- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by... and also by... a complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LivefromLBJ.org.

- Was the backlash inevitable?

- I think so because it's happening everywhere.

When I say backlash, I don't mean a backlash to a black man being president, although I think like that's probably some part of this, but just the backlash to government not working.

You know, we were in the position when Obama came in of having to bail out the banks, but no people didn't see anybody held accountable for that.

I feel like that really kind of set in distrust and disaffection with a lot of people.

(bright upbeat music) (soft music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the Library was dedicated by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson over a half a century ago, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Jennifer Palmieri has spent decades at the center of American politics, working for both presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and as communications director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

I talked to her about what propelled her into the highest levels of politics, the lessons she took from her years in the Clinton and Obama administrations and the steps the Democratic Party need to take to rebuild for the future.

Jennifer Palmieri, welcome.

- Great to be with you.

- You have been at the top of politics for over 30 years.

What started you on the road to a political career?

- I was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi and my mother, one of my mother's closest friends' husban was campaign manager for Trent Lott when he first ran for the House, I think in 1972.

And she was, my mom was the volunteer coordinator for the campaign and then she used to dress me up in like a Trent Lott sandwich board and have me go campaigning in front of like supermarkets and knocking on doors and there's a great photo of me with Trent Lott on Halloween dressed in my Trent Lott sandwich board.

And that just got me, my parents, my dad was in the Navy.

So like public service, a lot of educators in our family too public service is definitely a thing but no one else was interested in politics and I was just hooked from then on.

Trent Lott went to Washington and was on the Judiciary Committee, was part of impeachment hearings during Watergate.

I was very interested in that as a eight, seven year old.

And I just was interested in politics.

I always knew after that, I always knew.

I'd switched parties, but I always knew that I was gonna wanna do that.

- And you ascended the ranks pretty quickly.

You ended up working in the Clinton White House as a young woman.

- Yeah, I was lucky though, because it was just geography.

We eventually moved to California and I went to high school in the Monterey Bay area, Santa Cruz area and on the Central Coast and Leon Panetta was our Congressman.

And so I interned for him.

I went to school in DC and I interned for him in college.

And so I started working for him when I was 19 and then he became OMB director, the White House budget director for Bill Clinton and then Bill Clinton's chief of staff.

And so I went with him.

And then that was sort of my entree into the very scary big leagues.

- Well, those are the big leagues and with the big dog.

You're with Bill Clinton.

- The big dog, yeah.

- Right, Bill Clinton, the first of his generation to take the White House and considered by many to be the politician of his generation.

What did you learn from Bill Clinton?

- It was, 'cause it was at the time I felt like, I just wondered if Democrats would ever win the White House again.

It had been 16 years since President Carter had been and he was only in for four years.

And then prior to that, it was President Johnson and it just, so it was such a vibrant, exciting time.

And what I felt like, Bill Clinton was one of the first famous people I ever met.

So he has this incredible aura when he walks into the room, even as an older man to this day.

I thought, oh, maybe all famous people are like that.

And I didn't realize that this is something that is unique to him.

And it was just, it was this incredible time of possibility.

And obviously there was a lot ups and downs and just absolute chaos.

In eight years of that White House, not one person completed a sentence.

Because people were just, even President Clinton was not permitted to complete a sentence 'cause you were just like always interrupting each other.

But there was this really exciting pace and sense of possibility.

And there's no one I know who understands America better than him.

And what I really learned from him is it's like, you go everywhere, you listen to everyone, you talk to everyone, you don't count anyone out.

And that's the benefit of being a Southern governor, a Democratic Southern governor where it's harder to win.

So it's like just having this level of respect for everyone, not writing people off and believing that you can convince someone if you're able to relate to them with empathy and respect.

- So it's been 25 years since Clinton left the White House, a quarter of a century.

- Yeah, yeah, crazy.

- How do you think history will see that administration?

- It's fittingly the last administration of the 20th century.

I think it was sort of the culmination of the best of the 20th century.

- Talked about the bridge.

- The bridge to the (laughs) bridge.

Oh, we tried so hard to find something other than the bridge to the 21st century, which is such an obvious thing for his 1996 reelect, but sometimes the obvious answer is the right one.

But it was just in terms of American power, 'cause there was a lot of tough things that happened in his presidency, including Rwanda and the Rwanda genocide where the United States was, I'm not an expert, but largely absent.

But figuring out by the time of the Balkans and the Balkans war in Kosovo when Serbia invaded Kosovo, that the way the U.S.

could use power and bring all of NATO together to fight that war and to free people of Kosovo, that felt like, okay, we've come through the century and we have figured out a way to use American power really for good in a way of leading our allies.

With the economy, it felt like we had figured it out.

We had a balanced budget for the first time.

And just a real sense of possibility.

I also think as a political matter, Bill Clinton made it possible for Democrats to be president again.

Without Bill Clinton, I don't think there's a Barack Obama.

But someone who, 'cause the Democratic Party brand had been really damaged, and it had to go through a process that Clinton was part of undertaking after President H.W.

Bush was elected in 1988 to sort of figure itself out and come to terms with a lot of difficult things.

And I think he made that possible.

- First two-termer since Franklin Roosevelt.

- Yeah.

- And then paves the way for Barack Obama, the first African-American president to take the presidency.

You worked for Barack Obama for four years.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So how did the, and there was the prospect when Obama came in of a post-racial society.

So how did America change during the Obama era?

- I felt that when I was there, it was definitely different from Clinto It was not as much fun.

(laughs) In that you, and this is not, this is a product of the times.

This is not a product of President Obama, who was in many ways the most generous and easiest person I've ever worked for.

He had a lot of awareness about the press and politics and what's reasonable to expect how they're gonna react to you.

And a very generous boss.

But the world, the country had become more, was starting to become more polarized.

Democratic institutions more calcified.

People, things were more entrenched.

And so that made everything just more difficult and you didn't have the sense of possibility that I felt like we had with Clinton, although we got very big things done, including the passing the Affordable Care Act.

But I do remember like sitting in my tiny office, 'cause Office of the West Wing, we still have the West Wing.

Offices of the West Wing are tiny.

I mean, it was like as big as half the size of this carpet and thinking, "Wow, we're gonna look back on this time as such a time of change, right?"

It was like, we had the Great Recession.

We had just all these technological changes, demographic changes.

And like some, at some point we'll step back to appreciate how much we lived through.

But what actually happened was we had a huge backlash to all of that and sooner than I had expected.

- Was that backlash inevitable?

- I think so because it's happening everywhere, right?

It's not just happening in the United States.

I don't think that when I say backlash, I don't mean a backlash to a black man being president, although I think like that's probably some part of this, but just the backlash to government not working to the income divide growing and not being able to do anything about it.

The Great Recession, I think we were in the position when Obama came in of having to bail out the banks, but no people didn't see anybody held accountable for that.

I feel like that really kind of set in distrust and disaffection with a lot of people.

And I just wondered like, might we be in for a backlash?

Might this be too much too soon for some people?

- And that's exactly what happened.

You went on to work as communications director in the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

And you said of that loss, I've lost races before, but not one where you felt that the country had as much at stake.

- Yeah.

- Take us behind the scenes on the night of that loss.

Hillary Clinton, of course, won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college.

What was it like that night?

- It was, I've had like terrible deaths in my family, like normal life stuff.

It was, it will always be the worst night of my life.

It doesn't matter like what else happens because first of all, you just, it was, you feel the, you know, having like let the country down is so difficult, but also knowing we can't ever, you know, something that I thought could not happen, happened, right?

And so what, you know, fell in addition to, you know, Hillary Clinton presidency is a lot of assumptions about America and what's possible here.

And once you let, you know, once someone like him takes power, just the lasting changes it's gonna have on the country, you can't get back in.

But as far as like how it all went down, it was, you know, I mean, it was surreal for everybody that night, including Trump and then his team, but I was- - He did not expect to win.

- He did not expect to win, we did, you know, I knew there was a one in four chance that we would lose.

I definitely saw things on the campaign trail every day.

Every day I saw something that told me Donald Trump could win, right?

But as I could not wrap my head around, like we had put Hillary Clinton through all of this misery.

My, every day I was contributing in some way to making Donald Trump president of the United States.

Like, I just like, I believed in some kind of karma that I don't believe in anymore.

- You said on the circus that when it comes to the ultimate leadership position, the presidency, we ultimately default to men.

Since the loss of Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016, we've seen Kamala Harris lose.

Do women stand a better chance now of gaining the presidency than they did a decade ago?

- My husband says three times a charm, and I was like, I don't believe in charms, but I don't believe in curses.

I think that, I do think, women have, and I think it's important people understand this, 'cause I wrote a book about it after Hillary lost, because if you think that women face challenges just because everybody's sexist, that is not what's happening, right?

It is not, you know, I think most people, men and women both, want women to do well and succeed and be able to achieve whatever they want.

That is what most people want.

We have unconscious, you know, we all of us have unconscious biases based on our own history and our own families and what we've seen happen before and what we haven't.

So we just don't recognize.

The scope of all human history, it's a radical thing for a woman to be in charge.

It doesn't seem that radical in 2025, but it is in that scope of human history.

So I think, you know, with Hillary, it was sort of manifest itself and like, there's just something about her I don't like, people would say all the time.

There's just something about her I don't trust and we would do a lot of focus groups to try to understand and you would put just like, well, she's also sketchy, she's always hiding something.

Well, and try to get, you know, more at the root of why that was.

And people, you know, when you kept coming back, well, that wasn't true and that wasn't true.

And I know you've heard that, but that's not true.

And it just, it was just sort of like this over unease and Hillary Clinton from the time she was 18 years old was always pushing the limits of what had been a traditional role for women, for her whole adult life.

And we had seen her in that for 30 years, we'd seen her just like always kind of pushing a button.

And I think that that, you know, and that's how it manifested itself.

I think that a woman can be elected president to kind of depends on the woman, how good of a candidate she is, you know, Hillary almost did it.

Harris was, you know, Harris was in a very difficult situation, but she did better.

Her end result was, when she joined the ticket was better than when the polling was better than when Biden was there.

So I do think... I think it's really wrong when people say America won't elect a president, a female president.

You know, we have a lot of great female leaders now.

It just, it really depends on the person.

It depends on the person.

Not to be colloquial about it, but what kind of vibes is that person putting off?

Are they making clear that they are confident and comfortable in their own skin and comfortable with their decisions and know why they're running and, you know.

- Which is true with any candidate, male or female.

- Yeah, it's true with any candidate, male or female.

But I think what's exciting to me is to see, you know, Hillary's a Baby Boomer and to see Gen X women leaders.

And there's so many of them in the country right now, which they have a role model.

Hillary did not have a, you know, she didn't have a sort of female role model that she could look to to say, okay, that's right.

That's what it looks like.

And how can I learn from her?

And I think a lot of women today know, they don't take criticism as personally, because they like seeing other people go through it, right?

And we're also more used to seeing women leaders.

- What makes Donald Trump so effective politically?

- He knows how to... he has established a connection and trust with his voters that is unlike anything I have ever seen.

And I can't come to an American leader other than FDR, who people who support him felt the same way about it.

After we lost in '16, Harvard has this, they do this post-mortem with different campaigns and a friend of mine who worked on, not the Trump campaign, but another Republican campaign said, in retrospect, he said, "I think we lost the day that Donald Trump got into the race."

And he said this thing that, about immigration.

And he said, you know, people coming over from Mexico and, you know, some are rapists, some are criminals and some I suspect are very good people.

A lot of times we forget about the third one.

But his supporters don't.

And, you know, what he was... I heard him say that and I thought, "Wow, that is a really callous, grossly political thing to say," including throwing in the thing at the end about some are very good people.

But a lot of his supporters heard that and said, "That man is willing to say the hard truth, even though he's gonna catch a lot of hell for it."

And I think they felt like, so he established a bond with people about being able to say hard truths, reflecting, I hear this all the time, go to Trump rallies, he says what I believe, he says what I believe.

But it felt like because he was willing to take all the flack, you know, they see all the flack that he takes and they see them, that he's taking that for them.

- For them, yeah.

- And by the way, I don't think they feel that way about anybody else.

I don't see his support as transferable to anyone else.

And I don't see any Democrat that has that kind of bond that he has with people.

And it really, you know, at a time where you're not sure what to believe, and there's so much information out there, I think that bond that people have with a candidate, that sort of personal faith is all the more important.

- How does the Democratic Party rebuild itself?

- You know, it's super frustrating for everyone, but it doesn't start until there's a Democratic presidential primary process.

And we have a lot of great, I think we have a lot... I mean, the good thing, the thing about the Trump years is that it built a great Democratic bench because the people that had to win in battleground states had to be really great to win.

And then there's good leaders in blue states too that just had to be really active.

And also, I think, you know, President Biden was not good at this, but they have like, we have very good communicators that have learned how to, I mean, nowadays, politicians have to need to, they need to spend 50% of their time communicating.

Governor Whitmer of Michigan is a good example of that.

Her staff, I'm not sure the exact numbers, but they, you know, from traditional roles, they switched a lot of people to communications and she's gotten a lot done and people know about it because she is constantly telling you about it in every form from, on Valentine's day, there'll be like little, you know, the little hearts, the little conversation hearts, you know, so post pictures of that on TikTok of, you know, like paid leave or free childcare, whatever, whatever it is, all the things that, you just have to constant, you have to be in constant communication.

And often it needs to be the person themselves because like, again, 'cause you gotta form that, they gotta be like, I trust you, not just your clever, young digital staffer, it's gotta be, you know, and I think, so the Democratic presidential primary, and you gotta, and you need to... now we really need a vision forward, like where can we go?

What can we be?

What can we build?

You know, along the lines of the Kennedy years, I think we need to be like big and bold and optimistic.

But I do believe what matters most is people having a sense that, that person respects them and trusts them.

- Do you see other ways of building community outside of politics?

How do we repair the divisions we see across the country?

- I do, I do think that, I think that there is a hankering for it and you see some, you know, things, you know, some things popping up.

I have, in my own life, there's one with a group called Women in Ranching.

I'm on their board.

People from all over, women from all over the country that earn ranching.

These are not, this is not like yellow stand ranching.

These are people who live on $40,000 a year, a family of four, you know, usually working on somebody else's ranch or managing a ranch.

They're sort of, you know, the land is something that people can come together on.

And, you know, it doesn't care about your politics.

It doesn't care about why you're taking care of land the way you are, but you need to be good stewards.

And it's something that's very important to these women.

And it's built a good community and also trust because the land is the land and you have to deal with it.

And that has, I have found, if you're able to, I think that a lot of solutions are gonna come from the local level because where you're able to be like at ground truth, solving a problem together, then you can like form these bonds that will... 'cause there's a lot of caricatures that we have about both sides.

People I meet, you know, Trump supporters and they'll say to me like, "Oh, you don't seem like somebody who, oh, I guess, you know, who like, you know, just about abortion rights, you know, assuming that you like, there's like a sense that people like want there to be more abortion."

Like, of course not, you know, nobody wants that, you know, but just there's so many caricatures that need to get knocked down.

- As much as anybody I know, Jen, you've traveled across America and talked to people.

You've been on the hustings with candidates.

You've traveled with presidents.

You've traveled with the circus for five seasons.

What do you want people to know about the America that you have seen?

- That it's sort of tried to say, but that when you see, when I go to Trump rallies, for example, I would always tell people, Be very upfront about who I was.

I was there to, you know, part of a news show, but I was like, I'm a Democrat.

I worked for Hillary Clinton.

I worked for Bill Clinton.

I worked for Barack Obama.

I found that the fact that I trusted them to tell them that information and not think they're gonna freak out on me, that like formed a weird bond that, and I almost never had a problem developing a relationship with Marjorie Taylor Greene that way.

It did show me that it sort of tried to say, but there's just a lot of, that we're not that... we're not as divided as it seems because there's so much misperception about the people in both sides with some like very notable exceptions.

But the one thing that made me, that sort of apolitical that made me hopeful, which is again about ranching.

I went to a family's home in Broadus, Montana, which is this Eastern part of Montana.

Ranched there for a Women in Ranching event.

And the husband and wife that manages the ranch, they had sort of their rules for, 'cause they do regenerative agriculture.

So they do, that's kind of a new thing and it's not like what all their neighbors do.

And so I talked to them about how they... And these are conservative, politically conservative people.

And they said, what they've learned is, and it's like, I think it's good rules for all of us.

Once you tell someone they're wrong, you have lost them forever.

Okay, so they're like, I don't tell the fellow ranchers like you're wrong to do it this way.

If you tell someone something, it will take hold.

You just have to give it a time.

And I really believe that.

So like no conversation is, and they, you know, 'cause they might have a conversation with a rancher one year and two years later, he'll come back and be like, you know, I've been thinking about what you said and we've started doing it this way.

And you're right, it's working better.

People don't like change, but they'll say, let's adapt together.

And people want respect and you have to, and this is tough.

You have to balance what you value with what your neighbor values.

If you're gonna live in some kind of community.

- Jennifer Palmieri, thanks for being with us.

- My pleasure.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by... and also by... A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)