unicode error with python 2 and csv output file

[edsu]

edsu@cloudshell:~$ twarc search obama --format csv --output out
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/edsu/.local/bin/twarc", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/edsu/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twarc/command.py", line 250,
 in main
    csv_writer.writerow(get_row(thing))
  File "/home/edsu/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/unicodecsv/py2.py", line 86,
 in writerow
    _stringify_list(row, self.encoding, self.encoding_errors))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 706, in write
    return self.writer.write(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 369, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 236: ordinal 
not in range(128)