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

by David Plouffe

  By keeping McCain and Palin joined at the hip, they were sacrificing one of the most crucial components of potential electoral success: their reach into battleground markets. On a day when McCain and Palin were together, they did maybe four events, sometimes three. Traveling separately, Obama and Biden would do at least three events each, usually more. So we were doubling our exposure relative to theirs in the battleground markets, dominating local news, and garnering the organizational benefit of having our candidates rally volunteers and test the field operation. By the end of the campaign, our two principals had done almost twice as many events as their Republican counterparts. That differential was priceless.

  Palin was a phenomenon all the way through. Cable stations covered at least part of just about every speech she gave. They rarely covered Biden like that. While we complained, citing the need for balance and fairness, we didn’t sweat it. In one day Biden would be in, say, Joplin, Missouri; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Flint, Michigan; and Toledo, Ohio, generating terrific, on-message coverage. So it wasn’t hugely important to us that Biden’s speech be covered on CNN. Biden and Obama both did a lot of local interviews as well, to amplify and increase the coverage our stops were getting. In the beginning, Palin did much less of that, further eroding their footprint.

  We misfired tactically in one area at the end of August and beginning of September. While we saw little or no evidence that the celebrity attack was hurting us, we got a bit defensive and decided to start doing fewer rallies, and the ones we did we would hold after the nightly news broadcast. This ensured that the pictures on the news and in many papers, both locally and nationally, would be of Obama in more intimate settings—on a shop floor, in a diner, taking questions from smaller crowds.

  We had always diversified our events. The campaign wasn’t one long string of rallies, day after day. But during this time period we lost our balance and in many ways our energy. Our instinct—primarily Axelrod’s and mine—was off. We let the attacks and press narrative of the moment get into our heads and compensated by changing course, though there was no evidence we should. Our state staffs were especially unhappy with the change-up because rallies were the best way to attract voters in large numbers; we found that previously undecided or lean-Obama voters who attended rallies converted in high percentages.

  So for a while in late August, it was like the candidates had reversed roles. McCain, with Palin’s assist, generated large crowds and enthusiasm while Obama’s energy felt stagnant and produced desultory events. Recognizing this shift led us to rectify our course and resume regular rallies. Our state staffs were thrilled.

  We largely stayed away from engaging Palin directly during the fall. Obama slipped up only once. During an interview on CNN, he took the bait on a question comparing his experience to Palin’s. He dived right into the resume game, and within hours it spawned stories everywhere about Obama versus Palin on experience. The last thing we wanted was to be drawn into that battle.

  That night on our evening call with him, I started to raise the interview. Obama cut me off. “I messed up and took the bait,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  Every interview he was doing in this period was about Palin, Palin, Palin. I give him credit for letting it get to him only once.

  The week to ten days after the Palin pick were tough externally. National polls showed the race very close, some even giving McCain a slight lead. The public state polls also showed a closer race than they had in August, though if you were to predict the Electoral College based on looking at them cumulatively, we would have won, albeit narrowly.

  But as we headed into the second week of September, and things were settling down a bit post-Palin, previously undecided voters began to make up their minds. In state after state, we started winning independents who expressed a preference, and Democratic enthusiasm really started to rear its head. A little less than two months out, our voters showed more excitement about voting for Obama than theirs did for voting for McCain.

  By this point we were running a more forceful campaign in the battlegrounds than McCain was. While we had clearly outspent him on the ground in terms of offices and staff in the lead-up to his convention, our advertising spending during that period was about equal. But now that he had entered the federal finance system and we were out, the disparity began to emerge in ad buys as well. In many markets we were running positive ads, others challenging McCain on the issues, a response ad to his attacks, and ads geared toward women, seniors, and younger voters, as well as African American and Latino voters. And these ads blanketed every medium, from TV to radio to the Internet.

  The funds at the McCain campaign’s disposal would be at best a third of ours because of our respective decisions on public funding. They were generally running a couple of TV ads, but these did not seem targeted to specific demographic groups, and they did very little radio or online. The RNC was spending tens of millions on the air for McCain, but our testing showed these ads were woefully ineffective. The RNC and McCain, exploiting a loophole in the law, were pooling some of their money and running what are called hybrid ads. Since party money was being used, these ads could not be just about McCain and Obama. To meet this legal requirement, McCain-RNC ads featured fifteen seconds of McCain’s message before making a tortured turn to attack Democrats generally, usually by showing images of Democratic senators like Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Dick Durbin.

  The voters we researched found these ads utterly confusing. They didn’t know the featured politicians and kept wondering who they were. Many voters even forgot what the attack on Obama was supposed to be. We almost (but not quite) felt sorry for the McCain high command, saddled with this terrible hybrid construct as the only way of stretching their dollars.

  But what satisfied us the most was seeing our advantages in cash and organization finally begin to materialize in the numbers. I thought a superior, historically well-financed series of battleground campaigns could be worth anywhere from one to four points, which would make all the difference in a close race. And that’s what ultimately mattered: not snarky ads or manufactured controversies, but how we were doing every day with the voters who would determine the outcome in the battleground states. How many did we register today? How many sporadic-voting Democrats did we contact? What was our support level like with independent women voters between the ages of thirty and fifty in a certain state? By that measure, even in the midst of the turbulent Palin period, we liked what we were seeing.

  We were also amazed that McCain had not yet fully engaged in states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. In the latter two, they were doing nothing at this point—no staff, offices, advertising, or visits.

  Their silence in Virginia puzzled me the most. Virginia had changed demographically during the decade in ways that favored us. Democrats had won two successive governors races and a big Senate upset in 2006. We couldn’t have advertised any louder our intention to win Virginia and our belief that it was critical to our strategy. Obama and Biden traveled there constantly, and we had built a massive campaign based out of Richmond that stretched across the state. By my calculations, if McCain lost Virginia’s thirteen electoral votes, his chances to win dropped below 10 percent. He’d have to win multiple Kerry states to make up the gap.

  What was particularly amazing about the McCain indifference was that they were headquartered in Virginia, right smack in the middle of our ferocious campaign. And John McCain lived in Virginia and was there with some frequency. Yet they didn’t hold their first campaign event there until September 10. I marked it down as another instance of gross malpractice on the part of his staff. They must have thought that to lose traditionally Republican states like Virginia and North Carolina meant they were doomed from the start; better, then, to dig their trenches in a narrower set of traditional battlegrounds where they figured the race stood a real chance of being decided. But that looked at the race as a national contest, where individual strategies and campaigns in states were of
minimal value. We saw things completely differently.

  On a phone conversation with Obama, I was reviewing the state of play across the board and could barely contain my incredulity that in some of our key targets, McCain was still either leaving the playing field to us or not contesting as hard as I thought he should.

  Obama laughed. “You know, Plouffe,” he said, “most people would be celebrating the fact that their opponent is making bad decisions that could make winning easier. But you seem to be bemoaning it, almost like you’re offended by it.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that until now,” I replied. “But I think on some level I am offended.” I tried to find the right words to capture my feelings. “This is for all the marbles,” I told Obama, “the presidency of the United States. You can’t leave any stone unturned. And making excuses about money, or that ultimately if we lose a state like Virginia, it means we’re toast anyway—it just doesn’t cut it. This is a war. You cannot leave certain fronts unprotected. They run the risk of losing this race not by losing Ohio, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, but by losing states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. These states are not linked. What is happening in one does not happen in all. The strategy and effort in each state matters. We could lose what’s considered a more favorable state like Colorado and win a harder state like Indiana, simply because we believed we could and the McCain people left it to us and never competed.”

  Obama concurred. “It’s why we have to keep stretching the playing field,” he said. “What you just said is the avenue to victory we have to keep in place.”

  Our agreement on this was part of what made my job easier. But I could tell that the rest of our party was getting restless. Even internally, our media team kept asking me if we shouldn’t trim our spending in places like Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri to concentrate on states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

  But I had never believed more strongly in our game plan. We needed to keep pressing, not play it safe; even if we won states like Pennsylvania and Michigan by smaller margins, the complex puzzle we were trying to piece together would be more doable with more states in play. As the Los Angeles Times put it in a September story about our electoral strategy, “If the map were a roulette table, Obama would be dropping chips all over.” Well said, I thought. We were not going to start loading up our chips on just a few numbers.

  I quickly shut down the internal debate—we were not a democracy in this regard. Still, there was no doubt that if we lost the campaign, I would go down in infamy for spending too much time and money in Virginia and North Carolina.

  The New York Times was preparing a front-page story on the party’s nervousness about our campaign after the GOP convention. The gist was that Democrats thought we were mishandling Palin, she had thrown us off our game, we were not running an aggressive enough campaign, not attacking enough, and were in danger of losing must-win targets because of our pursuit of untraditional states.

  It sounded like a classic Times story, though this kind of criticism was not surprising. Whenever a campaign in either party goes through perceived turbulence, there is never a shortage of unnamed officials and operatives willing to point fingers. Some even reproached us directly. I had one governor tell me our “tepid” response to Palin had “doomed us to fail”; a Democratic operative said to me, “I never thought you guys would lay down like our previous nominees. But it’s the same nightmare and you guys won’t wake up and fight back.”

  The Times story would be a headache, but I thought it might also present an opportunity. I told Bill Burton, our press secretary, that I wanted to go on the record for the story, which was a bit unusual; generally I avoided press interviews. But I wanted to send a strong message—externally and internally—that we were confident and would not fall prey to nervous navel gazing. “We’re familiar with this,” I told the reporters, “and I’m sure between now and November fourth there will be another period of hand-wringing and bed-wetting. It comes with the territory.”

  They loved the quote but doubted their editors would allow it to run. I said if it got rejected, they could use just “hand-wringing,” but I vastly preferred the original. To my surprise and pleasure, they ran the unedited quote. I could tell our staff at HQ loved it—it was defiant without being entirely arrogant—and I wanted to remind them that we never made decisions based on armchair critics and wouldn’t start now.

  The morning the story ran, I received a very distressed call from a senator who was a loyal and great supporter of the campaign. “David,” he said with concern, “my colleagues here think that you’re calling them bed wetters.”

  “Senator, I am,” I replied.

  No organization can survive flitting from thing to thing, trying to please outside observers. Win or lose, I was not going to allow the second-guessers, who didn’t have the facts or numbers to back up their opinions, to take us off our game plan.

  Once again, we knew who we were. The two main pillars of the campaign—the message and electoral strategy—were firmly established and not up for debate, which meant we could focus on execution. We made decisions quickly and grounded in clear and consistent principles. That is especially important when there is a chorus of critics hollering at you to change course.

  This period was tough personally, too, on everyone in the campaign. The pressure was brutal and the hours beyond what would be considered healthy or tolerable in most situations. Families were largely abandoned, relationships tested, friendships put on ice. We took strength from our bond as a campaign family based on our deep desire to see Barack Obama elected president. We also came together over the common circumstances of campaign life, the personal struggles, and lack of any normalcy.

  Though the finish line was in sight, these last two months felt like two years. My wife and son had left Chicago in mid-August. I watched them pull out of the garage of our apartment building and drive off, and for at least ten minutes I just stood there, staring at where the car had been. It broke my heart that they were leaving and would have to navigate without me the last two months of my wife’s pregnancy and my son’s acclimation to a new home and school.

  I planned to visit on my son’s birthday in the fall and if possible the weekend before the election, when our baby was due, but that was it. In this early- to mid-September period, when things were more than a little challenging, anytime I began to think the campaign was rough, I thought of my wife and son, who were bouncing between various friends’ homes. Our own house was still uninhabitable, and there was no guarantee they’d have a home or a husband and a father in time for the birth of our baby.

  The mounting stress of dealing with a difficult time in the campaign finally blew into the open on one of our daily, early-morning conference calls. For the first and last time in a two-year period, Axelrod and I got into a heated shouting match. The point of contention was insignificant, and to this day other members of the staff have different memories about what actually sparked the flare-up. All they remember is that for the first time, we blew up at each other. Ax and I can’t recall exactly what it was about, though I vividly remember the heat, if not the light. Most on staff recall it was some kind of dispute over scheduling Obama to meet with an editorial board or group of reporters, which I didn’t want to do and Ax did. The conversation went something like this:

  “Well, that’s fine,” he screamed. “We’ll just thumb our noses at one of the most powerful papers in the country.”

  I responded too icily and personally. “I didn’t realize discipline was situation dependent. You don’t want to let down your buddies in the press. We aren’t going to do something in the closing weeks that is not strategic.”

  “Give me a break,” Ax shot back. “It’s a couple hours. So is your fucking answer no? Is it?”

  “It should be clear it’s fucking no,” I spat out. “And this conversation is over.”

  “Fine,” Ax yelled back, and got off the call.

  When I got to the office tha
t morning, people who had been on the call tiptoed around me. Finally, Messina came into my office and said, “That was horrible. It was like watching your parents have a screaming match at the dinner table.”

  He was right. That’s not how we should have conducted ourselves. I had no idea how we had spiraled out of control so quickly. The pressure must have been mounting inside us both and needed somewhere to escape. Ax and I had worked together for years and generally got along beautifully. There was genuinely no tension simmering between us.

  I called him to apologize but he jumped right in. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know where that came from. We should never fight like that, much less in front of all the staff.”

  “Me, too,” I replied. “I can barely even remember what we were arguing about an hour ago. Clearly it was a proxy for other things. Anyway, it was bound to happen once. I just wish the subject had been worthy of the blowup.”

  Ax laughed. “Yeah. We blew our wad on silly shit.”

  15

  It’s the Economy, Stupid

  The economy had been worsening throughout the campaign. In early 2007, Iraq and health care were the two dominant issues, with the economy lagging behind in priority. But as the market softened, growth slowed, and jobless numbers began to creep up, economic concerns began crowding out most other issues. By the spring of 2008, the economy was front and center for voters.

  As the fall arrived, it had exploded as the dominant issue in the general election. Voters’ stock portfolios and retirement savings were taking on serious water, and economists began suggesting the recession could become long and severe, with many more millions of jobs at risk. In August, the investment bank Bear Stearns had collapsed, and there were strong rumblings on Wall Street that other financial institutions could follow.