The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Yes or No

  Chapter 2 - Taking Off While Affixing the Wings

  Chapter 3 - Building Blocks

  Chapter 4 - The Empire Strikes Back

  Chapter 5 - Win or Go Home

  Chapter 6 - Roller-Coaster Time

  Chapter 7 - Super Tuesday

  Chapter 8 - Ecstasy. Agony.

  Chapter 9 - Agony. Ecstasy.

  Chapter 10 - Closing the Door

  Chapter 11 - Reloading for the General

  Chapter 12 - Innocents Abroad

  Chapter 13 - Filling Out the Ticket

  Chapter 14 - Hurricane Sarah

  Chapter 15 - It’s the Economy, Stupid

  Chapter 16 - Plumbers and Radicals

  Chapter 17 - Endgame

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © David Plouffe, 2009

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Plouffe, David.

  The audacity to win : the inside story and lessons of Barack Obama’s historic victory / David Plouffe.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15137-2

  1. Presidents—United States—Election—2008. 2. Political campaigns—United States. 3. Obama, Barack. 4.

  Plouffe, David. I. Title.

  JK5262008.P55 2009

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  For Olivia, Everett, and Vivian

  Prologue

  David Axelrod and I left the Obama campaign headquarters election bunker in Chicago at 10:30 p.m. central time to humbling cheers from the knot of staffers who had been prepared for a long night of data crunching and narrow margins. Instead, they were downing beers and celebrating, having just watched all the networks announce the election of their boss as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America.

  It was the end of long road. Axelrod and I had begun the journey walking together through an airport in November 2006, en route to our first meeting about the far-fetched prospect of Barack Obama’s running for president. At the time we figured it was probably the only meeting that such an unlikely endeavor would yield.

  Yet here we were, walking down the hallway of the high-rise that had housed our campaign for almost two years, on our way to greet the president-elect. As we departed the elevator and stepped into the lobby, the security guards broke into raucous cheers and tearful thank-yous. Their joy hit me with a jolt of reality that blaring televisions and hours of encouraging results from battleground states had somehow failed to convey.

  “I’m having a hard time actually believing this,” I said to Axelrod as we made our way into the street.

  “I know,” nodded Ax. “It’s too big to comprehend right now.”

  We had just elected the president of the United States—anAfrican American man, born to a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, just four years out of the Illinois state senate. He had defeated the gold standard in both parties, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, to win in one of the biggest upsets in American political history.

  The elation of these security guards, all African Americans, struck me powerfully. Later I learned that this same celebratory scene was playing out all across the country, in groups large and small; black, white, and brown; suburban, urban, and rural. Americans were expressing not merely satisfaction at the victory of a political party or candidate, or relief that the lesser of two evils had prevailed, but something deeper and more profound. Their reactions were closer to a kind of primal joy at seeing wrongs righted, at having risen up to achieve something cynics said couldn’t be done. For most of us under a certain age, any prior familiarity with this feeling came secondhand, from history books. Now we owned it.

  Ax and I crossed the street to the Hyatt Regency where the next president, his family, and Joe and Jill Biden were watching election results. The advance team directed us up some back stairs, to a blocked-off elevator and eventually down a hall to the Obama suite. Members of the road show—the staff that had spent two years with Obama on the road, living every minute of this amazing and improbable journey—lined the hall. Reggie Love and Marvin Nicholson, both giants, swallowed me in their emotional embrace.

  As Ax and I slipped into the suite, Obama was on the phone with President Bush, receiving his congratulations. I shivered, as another jolt of reality shot up my spine. Right before we walked in, Obama had received the historic concession call from Senator John McCain, our vanquished opponent. The next minutes were a blur of hugs and happiness: embracing the Bidens; Michelle’s brother, Craig Robinson; and then a wonderful high-five with Michelle. Michelle’s mother was radiant, holding hands with her son-in-law, the next president of the United of the States. Then Obama was done talking to Bush and crossed the room toward me. He and I embraced for a long time. He pulled Ax and Robert Gibbs in for a beaming photograph, a treasured memento.

  I suddenly noticed how quiet the room seemed. There were no shrieks or champagne corks popping or screams of delight. Perhaps because of exhaustion, relief, or a sense of elation that was more quiet and private than boisterous, we were a remarkably subdued bunch for a party of victors. An outside observer might not have immediately known if we had won or lost the election.

  I could not relax. Though victory was sealed, there were still states to be called, and these states were
like my babies—I couldn’t rest until they were all put to bed, hopefully tucked under a blanket of Obama blue. I stared intently at the suite’s TVs and checked results religiously on my BlackBerry.

  The press coverage and reports from our advance staff told us the crowd at nearby Grant Park was enormous and crackling with energy. We piled into a waiting motorcade and screamed down Lakeshore Drive; before it seemed possible, we began to see the crowd. The throngs on the outer edge of the park saw the motorcade approaching, and a roar of cheering supporters followed us all the way down the drive until we reached the security entrance. Axelrod, Gibbs, and I did not want to watch Obama speak from backstage, so we asked the advance staff to get us out with the crowd. We wanted to be swept up in the human wave of energy.

  As I watched Barack Obama emerge onto the stage with his beautiful family, I found it difficult to contain my emotions. Was this really possible? Was this our next first family? Obama delivered a phenomenal speech; at one point he thanked me and Ax personally, which was as surreal as it was embarrassing.

  Then it was over. The Obamas and the Bidens embraced and joined hands, waved to the crowd, and strode off the stage.

  Two years earlier, this historic moment would have seemed little more than a fantasy. It strained credibility—required a certain audaciousness, you might say—to believe that Barack Obama could wrest the Democratic nomination from the Clinton franchise, much less go on to win the presidency with 365 electoral votes, 7 million more popular votes than anyone who had ever run for president, and a higher vote percentage than any Democratic candidate besides FDR in 1936 and LBJ in 1964.

  The remarkable Obama for President campaign, led by a once-in-a-generation candidate, had the audacity to win—and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom time and again. We talked to voters like adults and organized a grassroots movement of average citizens the likes of which American politics had never seen.

  It was not easy. At the beginning it was a stretch just to find office space and fill it with computers and phone lines. Taking the first halting steps of the Obama for President journey, most of us, me included, were more resolute than starry-eyed. We could hardly have realized, in signing up to work for this political long shot from Chicago, that we had gained a unique perch from which to watch American history unfold.

  1

  Yes or No

  The week before the 2006 congressional elections, my business partner, David Axelrod, and I were sitting in an editing suite in Chicago, putting the final touches on a series of television ads for various Democratic clients. We were seven or eight hours into a sixteen-hour session at the studio.

  “I can’t wait for this goddamned election to be over,” I grumbled. “I want it to be over more than I want to win.”

  It was a biannual complaint. By October of each election year, everyone in the business has pulled too many all-nighters, been on too many conference calls, and read too many polls. If the whole profession could put the campaign in suspended animation and sleep for a week, it would.

  Ax fiddled with some music selections for the spot we were working on. “Well, then you won’t like this,” he said. “Barack wants to meet in Chicago the day after the election to talk about the presidential race. And he wants you there. So don’t get too excited for Election Day.”

  “Really?” I said. “Shit.”

  Obama’s book tour that fall for The Audacity of Hope had unexpectedly turned into a presidential draft. Independent groups calling for him to run had sprung up across the country, generating tens of thousands of rabid potential supporters. There was clearly enthusiasm on the margins. It seemed to me to stem from a hunger for something new and a desire to turn the page not just on the Bush era, but on our own party’s recent history.

  The crowds and chatter around the book tour in turn bred a great deal of speculation in the political community and the media about a possible Obama candidacy. Obama would be appearing on Meet the Press one Sunday in October, and it was expected that host Tim Russert would press him on whether he was going to run. The question was complicated by the fact that Obama had been on the show in January 2006 and made a Shermanesque statement about not running in 2008.

  The Saturday before his October Meet the Press appearance, Axelrod and I got on the phone with Obama and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs. Obama and Gibbs were driving down the New Jersey Turnpike toward Pennsylvania, in between rallies he was attending for Democratic U.S. Senate candidates. In 2006 Obama was the most in-demand speaker for Democratic candidates in every part of the country, thanks to the fame resulting from his stirring 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in Boston and the success of his two books.

  Ax, Gibbs, and I were trying to find the right turn of phrase to reconcile what Obama had said in January with where he stood in October: while a presidential candidacy was, as he said to us privately, “unlikely,” the response to the book tour, the state of the country, and his profound sense that we needed a big change in leadership had caused him to give the race some consideration.

  We started by throwing out some of the standard nonanswers: “Tim, my focus now is helping Democrats win back the Congress in 2006,” or “We haven’t even had the 2006 election, so let’s settle down a bit; there will be plenty of time to discuss 2008 down the line.”

  Obama listened and then offered a novel approach. “Why don’t I just tell the truth?” he suggested. “Say I had no intention of even thinking about running when I was on the show in January but things have changed, and I will give it some thought after the 2006 elections.”

  That kind of straightforward answer may sound unremarkable, but politicians always twist themselves into knots denying the obvious on these shows. His instinct to drop the charade and just say what he was thinking was enormously refreshing.

  When the strategy session ended I called Ax and said, “That was impressive. It sounds silly but I think if he answers the question that way people will be even more intrigued. Because it will sound so nonpolitical.”

  “That’s what makes him unique,” Ax replied. “He doesn’t have that political gene so many of them do. He’s still a human being.”

  Ax had known Obama since 1992, when Barack was running a voter registration drive in Chicago and Ax was emerging as the city’s preeminent Democratic political consultant. They stayed in touch over the years, and even though Ax never worked for him in a political capacity, they built a strong friendship. He often said Obama was one of the smartest people he had ever known—maybe the smartest.

  Ax and I were partners in a political consulting firm. We met in 1994 when I was managing a U.S. Senate race in Delaware and he was hired to serve as our media consultant. His firm produced our television and radio ads and served as campaign advisers on strategy and message.

  I thought David was unique among political consultants. He was not slick—in fact, whatever the opposite of slick is, Ax was its poster child. He and his partners did not take on too many races, choosing instead to pour themselves into a handful of worthy efforts. Ax took great pride in his work, opting for quality over quantity, and he had a healthy disregard for Washington, which I found appealing. He also had a great sense of humor, was a legendarily poor dresser, and was profoundly disorganized. And he was one of the smartest people I had ever met.

  We lost the Delaware race—as did just about every Democrat facing the Republican tsunami of 1994—but I thought Ax did an excellent job for us, and we stayed in touch. In 2001 he asked me if I’d be interested in joining his firm as a partner. The idea appealed to me; I was interested in learning a new discipline—advertisement production—and respected the firm’s focused approach. I agreed to join but would work out of Washington instead of the Chicago headquarters.

  The firm—which became AKP Media in 2007—had a meeting in late 2002 to discuss business options for 2003 and 2004. The main topic of conversation was the 2004 Illinois senate race, which would be an open seat.

&nbs
p; The two main Democratic contenders were Blair Hull, a very wealthy businessman who had vowed to spend millions on his campaign, and Dan Hynes, the state controller, who would have the endorsement of the state party and many labor unions and was considered a strong favorite. Both candidates had approached us about working for them, and David had sat down with each man to size him up.

  But at our meeting he announced that he did not want to work for either. Instead, he thought we should work for a little-known state senator named Barack Hussein Obama, who was given zero chance to win by the political establishment. Just fourteen months after September 11, most believed his name alone would sink his candidacy.

  “One of the others will probably win,” Ax told us. “But Barack Obama is the kind of guy who should be in the U.S. Senate. He’s bright, principled, skilled legislatively, and committed to a politics that lifts people up. I think that’s who we should work for.”

  “Let me get this straight,” summed up one of our colleagues. “We should work for the candidate with no chance, no money, and the funny name?”

  “As I keep telling you guys,” Ax wryly replied, “I am a terrible businessman.”

  So that was that. Ax had been the lead political reporter for the Chicago Tribune before transitioning into politics and had since elected mayors, senators, and congressmen throughout the state. He was considered the godfather of Illinois Democratic politics, from the operative side of the fence, and had great latitude on any decision the firm made involving Illinois.

  I was not heavily involved in the day-to-day of Obama’s 2004 Senate race, having other projects that I was primarily responsible for, but I attended some meetings and wrote his initial campaign plans for the primary election and then, when he won the primary in a stunning landslide, for the general.