Glennon Doyle and Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon on Politics, Motherhood, and Doing Hard Things

Within an hour of the networks’ at last declaring Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon took to Twitter to celebrate. In contrast with what we’ve come to expect from those who serve in the current administration, she wasn’t gloating or triumphalist. She was honest, elated, and grateful. “We can do hard things,” she wrote, “and you just did!”

The phrase “We can do hard things” will sound familiar to the 1 million women who have kept the book Untamed on the New York Times best-seller list for the past 39 weeks. Glennon Doyle—the activist and public speaker who made a name for herself on her parenting blog and has since founded Together Rising, a nonprofit that’s raised over $25 million for people in need—wrote it to chronicle her divorce from her husband and her eventual marriage to the soccer star Abby Wambach.

The book is about those seismic life events, but it’s also about an ethos: The world is rife with heartache and obstacles. There is no hiding from that. We have to do hard things. We can do hard things. 

No wonder the mantra resonated with O’Malley Dillon—whose college softball coach introduced her to it. She is the first woman to manage a successful Democratic presidential campaign, the first woman to run a campaign that ousted an incumbent president, and of course the first person to spearhead a winning ticket in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic.

Her task since she joined the Biden team on March 12, 2020—less than 24 hours after Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive for Covid-19, the NBA suspended its season, and the World Health Organization designated the brand-new disease a global pandemic—has been to do the hardest possible things: Win a virtual election. Fight a cascade of misinformation. Keep hundreds of staffers and the candidate himself safe. Do not flinch.

After Biden is sworn in, O’Malley Dillon will serve as his deputy chief of staff—her first White House role ever after two decades in presidential politics. But in the meantime, with the tiniest bit of breathing room now that Donald Trump and the GOP have lost almost 60 court cases in their futile, craven efforts to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 race, O’Malley Dillon made some time to meet Doyle over Zoom and talk about—what else?—the hard things. —Mattie Kahn 

Glennon Doyle: So to start: Thank you for being here and for saving the world.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well, it was a team effort, but we’re getting there.

The first thing I wanted to ask about was deciding to take this job. So many women rationalize themselves out of big opportunities, listing all the ways we are not ready enough, not perfect enough, not prepared enough. In the moment you got the call from President-elect Biden, asking you to manage his world-defining 2020 presidential campaign, what was happening inside of you and how did you get to “yes”?

Look, I think there’s never an easy path to that, right? I’ve been doing presidential campaigns for the last 20 years. Before I worked for the president-elect and before he was in the race, I ended up going on the campaign trail for Beto O’Rourke. I had a great life! I had a consulting firm, and I loved the work I did. I had three little kids. People thought I was crazy that I was even thinking about taking that job.

But I just had this sense—for both my husband and me, because you obviously can’t do any of this shit if you don’t have a partner that believes in it as much as you do and is willing to help. I just felt like, How do you answer to your kids when you look back on your life? How do you go on with your life without doing something to help? So I left all that stability. We moved to Texas. I moved three kids to El Paso, and my husband agreed to do it, and we made our lives work.

When it came to Vice President Biden, we had just around that time found out that my dad had cancer. We didn’t know how serious it was. And I asked myself, “Am I even up for this?” This is scary shit, and everything is at stake. In the end, I just really felt called. I had to do something. And I believed in the vice president. It was kind of as simple as that.

It’s so awesome—the thinking of it in terms of “I did it, not in spite of being a mother, but because I’m a mother,” right? It was part of parenting, deciding to help make our world better for the children that you’re bringing into it.

I think for our generation—the women before us were such trailblazers and were held to such a different standard. But when I was growing up, my dad said that I could be anything, and I really believed him. I didn’t even get what women had done and sacrificed and still didn’t have until I got much older.

I feel like it’s so important to talk about the fact that I’m a mom. I think a lot of people just feel like that’s still so incongruent with being a professional woman. I had my girls—twin daughters—a week after the election in 2012. When I was deciding to do that campaign, I had women who I admired telling me, “You can’t do it. If you want to be on a campaign, you cannot have a kid.” Or, “If you’re thinking about having a kid, don’t tell anyone.”

That was the norm. And now we’re seeing more and more women who are able to have kids in a campaign environment that’s more supportive, so I just feel like talking about it is so important; talking about it is how other people believe it’s possible to do it.

That’s interesting. I imagine that you get that question—How do you balance the family and your job?—probably more often than your husband gets that question. You’ve said you actually don’t mind when it’s brought up.

You know what? No, I don’t. I am not sitting here telling you I’m an awesome parent right now. It just feels like it is important for me to say to a young woman, “You can figure this out if you want to. You don’t have to want to, but don’t believe you can’t. And also, don’t be afraid to talk about it.”

I feel like I’m at my TED Talk here, but that’s the other thing that’s totally a pet peeve for me. When you have a meeting somebody wants to schedule, so many women are like, “Well, I don’t want to tell them I can’t make it because I have a school thing or my kid is sick, because that’s not professional.”

Fuck that. Why shouldn’t I say, “Actually, you can’t talk to me from 6:30 until 8:00 unless it’s an emergency, even on a presidential campaign during a pandemic, because that is the only time I have with my kids. And that is more important.” Of course there are going to be times when you make exceptions. But I feel like if we don’t talk about that stuff, it means it’s not okay for that to be the reason. And as a professional woman, that has to be okay.

And you’re redefining what “professional” is.

Exactly. Exactly.

Because what people are saying is, “I’m just still subscribing to this old patriarchal idea of what ‘professional’ is.” And you’re rejecting that by bringing those issues up and claiming them. What do you think would be or has been missing when only men are in charge of communities and campaigns? What do women bring to the table that is new and fresh and important?

I mean, the answer is so long and obvious, but also it’s still such a problem that we have to talk about it. First I want to caveat that I’ve been super fortunate. The first time I met with the president-elect, he talked about family coming first. That is the Biden way. As I was trying to navigate this job, I wasn’t sure how long my dad might have to live. We didn’t really know. I had the kids. How could I do this to them again? I had just moved them to Texas. And he allowed me to work through that. He gave me the space to do that, and also was like, “Look, if something happens and your dad gets sick, that will always be okay and family will come first.” That is not how it usually goes. I think it’s important to mention that.

But when it comes to this campaign or campaigns in general or other jobs, I would say a couple of things. First, I think that there is an opportunity with women for working together more effectively. Women are not afraid to share information. We’re communicators—sometimes overcommunicators. You hear the stories, too, about women trying to reinforce another woman’s voice. I still do that.

Of course not everyone is perfect here. We’re all human. But I do think seeing other women in roles of leadership, seeing them in partnership, there’s a sense that they’re thinking about the integration of how one role fits with another. There’s a feeling of shared responsibilities.

And then the other thing I is, at least how I have experienced it—the shit, the drama, and the turf wars, who gets credit—first off, it’s not important to me, but also it doesn’t get me bothered as much as I think as it might bother others, because I have kids. Every moment that I’m not spending with them, I’m not spending with them. You have to be efficient about how you use your time, because you know what you’re giving up. I think that that really in turn reinforces the efficiency of the entire workplace and helps clarify what’s really important.

I feel like intuition is another one of the things that women do tend to bring to the table. The hard part is sticking to knowing and trusting yourself, even in the midst of all of these different opinions and conflicting voices. I was so amazed at how you developed your strategy with the campaign and then you held the line. You got so much national pressure and there was even public tension within your party, for example, about whether it would backfire to keep Biden off the road during the pandemic. But you held the line and kept him in unwaveringly. How did you have the strength to do that with all of the noise swirling?

Well, we could spend a whole lot of time talking about who were the people within the party on the outside of the campaign who were sharing all their thoughts publicly, but that would probably be a different conversation. I will say honestly, it would have been impossible to do it if the vice president didn’t set the tone. He said that we had to make sure people were safe, and we could not deviate from that. And also, he knew he had to be a role model. It wasn’t good enough to just talk about the science. You had to live it, and I think that is the model for his life too.

It was hard, though. We had a lot of people who were well-meaning, who were just scared that this was the wrong call: It was going to hurt us; we were never going to be able to build the campaign we needed. But this was not my first rodeo. I’ve spent 20 years on presidential campaigns. So I just was confident that I had the support of the candidate and that this was the right thing to do.

Now, even though I thought it was the right thing, I thought there was a political price to be paid. It is possible that that was the case. But it felt to me like, this was authentic to who Joe Biden is. And if we lost that, or we lost sight of him being a good man and a great leader and someone who is resilient and has gone through these hard things, then how could we be true to the campaign? That was grounding as well.

But again, it was not easy. I had so many people calling me. My mom was like, “Jen, I saw on CNN that these luminaries in the party are saying you’re doing the wrong thing. Are you going to get fired?” I had to be like, “Stop watching CNN, Mom.”

Oh, that’s so heartening, though. Even if you’re Jen O'Malley Dillon, your mom still calls you to tell you you might not be doing the right thing.

Yeah, exactly. And then her other question is, “What actually do you do?” We’ve been doing that for 20 years.

That’s great. I love it. So this I’m curious about: So many women—especially now, but always—feel like the weight of the world is on our shoulders. But it strikes me that for you, that was actually true. The world was actually depending on you. Did you have strategies or rituals to deal with the stress of knowing that, or are you just a generally calm person?

My whole professional life has been in a stressful environment. So I don’t mind that. And campaigns—it’s like sports, I think. You’re building for the moment, the end game. I have developed an ability to push myself because I know it’s going to be over. I think that’s owed to a few things.

One, again, I have my kids to anchor me. They could give a shit about all this. Around the time of the decision around the running mate, we were having a serious meeting. It was Dr. Biden, and it was the vice president. And my daughters came in, and Katie was like, “Oh, hey, Joe Biden, what are you doing?” Like, no concern. He was happy to talk to them, but it just kind of puts things in perspective.

And the second thing is, you as one person actually can’t take in the totality of what you’re responsible for. I had this amazing team. There were so many other people. Ultimately, it was the president-elect who really carried the burden. But for me, I couldn't focus on the bigness of it. I just had to know that we were headed in the right direction. And I had to ask myself, What did I have in front of me that I had to accomplish? You can’t let yourself get distracted in the abstract.

I’m going to put a Post-it on my computer that says, “Do not get distracted in the abstract.” That is so good. I read a piece in which your husband said of you, “I’d vote for her. I’d go to the mat for her.” That is so beautiful to me because it struck me that there’s so much connection between love and politics—it’s about who you show up for, how much you believe in them, the risks you’ll take for them, and the world you want to create for them. So love and politics, can you talk a little bit about that connection?

I’ve never thought of it quite like that, but it’s passion and belief in values. Those are the things that drive the work. My dad and my mom are teachers, and they taught us that it was important to be part of your community and to find ways to give back—whether it was through a job or just in your own life. I think that’s what I found when I started doing organizing work, which meant figuring out what other people cared about and what mattered to them. It wasn’t just a one-sided thing. That showed me that you couldn’t be successful in politics if you didn’t understand what another person needed, if you didn’t understand what a community needed. And you had to be open to listening.

Like Joe Biden says all the time, “Great leadership starts with listening.” It’s challenging for us to do that right now, because of how polarized we are. But politics breaks down to one-on-one conversations and not being afraid to talk. I get that you’re not supposed to talk politics at the holiday dinner. Well, fuck that. It’s because we don’t do that that we are in this situation now.

I also think, as in love, compromise is a good thing. The atmosphere in the world now is like, “Oh, if you compromise, you don’t believe in something.” No, it’s: I believe in it so much that I’m going to work to find a path we can both go down together. That feels to me like the heart of relationships and love and success across the board.

That might be what we’re missing—is that redefining of compromise. That it is or it can be the ultimate victory.

Yes, exactly. And frankly, that’s what we need. The president-elect was able to connect with people over this sense of unity. In the primary, people would mock him, like, “You think you can work with Republicans?” I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that. From start to finish, he set out with this idea that unity was possible, that together we are stronger, that we, as a country, need healing, and our politics needs that too.

Which is not to say it is easy. It is like a relationship. You can’t do politics alone. If the other person is not willing to do the work, then that becomes really hard. But I think, more than not, people want to see impact. They want to see us moving in a path forward. They want to do their work, get paid a fair share, have time for themselves and their family, and see each other as neighbors. And this overhang of this negative, polarized electorate that politics has created is the thing that I think we can break down.

I love that. My wife is a sports person, obviously. And I have noticed that so many women I admire, so many strong leaders have this one thing in common—they were all serious athletes. And you were too, right?

I played softball in college, yes. Not anywhere near your wife’s level as an athlete. But my sister and her wife are coaches. They’re basketball players, and they’re phenomenal.

I’ve been committed now to my girls staying in sports, because I have now learned that sports are not just about sports. They’re about learning how to lead and work together. What do you think that you learned from sports that’s helping you now?

Everything. I am not here, doing this work, without sports. As a kid, I didn’t feel like I fit with everyone else. I didn’t always feel like I connected. Sports was a place that I felt like I belonged. It was a place where I felt like I could work hard and see improvement, which I think applies so much to campaigns and politics.

Sports also taught me about leadership, and when I was a girl and then in college, it helped me find a voice. I was good at softball. I was not great. But being part of it allowed me to see that I had things to contribute. I saw what was required of a leader, and I saw what might be required of me to lead too.

I think that’s so important.

That college coach is the person who introduced me to the idea of “We can do hard things.” I didn’t even know you had said it before. I was just starting on the campaign. And people were finding out about it, and my college softball coach reached out. We were chatting and she said that one of the moms of her players was talking about how hard everything was with the pandemic, and she was trying to figure out, like, what’s a simple thing the team can rally around to get through the day and to just hang in together? And my coach said the mom had said, “We can do hard things.”

Oh, my God.

And I was like, “Oh, that’s the exact thing that I’m looking for.” I had just started this job. Everyone was remote. I had 200 people that I was working with who had never even met me. We started these weekly virtual meetings, and in the first one I said, “This is hard, but we can do hard things. We’re going to get through it.” It became the rallying cry we used every week. And it was hard. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

That’s amazing.

That little saying really helped us get through it, honestly. Because sometimes, like in sports, you don’t have it in yourself, but someone in the group has it, and someone can be there to say, “We’re going to get through it. We’re going to be okay,” and that’s what you need.

That’s why the “we” is so important. Every time somebody switches it and says, “I can do hard things,” I’m like, “Look, I’m not vouching for that.”

Right. Exactly. It has to be a we.

Because we can only do it together.

Exactly.

That was the mantra that got me through sobriety and has gotten me through so much in my life. And it comes, for me, from this thing that my mom sent to me. I wrote it when I was 10. It says, “My mom and dad, they trust me to do hard things.”

That is amazing.

And then I saw it again. I used to be a teacher, and I saw it again on a sign in my co-teacher’s classroom. It was just the reminder I needed that life is just hard, not because we’re doing it wrong, but because it was designed that way. And the “we” reminds me that while so much of life is terrifyingly lonely, we’re all alone together. We’re doing our hard things alongside a million other people doing their hard things.

And we’ve already done hard things. That is the other part of it for me. It’s grounded in the fact that we’ve already done hard things. And that is what holds me together.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on Glamour