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

by David Plouffe

  “Marley woke me up and then collapsed by the bed,” she said. “He’s still sprawled on the floor. If I leave the room he tries to struggle to his feet but can’t make it. He’s whimpering and his breath is labored.” We’d had prior health incidents with Marley, so we knew to be calm and roll with the punches, but I sensed this time was different. I could tell my wife did, too. “I am going to put the phone up to Marley’s ear so you can talk to him,” she said.

  “Good boy, Marley, everything will be okay, buddy,” I promised him; she said he perked up a bit. I heard my son in the background, very distressed, his two-year-old voice insisting, “Marley, get up right now!” Somehow by this time my remarkable wife had already arranged for a babysitter to watch our son while she found a pet ambulance to help her carry Marley outside and drive them to the veterinary hospital.

  I hung up and got ready for a breakfast meeting at my hotel with the most important labor official in Nevada and some members of his union. I had to force myself to focus. Usually I am adept at compartmentalization, but I desperately wanted to get on a plane and be with my family.

  While the union leaders and I were deep in a discussion of the race and Nevada’s role in it, my phone rang. It was my wife. I excused myself and stepped out onto the terrace, which was strikingly warm in the desert sun.

  Through sobs from the animal hospital, she asked me to say good-bye to Marley. That was all she could get out. I did so, barely holding it together on the outside, torn up on the inside. “We just lost him,” she whispered. “He is gone.”

  I gathered my composure, did the best I could during the rest of the meeting, and headed off to the airport in a daze. Stricken with my own grief, I was also beset by knowing that for my wife and son, losing our beloved dog would not make it any easier for them to adjust to Chicago while I worked around the clock.

  We eventually got the endorsement of the labor official and his union-and when we did, all I could think about was that horrible morning, my wife dealing with the death of our pooch all alone, my son terrified, and me thousands of miles away and of zero help.

  That’s what life is like on presidential campaigns. There is little time to get diverted from the mission. Dedicated staff become more machine than human, not by choice but because the reality of the challenge and the pace demand it.

  When we entered the race, we talked a lot about trying to run a different kind of campaign. The odds of our electing a president were against us; our only hope of success depended on breaking free of the standard political paradigm and becoming a movement. Ax and I discussed this often, frequently with Steve Hildebrand. One of Steve’s roles was to manage our relations with elected officials, constituency groups, and organized activists, forces that constantly pressured us to take conventional routes. They wanted us to seek endorsements, attend events that did not fit our strategic needs, and meet the demands of narrow but seemingly powerful interest groups.

  Our determination to run a campaign that eschewed these machinations became shorthand for us; “If we do this, how is that running a different kind of campaign?”

  What precisely did we mean? Above all, it meant a change in tone. We wanted to avoid engaging in the snarky tit-for-tat that had consumed our politics for years, and to put the grassroots-the people-before interest groups and endorsement politics. We wanted to reach voters individually rather than expect some group or person to deliver them.

  Our dogged refusal to be led around by the nose by insiders and interest groups was driven by a few factors: We had no margin for error; We knew we wouldn’t run the perfect campaign, and we didn‘t, but we could not be cavalier in making decisions on resource allocation-whether time, money, or message. We had none of them to waste. Because we were trying to expand the electorate and attract new and younger voters along with independents and Republicans, we could not afford to spend time at events where there would solely be a very limited audience of traditional Democratic activists.

  This caused great stress to our early state and political staff, which time and again had to convey Obama’s polite refusal to incredulous party and constituency leaders unused to being rebuffed by major presidential candidates.

  For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to remain faithful to its principles all the time. If we were turning down a traditionally important event in one state, we couldn’t cave on another. We had to be consistent and clear, or our schedule would soon be out of our hands. Allocation of the candidate’s time is the most important decision any campaign has to make. How the candidate is spending time, day in and day out, ought to be the clearest reflection of a campaign’s strategy and priorities.

  Our strongest preference when it came to Obama’s time was avoiding the pack. Orchestrated Democratic events involving all the candidates produced no unique or meaningful press coverage; the story was always “Dems Gather in Cedar Rapids, Woo the Faithful.” We believed that at best 25 percent of our eventual caucus supporters would pay fifty or a hundred dollars to attend a Democratic party dinner; attending these types of events robbed us of days we could run the show our way.

  In Iowa our staff had to deliver the bad news that we were not going to one of the Iowa Democratic Party’s major fund-raisers or the second-biggest county’s annual Democratic Party dinner. All the other candidates were attending both, and the grief was raining down on us not just from party leaders and the press but also from some of our own more traditional supporters in the state, who couldn’t fathom what we were doing.

  On the phone with Hildebrand and me, Tewes pleaded for some relief. “Guys, you know I agree with the premise. But we’re getting killed out here. People are starting to say we are arrogant and don’t care about the party.” From his voice, we could tell just how much grief he was taking. “Please,” he continued, “just find a way to give us a few more days in Iowa?”

  I had great sympathy for him. But the allocation of Obama’s time was a complex dance between fund-raising, all the horrid debates (the reason we tried to limit them from the beginning), time in other early states, and his need to be in Washington for key Senate votes. There were simply no extra days floating around.

  I told Tewes to let HQ be the bad guy, as I had in South Carolina, so that down at the state level they could claim, honestly, that they were trying to persuade us to attend some of these events. He did, and it gave me the chance to say, “Our state staff thinks we’re nuts here in Chicago. They’re beating the hell out of us to go, but sorry, we just can’t be there.”

  As time went by, though, our in-state staff increasingly came to see the value of this iron-willed discipline. They also saw that the fallout from Obama’s absence at certain functions was never as bad as had been predicted. The lead-up to missing an event was treated like a ten-alarm fire; afterward, there would hardly be a puff of smoke. Eventually, state staff led the charge to maintain our flexibility to do the types of events that best served us.

  Obama deserves enormous credit for backing us up on these decisions. He got incredible grief about his absences from local pols in the states, usually couched in biblical terms; at the very least, they assured us that skipping their events would absolutely destroy any shot we had at the presidency. It must have been tough for him, but almost without fail he would diplomatically hold the line.

  Our independence also enabled us to create our own large, untraditional crowds. The more events we did in the early states, the more we drew crowds that were substantial, diverse, and filled with the type of people who traditionally did not attend political events. We used our database to model those who attended our events, looking at past voting history and demographic information. It turned out to be a real representative sample of the population, not just a solid block of Democratic Party activists. So while some candidates were thrilled to have a big audience to speak to at an existing event, we were more interested in building events that would feed into our specific voter targets and that included trying to attract a lot of people who
do not like to pay to go to a political event.

  Of course, there were times we relented. One example was the International Association of Fire Fighter’s Legislative Conference in the spring. It was held in D.C.; Obama was already scheduled to be in town for a Senate vote the day of the convention, so he had to go. We decided, however, that rather than do what the rest of the candidates would do-rattle off a list of the firefighters’ priorities and pledge undying devotion to them-we would refuse to pander. Instead, we would give a broader speech about Iraq, the toll it was taking on local communities and preparedness (firefighters, too, of course), and make a general call for bringing about fundamental change.

  The other candidates received loud and sustained applause as they each recited the same talking points, hitting the obvious buttons. Obama’s comments about Iraq and its implications were received politely but quietly. The political punditocracy, which attended all of these cattle calls and assigned them overblown importance, judged it an abject failure for us; some went so far as to say we bombed. Yet the coverage around the country in AP stories and local papers was actually quite positive; we had differentiated ourselves and gotten a compelling message out beyond the hall. Still, we had to concede part of the pundits’ point: there must have been a better way to differentiate ourselves without creating stony silence in a cavernous hall.

  The candidate thought so, too. After the event, Obama called me and said, “Listen, I signed off on this strategy and believe in it but there has to be a happy medium. I have to be able to give these groups some red meat so I can get their attention and then make our broader message points.” He was clearly unhappy at having to sweat out the silence. “I just kept talking louder and louder but it was painful. They were just staring back at me.”

  We agreed that, going forward, we would play these events a bit more traditionally but not go as far as Clinton and Edwards, who were just playing up to the crowd—albeit to undeniable effect.

  So all things being equal, other than the David Geffen episode in February, we had done a pretty good job of staying out of the deep muck. Until Punjabgate.

  Our research team had put together a document that highlighted the voluminous examples of Hillary Clintons’ expressing tacit support for outsourcing. We knew this could cause huge problems in Iowa with blue-collar voters, so we decided to send this background document around to select reporters in hopes of getting some stories written.

  This is standard operating procedure—campaigns move research and story ideas around to introduce them into the campaign dialogue without having to launch the attack themselves. Sharing such information is meant to spur a reporter into doing her own research and reporting; get it right and you can draft behind a press story and not catch the arrows for doing the dirty work. We did much less of this than many campaigns did, but there were times when we indulged—it was our researchers who found John Edwards’s infamous $400 haircut expenditures.

  The document on outsourcing was titled “Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab,” after an incident when Hillary Clinton was in India and she jokingly told a local official that should be her title because of her ongoing political interest in many things Indian. It was stupid and snarky; these research documents historically do not see the light of day, so communications staff doesn’t treat them as though their language will be repeated. They are considered off-the-record and rarely get sourced. As a result, we were sloppy. But we got burned, and the New York Times broke the story that we were moving the D-Punjab document around the press world.

  As soon as we got the first call from the Times we knew we were in deep shit. Our press secretary, Bill Burton, called me with the news as I was landing in Chicago, and my stomach sank. My first reaction was, “How on earth could they write a story off a paper that was clearly research, a background document?”

  But that was blame shifting and rationalization. We had screwed up, and in a way that could be uniquely damaging. For other campaigns this would be a blip on the radar. But we had promised a different standard, and this was about as far as possible from the type of campaign we had pledged to run.

  Obama was predictably furious when I talked to him after getting off the phone with Burton. Worse than that, he was disappointed. “This is the first time I am embarrassed by my campaign,” he said. “How could this happen? Is staff going renegade?”

  “No, this was distributed to the senior message staff before it went to reporters,” I told him. “None of us objected because it was a research document and we didn’t expect that material to surface or be printed by the press.”

  “I never want this to happen again,” he said, making sure I had it clear. “I want controls in place and I want you to take personal responsibility for it. I don’t care what the other campaigns are doing. We can’t use that as a standard. Get control of it or I won’t allow us to send anything but our schedule out to the press.”

  He was as short and upset as I had ever seen him. His campaign now looked jingoistic, simplistic, and engaged in the kind of politics he was running against.

  Poor Gibbs was traveling with Obama and said that Punjabgate put Barack in the foulest mood he’d seen him in in three years. And much of it was directed at Gibbs, who was part of the command chain that was responsible for things like this and also happened to be in front of him all day long. Obama kept coming back to it. Gibbs took a lot of heat, but this one was my screwup; I should have killed the memo. I did a call with prominent Indian American activists around the country, who appropriately let me have it.

  We changed course after this incident and sent out very few research documents; when we did, they were straightforward and fact-based. We set up internal controls so nothing got sent out without the right groups of us paying close attention and giving it a go-ahead. We had to control our message and make sure it was consistent, but we needed to pay even more attention to the tone of everything we were doing. This meant avoiding snark while still pointing out differences without abandoning decency.

  In May, we had unveiled our first major policy proposal, the Obama recipe for health care reform. After the candidates’ first joint appearance, when Obama felt disadvantaged because he did not have a formal plan, this issue shot to the front of the line. Along with energy independence, it was also the issue Obama consistently used as an example of what was wrong with Washington: every president since FDR has talked about health care reform that results in coverage for all. But far too little has been done in those six decades to bring it about.

  Health care was also the top domestic issue for likely Democratic primary voters in the spring of 2007. We spent weeks getting ready for our health care offensive. Our policy staff, led by Heather Higginbottom, our Jill-of-all-trades who eventually became our policy director, was working around the clock and enlisting health care experts to help shape the choices for Obama. It was an arduous process but necessary, as our ultimate plan had many moving parts and aggressively attacked health care costs. One decision point in particular illuminates how Obama thought about it.

  A few days before our formal unveiling of the health care plan, we had one decision left to make: would there be an individual mandate for all Americans over twenty-one forcing them to obtain coverage, even resulting in hefty financial penalties if they didn’t?

  Obama asked for the pros and cons on both sides. It was clear that the press—and our opponents—would default to a simple evaluation of our plan: whether it would provide “universal coverage” in the truest sense of the word. Gibbs was confident that factor would dominate the news. “We can argue till we’re blue in the face,” he said, “but if the referees say Edwards offers universal coverage, and we fall short, that will be the measuring stick. I am not advocating here, just laying out the facts.”

  He was right, which frustrated Obama. “So on a complex issue like health care reform, where there are cost, coverage, access, quality, and technology aspects, they’ll just dumb it down to one evaluation?” he asked with exasperation. E
ven this far into the campaign, Obama still expressed surprise at the lack of depth in political reporting.

  “I hear you,” said Gibbs. “But I’m just the messenger here.”

  Barack fundamentally believed that before mandating coverage, costs had to be tackled. “I reject the notion that there are millions of Americans walking around out there who don’t want health coverage,” he said on this call. “They want it but can’t afford it. Let’s attack costs from every angle, provide incentives for small businesses and families to allow them to provide and buy coverage. I am not opposed to a mandate philosophically. But I don’t think we should start there. It could be a recourse if coverage goals aren’t being met after a period.”

  Heather’s health care experts believed our plan could achieve near-universal coverage and universal access. Axelrod summed up, “We are just going to have to do our best to explain that this plan will cover just about everybody and does the best job by far of cutting costs.”

  Obama’s pragmatic side was kicking in. Much has been written about Obama’s “liberal” voting record, but a two-year U.S. Senate voting record is a poor measure of someone’s ideology. Leaving aside the problem of the small sample size from such a short tenure, most votes in the Senate are highly partisan, constructed so that Democrats vote with Democrats and Republicans with Republicans. A more accurate representation would be his record during his tenure in Springfield, when he found common ground with Republicans on issues like health care, tax cuts, and death penalty reform. Obama has a deeply practical, results-oriented streak—grounded in progressive values—that was on display during our health care discussion.

  Our health care plan was fodder for many attacks from the Edwards and Clinton camps during the rest of the campaign, but our research showed they never gained much traction. Few, if any, voters believed Barack Obama was secretly running for president to deny the American people health care coverage. Independents and Republicans, and some Democrats, preferred our more pragmatic approach, and progressive Democrats-on the whole, with some notable exceptions-had no question about Obama’s sincere commitment to providing health care for every American. As is often the case in politics, when you make substantive decisions the right way, not based on polls and political wind gauging, you often end up on the high side of politics.