Playing the Long Game: An Interview with Anita Dunn

Anita Dunn most recently served as Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden at the White House. She held a senior advisory role on the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign. She was also Chief Strategist and White House Communications Director for President Barack Obama. A longtime Democratic strategist, Dunn has held senior roles advising leaders such as Tom Daschle, Bill Bradley, and Evan Bayh. Notably, she is the only person to have served as a senior advisor on winning presidential campaigns for two different U.S. presidents. For Spring 2026, Dunn was named a Hauser Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

Your career has been quite expansive, starting with the Carter administration and more recently working for both Obama and Biden. What do you look back on as the highlights or defining moments of your work?

Certainly, one of the highlights of my career was getting the Affordable Care Act passed. I had left the White House by then but was still very active in working towards it. I had worked on both the attempts by then First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1993 to 1994 to get health care passed and then Senator Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign in 2000, [where] we had a comprehensive health care platform. President Obama’s commitment to getting this done and actually getting it done was certainly one of the largest policy highlights of my life.

Can you think of a policy you didn’t expect to work, but that ended up being successful and surprising you?

By the first two years of the Biden administration, we had an incredible legislative record of achievement. People had talked about doing a massive infrastructure program as long as I had been in Washington, and Biden got it done in a bipartisan way through the CHIPS [and Science] Act. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, did an amazing job. Something that the President was able to get through in a bipartisan way again, was on the climate, with the Inflation Reduction Act, which was extraordinary. The stimulus that he did at the beginning was the [American Rescue Plan] Act. You still have towns that are spending that recovery money on projects. The first two years of the Biden administration were incredible to watch and to see him get these things done in a bipartisan way in a polarized Washington.

What enabled those bills to happen since not only did they happen, they also happened in a bipartisan way?

Part of the reason came from Biden’s experience, having served 36 years in the Senate and then eight years as vice president. He understood how to pass legislation, and he respected members. Biden genuinely liked members of Congress, having been one himself for 36 years. Both he and Obama shared an important trait for a president: playing the long game and understanding that a setback today doesn’t mean it’s all over. You regroup, keep your eye on the ball, and get it done in the future. Those were also things I felt very fortunate to be part of.

I also feel honored to have worked with some of the people I did. I worked for Senator Tom Daschle when he was majority and minority leader, and he is a great human being and a strong leader. I felt fortunate to work for President Jimmy Carter, even though I was just answering phones. He was a fine human being and a president who was underrated at the time. I was also fortunate to work for Senator Bill Bradley, both on his Senate staff and his presidential campaign. It was an experience that taught me so much and helped me succeed later on. From the campaigns I worked on to my colleagues at my firm, very talented people, I had the chance to work on so many great political campaigns and projects. I feel very lucky.

What do you think is the future of the long game you have mentioned, given recent, quite major pushbacks?

Right now, our politics is a pendulum swaying rapidly from side to side. In the future, some policies, particularly around climate, will need to be discussed in the context where they belong: energy technology is a critical part of this country’s economic growth. You see it with China, with Europe, and around the globe. These energy technologies are the clean technologies we want and the technologies of the future. You don’t have to make people feel as though they’re dirty. We need to move some of the political rhetoric away from “I’m right, you’re wrong” and toward what makes sense for us all to accomplish together for our future, since this country needs a heavy dose of optimism and a sense that people can figure out how to work together again for the common good.

How have you seen political rhetoric change over the course of your career? And how has your approach to strategy, thinking about which policies and levers to pull, evolved?

There was a quaint time in this country when you couldn’t, for instance, use the word liar in talking about your opponent. You worked your ways around it. [Politicians might say that their opponent] “isn't being candid” or “isn't telling you the entire truth,” but it was seen as harsh rhetoric that would rebound negatively on you. Of course, now, [liar] is the first thing most people call their opponents. There’s no question the rhetoric has gotten coarser, cheapened, and hotter.

The people in the center of this country, in their local communities, in their day-to-day lives, don’t act like that, and they don’t especially like seeing their elected officials act that way. One of the challenges for the next group of leaders in this country will be figuring out how to take what’s working at the local and community level, where people can cooperate and disagree without it turning into the vitriol seen nationally, and bring some of that back to national politics. How can you rebuild a sense of consensus around certain issues? It’s a huge challenge for the next generation of leaders. Both parties are seeing generational change in their congressional and presidential leadership, and it will be a challenge for both.

How do you see this domestic shift with rhetoric and presidential leadership fitting into the United States’ relationship with the world and a more international story?

I don’t have a great sense of what happens next in terms of our international narrative. It is going to be interesting to see what the next president, whether they are Democrat or Republican, does in terms of rebuilding or reinventing an international strategy unless, of course, it is someone who decides to follow the current administration’s track, [which is] obviously one option. I tend to think that the world is changing rapidly. The United States has changed a great deal, and anyone who sees the next president as somebody who will go back and restore the former order is probably being very naive, because I don’t think there’s a restoration piece. I think there is a reinvention and [questions] of “where do we go next” and “how do we do it differently and better?” but perhaps achieve many of the same goals.

What goals would you identify for the next 10 to 20 years for this reinvention?

I’ve never been a foreign policy expert, but I think that both the economic competition and the spheres of influence are going to be important for the next administration to figure out.

Looking back, what advice would you give to people, especially young people, entering politics today, and what are your thoughts on the future direction of American politics?

My advice for people is work for causes and people you believe in. Take a few jobs at the beginning of your career to learn the skills, but work for the people you believe in and the causes you believe in. At the end of the day, even if you have not won a lot, you’ll feel very good about how you spent your career.

In terms of American politics, it is going to take a great degree of courage for people to enter elective office, and they should not forget why they entered elective office, and it’s to represent people in this country. There are people in this country [who] see both political parties, to some extent, as not representing them any longer. How do you fix that?

There are a lot of people who talk about the problems with democracy, [and] they’re thinking about voting rights, and election reform, and January 6. Those are all very real, scary issues. But there are a lot of people who see the problem with democracy in this country as a government that doesn’t represent their interests or do anything about their problems. As you look at the growing economic divide in this country, very disturbing and upsetting, that is going to be the challenge. How do you have a government that really does go address those issues in a way that people see as meaningful? It’s going to take courage, and it’s going to take a willingness to take positions that aren’t always popular.

Dunn spoke with Black on March 26, 2026. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The views expressed in this piece are the interviewee’s own and are not reflective of the views of the HIR.