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

by David Plouffe

  One of the most important things Katie did was keep me from getting into a logjam; she developed a great sense of what I needed to deal with personally and what could or should be handled by others. It was critical to the successful management of a seemingly unmanageable torrent of tasks. With Katie’s help, my first cut at every call, e-mail, or request was to determine who else could handle it. Managers have to keep most things off their desks, so they can focus on execution in the moment and still have time to look around the bend and keep ahead of unfolding events.

  Delegation kept my plate relatively clean, but I also wanted the senior staff to be empowered in their interactions with the outside world. Whether it was a donor, reporter, or politico, I wanted the people who worked with us to understand who their internal contact was, and that there would be no end runs. The buck stopped with whichever department head their business fell under. If our finance director, Julianna Smoot, wanted me to talk to a donor, or Gibbs to a reporter, they made that decision and delivered me on their own terms. This policy and our discipline in enforcing it helped our organization run smoothly and gave our senior staff necessary muscle.

  It held for internal matters too. If a junior staffer came to me with an idea or complaint, I told them, “Talk to your boss,” or just forwarded the e-mail to the appropriate senior staffer. We needed a clear chain of command and awareness throughout the campaign that there was no daylight between members of the senior team—no court of appeals.

  As we prepared for the announcement, the campaign still existed mostly on paper. We had no campaign office. No internal e-mail. No staff in the early states. No polling or policy work. We didn’t yet have the ability to get campaign credit cards, so our staff out in the states and advance staff working on the announcement were forced to charge everything to their personal cards and file for reimbursement. And Obama wanted to write much of the announcement speech himself. The odds of crashing were getting higher by the moment.

  The campaign infrastructure consisted of a few of us in a temporary office in D.C., some others in D.C. working from home, and a few living in Chicago, including Ax. Every problem proved a good reminder that even with technology, there was no substitute for being able to run down the hall and discuss issues with your colleagues. We were a disorganized mess, communicating by e-mail chains and conference calls. Our goal was to find space and get settled in our Chicago headquarters by early February, but until March about sixty of us were packed in three to a desk in temporary space that would have made OSHA’s head spin. A few people were crammed in the tiny Hopefund space in D.C., which housed Obama’s hole-in-the-wall political committee and from where he now made his fund-raising calls. Basically those days were a total shitshow—the term, introduced by Alyssa, that we used to describe the times when things seemed completely off the rails.

  Our senior staff met in D.C. in mid-January to discuss the announcement and decide where the kickoff speech would be. Obama suggested Springfield, Illinois, as a location, specifically the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech. Obama had served in the state legislature in Springfield for eight years and had been unusually successful at bringing Democrats and Republicans together, which made it a good choice in terms of alluding to his record. It also bolstered the midwestern-values-versus-Washington-values contrast we would highlight in the announcement speech and throughout the campaign.

  Ax wrote the first-draft script for the short video that we would release online to announce Obama’s intention to run. I made a few small changes, but it hardly needed them. From Day One, David had in his gut and at his fingertips the core elements of our message—change versus a broken status quo; people versus the special interests; a politics that would lift people and the country up; and a president who would not forget the middle class.

  The video was shot in Chicago at a supporter’s home. Obama, as he always did when filming an ad, changed the language and improved the final product even while they were shooting.

  Ax e-mailed the clip to me a few hours later. When I did not respond immediately, he called me three times in ten minutes, leaving increasingly urgent messages. Ax got this way when putting together an important creative piece; desperate to know what others thought, he’d seek immediate feedback.

  I called him and innocently said, “What’s up?”

  “You know what the hell is up,” he replied. “Have you seen the video?”

  “Video? Oh, the announcement video. I’ll get to it soon,” I replied.

  “Look at it now!” he all but screamed into the phone.

  I laughed, dropping the ruse. “I have. It’s terrific. We have a provisional core message that should carry us through for some time. And the fact that it feels more casual, not like an Oval Office address, is dead-on. It looks less contrived.”

  We released the exploratory video on January 18 and it instantly became a YouTube phenomenon, driving hundreds of thousands of people, to our embryonic website. This was an important moment: it heightened our belief that the Internet could become both a message tool that would let us speak directly to voters as well as an organizational net—and hopefully more. In the video Obama laid out the CliffsNotes version of his candidacy. (I think it says something about the depth of his beliefs that almost three years later he still uses much of the same language and makes the same arguments.) He also stated flatly that on February 10 he would share his plans with the nation in Springfield, Illinois—there was no ambiguity. We wanted to make clear we were in, for good.

  Obama spent much of those early days calling potential contributors and fund-raisers, and we were surprised by the positive response from a mixture of fund-raising graybeards and new talent. We were on our way to having strong people in place in all the major finance cities. Many of them had been with the Clintons for years but were ready for something new. It didn’t hurt that these donors were intensely motivated, having infuriated the Clintons by jumping ship. If Obama failed to win, they faced eight years in political Siberia.

  Alyssa ran daily countdown calls on the announcement to make sure everything was coming together. How was building the crowd going? What press access needed to be granted around the announcement and when? Who would speak at these events? What political meetings or calls should Obama do at each stop? What would the staging and pictures look like?

  We had no phone numbers in any state, so we set up temporary phone numbers that flowed to a call center; if someone from Iowa called and expressed interest, we could capture their information and get back to them once we had staff on the ground. By the time we assigned people to begin working through the list, we had a backlog of more than ten thousand e-mail questions and offers of support. It took us two months to get caught up.

  One of my most important hours during this time was spent over a couple of beers at D.C.’s Union Station with Paul Tewes, the leading candidate to become our Iowa state director. Tewes was eccentric, a strong leader, and passionate about Obama. He also had excellent credentials; he was business partners with Steve Hildebrand, our deputy manager, and had run Iowa for Gore in 2000 and served as a key strategist at the committee charged with running U.S. Senate races. A Minnesota native, he was partial to the late senator Paul Wellstone’s style of grassroots politics.

  Tewes and I got into an intense discussion about what our strategy and approach should be in the Hawkeye state. We sketched out the blueprints for an organization that would go after every voter, place a huge staff on the ground (Tewes’s first budget draft could have funded the Iraq war), and put a premium on local volunteers. As we talked about this, Tewes said something that sold me on his ability to do Iowa right: “A staff is not an organization. A staff is there to support a local organization.” That would be our strategy: Iowans talking to Iowans. We’d have to build that kind of network to have any chance of winning this state—or any others after it.

  Our staff was as motivated as our donors. We attracted people who wanted to be ther
e for the right reasons. No one was joining Obama for President because they thought it was the best avenue to a White House job. In the dark recesses of our minds we all knew that Hillary Clinton would likely be the nominee. Nevertheless, a wonderfully talented and committed staff materialized, many of them uprooting their lives to do so. Some were drawn to the chance to be part of making history; some liked Obama’s call for a new politics; others were excited by the clear stirring in the country about his candidacy; yet others, myself included, while grateful for the good the Clintons did in the 1990s, felt it was time for a change of the guard. Twenty-eight years of Bushes and Clintons would be too much. Our country needed a fresh start.

  Tewes came on board and began to fill out his Iowa staff. Mitch Stewart, an up-and-coming talent with a strong organizing background, was brought on as our caucus director, overseeing the organization. He worked with Anne Filipic, our Iowa field director, who managed many of the field organizers, the young kids working with our volunteers. Emily Parcell, our Iowa political director, had helped the Iowa senate turn Democratic for the first time in over a decade, and had great credibility throughout the state. We needed a balance of novices and grizzled hands, and Emily identified our best political targets and whom Obama should spend time courting. Tewes brought in Marygrace Galston to serve as his deputy and occasional therapist. Tewes had ten ideas a day, nine of them nutty, and Marygrace sorted for the daily stroke of brilliance while generally keeping the operation on track.

  One of Tewes’s ideas was to make sure we were working every community, no matter how small. African American, Latino, high school kids, Republicans—we had staff assigned to all of the demographics, months ahead of our competition. It gave us a real leg up.

  Singling out all that our heroic and skilled campaign staff did right would fill an encyclopedia. But I will mention some structural decisions we made that in hindsight were very important to our success.

  First, we imposed a salary cap. No one in our campaign, with the exception of our finance director, made more than $12,000 a month. Now, that is a lot of money. But in many statewide campaigns, never mind presidentials, staff can make twice that. In addition to conserving money, the cap also took all the drama out of salary negotiation. We eventually had salary bands for more-junior staff, so new hires were offered what their peers made—take it or leave it. We also instituted a no-raise policy, unless someone was taking a new job with more responsibility. This was not ideal; people were working hard and we were succeeding. From a management perspective, though, deciding who would get a raise and how much they’d get could cause serious internal discord and suck up valuable time. Because we were a campaign with a set end time—and not a business with a longer horizon—we were able to put this policy into place without too loud an outcry.

  Obama heartily agreed with the salary cap, which signaled to him from the get-go that I would watch our funds carefully. I tended sometimes to go beyond careful to downright miserly. People weren’t always happy with my decisions, but once they were made, the issue was settled. This was critical, in fiscal instances and in others. We did not have a lot of time to build up trust with one another. We had to make dozens of decisions a day, and not all of them would be optimal. But we were a start-up in the truest sense of the word, running against a behemoth, and we did not have the luxury of wallowing in hard decisions or overanalyzing things. We had to move, move, move. Through that process, Obama and I developed a good sense of what decisions he needed to be involved in, and he trusted that we were doing the blocking and tackling well enough that he could focus less on the “Did we do this?” “Did you think of that?” “When is that getting done?” and spend the majority of his time on the major responsibilities of a presidential candidate—improving delivery and fine-tuning message, executing political and fund-raising asks at a high level, and getting to know the states and the rhythms of what was a shockingly new experience for him.

  Axelrod brought in Larry Grisolano, a talented, longtime Democratic manager and strategist, to oversee our paid media and polling teams, which became an increasingly important part of the campaign as we got closer to elections. Larry had Iowa experience, working for Tom Harkin twice (we were roommates in Des Moines as kids on Harkin’s Senate race in 1989), but he had also managed major races in California and other states. Ax is brilliant and has many strengths; knocking off a to-do list every day is not one of them. To his credit, he identified this as a challenge early in the campaign and insisted we bring in Larry; it made a huge difference. We would have languished without a strong person in that role.

  The new media group (online communications, Web-page development and maintenance, texting) in most campaigns reports to the communications department, and its department head is not considered an equal of other senior staff. But I saw how important the burgeoning online world was to our overall success; new media would touch just about every aspect of our campaign. So I had that department report directly to me. To find us new talent we enlisted one of Barack’s law school classmates, Julius Genachowski, who was steeped in the technology world. He identified our director of new media, Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean’s revolutionary new media effort in 2004. Joe seemed to relish the challenge of marrying digital technology and strategy with a strong grassroots campaign.

  Julius also found the former chief technology officer of Orbitz, Kevin Malover, to be our CTO. Kevin saw things from a large corporate perspective in terms of our infrastructure needs. From the start we had a wealth of technology geniuses supporting us, and our new media and technology staff held weekly conference calls with them to generate ideas as we refined our plans and tried new things. Though the rest of the world was zooming forward at a rapid digital clip, for some reason political campaigns were in many respects stuck in the Dark Ages technologically. With the help of supporters like Eric Schmidt of Google, we dramatically improved our digital strategy and execution, and I’d say we were competitive digitally with any business-world start-up.

  Julianna Smoot had been the chief fund-raiser for the Senate Democrats in 2006 and knew many of the major Democratic donors in the country firsthand. Julianna had our entire national finance operation up in a matter of days and hired a slew of fund-raising staff who were deeply loyal to her. Her North Carolina roots showed in her accent, but Julianna’s soft drawl camouflaged a hard-charging, take-no-prisoners mentality. She rode her staff hard to meet their goals and did not take guff from our fund-raisers around the country.

  Steve Hildebrand did a terrific job of finding our lead staff for the first early states. We preferred hungry people for whom a proposed role on the Obama campaign might be a bit of a stretch, as opposed to people who might coast because they had been a state director in a presidential race before. We were fortunate that most of the Clinton campaign apparatus was set in stone; because they had been planning to run for a long time, they knew who was playing what roles, and this froze out many talented players. A mixture of availability and faith in Obama led a huge number of very qualified and motivated staff to come knocking at the Chicago HQ, despite the long odds.

  I set the tone early, at our first staff meeting, by decreeing that all of us in Chicago should view our job first and foremost as supporting the states. Most presidential campaigns operate with the mentality that headquarters knows best and that that’s where the major action is. My view was there were no voters in headquarters. I wanted the staff to wake up every day and see their job through the prism of “What can I do today to help us win the Iowa caucus?” I sought to instill that discipline throughout the organization. We would not waste time or bounce from strategy to strategy. We would all align in the same direction and work as hard as we could.

  Even as our staff was coalescing at breakneck speed, there were reminders every day that we weren’t shooting free throws; we had defenders in the lane. On a Saturday morning in late January, Hillary Clinton released her own video, and then a press release, proclaiming, “I’m in it to win
it.”

  I understood the strategy behind those words: she presented herself as the inevitable nominee. Hillary is going to win, her campaign insisted, so why would any donors, activists, or elected officials support one of the other campaigns? We thought it was a terrible misreading of the electorate—inevitability doesn’t speak to a hunger for change—and they certainly misread the electoral terrain of the primary. The early states really do not like to be told the election is over before it has started. They like to soak up every ray during their quadrennial moment in the sun, and that requires a competitive race.

  That said, we all had enormous respect for the Clinton political machine and assumed they were three steps ahead of us. The Clinton campaign may have underestimated us, but we never made that mistake regarding them. We knew what we were up against—or thought we did.

  We knew Clinton’s campaign would be run by loyal, longtime lieutenants. Patti Solis Doyle was my counterpart. She had been with Hillary in various roles going back to 1992, as a scheduler and then as director of her political action committee and her 2006 Senate race. Originally from Chicago, Patti was known as a tough and organized operative, though she had no experience managing competitive elections.

  Mark Penn, a pollster with a long history with both Clintons, played the role of lead message strategist, the rough equivalent to Ax in their campaign. Penn was known to develop strategies geared toward the center of the electorate, and he was a believer in microtargeting, an approach spelled out in his book Microtrends. We thought this was an election with one big macrotrend—change—and thought Penn’s penchant for slicing and dicing the electorate could come back to bite them. Or so we hoped.