Fmr. Obama White House member: Minorities 'will show up as long as campaigns invest the tools into these communities'

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Kal Penn, Former Associate Director of White House Office of Public Liaison joins Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers and Adam Shapiro to break down the highlights from President Joe Biden's inauguration.

Video Transcript

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- I want to bring in Kal Penn now. He's the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. Kal, thanks for joining us. The job of the Office of Public Liaison is essentially to help the White House engage with the public. I'm wondering how you imagine engagement going forward, especially after four years of a president that you did work with briefly, who was known essentially as the Twitter President.

KAL PENN: Yeah well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's an amazing, uplifting, historic day. Look, in terms of public engagement, you've had a total lapse in the last four years. I'm not familiar with how President Trump ran that office. It doesn't seem like it was as staffed as the Obama, Biden Public Engagement Office was.

It seems that President Biden and Vice President Harris are sort of approaching that office in a similar manner that President Obama did, which is that, proverbially, every American should have a seat at the table, meaning that there's a point person in the executive branch for any issue or demographic group that might exist. So in my case, I was President Obama's point person for young Americans, also for Asian-Americans in Pacific Islander communities, and for the arts community. So those were sort of my three jobs.

And there was somebody who would cover rural issues, urban issues, Italian-American issues. The list is almost endless, but those offices work really well when they work together. So when you don't just, for example, have your LGBT outreach person bring in LGBT folks for a meeting about that particular community, but they need to be at the table for a conversation about economic reform or health care or student loans.

And I would imagine that, especially if you paid attention to the president's speech today, it seems that that's the approach. It's a really unifying approach. It's not just a return to that sort of civility and decency but the understanding that, if our country's going to move forward, we're going to have to do it together.

- So you're highlighting several groups that it was your responsibility really to engage with, and I'm going to ask you a question that Adam kind of threw to me earlier, which is the importance of the election of 2020 and now this inauguration as a younger person. I'm wondering how you imagine some of those communities, the younger communities, the Asian-American communities, Pacific Islander communities, really interacting with this administration and with this presidency going forward given the historic nature of the election and of this inauguration.

KAL PENN: Yeah, it's an interesting question that I've thought a lot about. When we started, I joined the White House in June of 2009, and at that point, we weren't allowed to use any social media because, between the Hatch Act and some of the Presidential Records Act, they hadn't yet sorted out what you can and can't do.

Obviously, after the last four years, I feel like none of that even mattered. You can just sort of do what you want, and there's really no penalty. Not that I'm suggesting that the President Biden and Vice President Harris should go down that road. It's a dangerous slope and not one that you want to set a precedent for.

But it's interesting because my job was to reach out to young people, and I wasn't really allowed to use Twitter. I wasn't really allowed to use digital technology except for maybe video conferencing or the phone or, obviously, getting out on the college campuses or community organizations.

That's changed so much. We know that there's an opportunity for the White House to engage on multiple social media platforms, official and unofficial. There are conferences and gatherings that, now-- if there's ever a silver lining to the fact that we need to be socially distanced right now, it's that we're all used to working with the Zoom and used to communicating remotely.

So I feel like there's a lot of opportunity there, and then, the real underscore there that the president mentioned and that I know Vice President Harris has mentioned before is, it sounds almost cliche, but they can't do it themselves.

So we saw this with Georgia. If everybody had just sort of said, OK, the elections are over. We have President Biden and Vice President Harris, we wouldn't have won those two Senate seats in Georgia, but that didn't happen.

You had all of these young people. You had these previously disengaged groups. I call them that because usually you read about it in the media. It's like, will young people show up? Will Asian-Americans show up? Will Black folks show up? And it's kind of an archaic question now. They will show up as long as campaigns invest the tools into these communities, and you saw them come out in huge numbers. So I'm actually really hopeful, yeah.

- Kal, how should the Biden administration, if it should, reach out to those media forms-- and I don't want to say news platforms-- that are absolutely aligned at creating the animosity and the negative anger that perpetuates their ad dollars? You know who I'm talking about, and they're lining up to do that. So should the president even engage them?

KAL PENN: I mean, I think it depends who you're talking about. It's such a funny thing.

Let's be honest, cable news as a whole, I think, is designed to sell advertising space. So within the confines of that, sometimes you'll get a more salacious story as opposed to a story that's a little more middle of the road. I remember, for example, when we were working on the DREAM Act, the DREAM Act got very little traction in the news because it just wasn't sexy enough. But the DACA story, DACA stories, rightfully, were covered quite vociferously by the press because it just offered a kind of a sexier imagery.

I'm hoping that the current administration can avoid some of those traps and pitfalls, and the reality is, a lot of younger folks and a lot of newer voters or those communities, don't necessarily get their news from fringe platforms, nor do they necessarily get their news from TV even. Ask anyone under the age of 25 how they get their news, and most of it is various social platforms. So I think you have a lot of really bright, digitally savvy staffers who can help figure that out.

- Will the fact that some of the predictions of calamity that you see on platforms like Parler among QAnon adherents, the fact that those don't come true, will that help open the minds of those people to the administration?

KAL PENN: I don't know, and I don't know how fringe they are. I also don't know that the onus is on the administration to address those lies. I heard one of your guests earlier talking about, it's Biden's responsibility to turn down the temperature. And I sort of giggled to myself because it hasn't been Biden who's been yelling and screaming for the last four years. It's decidedly been the Republican Party.

This is not just an issue of President Trump. It's an issue of the entire party, and some of them, thankfully, are starting to change the way that they talk about their fellow Americans a little bit since January 6th. I hope that continues, but, I think in a lot of ways, it's going to require people on their side to sort of say, hey, we've been peddling this complete insanity. And maybe we need to dial that back a little bit in the interest of some of our shared goals as a country.

- You know, Kal, you're bringing up a lot of issues here that I would love to discuss further with our next panel. Kal Penn, former Associate Director of White House Office of Public Liaison. Thank you so much for joining us.