"There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion"
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A little confession, a little corrective: Obama is admitting that moral seriousness can harden into self-satisfaction. The phrase "perverse pride" is the tell. It frames his administration's posture not as pure courage but as a kind of aesthetic of righteousness, the pleasure of being seen (by yourself, by history) as the adult in the room. That self-image powered big choices in the wake of crisis, but it also became a blind spot.
The subtext is a critique of the liberal technocratic instinct: if the policy is sound, persuasion will take care of itself. Obama rejects that myth here. Governing, he argues, is not a seminar where the best answer wins; it's an arena where legitimacy is manufactured daily. The word "intersection" does a lot of work, suggesting politics isn't a contaminant of policy but the medium it has to travel through. If you don't "market" the work, you don't just lose a news cycle; you lose the mandate that keeps the work alive long enough to matter.
Context matters: this is the postmortem voice of a president who watched signature achievements become permanent targets in a polarized media ecosystem. It echoes lessons from the Affordable Care Act rollout, the slow burn of economic recovery messaging, and the way "no drama" discipline sometimes read as detachment. He isn't praising spin; he's acknowledging that public opinion isn't cosmetic. It's infrastructure. The irony is that the administration's faith in doing the right thing "even if unpopular" may have helped make it stay unpopular.
The subtext is a critique of the liberal technocratic instinct: if the policy is sound, persuasion will take care of itself. Obama rejects that myth here. Governing, he argues, is not a seminar where the best answer wins; it's an arena where legitimacy is manufactured daily. The word "intersection" does a lot of work, suggesting politics isn't a contaminant of policy but the medium it has to travel through. If you don't "market" the work, you don't just lose a news cycle; you lose the mandate that keeps the work alive long enough to matter.
Context matters: this is the postmortem voice of a president who watched signature achievements become permanent targets in a polarized media ecosystem. It echoes lessons from the Affordable Care Act rollout, the slow burn of economic recovery messaging, and the way "no drama" discipline sometimes read as detachment. He isn't praising spin; he's acknowledging that public opinion isn't cosmetic. It's infrastructure. The irony is that the administration's faith in doing the right thing "even if unpopular" may have helped make it stay unpopular.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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