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

by David Plouffe

  On April 1, Hillary reported raising a total of $26 million, only $19.1 million of which could be spent in the primary (the other $6.9 million could be spent only if she became the nominee). This perplexed us. They clearly were raising a lot of general-election money just to boost their overall number, to cement the perception of their fund-raising strength. It was also easier to get someone to write a $4,600 check, a max out for the primary and general, than to get them to write $2,300 and find someone else to write another $2,300 check. But general-election money is funny money during a primary; it can’t be spent until the game is over.

  We strongly discouraged our donors from raising general-election money and went so far as to say any general-election money raised during the primary would not count toward their membership in the National Finance Committee, which required raising at least $100,000.

  There was a practical reason for this: primary money was the only money we could use during the nomination fight. But the theory behind it had real implications. It was clear from our discussions with the press that they understood the importance of the distinction, so the Clinton campaign would receive far less mileage from their large overall figure. We spent a good deal of effort making sure the press accepted the metric of primary money.

  We intentionally held off releasing our finance numbers until April 3 to build suspense. It worked. We reported raising almost $26 million, all but a few thousand of it primary money. Obama had outraised Clinton in primary money by $7 million. This news sent shockwaves through the political community, especially in early states like Iowa. People who had been on the fence, waiting to see if we could really put together a viable campaign, were now convinced we could and jumped on board.

  Without that big first quarter, I’m not sure we could have won the nomination. It showed once and for all we could compete with Hillary on what was considered her home court. And it demonstrated that something powerful was stirring across the countryside.

  Clinton had constructed a campaign of inevitability, built on a foundation of financial dominance. Those early contribution levels were important markers, and they showed that we had the power to weaken that foundation.

  We ended the first quarter in stronger financial shape than we had dreamed possible. We exceeded our own expectations in other areas as well. The size of our e-mail list was well ahead of schedule. Our presence on the ground in Iowa was much stronger and deeper than Clinton’s; she was organizing at a remarkably slow pace there. In the other early states we were either matching her activity (New Hampshire and Nevada) or exceeding it (South Carolina). We had a strong top-line change message, which was very distinct from the inevitability and experience message Clinton was employing. And we had survived-so far—the scrutiny of our candidate.

  We were off to a strong start. The plane lifted off the runway and did not explode in flames. We weren’t soaring but we were on an upward trajectory.

  3

  Building Blocks

  As we rolled into spring of the 2007 primary season, we could no longer consider ourselves a start-up. We were still years behind Hillary Clinton in terms of policy planning, political relationships, and national donor base, but we were now a fully formed campaign. We had staff and organizations in place in the first four primary states. We had a donor network around the country. Our website and its social-networking component were heavily trafficked and becoming a real resource for our supporters. Internally, we had clear lines of authority and were establishing a calm, respectful operating rhythm.

  It was time to take it to the next level.

  We needed to put some policy meat on the bones, starting with health care. We needed to continue our aggressive compiling of supporter e-mail addresses, volunteers, and contributors. Our early-state organizing and political activities had to accelerate. We had to start building large volunteer networks in these states and begin to lock down support, voter by voter. And we had to continue to gel as an organization and cement a campaign culture that could carry us through what promised to be an increasingly brutal race. The turbulence of takeoff was nothing compared to the white-knuckle moments that lay ahead.

  During the first several months of the campaign, none of us had time for much reflection. We had been shot from a cannon-Obama especially-and our efforts had been focused entirely on getting our bearings and surviving the launch. As we caught our collective breath, the implications of what we were doing started to sink in.

  In mid-April, Axelrod slumped into a chair in my office and asked, “Is it ever going to slow down? It feels like it’s the week before the election, not ten months out from the primaries. I don’t know if I can sustain this pace.”

  “I know,” I wearily replied. “I misread this. I thought we’d be moving helterskelter to get up and running but then things would calm down and we’d have somewhat of a lull-or at least a more modest pace until the fall.” I sighed. “The press is going to cover every sneeze and hiccup 24/7. Plus it’s going to be an arms race out there, each of us trying to escalate financially and organizationally. I don’t think it will slow down a bit.”

  “A marathon at sprint pace,” Ax observed. And he was right. None of us was prepared, most significantly our candidate, whose attitude about the whole enterprise took a sharp turn for the worse as we headed toward summer.

  The spring months were tough for Obama. By most external—and internal—measures the campaign was ahead of schedule. But with the rush of his first weeks as a presidential candidate now in the rearview mirror, he had enough perspective to realize that this was going to get only more difficult over the next nine to twelve months. He already missed his family. He spent much of his time fund-raising. He found most coverage of the race banal. And there wasn’t nearly enough time for his favorite part of the campaign—noodling over policy, or as he called it, think time.

  Gibbs was on the road with Obama more and more, a duty that eventually claimed him full time. The two men shared a close bond, and Gibbs was brutally honest with Obama when he found his performance or outlook flawed. In the end, Gibbs’s transition to the road greatly benefited the campaign. It helped to have a senior person with Obama at all times to ensure that coordination between the road show and HQ was smooth and that someone on the ground could make things happen when we needed to call an audible.

  Gibbs had excellent instincts when it came to reacting in the moment, offering sage advice as we navigated any number of unforeseen situations. The desk work of communications, including planning and management, was less his strength. We brought Dan Pfeiffer, who was Gibbs’s deputy at the time, in off the road to take over management responsibilities at the HQ.

  Pfeiffer was from Delaware, like me. Coupled with all our South Dakotans-Hildebrand, Pete Rouse, and a bunch of junior staffers—it had to be the greatest representation of tiny three-elector states in presidential campaign history.

  I never asked Pfeiffer directly, but I still wonder if he was at all relieved to escape for a while from our increasingly sullen candidate. During a flight leg in April, Gibbs tried to have a heart-to-heart with Obama. “Are you having 0any fun at all?” he asked him.

  None,“ Obama flatly replied.

  “Do you see any way we can make it more fun?” Gibbs replied.

  “No.”

  Reggie Love, who was listening in on the conversation, piped up, “Well, if it’s any consolation I’m having the time of my life!” Reggie, a former basketball player at Duke, was renowned for working hard and playing hard, as befit a single twenty-four-year-old who seemed to require zero sleep. As Obama’s “body guy” or close, full-time personal aide, Reggie would experience the campaign from a unique perch and always with a great outlook and sense of wonderment for the ride he was on.

  Obama still didn’t flash a smile. He hadn’t embraced campaign life, and it was beginning to cause concern. The early-state staff in particular thought he was not locked in on the trail, either in his remarks or in his solicitations of political support.
We weren’t sure if Obama would turn out to be Secretariat, but we suspected he had some thoroughbred political talent; it just wasn’t on daily display. During his 2004 Senate race and in flashes on the presidential campaign trail, Ax, Gibbs, and I had seen his ability to move a room, to hold a crowd in thrall. His was never a fire-and-brimstone style; he quieted a room, until everyone was listening so intently that all else fell away. This command was on full display during his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, and it had catapulted him onto the national stage. He was also strong when working one-on-one or in small groups, where he could be more focused and convey a sense of urgency. But the reports from Iowa were that he was mostly going through the motions. After one event, Tewes called me and laid it on the line. “Unless he gets better, we might as well just not have him meet with people,” he said. “They tell us afterward, ‘He really never put the squeeze on me. It was a nice enough conversation but he doesn’t seem like he really wants it.’ ”

  We needed to address this, and fast. In April, Axelrod, Rouse, and I arranged a dinner with Obama at a restaurant in downtown D.C., ostensibly to talk about next steps in the campaign. While we did some of that, our main purpose was to let him know he had to find his inner motivation-or at least better disguise his weariness. As we unfolded our critique, he seemed bemused at first. Then he grew irritated. Eventually, though, he accepted we had a point.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I am struggling a bit out there. And only I can fix that and I will try. But you guys also need to make sure the things I ask for-like more time to kick ideas around with policy experts-get taken seriously and get scheduled.” We agreed to try to do our part better.

  This in no way solved our candidate issues—he’d have to find that spark himself-but thereafter he did a better job of keeping his doubts and perhaps even second thoughts about running to just a few of us. “Maybe you shouldn’t have run,” I told him later. “But you did, and the one thing that won’t happen is that you’ll quit. So let’s at least give it a go, try to enjoy ourselves. Worst case, in eight or nine months we’ll be out and have nothing but time on our hands. This is hard enough firing on all cylinders-it’s unbearable if your heart is not one hundred percent in it.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s like being in the middle of the ocean. It’s the same distance to swim back as to keep heading across. Just tell me this is going to get more fun.”

  “When you finally own Iowa,” I said, “really own it, think about it 24/7, get competitive, and see how everything you’re doing comes together-then I think you will. Plus, summer in Iowa and New Hampshire is a lot of fun. Outdoor campaigning, lots of good food. But that’s all I have to offer you.”

  He laughed. “Well, I’ll work on having fun if you work on your pep talk skills.”

  Barack is a logical guy. Later that spring he wrote a memo about his own state of mind and performance to close an internal memo about his overall view of our progress and challenges overall in the campaign. In it, he was as unsparing and clear-eyed about his own struggles to date as he was in expressing concerns about other aspects of the campaign.

  “Many of the difficulties that we have had over the past five months are my responsibility,” he said, with disarming candor. He acknowledged that he had been slow to adjust to the pace and demands of the campaign, and that his ambivalence had had a negative “impact on staff morale.”

  He panned his first debate performance, which he said, after reviewing it on tape, “was worse than I realized at the time.” And despite the constrictive nature of debate formats, which he felt could often lead to mindless and pat answers, he vowed to, if not master the discipline, improve.

  But most of all, Barack said he needed to find his authentic voice and reconnect with the fundamental concerns that drew him into the race in the first place. He had run to challenge the bankrupt and conventional politics of Washington, not master it. He would never win a race by trying to beat the insiders at their own game. But, he said, “if I can muster the discipline, the energy, and the confidence to consistently speak the truth as I best understand it, and the campaign can help me do that, then I don’t think we can be stopped.”

  It was hard not to run through a wall for this guy. Few people are this self-aware, fewer still politicians at the highest levels. It was a trait I thought would be invaluable in the campaign and, if we won, as president.

  As we moved through spring, he dug out of his funk and began to locate the motivation that would see him through the day-to-day grind and let him kick into a higher gear when the moment required.

  Though Obama’s understated personality and demeanor sometimes made it difficult for him to transition to high-energy moments, it also played a pivotal role in grounding our campaign. In most of the campaigns I’ve worked on—and in most principal-driven endeavors of any sort—the principal’s moods, reactions, and operating style become the focal points of the enterprise. Everyone becomes accustomed to saying things like, “He’s going to be pissed about this”; “She blew her top last time this happened, we’d all better duck”; “He’s going to lose his shit.” We’ve all been there.

  That was never the case with Barack. Sure, sometimes he’d think his schedule was too long or didn’t make sense, or that an event could have been better organized, but he would make his point and move on. His normalcy wasn’t a dominant reason for our success, but it proved a major factor. We were free to focus on doing our jobs, knowing that any criticisms he offered would be on the merits and made without histrionics. Ours was a healthy campaign environment; we never woke up dreading his reactions. In politics that is the exception, not the rule.

  We finally nailed down a debate calendar sanctioned by the DNC in the spring. Or so we thought. Before the cement could set, one more early debate was quickly added, to be held in April at South Carolina State University, a historically black college, and broadcast nationally by CNN. None of the major candidates was eager for the first formal debate to be this early, but Congressman Jim Clyburn, the most powerful Democrat in this newly pivotal early state, put enormous pressure on the candidates. We all buckled.

  Debates were considered hugely important by the press and dominated campaign coverage for three days: speculation and expectation setting the day before, debate day itself, and scoring and postgame analysis the day after. Most primary voters were oblivious to these early showdowns, but a lot of core Democratic activists, elected officials, and donors tuned in. For this reason, the opinions of the general electorate were of less concern in our preparation than the echo chamber of insiders.

  A good performance would be helpful with the political community and foster a sense of momentum and strength. But a bad performance would have a much stronger adverse impact. Accordingly, our first imperative was to do no harm.

  Historically, Obama was not a strong debater, so we tried to work him harder in the run-up. We prepped him over and over, reviewing likely questions and practicing answers and exchanges he might have with the other candidates. These sessions did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Obama thought the whole exercise of boiling down complex answers into thirty- or sixty-second sound bites was silly and rewarded glibness, not depth and complexity. It was definitely going to be a challenging night. A big part of managing debate coverage was setting and then meeting expectations. We tried to set our bar as low as possible so it would be easier to surpass.

  At debates, each campaign is afforded a walk-through in which the candidate and his staff are allotted time to take the stage and get comfortable with the lectern, lighting, and stage positions of the other candidates and moderators. This generally happens a few hours before the debate, so the producers can lock down the set and prepare for the broadcast, while the candidates go off for a few hours of rest and last-minute prep.

  Obama was loose as we took our tour. As we surveyed the professional staging and the avalanche of media, he joked to Gibbs, Ax, and me that the scene was just a bi
t different from his last debate, with the gadfly Republican Alan Keyes during the 2004 Senate race. “I guess I should consider it a step up that I’m now debating Hillary Clinton,” he noted wryly.

  We wanted to check into our lodgings to let him rest, review his debate materials, and do some light “pepper” before the debate. There were no hotels in Orangeburg, South Carolina, just a series of motels, a grim line of rundown doors looking out on dreary parking lots. This was one of our first trips with Secret Service, but our driver got lost and couldn’t find the motel where we had reserved rooms. We went the wrong way for several miles, turned around, and then finally pulled into a motel parking lot—the wrong one.

  I was riding with Obama, who remained surprisingly relaxed. “Maybe we were better off back when we had volunteer drivers using MapQuest,” he cracked.

  As we looped through the rear parking lot on our way back to the main road, we came across one of our primary opponents going through his own version of prep. In what appeared to be an approximation of exercise, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico was shuffling-and that may be too kind a word—along the motel sidewalk in a velour sweat suit, trailed by what must have been a couple of very large New Mexico state troopers, his regular entourage. He looked, as I said at the time, a bit like Tony Soprano. We were howling with laughter as we pulled away, because it was such a bizarre sight, and we would have missed it had we not wandered into the wrong motel parking lot.