When approached by Politico to provide quiz questions for the media company’s daily West Wing Playbook newsletter, Tom van der Voort, the media strategist for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, wanted to take it a step further.
This was an opportunity to showcase the Miller Center’s proud brand on a large platform. Why not maximize the exposure?
“From presidential oral histories and secret recordings to detailed biographical information and an archive of key speeches, we have so many stories to offer,” van der Voort said. “So instead of saying, ‘OK, we’ll come up with questions about the presidency,’ we said, ‘What can the Miller Center bring that’s not generic trivia?’
“We wanted to dive a little deeper, and Politico was totally receptive to that.”
Miller Center Presidents Day Quiz
Question 1: Which president said, “I spent hour after hour after hour studying the structure of the federal government in preparation of the budgets and really did a lot of detailed work on the budgets because I felt that this was one of the managerial weapons or tools that I had to exert my influence in a definitive way”?
Answer:
The result was the “POTUS Puzzler.” If you’re looking to enhance your knowledge this Presidents Day, perhaps scroll through recent editions of the , where the challenge can be found. Look for “From the University of Virginia’s Miller Center,” and you’ll find the question.
From Feb. 16: “Which president used his State of the Union message to praise his fellow Americans for ‘having performed the high and important function of electing their Chief Magistrate for the term of four years without the commission of any acts of violence or the manifestation of a spirit of insubordination to the laws’?
If it’s trivia night at a bar, maybe someone correctly guesses “John Tyler,” and the game carries on. But the Miller Center’s purpose here is to educate, not award points. While it was John Tyler who included this in his State of the Union, did you also know it came in December 1844 following Tyler’s failed bid for a second term?
That bit of information – plus a link to the Miller Center’s – is provided at the bottom of the newsletter. It’s a tiny glimpse into the work van der Voort and two UVA student interns, second-year undergraduate Powers Trigg and fourth-year Olivia Morrison, have been doing since November.
Each week, they supply four questions (and answers) for the Playbook and its 100,000 subscribers. They’ve submitted more than 60 questions up to this point, all a collaboration between van der Voort, the students and Miller Center scholars.
“The best kind of advertisement for any brand is to demonstrate your value,” van der Voort said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re demonstrating the layers and layers of knowledge that are here.”
Miller Center Presidents Day Quiz
Question 2: Which president's one trip outside of the country during his lifetime was marred by the death of his brother?
Answer:
Trigg, a government major from Kansas City, got a kick out of researching fellow Missourian Harry Truman.
“He journaled pretty regularly, and the Miller Center has a lot of his stuff,” Trigg said of the 33rd president. “He was known for taking a shot of bourbon every single day with his breakfast. That’s got to be my favorite fact. I was able to turn that in for a quiz question. It was one of the first five questions I did for my internship, and I haven’t been able to top that yet.”
Trigg, though, has learned there’s no real cap on the difficulty of any question. The newsletters’ readers are presumed to have a strong base level of presidential knowledge, he said. This, naturally, gives way to expanded research.
“You’re trying to find the best question you can,” Trigg said. “Even though the question is usually pretty short, there’s a good deal of thought that goes into it.”
