Dan Pfeiffer
The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Dan Pfeiffer is a seasoned political strategist known for his role in shaping communications strategies for President Obama. This interview reveals his ability to cut through the noise of political discourse and focus on what truly matters in mobilizing support for progressive causes.
“The big, bold economic things you can do, the big levers you can pull require Congress. We never had Congress in that second term. We lost the Senate in 2014. And then you also feel, so you do the things you can do. And unfortunately, the economic basket of purely executive actions is pretty limited.”
“I was going to say, when I was writing the book, my editor was like, you have to tell your story. I struggled a lot to tell my story. Even though we work closely together for a decade, the things you may not have known about my story. And I would tell my editors, this is not a Horatio Alger story.”
“It just, what that meant to see how different people live, to see, particularly when I was living in Brazil, a level of poverty that you do not see every day here in America. You know, I went to Africa, I went to India to see those different parts of the world and think about how big the world is.”
“I tell this story about Ronnie that I think says a lot about him as a person, which is one of our colleagues who was not one of the most senior White House staffers, but his father had a really serious heart attack while we were on an overseas trip.”
The Axe Files with David Axelrod — Ep. 258 — Dan Pfeiffer
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