Current Position: Online Programs Director for President Barack Obama (since November 2008)
Credit: Trinity Reporter
Why He Matters
Lee launched his political career as the author of a one-page anti-Iraq war leaflet distributed in cafeterias, coffee shops and libraries across the country. That’s a strange beginning for someone who is best-known for helping push the Democratic Party into the Internet age. But Lee doesn’t see this as a contradiction. “I view my role as part of a progressive movement … to make ordinary people feel invested in their democracy again,” he said in 2008.
Lee got his start in politics running a popular Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) blog in 2003. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) snatched him up in 2006 to run
The Gavel, the representative’s YouTube generation-friendly blog. In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential campaign, he ran the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) rapid-response team.
Now, as the online guru of the fledgling Obama White House, he is tasked with mending the occasionally contentious relationship between left-wing bloggers and Beltway politicians, harnessing the netroots reach and passion to spread the administration’s message.
At a Glance
Current Position: Online Programs Director for President Barack Obama (since Nov. 2008)
Career History: Rapid Response Team Manager, DNC (2008); Senior New Media Adviser, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, (2007 to 2008); Blogger, DCCC (2003 to 2006)
Birthday: N/A
Hometown: Takoma Park, Md.
Alma Mater: Trinity College, B.A., 2002
Spouse: N/A
Office: N/A
Email
Web site
Path to Power
Lee grew up in Takoma Park, Md. He attended Trinity College in Connecticut. He decided to go into politics “after studying philosophy … out of opposition to the Iraq War,” he told Roll Call.
After graduating in 2002, Lee began working part-time as a paralegal while trying to figure out the best way to get involved in the nascent anti-Iraq war movement. He began writing opposition pieces for Internet sites, but he felt like he “was preaching to the choir.” Instead, Lee started producing a one-page newsletter that could be easily printed by restaurants, libraries and factories. That way, he hoped to reach “people out in the heartland, out in the places where anti-war voices were hard to find.” He said he eventually had about 20,000 readers.
Democratic Party Blogger
In 2003, Lee took a job with the DCCC writing a blog called The Stakeholder on the inner workings of the Democratic Party. When White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel took over the DCCC in 2005, he tried to focus its message, but he allowed Lee to continue posting whatever he wanted. “Here was this massive, tight machine with this one leaky spigot where this kid was running his mouth, but it worked great,” Lee said in 2008.
During his time at the DCCC, Lee also designed a Web site called “House of Scandal” that highlighted Republican lawmakers’ unethical behavior and showed the connections between politicians and donors. In 2007, Lee called the site his proudest accomplishment.
At the DCCC, Lee developed a reputation for accessibility among the netroots Web activists. “Jesse was amazing,” said blogger John Aravosis, who writes the liberal America Blog. “He was always available ... literally 9 or even 11 [o’clock at night], Jesse was on his cell phone, helping me out.”
In 2007, Lee joined Pelosi’s office as a senior new media adviser. In that position, Lee wrote the speaker’s first blog The Gavel, and coordinated outreach to the new media. Pelosi hired Lee to capture a younger online audience. He did so by including video from the House floor, congressional hearings, committees and subcommittees on the speaker’s blog and on YouTube. Leewanted his work, he said “to find a whole new audience outside of the dedicated C-Span junkies (bless their hearts).”
In the days leading up to the 2008 election, Lee jumped to the DNC, where he managed its online rapid-response team. Some of the work he did there is still on display on the Huffington Post Web site, where he wrote daily “message updates” on stories the DNC wanted to circulate.
Inside the White House
After President Barack Obama clinched victory in November 2008, Lee joined the new president’s transition team, where he led the online outreach along with Macon Phillips. There he worked to smooth over the Obama administration’s sometimes contentious relationship with liberal bloggers, who felt officials would reach out to them when they needed help, then disappear.
On February 23, 2009, Lee was named online programs director for the Obama administration. He has already started organizing conference calls between bloggers and administration officials, a welcome change from treatment from the Obama administration in the past. “We were like thank God,” Aravosis said of the appointment. “He recognizes the value of the blogs.”
After a call with Obama economic team member Jared Bernstein, Talking Points Memo writer Matthew Cooper wrote that Lee “introduced Bernstein on the call and said he hoped that the progressive media call would be ‘the first in a newly sustained tradition.’ Let's hope.”
The Issues
Though Democrats have been hailed as the party that harnessed the Internet for political purposes, government officials have sometimes struggled to build relationships with the blogging community. During the 2006 campaign, liberal bloggers and party officials sometimes butted heads over strategy and which candidates to nominate. The netroots clamored for outspoken anti-war candidates who were loudly left-of-center, while Beltway politicians tended to support more centrist contenders.
Though the Obama campaign was quick to tap into the power of the Web, it ran into its own problems with liberal bloggers, who complained that the campaign ignored them until they were in trouble. Additionally, in the White House, the Obama administration has struggled to figure out how to use the Internet to rally support for its goals. Greg Sargent of WhoRunsGov.com’s The Plum Line blog asked whether the White House “can duplicate the campaign's [Internet] innovations to organize and push the Obama administration's agenda.”
Lee has worked with online scribes to spread the administration’s talking points. Aravosis and others have described Lee as someone who is almost universally liked. At the start of 2009, he organized a series of conference calls between the netroots and Obama administration officials, including a talk with Obama Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag the day the budget was released and another with Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s chief economic adviser. “He gets the Internet and he gets politics,” Aravosis said.
But Lee will also face the increased exposure and challenges of working in the White House, where he won’t have access to instant messenger or Google-chat, two key means of communication during the campaign. “You almost have to move back 10 years,” Aravosis said. “Jesse was just prolific online. He can’t do any of it anymore. It’s a luddite 1990s political relationship.”
Fighting the Right
In the beginning days of the Obama administration, the online team was fairly restrained with its response to attacks from the right. However, the health care debate in summer 2009 changed this. The White House began using the internet to fight mistruths about health care. In particular, the Reality Check site took on claims that the health care bill would require all American senior citizens would face death panels.
In September 2009, Lee took on Fox News in an unusually public way, attacking Glenn Beck and others for distorting the truth about Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, which Obama lobbied for personally. In the post, Lee wrote "last night Fox News continued its disregard for the facts in an attempt to smear the Administration's efforts to win the Olympics for the United States."
Several media blogs picked up on the post, which they called an unusually direct attack. "It's unusual for the official White House blog to so sharply criticize a news organization," Michael Calderone wrote on his
Politco blog.
The Network
In the White House, Lee will be joining a team that includes
Macon Phillips, deputy director of new media Cammie Croft, and Kate Albright-Hanna on content lead.
Lee has also worked with his share of high-profile House members. He helped White House Chief of Staff
Rahm Emanuel, when the then-representative was spearheading the House Democrats’ 2006 campaign. He wrote House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) first blog in 2007.
