Then we walked out onstage together. After I introduced him, Bill Clinton said, “Symone spoke so well that I hate to follow her!” In his remarks he brought up stuff I had just mentioned to him backstage. He spoke so smoothly you’d have thought he had his speech prepared weeks in advance—but then he was referring to things I had told him moments before, things he wouldn’t have known except for talking to me. I realized right then and there that that’s the kind of speaker I wanted to be—someone who makes people feel special and who makes everyone feel at ease by being themselves, by being a good listener, and by being natural. The road that would lead me into politics and onto CNN definitely began right then and there, in Omaha, standing next to Bill Clinton. (And as it turns out, you can look up what Bill Clinton wrote about my sixteen-year-old self on page eighty-one of his book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.)
The luncheon was an important lesson in learning to ask for what you want and making the most of the opportunities that you are given or that you earn. Not only did I ask over and over to have the opportunity to introduce Bill Clinton, but once I actually got onstage with an audience, I found a way to talk about my goals too. It was up there for the first time that I said I wanted to go to law school and eventually be a judge, knowing that powerful and influential people who could help me do just that might be in the audience. And they were. Some individuals on the board at Fraser Stryker—a top law firm in Omaha—were there. They connected with me after the event and that’s how I learned about the diversity internship position that I applied to and earned once I was in college. Along the way I realized the law wasn’t for me, but I was very grateful that I had the experience. (Problems with lawyering: one, I like windows, and two, I like talking to people. When you’re practicing law, you don’t get windows unless you’re a partner, which was too many years down the road for me to wait for sunlight. And as for talking to people, well, too much of that can get you in real trouble as a lawyer or a judge.)
Once I realized the law program wasn’t for me, I had to figure out what was. What sort of degree would help me get to where I wanted to be? What sort of job experience could I gain that would help set me on the path to my goal? I took a great sociology class that made me into a sociology major for a while, and with my interest in juvenile justice I thought I’d do a minor in criminal justice policy. Then I tried out political science. Understanding the theory and practice of government, and the policies and institutions that shape people’s experiences of their government. The role of the media. The politics of race and ethnicity. The philosophical ideas that we use to create a concept of a citizenry. I was blown away and realized: This is what I should be studying; this is what I should be doing!
It was pretty obvious to me from the start that people in politics didn’t look like me. They weren’t young, there weren’t many women, the prominent politicians were mostly from the coasts and not from the middle of the country, and most weren’t Black either. But what was also clear to me was that the true power lies in the people behind the elected official—the folks in charge of putting the message together. Pretty quickly I decided that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a part of a movement. I wanted to be in a position where I could help effect real change, where I could push for a greater “we” to have access to power in this country.
One of my 1,001 internships during college was in the communications department in the office of Omaha mayor Jim Suttle. During my tenure in that office, there was an attempt to recall the mayor—some people were saying he was focusing too much on North and South Omaha, and not enough on West Omaha. In a recall, you actually have to have two elections. The first is a vote on whether the people in the municipality, state, or wherever the vote is occurring, want the recall election to even happen. If that vote is an overwhelming yes vote, then there is a second election, where folks vote whether they want the elected official removed. In other words, it’s a whole thing.
So I went to volunteer on the effort to beat the recall and keep the mayor in office. This is where I met Chris Smith and Robert West of Little Smith Strategies—a firm that did polling and campaign consulting. The Suttle campaign hired them to help with turnout in North and South Omaha for the recall vote. It was a hard-fought and very close battle: in the end, 38,841 voted “NO” to the recall, and 37,198 voted “YES” to the recall. Suttle stayed in office for the remainder of his term but lost the election two years later, and a Republican took office. Still, the fight was worth it, to me. I believe he was a good mayor and deserved to finish out his term.
Following the recall campaign, Chris Smith and Robert West gave me my first real job in politics by letting me continue to work with them—I copyedited talking points, worked on clients’ website content, did some copywriting; they’d take me with them while they were doing candidates’ assessments, fly me around the country, and generally make me feel like a real working boss lady. But in reality, it was far from glamorous. This was local politics, and they were paying me pennies. But here’s the thing: it was an invaluable experience. I worked on judges’ races, mayoral races, campaigns involving candidates on Native American reservations. I learned so much about different political contexts—the essential roles everyone can play in a campaign, from the scheduler and the rest of the advance team, to the driver, to the candidate’s right-hand advisors. I got to see how different styles and personalities worked in politics, and I loved it. I realized this was what I wanted to do. Helping the best candidate to get elected was how people gained access to power. This was how individuals could truly make a difference.
I stayed on at Little Smith Strategies after graduation, but I was itching for the chance to do more in electoral politics. Again, always talk about the thing that you want! Articulate it; put it out into the world. You never know who is listening, who will be willing to help you get to where you want to be. I shared my thoughts with Chris Smith, and he put me in touch with Rebekah Caruthers—a Black woman who had also attended my university. She was the deputy campaign manager working on Chuck Hassebrook’s gubernatorial campaign at the time. Chris and Robert reached out to Rebekah on my behalf to see if there might be a job for me on the campaign. I anxiously waited to hear what she had to say, so I (gently) pestered them about it. Daily. Apparently, she wanted to know if I could write. CAN I WRITE?
I went to work for the Hassebrook campaign, where I started as a communications assistant. I asked for a different title and more money, but because, you know, “experience” . . . I felt like I knew more than enough about campaigning at this point to be more than an assistant, but if that’s what it was going to take for me to get in the door this time, fine. Nothing lasts forever, and I knew I would prove my worth in a short time. So I said okay to the assistant title, but I also negotiated the opportunity to revisit both title and salary in a few months “pending my performance.” (You don’t always get what you want the first time you ask.) Three months later, I was promoted to deputy communications director for the campaign. It was a big job, and I loved it: I worked with our consultants, I helped scout talent and locations for ad shoots, I wrote talking points and helped prep the candidate for interviews, I offered to drive him to events (you learn A LOT when you’re in a car with someone . . . ), and I managed our “letters to the editor” program across Nebraska’s ninety-three counties. While I was there I was honored as the youngest recipient to ever receive the Midlands Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 Award, given to top entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals under the age of forty.
During that campaign experience, I fell in love with political communications. You know why? Controlling the messaging of a campaign or a movement is the true source of power, and it’s also fun. In the end, politics is just a bunch of messages strung together, and communications means that you put it together in a way that makes sense, in a way that tells a story, in a way that makes a case for your candidate and makes people believe in him or her.
When people say they don’
t like politicians, or the campaign slogans or messages don’t resonate, they are saying the stories these politicians are choosing to tell aren’t hitting home with the audience. Maybe they aren’t keeping up enough with issues as they evolve; maybe they aren’t choosing stories to share that are relevant to the particular group of people they are trying to reach; maybe their tone or their timing is off.
Here’s the thing. Every campaign, whether the campaign is for county commissioner, mayor, or president of the United States, has a “theory of the case.” In the law, the theory of the case refers to a succinct statement that a lawyer comes up with that encapsulates the issue to be argued and decided, the evidence that will be brought to bear, and the position of the attorney. Campaigns must have a similar animating theme, a sort of central tenet. And guess how that theory of the case is formed? Your top communications people and strategists come together in a room with the candidate and talk. And talk. And talk. And together they craft that central message that will shape everything else the candidate says and does. For Bernie Sanders, the theory of the case in 2016 was: “We live in a rigged economy kept in place by a system of corrupt campaign finance.” Every policy idea he had, every other statement he made in his campaign, linked back to that central tenet of his campaign.
For Joe Biden, the theory of the case is: “Restoring the soul of the nation, rebuilding the backbone of the country, and uniting America.” The “soul of the nation” part of the message speaks to combating hate and dealing with the rise of white supremacy. The “backbone of the country” refers to his focus on working people, on creating more and better jobs for the middle class, on a health-care system that people can afford, on an educational system that doesn’t cripple students with debt. “Uniting America” means reasserting how we present ourselves on the world stage, how we deal with foreign policy, recognizing that America is still the greatest democracy in the history of the world. How did we get to this theory of the case for Biden? A bunch of people sat in a room talking with the candidate.
Sometimes you don’t get it right the first time. Maybe people don’t understand what your theory of the case is; maybe it’s too abstract, maybe it doesn’t speak to them, or maybe they feel it shows you don’t know who THEY (the voters) are. So, back into the room the comms people and strategists go. Messages have to be authentic and organic to the campaign. When you start pandering, that’s when people start to say your message doesn’t resonate.
The Democratic Party apparatus has a huge communications problem. We have to fix it if we want to connect with people across many different factions and get them to vote. It is part of what cost us the last presidential election, and we can’t allow it to continue to hobble us going forward. The heart of the problem is that there are so many factions within the Democratic Party, from Berniecrats to Blue Dogs to progressives to semi-Socialists. The party is composed of many people who believe and want many different things, making for a disjointed and sometimes chaotic coalition. We need to alter the Democratic apparatus (first by allowing more people access to that apparatus, as we talked about) so that it can communicate across the factions of the Democratic Party more effectively. We need to rejoin the constituent parts to move forward as a united and collective whole. And to do that, we need better communications within the factions of the Democratic Party and better messaging, more nuanced and tailored, coming out of the party as a whole.
As I write this, there are no fewer than twenty-three confirmed candidates looking for the Democratic presidential nomination—a sort of something-for-everyone buffet of personalities.
Here’s the frustration that I’m hearing from people I meet with on the campaign trail and in my daily life: the Democratic Party is too concerned with telling the American people how they can make America better before focusing on what the people themselves are actually saying. The Democratic Party apparatus tells folks it will help them, that it knows best, and that it has the answers, based on how things have always run in the past. But the American people, and more specifically, the many diverse factions of the Democratic Party, are tired of this. Americans from different income brackets and age groups, religions, ethnicities, and races have all concluded that they no longer want to hear empty promises. Even people who have long been okay with how the Democratic Party has functioned in the past are fed up with the lack of forward progress. They want to see their fellow Americans speaking, and the leaders of the Democratic Party listening: they want to see Parkland students giving speeches on gun control, and congressmen and -women taking action.
When I was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School in 2018, I asked my students how they would describe the current state of the Democratic Party. “Leaderless, shit show, nihilistic, eating its young, directionless, reactive, old, nationally focused, growing, cautious, damaged, dysfunctional, fractured, complacent, boring, coastal—broken.” Goodness. But that’s when I told them to take a step back and reminded them that when we talk about “the party” in this way, what we are really talking about is the apparatus—the DNC, DCCC, elected officials, DLCC, super PACs, DGA, consultants, and donors . . . the cogs and gears. But the factions are the fuel that powers the machine. Black Lives Matter activists, Dreamers, and proponents of the Green New Deal have shifted the conversation in the Democratic Party—these factions are driving the Democratic apparatus forward, making the machine go, and moving it in a different direction.
The wants of the people, not the promises of party leaders, need to lead the way toward the future. If the party truly makes an effort to give a voice to the people, the factions will not work against the apparatus in Washington, DC, but with it. If the apparatus stops telling people what they need and instead allows the people themselves to construct the party’s messaging and directives, I believe we have a chance to regain the power and ensure the continuing future of the Democratic Party in this country.
Don’t get me wrong, the factions are the future, but we still need strong leaders. The American people should be involved in the messaging of the Democratic Party, yes, but we still need a candidate and a president that we can vest our trust in—let’s not forget this is the primary function of a democratic republic. When I ask people what that leader should look like, who that leader needs to be, the young people and the LGBT people and the people of color and the working-class people and the new immigrants and others tell me they want—WE want—somebody who is authentic, with real stories and real heart. Someone who has a vision, who is looking to create an America that includes all the factions, someone who listens to the “we” and who allows their voices to be heard. What we truly need right now is a visionary, and someone with a diverse and experienced team, so that the American people can see themselves in and trust the president’s entourage. Most of all, the American people want to see more people in politics who honestly, authentically, and genuinely give a damn. And the only way for this to happen is for candidates to communicate their authenticity effectively, so we can decide who has it and who doesn’t. Who really means what they’re saying.
When I worked on Bernie Sanders’s campaign, one of the things I was most proud of was helping him communicate his authenticity. No one could argue he isn’t an authentic person and leader; I mean, he has been saying the same thing for forty years. But his ability to convey that was, oh, challenged, let’s say, at the time I joined his campaign. When I signed on as his national press secretary, activists from the Black Lives Matter movement were rushing the stage at his events, disrupting his speeches.
Disruption is an effective tool, and at its core it is about attention. The lack of attention paid to activists in 2016, specifically to the issues the Black Lives Matter movement raises, created an environment ripe for disruption. When I was hired, I decided to make it my personal mission to find a way to communicate the issues fueling that disruption to Senator Sanders and the other people on his campaign team in a productive manner. In addition to my duties as a press secretary,
my first task as part of the team was creating a dialogue with the groups using his events to gain attention. In every single place that we had a rally for the next few months, I would get in touch with the local BLM folks and invite them to a listening session. I would tell them that the listening session would take place after the event, and if the activists ended up disrupting the events, we weren’t going to meet with them.
It worked. The disruptions ceased to exist. Senator Sanders went to a lot of listening sessions during that time period that helped inform a number of policy issues that we ended up putting in our platform. BLM folks got their voices heard in a more productive and convincing manner than shouting at Bernie from the crowd, and Bernie got a chance to sit down with them one-on-one and hear them out from a place of mutual respect.
Let me be very clear, I know when I was hired to work on Senator Sanders’s campaign I was often referred to as a Black Lives Matter activist (LOL). I’m proud of my involvement with the movement, but I am not an activist. I like to say I just played one on TV. My activism work has not included physically putting my body on the line; that is just not how I’ve contributed. I know DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Tef Poe, and many others; they are the real activists. They are the people who have put their bodies on the line, who have been teargassed and hit with rubber bullets because they dared to raise their voices. Now, that’s authenticity. My activism looks a bit different.
While BLM is often portrayed in the media as a single, centralized movement, in reality the movement is made up of a variety of different groups with similar goals. The hashtag itself, #BlackLivesMatter, started circulating on social media in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Then, in 2014, when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, local folks organized street protests and utilized social media to tell the real story of what was happening. America started paying attention. Today there are several groups: Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and Campaign Zero, to name a few, all working on issues of violence against Black communities in the United States. Even though the movement is fractured, there is still important work being done in various spaces and places. I feel like part of my job is to keep these issues involved in the more mainstream political conversation, in whatever way I can. Because these issues continue to matter to me personally, no matter where I find myself in my career.
No, You Shut Up Page 4