Lessons from Pennsylvania Avenue

Michael Wear worked in the 2008 Obama campaign and in 2009, at age 20, became one of the youngest presidential aides in American history. He now heads Public Square Strategies, a public relations company, and is the author of Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America. Here are edited excerpts of an interview in front of students at Patrick Henry College.

You grew up in a Catholic home but not one that emphasized belief?

It was a Catholicism of fish fries and not something that penetrated my heart.

Your older sister evangelized you?

She became a Christian a few years before I did and started working on me immediately, like a homing missile. She’d sit me down and go through Scripture with me. I built up an antagonism, but she finally got me to go to her youth group: I thought, I’ll go and get more ammunition so I can make fun of her and tell her how silly all this is.

You went home with a handout of Romans.

Just Romans: no commentary, just Paul’s letter. I took it home, read it, read it again—and it changed my life. It’s a perfect antidote to someone who thinks “there is no there there” in Christianity.

‘When we have the White House, an ideological calcification goes on: Same thing happens when Republicans are in control.’

What really hit you as you were reading?

I knew that at Easter, Jesus died and rose again. But why did that have to happen? The wages of sin is death. Why don’t Christians act like Jesus all the time? It’s because I do not do what I want to do. What does it mean to enter into Christian life? The logical argument engaged me, but the Holy Spirit moved me.

You then went to George Washington University and in your freshman year became a leader in the College Democrats. Why Democrats rather than Republicans?

I already was a Democrat, partly for family history: My grandfather was a union guy. Probably the first substantive policy issues I cared about were civil rights issues, voting rights, and the Democratic Party spoke often and significantly about advancing racial equality. If it was 10 years earlier or 10 years later, who knows? I became a Christian on the tail end of the religious right and came to terms with the downside of that movement versus the good things that it brought to our politics and to the nation.

Tell us about how you went to a hotel for a conference on the wrong day, but you had a providential encounter.

I went to the Washington Hilton for the Democratic Winter Convention in 2007, and the receptionist said, “Oh honey, that’s not for a couple more days.” I’m dejected, embarrassed, and exiting the hotel—and Barack Obama is walking through the hotel lobby. It was about a week before he announced he was running, so he didn’t have Secret Service around him. He walked up to me, and I told him I thought he would run for president and wanted to work for him. He connected me with some staff.

Was it love at first sight?

I don’t know about that. John Kerry in 2004 was a religiously inept nominee, but at the convention nominating him Barack Obama talked about the awesome God we serve. That perked me up. In 2006 he gave a speech calling the secularist idea that we should take faith out of our public debates a “practical absurdity.” I had seen him in bold, unconventional ways advance a positive vision for faith, so I had a pre-existing interest. That’s why it was so crazy, out of all people, to see him in the lobby.

Then you worked for him in Iowa: more fun and more educational than just sitting in a classroom?

That’s right. In Iowa I knocked on doors, but then I started doing religious outreach.

Which led to your work in the White House faith-based office in 2009. Did you feel a bit like Cinderella, or—switching to My Fair Lady—did you want to sing, “I Could Have Danced All Night?”

I was on the street where Barack Obama lived. A My Fair Lady reference, sorry.

Soon to be a major musical.

Right. You never forget that you’re working in the White House. You never quite get used to it. But I didn’t really have much time to gawk. We were trying to figure out what a faith-based office would look like. It had only operated under one administration.

Barack Obama’s statement in his first campaign for president that he was open to restrictions on abortion—political posturing?

What is clear is that in the campaign he said he supported abortion restrictions, and in office he not only vetoed the ones that got to his desk but never put forth any restrictions. You’d think that would be an option.

Is there room in the Democratic Party for pro-life people?

In 2006, because Democrats were out of power and had lost two straight elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intentionally recruited candidates in conservative districts who were pro-life, and we had dozens of pro-life House members as a result. We’ve lost a lot over the last six years.

That was a successful strategy in 2006, and normally when political parties see a successful strategy they want to continue it. Seems to me that if the Democratic Party was not radically pro-abortion, Democrats would have won in 1980, in 2000, in 2016. So what keeps the Democratic Party from doing what political parties normally do: adjust to win?

When we have the White House, an ideological calcification goes on: Same thing happens when Republicans are in control.

I had been involved in developing compassionate conservatism, so the way it turned out in the Bush administration was disappointing, but I always thought it was a long shot.

We go back and ask, “Had I approached it this way instead of that way, would the outcome have been different?” But I wasn’t the person making the decisions. My role was primarily in outreach and in making sure that the views of the faith community were represented.

Chris Hayes at MSNBC said he was troubled by presidential misleading, particularly about same-sex marriage. Did the Obama administration end up increasing cynicism?

Politics is about taking two steps forward, one step back. I’m not more cynical. The troubling thing for me was not that the president changed his mind, if there was a change of mind. The problem was people applauding how astutely the change happened. It wasn’t just that he was going to religious groups and saying that he supported the traditional definition of marriage. Less than a week before the 2008 election, he was on MTV, telling teenagers who generally support gay marriage, “I support marriage between a man and a woman.” It was a clear part of his campaign. We can’t accept that it’s OK to mislead the public, if that’s indeed what happened.

You’re saying “if.”

The only evidence we have for this is David Axelrod saying the president supported gay marriage at least as early as 2007. If the president writes in his memoir or says publicly that Axelrod’s book is wrong, that’s a whole other thing. Hasn’t done that. The question is hanging out there. That’s significant.

Troublesome?

Absolutely.

For other excerpts from our Michael Wear interview, please go to wng.org/2017/05/no_political_home