88: The Party of Chaos, Sickness, and Death with Bill Burton
The Lincoln Project
The Lincoln Project
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Host Reed Galen is joined by Bill Burton (Former White House Deputy Press Secretary & Founder/President of Bryson Gillette) to discuss how the White House isn’t using Vice President Kamala Harris correctly, the right-wing rage machine and how social media has completely transformed the political landscape, and how the Democrats need to message in order to be successful in 2022. Plus, a lunchtime proposal from Lauren Boebert.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today I'm joined by political |
| 0:13.7 | consultant and communications strategist Bill Burton. Bill was deputy press secretary |
| 0:17.9 | and special assistant to President Barack Obama and is now the founder and president of |
| 0:21.4 | Bryce and Gillette, the minority-owned political and strategic communications firm in Los Angeles. |
| 0:26.7 | Bill, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Reed. Good to see you. Thanks for coming back. |
| 0:30.7 | So you obviously worked inside the West Wing. You were close to President Obama and you lived in DC |
| 0:36.1 | and long enough to understand the dynamics. So I wanted to start with something that we've been |
| 0:40.6 | talking a little bit about for the last week or so, which is there's this fascinating sort of |
| 0:46.6 | commentariat maelstrom around Vice President Kamala Harris. And from our perspective, |
| 0:52.7 | it sort of encapsulates all the stuff that frustrates us a little bit about democratic messaging and |
| 0:57.2 | sort of behavior, which is not understanding how to fight the culture war, which when the right |
| 1:03.0 | goes after the Vice President, it is specifically for cultural issues that they hope to be electoral |
| 1:07.9 | issues. Then there's a little bit of this sort of naked ambition piece, which I guess is always |
| 1:12.6 | endemic to Washington DC, so I shouldn't be surprised about. But then there's the last piece, which is |
| 1:18.2 | you have someone who is by her very election historic in nature, but they're not utilizing her, |
| 1:24.6 | at least not in a way in the wake of a big legislative victory or in the push for more legislative |
| 1:29.5 | victories would seem to make sense. So I just wanted to open with that and get your sense of it. |
| 1:33.8 | Well, Vice President Harris was my senator here in California. I know her Liker. I think she's |
| 1:39.4 | great. We're not like best friends, but I am a fan of hers and I'm rooting for her pretty hard. |
| 1:45.5 | And it'd be nice to see some folks in DC room for a little harder on our side. I think that |
| 1:51.4 | she has not been set up to succeed in a lot of different ways. Putting her in situations where she's |
| 1:57.8 | going to be comfortable, where she's going to be able to take the White House message and really |
... |
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