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

by David Plouffe

  Conversely, if we opted out, we would be able to run the positive ad we thought was in our best interest, a comparative or negative ad, and other ads geared to different demographics, like seniors or middle-aged women. We would also have the resources—and more important, a fully coordinated strategy—to deal with any attacks, no matter where they were coming from.

  So from a practical perspective, opting out seemed like the right move. With that settled, we turned to the principle questions. As far as how opting out of the federal system squared with our claim that Obama had been and would be a reformer, there was quite a lot to recommend it. First of all, we all felt very, very good about how we were raising our money. Obama was the first presidential nominee to ban contributions to his campaign and the national party (DNC) from PACs and lobbyists. Despite McCain’s talk and record on reform, his campaign was scooping up all the insider money they could find.

  We had achieved what many consider the ideal of campaign reform—receiving a lot of small contributions from a lot of people. Our average contribution was under $100, and our donor base composed a diverse portrait of America: teachers, retirees, small-business owners, farmers, students. I certainly felt that our present fund-raising method was a lot cleaner than what we would be forced to do if we stayed in the system.

  The maximum allowable contribution to the campaign was $2,300. If we opted in, and had to turn our attention to raising money for the DNC (though we could have no knowledge or say in their spending), the limit would be just over $30,000. The McCain campaign had already done numerous RNC fund-raising events with lobbyists, where each attendee was asked for $30,000. And shadowy outside groups would have almost no limits. If we stayed in the federal system, these groups on our side would kick into high gear. Very wealthy individuals and interest groups would write, in some cases, multimillion-dollar checks, with little outside accountability when it came to how that money would be spent. It was clear to me which of these pathways was the more questionable.

  Whatever we decided, I was determined not to make a decision out of fear of some hypocritical lectures from John McCain about breaking our word. There is also a federal financing system in the primaries, and when McCain’s campaign foundered in the middle of 2007, he signaled that he would take the money. Before that point, they had sent the clear message that they would not be bound by limits. McCain signed his own name to loan documents in December of 2007, using the promise of federal money as collateral. Without the loan, McCain might well have lost to Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, ending his campaign.

  Yet once McCain wrapped up his nomination in March 2008, he reversed course and said he would not be participating in the federal primary system. The reason was politically transparent: our primary would still be dragging on for some time and they wanted to have maximum financial flexibility to wage what was in essence a general-election campaign for those five months before the GOP convention. This reversal undercut any moral authority he might claim on campaign finance reform.

  Obama and I talked about this issue a lot through the late spring and into early June. In the beginning he was genuinely torn—all things being equal, he was an instinctive reformer who was determined to win. Ax also played a part in these discussions. Like me, he was determined we not enter the general with one arm tied behind our back. But Ax is more sensitive to press criticism than I am and wondered if we could have our cake and eat it, too. He suggested opting out of the federal system but limiting contributions to, say, under $250.

  The idea sounded appealing. But when our finance staff ran the numbers, it became clear this option would produce the worst of both worlds: we would not raise enough money to justify the pummeling we would take. Meanwhile, Ax had shared this idea with Obama, who mused about it in a press interview. I immediately sent them both an e-mail banning further trial balloons.

  More than any of us, Obama was living the way we raised our money; maybe it wasn’t pure, but it was as close to the ideal as had been achieved in presidential politics. Out on the trail, he met our grassroots donors all the time and even called up some of them unprompted, to try to stay connected with the ground.

  The largest two categories of donors to our campaign were retirees and students. I doubt that has ever before been the case in American politics, and it’s all the more remarkable that these are two groups filled with members who are often living on very fixed budgets. But their dedication was unwavering and inspiring. After the campaign, we got an e-mail from a college student named Brandon Humble, who described how he found the money to make several donations to us. “I didn’t eat out, grabbed some ramen on the weekends instead, and kicked in ten to Barack’s campaign,” he wrote. “Didn’t take the girl to a movie, just had drinks together, kicked in another ten. Small things. But it was my belief that there were millions of us, scraping what we could together, and through the small things and the small people, headed by the campaign, a movement was created.”

  We also had some wildly successful online promotions, including one that was fittingly called “Dinner with Barack,” where we would select a group of donors to have a meal with Obama. Other contest winners got to spend time with us on the trail. Barack loved these. He got to meet donors like Michael Wilson of Cocoa Beach, Florida, an Air Force veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom who disagreed with the reasons for our going to war. A registered Republican, Mike believed Barack reflected “what America is and what America needs.” As Obama pondered the finance decision, these were the people he visualized.

  On the phone late one night I laid out for him the different campaigns we would have to run in the two scenarios. “I’ve made up my mind,” he said when I finished speaking. “We’ll get out of the system. Let’s execute it right away. No reason to delay.”

  The most important component of our decision was sharing it first directly with our supporters. We had done this from time to time, though never on something this significant, and learned that it held real value to our supporters—it made them feel very connected to the campaign. They loved getting information directly from us, rather than seeing it reported elsewhere.

  Obama filmed a short video explaining his decision. “It’s not an easy decision,” he said, “especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections. But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system.”

  We sent the video out by e-mail to our entire list on June 19, and that’s how the press and John McCain learned of our decision. As predicted, the press hammered us and editorialized against our decision, saying that we had dealt “a body blow both to the system of campaign finance and to [Obama‘s] own reputation as a reform candidate.” McCain, perhaps prizing media opinion over voters’, spent days denigrating our choice. But we thought voters had bigger concerns and that he wasted precious time making a process argument when his own hands weren’t clean.

  Next we had to lock in how we planned to spend the revenue. We had quietly begun planning and budgeting in April and May, so we would be prepared when the general election began in earnest. Hildebrand, Jen O‘Malley, Grisolano, Carson, CFO Marianne Markowitz, and Henry Desio, our chief operating officer, and their teams began a very arduous process to lay out our state and national budgets for the final five months.

  I gave them a figure of $475 million to work with. Our fund-raising staff was very nervous about these numbers—their projections had us raising under $400 million. But I expected the grassroots funding to explode after the two conventions and throughout debate season, and did not want to budget too conservatively. It was a leap of faith but one I thought was justified given our trajectory. Campaigns often spend money haphazardly at the end because they did not accurately budget for the inevitable surge in contributions as the country’s interest waxes in the days before the election.

  Budgeting is an art, not a science. I wanted us to have an approach of high growth and risk, b
ecause I actually believed that $475 million would just be our floor. Some of this was based on incessant calculations I did on my own. Pure gut instinct was a factor as well. This race was so intense and our supporters so passionate that I thought we had to plan as if the additional money would come.

  As I expected, the budget team came back with a much larger budget than $475 million. Their first cut was $611 million. This was brazen but laughable, and my response was short. “Right now there is no play in the $475 million,” I told them. “This is not a negotiating exercise.”

  Despite Herculean efforts, their next budget was still over $500 million. To get to $475 million we cut even more paid media, which is usually the sacred cow of campaign budgets. Media gets funded first and fully, and other departments make do with whatever is left.

  This time I believed that our state campaigns should be the driving factor. Registering voters, person-to-person persuasion, building strong local organizations, boosting turnout where we needed to, and gathering as big an e-mail list as possible would be more important than advertising to our ultimate success. It is much more effective to throw late-stage surplus funds on TV than to field operations, which need time and infrastructure to grow.

  Advertising would be critical, though, and we would do plenty of it. We still needed to educate voters about the basics of Barack’s biography and values, as well as his positions; many of the general-election voters did not pay close attention to the primary, and McCain had already spent decades on the public stage; he was a much more known quantity.

  Our paid media team was nervous. For all the McCain campaign’s belly-aching, our ad spending and theirs were roughly equal through July and August in the states where we both advertised. But I was comfortable with the risk inherent in our de-emphasizing paid-media funding. First, there are some races where advertising is the central driver, but these tend to be Senate and House races, which don’t dominate local news coverage or voter attention. Voters follow presidential races carefully. They watch the conventions and debates. Thanks to the explosion of the Internet, following the contest had never been easier. The personalities and stakes of the 2008 race promised to deliver a highly engaged electorate, which alleviated the need, at least early, to have monstrously large media buys. Second, with McCain staying in federal funding limits, we could develop quite a gap in our media spending at the most critical time—the last two months of the campaign—even working within our $475 million budget.

  With so many factors in play it often felt like throwing a dart at a moving bull‘s-eye. We developed a good system to help us stay within budget, assess why we were exceeding it in certain areas, and make strategic adjustments. We never dipped into the red; only once did we have cash-flow issues—as projected, right before the Democratic convention when our spending was ramping up and the dog days of August made for sluggish fund-raising.

  While the budget team was initially in Fantasyland, the final budget was far from spartan. It funded every state at muscular levels and represented the most expensive presidential campaign effort in battleground states in history, by several factors. Our Florida budget was $38 million; our Virginia budget, $22 million; and our Colorado budget, $10 million. We built budgets that we thought could produce wins and did not tier the states by importance. We were all-in.

  As we transitioned into the general, we needed to make some staff additions and changes. Most pressing was building our senior team in all the battleground states. Many state leaders were drawn from our staff in the primary, but we had ample holes and filling them was harder than we expected. For starters, we had a salary cap, and some folks balked at it because they could make more in other campaigns. That was an easy one for us. No negotiating, no looking back. See you later.

  Second, our approach in the states was very different from previous Democratic presidential campaigns. In many elections, state directors handled their local politics, made sure the candidate’s trips into the state went well, and helped spread the campaign’s message when the candidate and other principals were not there. Our state staff leadership would have these responsibilities, but we asked much more of them. We valued above all their ability to build a state campaign that worked day in and day out toward our voter-turnout goals, constantly measuring their performance against established metrics, and prioritizing volunteers above party leaders.

  Those with experience in the Kerry, Gore, and Clinton campaigns were not necessarily the best fit. Not everyone we talked to grasped this concept or agreed with it. It took some time to fill out the roster, but we ended up with terrific state staff, a healthy balance of Obama primary warriors and new blood.

  We sent Paul Tewes, of Iowa fame, to manage the DNC for the last five months, to make sure we were in alignment and getting the most from that committee. Mitch Stewart was running Virginia. Emily Parcell, another Iowa stalwart, took Indiana. Ray Rivera, who led us to a key win in the Colorado primary, now revamped his team for the general election. These Obama veterans were joined by people like Aaron Pickrell, chief of staff to Ohio’s governor Ted Strickland, who had worked his heart out for Clinton but now ran the Buckeye state for us. Marc Farinella, a longtime Democratic consultant, went back to his campaign-manager roots and ran North Carolina. Steve Schale, who worked in the Florida statehouse, took a leave to head up our team in the Sunshine State. These folks and their colleagues were some of the strongest state directors in the history of presidential politics.

  We also needed to build a staff for our yet-to-be-named vice presidential pick. Our selection for the top job on this team surprised many—we selected our old nemesis, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been Hillary’s campaign manager until she was fired after the Maine caucuses. The vice president’s campaign chief of staff was a largely organizational figure; key strategic decisions would all come from our core Obama team. We needed a leader who would make sure everything was well managed day to day, someone who could get our VP up to speed quickly on message and electoral strategy, and make sure he (or she, at this point) was briefed properly as breaking news or new attacks surfaced.

  After she left Clinton’s campaign, Patti came under fierce criticism for how she managed their money, and she was a prominent contestant in the blame game of how they had been outfoxed on electoral strategy. Those may have been valid criticisms. But Patti had been Hillary’s scheduler and then her top political person; her skill set matched up very well with the position we needed to fill. As a Chicago native, she was also a known quantity to Axelrod and Obama—Ax in particular—and they felt she would be a good fit.

  Many Clinton supporters attacked us for hiring Patti, suggesting we were rubbing salt in a wound and insulting Hillary by bringing on the person they blamed for her defeat. One insider reacted to Patti’s hire by saying, “Translated subtitles aren’t necessary. There is no other way to interpret this other than ‘[Expletive] you.’” Wow.

  This took me by surprise. Suggesting we had the time or inclination to make important hires based on what would annoy Clinton partisans was nuts. We stuck to our guns and tried to explain to those who asked that we would never be illogical or mean-spirited in making any hire, particularly one so important to the campaign’s smooth operations. We brought in other Clinton campaign veterans, including senior people like Clinton’s policy director and speechwriter and many of her state staff. There was a lot of talent out there and we needed the help. Secondarily, we thought it would expedite the healing and make Clinton’s supporters around the country feel more comfortable getting involved.

  Fitting all these new people into the framework of our well-oiled campaign offered its own challenges. Our existing senior staff sent a message to the new additions: We had largely been a collegial campaign with a healthy culture, relatively devoid of drama. If that changes, we asked the newbies, where was the first place we’d look to figure out why? The message was not lost. For the most part, the assimilation went well. Having strong continuity in our campaign made this task easier. We w
ere not making wholesale changes—we simply strengthened and expanded our core, which remained fiercely loyal and like a family.

  This unity was highly unusual in Democratic presidential campaigns. Most organizations experience upheaval at some point, as the pros from Dover come in to replace some of the candidate’s loyal, local inner circle. Barack did not want that. “We rode into town together, we’ll ride out together, win or lose,” he often said.

  Once we squared all this away, I turned my attention to the one remaining senior position that needed to be filled: mine. In early spring I told Barack that once we had sealed the nomination I would step down as campaign manager. I pledged to stay heavily involved, but I could no longer run the show in Chicago.

  I was not abandoning ship. I fundamentally reject the notion that any member of the staff is irreplaceable. Fathers, however, are. I had been largely absent from my young son’s life for over a year. We had a baby due two days before the general election; I wanted to spend some time with my boy before he had to share me with a sister.

  My wife had decided to leave Chicago and return to Washington in August, in order to be with family and old friends for the last months of her pregnancy, and to allow our son to settle into a new hometown and start preschool with the rest of his class. Unfortunately the home we would be moving back into was being renovated, meaning my four-year-old and his extremely pregnant mother would spend two months staying with various friends and family, hoping the house would be ready before the baby came. I knew it would be tough and I couldn’t stomach not being there to help.

  Barack was not happy with my decision. He had come to lean on me and we had developed a solid relationship. There was also a comfort factor; with everything else Obama needed to do, he did not want to have to adjust to a new manager to boot. I thought perhaps Jon Carson, who had masterfully managed our state operations in the primary, could step in. I tried to get Ax’s approval on this, and he shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, Carson would be great. But you’re not going to leave as manager. Obama simply won’t allow it.”