On Thursday, April 11, at 7:30 PM, Hamilton College will host the fourth iteration of its Common Ground series, featuring Reince Priebus and Jim Messina.
Priebus is the former head of the Republican National Committee (RNC). After Priebus’ five-year tenure as the head of the RNC, he became then-president-elect Donald J. Trump’s Chief of Staff in Nov. 2016. He would go on to have the shortest tenure of any White House Chief of Staff, resigning on July 31, 2017.
Messina was President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff from Dec. 2009 to Jan. 2011. Messina then became Obama’s campaign manager for his successful 2012 reelection campaign. The campaign has been praised as “the best run campaign ever” by Google chairman Eric Schmidt because of Messina’s innovative tactics with social media and mass texting. Since then, Messina has worked on parliamentary campaigns in England, Italy, and Spain. Notably, he worked on conservative campaigns in the United Kingdom, first with then-Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015 and then with current Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017.
April’s event offers compelling storylines surrounding two career political operatives who often directly opposed each other in the political theater. Priebus has long criticized the Affordable Care Act and worked directly against its passage. In contrast, Messina was an integral part of the bill’s creation and passage. Priebus is famous for being close friends with former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate against Obama in 2012.
An issue where the two may come close to agreeing is immigration. After Romney’s failed campaign in 2012, Priebus famously called for Republicans to embrace immigration reform to allow more pathways to citizenship for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He also called for them to change their messaging toward women, Hispanics, and young people in an effort to win the next election. This immigration policy is similar to the one that Obama pushed as president and Jim Messina advocated for as chair of Organizing for Action, an organization devoted to advocating for Obama’s second term policies. Later, Priebus criticized Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and other issues. Priebus was often a counter to other Trump staffers in the White House who had a more extreme immigration policy.
The first Common Ground program took place in October 2017 with Karl Rove and David Axelrod. Since then, this series has brought other notable names to the Hamilton campus to engage in dialogues in an attempt to find “common ground.” The hope for these events is for “the speakers to model the kind of respectful dialogue across political boundaries that should occur not just on college campuses, but in the broader society as well,” according to College President David Wippman.
Wippman adds that “hearing speakers we don’t agree with allows us to find things we agree with them on but it also makes our arguments against them stronger and makes us better able to deal with them in the real world.” He hopes students learn from this iteration of Common Ground and encourages all to attend.
Benjamin Rhind ’19, who currently serves as Co-President of the Hamilton College Democrats, offered a harsh critique of the event and of both the speakers attending. Of Priebus, he said that “just because we’re at a college that wants to create students who can engage with people on the other side of the aisle doesn’t mean that any single person who has an opinion should be upheld as someone who should be taken seriously in a debate. Someone who has a track record of saying nothing but lies […] you have to simply say to them you’re not worth engaging with […] We deserve speakers that have value and actual substantive ideas. Priebus has none of that.”
Rhind views Messina as a centrist due to his work on conservative campaigns in England, and as someone not representative of today’s liberal left. “If you’re willing to offer this prime speaking position to speakers on the far right then the liberal representation can’t be a centrist,” he said. “Presenting this event like it’s representing the entire political spectrum is a narrowing of the spectrum and it’s a misrepresentation to say that it’s finding ‘common ground’ between two opposite perspectives.”
