Actor turned bureaucrat Kalpen Modi, or Kal Penn as he’s known in pop culture, has a good thing going on. He helped get President Obama elected and later joined the administration in 2009. He left for several months to film the third installment of the “Harold and Kumar” movie franchise and now he’s back in his gig as an associate director in the Office of Public Engagement at the White House.
That being said, he doesn’t consider his job easy. When asked to describe a particularly tough day at the White House he responded with this question. “So an average day at the White House?” Modi asked during an appearance at the Campus Progress conference Wednesday, being held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in northwest D.C. “It’s a rough job,” he added.
The biggest issue, Modi revealed, was that he felt he somehow crumbled his clout with his progressive peers when he joined the Obama administration. “We sort of lose a certain amount of credibility when we become staffers, I don’t know why that is,” Modi explained. “I know that when folks come in, we have the same conversation that we may have had three years ago…and now it comes to the assumption that we’re not being candid.”
Modi also dished out advice to the liberal audience on how to work across the aisle. “Try not to call each other crazy,” he advised. “Try not to stigmatize [and] try not to watch too much MSNBC or Fox or CNN.”
