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

by David Plouffe

  Given all that, when he insisted that we also should have some fun, it did not ring hollow. We’d strap on the armor, battle our way across the countryside, and see what we could accomplish without getting weighed down by overseriousness. This also led to the “no asshole” rule, so popularized in our campaign by Axelrod. We stated from the outset we would try to build a collegial team, where everyone was in it for something bigger than him- or herself. We would not staff positions with merely the best talent available. Of course our people had to know what they were doing—but how they went about doing it was equally important. Presidential campaigns are brutal affairs in the best of circumstances; when the internal dynamic is corrosive and not filled with trust, it can be unbearable. We were determined to avoid that from the beginning.

  Campaigns are no different than any other organization—they are collections of human beings. The clarity of the mission and the culture of the group may not outweigh strategy and resources in determining eventual success, but they’re awfully close. We would strive to build a campaign where people did not scream at each other, where performance was measured objectively, where crises were dealt with calmly, and where the team was there to serve the cause, not personal ambition.

  A healthy culture was hard to quantify in terms of its eventual impact on the election. But we thought it would be a big factor. The Clinton inner circle was notorious for infighting, backstabbing, and jockeying for position. Our approach could offer an important competitive advantage.

  The formations of a campaign strategy were taking shape, as were some core principles that would define how we would operate and what would be important for us to focus on in creating a start-up organization at warp speed.

  I was in Chicago a few days before Obama left for Hawaii on his long-planned family vacation in December. AKP Media was soon to have a meeting to plan out the next two years; most of the conversation would revolve around how we would adjust if Obama ran. The night before the meeting, Obama called and asked me to come to his house. I had a sinking feeling that he was going to ask me to manage his campaign if he jumped in.

  I arrived at the Obamas fairly late in the evening, and after saying good-night to Michelle, he and I settled down in the den with a couple of beers to review the current landscape. I was more or less the operational hub in this strange period, so I updated him on various areas: potential staff, machinations of the other candidates, timelines we would need to meet if he were to run. After we chewed on all that, he got around to the subject I’d been dreading.

  “So, David,” he said. “I won’t make a final decision until the Hawaii trip. But I think it is all but a certainty that I’ll run. And if do, the most important role I need to fill is campaign manager.” Here it comes, I thought. “I’ve been impressed by your judgment, temperament, organization, and strategic sense over the last few weeks. There are lots of bigger names out there, and maybe I should have canvassed for other possibilities. But I think you and I would work well together, and it’s clear you can work well with Axelrod, Gibbs, and the other likely staff. So I want you to manage the campaign.”

  I took a big chug of my beer before replying. “There are not many people in our line of work who would not jump at this opportunity, win or lose. But I have two huge stumbling blocks. First, I have a young son. I’d rarely see him. And my wife and I want to have another child, ideally pretty soon. So that will be put off at least another year, and I’m already pushing forty.”

  “I had my youngest when I was forty,” Obama piped in helpfully.

  “I understand,” I said. “But what if we do the improbable and win the primary? It’ll be two years. And it’s not just that. My wife’s career will be affected too. She’ll be marooned here in Chicago with no support network and a husband who is a ghost. It’s a personal loser all the way around.

  “I’m also not sure I will do a good job. I haven’t managed in eight years, since the DCCC. My last stint as campaign manager for a candidate race was the 1996 U.S. Senate race in New Jersey. I will be terribly rusty from a manager’s standpoint, and I’ve gotten used to pontificating and giving advice and counsel, not being responsible for everything from the budget to electoral strategy to personnel headaches. I’m not sure I want to go back to that world and, even if I did, that I would be any good at it.”

  He nodded. “Well, I understand the hesitation on both fronts. They are valid and you need to wrestle with them. On your last point, I know there will be some rust, but I have faith you’ll shake it off quickly. You’ve never managed a presidential campaign either. But I can see you understand the rhythm and contours of a race like this. I’ve never been a presidential candidate. Hell, I’ve never had a negative ad run against me. So I think we’ll be a good team, in some ways much more so than people who have been around the track a bunch of times in their current roles. We can look at everything through a fresh set of eyes and be more agile.”

  “Just making it up as we go along,” I added.

  Obama laughed. “I prefer the way I put it. It sounds more appealing.”

  We agreed that I would talk it over with my wife and I would call him in Hawaii to tell him my decision. If it was no, I would have some other candidates lined up for us to consider, and if I didn’t manage, I’d work on the race from my firm and spend as much time on it as I could.

  On the ride back to my hotel I reported to my wife that the offer was indeed made. She sounded as angst-ridden as I felt. I don’t think I had ever before agonized over a job in my life, whether it was cleaning chimneys, selling knives door-to-door in college, or my many political jobs. Things made sense immediately or they didn’t. I accepted or turned down jobs very quickly. This one would take longer to work through.

  The day before Obama left for Hawaii he met with Ax, Gibbs, and me in the same AKP conference room where our initial meeting about running had been held the month before. “I am ninety percent certain I am running,” he reported. “Maybe even higher. You guys should proceed quietly as if I am, and keep making progress on planning and sizing up potential personnel. I had hoped to have a final decision by now, as you know, but I want to mull it over a bit more while I’m away. When I get back in early January, I’ll give you the final green light.”

  I thought this bout with normalcy might cause him to pull back. Spending two weeks in Hawaii, frolicking with his kids, feeling the weight of the looming possibility that his life would be changed for the next year if not forever—it would be a sobering experience.

  Meanwhile, I had my own decision to make. My wife and I debated the pros and cons, weighed the move to Chicago and the impact on the family. It was difficult to find any kind of clarity until my wife finally opened the door for me.

  “I have watched you struggle through campaign cycles for years now,” she said. “Your heart hasn’t been in it since Gephardt took a pass in 2000. You tell me Barack Obama is authentic, one of the smartest people you have ever met, and in it for the right reasons. You say that you’ll try to run a different campaign, getting people involved, especially young people and minorities. This seems like the kind of campaign you idealize. Sure, he probably won’t win. But won’t it be hypocritical if, after all the bemoaning of politics today, you don’t answer the call here and try to do something about it?”

  It took me aback. She had plenty of valid reasons to oppose this step for us, but now, to my surprise, she was challenging me to live up to my rhetoric. And what’s more, she was dead-on. This was a gut check. And if she thought we could potentially make it work, with all the sacrifice it would entail for her and our son, it would be fraudulent of me not to address my own cynicism by doing all I could to change it.

  She added, “We’ll have to figure out housing, preschool, and my work. I guess it would mean putting off grad school again. We just signed on to a new mortgage and we’ll have to swing Chicago rent on top of it. It makes no sense for us right now. And frankly, I’m not sure a guy who was in the state senate three years ago h
as any business running for leader of the free world.

  “But we’ve been making a living in and around politics and government for a long time, complaining all the while about how nasty it is. You believe in this guy. I believe in you. We can muster the courage to make this leap. I can figure out the finances, the logistics, and the family stuff. You just make sure we are part of a campaign that’s worth it.”

  I called Obama in Hawaii to tell him. “Against my better judgment,” I said, “I’ve decided to accept and manage this nutty enterprise. All-in. I’m yours until we win or lose. ”

  “I am very grateful,” he responded. I’ll do my best to make sure you don’t regret it.“

  Then he became wistful discussing his vacation so far. “For the first time, it’s hard for me to move about the island—I’m getting stopped everywhere I go, people asking for pictures, asking me if I’m going to run. I guess this is what it will be like everywhere if I run.” He asked if I thought he could get to Hawaii next year; I said it would be difficult. That prospect clearly made him unhappy. If he knew that pictures of him shirtless would appear on newsstands days later, he probably would have decided right then not to run. I thought I was hearing a guy experiencing huge second thoughts. Maybe I’ll get to have my cake and eat it too, I thought to myself—agree to manage the campaign, get out of my comfort zone and belly up for the greater good, and never have to see it through.

  But I tried to give him some clarity. “I figured being over there would cause some doubts to creep in,” I told him. “That’s what you are giving up. Normalcy and time with your family. You have to own that. You should not feel like you have to do this, that you are on some inexorable path here. We will be ready to charge out of the gate if you tell us it’s a go. But you can still pull up. Because the worst thing would be for you to get in this when you still have lingering doubts. You’ll be twisting in the wind for a year and hating every moment of it and we’ll almost assuredly lose.”

  I think he appreciated the candor. He said he was still much more likely to run than not but would need to spend more time thinking about it during the remaining days of his vacation.

  Yet when he landed in Chicago in early January, he still had not made a final decision. He called Axelrod to get together and the two of them spent a couple of hours reviewing the bidding. Ax called me afterward and said he had done a lot of listening. He now thought it was no better than 50-50; Obama was having a hard time taking the final leap. We had all the rockets on the launch pad, ready to hire the first wave of staff and to plot out and execute the first moves of the campaign. But now everything ground to a halt, and we idled by for a few days as he wrestled with this momentous decision.

  On January 6, Obama called me late at night (that’s when Obama usually called, after his kids went to bed) and said he had crossed the Rubicon.

  “It’s a go,” he said. “You can start hiring some core people quietly, but swear them to secrecy. We should all get together in the next couple of days to hash out how we announce I’m running and what the first few weeks will look like.”

  “Okay,” I replied. “I have a memo that Ax and I worked on that lays out a lot of thoughts on this. I’ll send it to you and we’ll get together to discuss it. I feel confident that you went through a rigorous process about deciding. As did I. So why don’t we make the best of this and win this thing.”

  “I think we can,” he said resolutely. “Let’s get to work.”

  Just like that we were off to the races. It had been only sixty days of contemplation, planning, and decisions, but it felt like six months. Barack Hussein Obama, forty-five years old, a United States senator for two years, born to a Kenyan and a Kansan, was running for president of the United States. With little more than hope in his sails.

  We had a presidential campaign to get off the ground. And quickly. And a mountain named Hillary Clinton in our path that we had to find some way to scale, get around, or blow a hole through.

  2

  Taking Off While Affixing the Wings

  Barack Obama was running for president. Now his team—such as it was—had to figure out how to get his campaign aloft without crashing and burning.

  Our short-term goals through the spring of 2007 were clear and daunting: achieve a clean lift-off with a strong announcement of his candidacy and take no blows to the engine—external shots or self-inflicted wounds—that might stall our momentum; raise at least $12 million in the first quarter, a number we thought would give us a solid foundation and put us on pace to make $50 million for the year; flesh out our core message and provide some substance—like health care and energy plans—to go along with the hype; begin to build a grassroots movement, most aggressively in the early states, and figure out the best way people could be helpful beyond giving money; assemble a top-shelf campaign organization marked by camaraderie, collegiality, and discretion; and somehow survive the fusillade we would be facing from the press and our opponents.

  The last of these goals was complicated by the fact that we had done zero research on our own candidate beyond a small and incomplete package from the 2004 Senate race. With this lapse, we were violating a central rule of politics—know more about yourself than your opponents and the media do. Since we had not scrubbed every quote, vote, speech, and donor of Obama‘s, we knew we’d be getting questions we couldn’t foresee, and unless he remembered each incident and vote precisely, we’d be scrambling to mount a defense.

  Our goals were all derived through the prism of our electoral strategy: their attainment was necessary for us to successfully execute that strategy—focus like a laser on Iowa and the other early states. The plan was clear and logical. It just seemed nearly impossible to carry out in the infancy of the Obama campaign.

  First, we had to decide how to let the world know that Obama was running for president. Our initial recommendation was that he tape an online video announcing that we were forming an exploratory committee but that left no question he was running. Then he could follow up a few weeks later with a video saying he was officially in. We thought he should postpone a formal announcement speech and tour until after the first quarter, in April, when we would have our sea legs under us.

  Obama readily agreed to the exploratory committee taping—our lawyers said we needed to get that set up as quickly as possible so we could legally begin taking care of the thousand things necessary to get the campaign up and running (raising money, opening accounts, spending money and tracking that spending, and having a process in place to hire people, quickly). But he insisted that he needed to give a speech laying out the rationale for his candidacy as soon as possible, certainly before April.

  “We just can’t wait to begin laying out why I’m running—not fleshed-out plans but principles,” he insisted. “I’m going to be hyped to the nth degree, and I need to make sure the voters and the press corps understood why I’m running before somebody else fills in that canvas for us.”

  It made sense, and, moreover, he had 99 percent of the voting shares in this particular decision. That this would be extraordinarily difficult to accomplish in a month was beside the point. The whole endeavor was so improbable that we could afford to be cavalier and shoot for the stars. Axelrod and I compounded the degree of difficulty by insisting that we couldn’t just do one speech at one location. We’d have to cover at least Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina in addition to whatever kickoff we did in Illinois. If our strategy was about the early states, we’d have to be there from Day One or it could get some noses out of joint—and we needed to begin building our organizations in these states. From scratch.

  FUnfortunately, you can’t just say you’re running and have everything fall into place. There are a million little things to do and a few important ones. In addition to getting the campaign particulars functioning—the website, a system to receive and respond to e-mails and phone calls, office space, equipment for all the employees, a way to process contributions and generate thank-you letters, and ensuri
ng everything is done legally—we also had to get the organization functioning. Who was going to do what and who would report to whom? We also had to make sure everybody we hired understood our strategy and message so they could internalize it and default to those touch points when making decisions.

  We wanted to keep the campaign structure simple so it would work smoothly once assembled. Our operations department dealt with human resource issues, maintaining the budget, preparing Federal Election Commission reports, and a gazillion other items. In essence they administered the campaign. We had a finance department. A new media department. A scheduling and advance team. Press and communications. Opposition and self-research. A team managing our polling and paid media efforts. A political department to deal with elected officials and constituency leaders around the country, excluding the four early states. A field department to interact with our volunteers in the non-early states, complementing new media’s online organizing. The information technology department. And then, finally, our state operations.

  The heads of each of these departments reported directly to me, though some I dealt with much more frequently than others; Hildebrand spent a lot of time with the political and field departments in the beginning so I could focus on press, message, fund-raising, and Iowa.

  I would have drowned if not for one of the best hires I made early on. Katie Johnson was technically my assistant but really the glue of the entire campaign. She kept us all organized and facilitated internal communication, setting up many of our meetings and conference calls, often on her own initiative. Katie had served as Rahm Emanuel’s assistant at the DCCC in the 2006 cycle, while he was chair. Rahm makes a hurricane look like a spring breeze. I figured if Katie could thrive under that force of nature, she could handle a presidential campaign no sweat. I was right.