to be so dominant in the post-Cold War period. I don’t think that was ever going to be the new normal. But we do have a lot of work to do.” This aspiration toward the idea of America as a global leader is still debated in the public and online discourse around Obama’s presidency. It is impossible not to miss how much Rhodes sees the storytelling and discourse as a form of foreign policy. “Presidential legacies are not a settled thing,” he says. Neither are countries.

This article was previously published in the Claremont Journal of International Relations (vol. 4, issue 9, Spring 2019). It has been republished here with the permission of CJIR. The original article can be found on their Issuu platform.

[1] Lahle Wolfe, “Twitter User Statistics 2008 Through 2017,” The Balance Careers, November 4, 2018. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/twitter-statistics-2008-2009-2010-2011-3515899

[2] Jacob Kastrenakes, “Twitter’s final monthly user count shows a company still struggling to grow,” The Verge, April 19, 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18511383/twitter-q1-2019-earnings-report-mau

[3] Nathan J. Robinson, “The Obama Boys,” Current Affairs, March 20, 2019. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/the-obama-boys.

[4] Helene Cooper, “Bipartisan Agreement: Obama Isn’t Schmoozing,” New York Times, December 28, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/politics/obama-gains-reputation-as-distant-in-washington.html.