Not Another Puff Podcast

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is Becoming … a video podcaster. Co-hosted with her brother, the pro basketball executive Craig Robinson, IMO will launch under the Obamas’ Higher Ground production banner and follow a formula that’s so familiar it’s practically generic. The influential hosts will dispense life advice off listener questions (unsurprising) with the help of an array of celebrity guests (even less surprising), including Issa Rae, Tyler Perry, fellow podcasters Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, and probable self-help grifter Jay Shetty. If you’re wondering what type of advice is on offer, think of the most banal version of the premise possible. Hearing Obama and her celebrity guests tell a stranger how to manage challenging adult relationships when most people want to hear her take on, say, how to manage intrusive thoughts while flying in the age of an FAA decimated by Elon Musk. The show does not appear to touch on politics or current events, based on the two preview episodes mentioned in a New York Times report, which is both a predictable brand move and an aggravating decision. It makes you wonder if any of these mainstream Democratic figures are not still living in a fantasy world.

The first episode of IMO, out March 12, drops about a week after California governor Gavin Newsom rolled out his new solo podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, a naked expression of his intent to mount a 2028 presidential run. Newsom appears particularly obsessed with interpreting the new political communications paradigm through the lens of launching his own podcast. This Is Gavin Newsom is his second attempt at politics via podcasting, following his Politickin’, a Smartless–aspiring gabfest he co-hosts with Marshawn Lynch and the NFL agent Doug Hendrickson that, not unlike IMO, features celebrity guests — from Lance Bass to Flavor Flav. The hosts weigh in on the Super Bowl, dole out relationship advice, and intermittently chat politics, like discussing Trump nominees. This Is Gavin Newsom is the governor’s more direct effort at political outreach across the aisle. In a bid to revive the corpse of substance-optional political decorum, which he seems to believe is a road toward building crossover appeal, Newsom kicks off the pod by hitting up Charlie Kirk, the right-wing talking head and activist, to whom the governor broke with his party by saying that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” If the idea was to beef up bipartisan street cred by offering an ideological compromise to the political other — in this case, a powerful MAGA-world figure who denies the existence of climate change and argues against abortion even under cases of rape, among many other noxious topics — it’s a deeply cynical move. The inaugural episode is an illustration of an ambitious politician willing to throw a vulnerable population under the bus to test his theory of what centrism looks like in favor of play-acting bipartisanship. Newsom’s comments rankled fellow Democrats, and even if he did believe he was catalyzing some “much-needed” debate within his party around how it should approach trans rights, he still came off looking sweaty and pathetic — a slick politician aggressively looking for love.

Like Newsom, IMO isn’t the former First Lady’s nor Higher Ground’s first foray into podcasting. Specifically, there was The Michelle Obama Podcast, which launched in 2020, and Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, an interview series expanding upon her memoir that came out in 2023. Former president Barack Obama had his own turn as well with Renegades, his bro-down libcast with Bruce Springsteen, which, true to form, can say only so much. It’s as if these shows are living in the past, in a more stable period when political figures could get away with fiercely believing in the power of political decorum and thinking it’s enough to be a big public figure with very little to actually say.

Someone should have sent a note up the chain: Dropping IMO so soon after Democratic figureheads, the former First Lady included, spent a good chunk of 2024 warning about the collapse of American democracy should Trump win a second term, and with the Democratic Party so incohesive and unappealing even to its base in the aftermath of that defeat, is a complete failure to read the room — which is currently on fire. Even if the explicit intent was to model a case for the older, gentler cultural status quo, this is a distinctly weird time to do it.

The issue here isn’t simply the notion of a puff political podcast. Obama and Newsom reflect different expressions of a similar misunderstanding about today’s media ecosystem. The modern content game is for grinders, and if you’re going to pod, commit to the bit: Go long, say your piece, run your mouth, think out loud, embrace spectacle, and publish, publish, publish. If you’re going to give life advice, then talk about your life. If you’re going to give us a shift in political stance, then let’s really hear it. More important, step outside your podcast and go everywhere else. You don’t win by keeping yourself at arm’s length from the others in the scrum. If you seek to advance the case for decency and political decorum, go on Call Her Daddy and Flagrant Ones and whatever lifestyle grift Candace Owens is currently pulling and fight for it.

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