Working at the White House: Public Engagement Director, Paulette Aniskoff

This season on Working, we’re going to the White House. For our second episode, we spoke to Paulette Aniskoff, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Aniskoff has been working with the president since 2007, and she brings many of the strategies developed on the campaign trail to the administration’s outreach to the American citizenry. She explored question large and small, including a bit about how the White House coordinates its approach to issues via sequences of morning meetings. Even in our digital age, much of the administration’s internal communication still happens through face-to- face conversations, Aniskoff suggests. That extends to the way she and her office work with constituents: She told us about the effort they put into bringing real people into the White House to talk with the president, going into the ways that they diagram seating charts for meetings in the Roosevelt Room.

In a Slate Plus extra, Aniskoff goes into detail about how her job has changed since the early days of the campaign and tells us how she maintains balance in her current life as a new mother. If you’re a member, enjoy bonus segments and interview transcripts from Working, plus other great podcast exclusives. Start your two-week free trial at slate.com/workingplus.