Now, thirty years later, I was trying to get to 270 for real. Win or lose, I knew how fortunate I was to be in this position, managing a presidential campaign on the precipice of achieving something that would have a profound and lasting effect. I felt lucky to be working with this candidate and this campaign team, and with all our passionate volunteers, at this moment in history.
As I looked at the Chicago skyline and its reflection shimmering on the lake, I felt at peace despite the mistakes we had made throughout the campaign. We hadn’t left anything on the field and had run things the right way, trusting people, inspiring them, and thinking innovatively. It was hard to construct a scenario in which we would lose. But I had been down that road once before, on primary day in New Hampshire. If we lost on Election Day, it might take a lifetime to understand why, but it would not be because we screwed up the X’s and O’s of the campaign.
I took in a deep breath of the cool night air. I was ready for Election Day. And ready for it to be over.
What a difference the years had made. Though the campaign had started with little pressure or expectations of winning, I now felt weighed down by several factors that made the possibility of defeat unbearable.
I worried that if we lost, we could lose for a generation all the young and new volunteers and voters who got involved in our campaign. They poured their hearts into it; for many, it was the first time they’d ever taken this kind of leap, or even fathomed it. They believed in Obama, and in their capacity to affect the outcome of the election. Obama had ignited something very powerful in young people throughout the country. If that spark could be preserved, I was convinced we’d be a much stronger country for it.
As Obama often said: “I do not want to let them down.”
“Them” meant people like the high-school-aged group of young men, a rainbow of ethnicities, that I saw on the street the day before the election, some wearing Obama gear, talking excitedly about states and polls and what they thought our chances were. I had stopped and pretended to tie my shoe while eavesdropping, wanting to soak in the moment, because I knew I might never witness another one like it. I felt a deep obligation to make sure these kids were celebrating the next night so they might be following and talking about elections for decades to come.
At least 95 percent of our six thousand employees were under the age of thirty, most under the age of twenty-five. It was hard for me to imagine the depths of their heartbreak if we came up short. Most of the staff were field organizers, the people who worked most closely with our volunteers out in the states. They would be personally devastated, and so would all their volunteers. I wanted to avoid that situation, if for no other reason than to fend off thousands of therapy sessions in the years to come. People felt that strongly about what we were doing and the necessity of winning.
I also felt growing pressure because of my changing assessment of Obama. In the beginning, Ax and I would often say we were pretty sure he had what it took to be a very good president, but we remained uncertain as to whether he could turn into a very good presidential candidate.
Well, he turned into one of the best presidential candidates ever to grace the stage. A brilliant communicator and motivator, he rarely made a mistake and in this most grueling of transparent processes actually ended up stronger than when he started. He wore well on the American people and grew in stature over the course of two long years. It was a remarkable feat for someone who burst suddenly onto the national stage and who even as recently as three months before Election Day had been an unknown quantity to many general-election voters.
And the grassroots movement we built, the well-oiled machine that funded so much of our campaign, moved our message person-to-person and organized volunteers and voters—this was all his making. Volunteers came to the campaign because they were interested in him. That interest became action, and then it became passion. Their commitment grew over time—perhaps it was tested in moments, but the faith our supporters had in him developed into a powerful force. In turn, his trust and faith in them was crystal clear, and this could not have been more motivating.
But I no longer thought Obama had the qualities to be merely a very good president—he might have the qualities to be an excellent president, even one for the ages. Grandiose, I know. But the problems the next president would inherit seemed to mount by the day, and I thought Barack’s composure, intellect, desire to find common ground, and willingness to take on entrenched interests might meet the moment as well as any president had in recent memory, certainly going back to Reagan.
One night during the last week of the campaign, we did have a rare “What if I win” conversation. Sometimes we’d joke about it to lighten the mood in a rough moment: “Well, you think dealing with Ayers is bad, just wait until you have four seismic decisions on your desk in one afternoon.” But this time was different.
“You know, David,” he said, “when we started two years ago, I thought the stakes of this election and a change in direction could not be more important for the country. That need has only compounded. But the need for leadership and management and confidence building is more pronounced than we ever could’ve anticipated back then. And I think with the right help, I can provide that. And relish it.”
“As crazy as this sounds,” I told him, “I’ve thought for some time that you’re better suited to the presidency than the campaign. Running critical meetings all day, gathering diverse, thoughtful opinions, making decisions, using the bully pulpit here and abroad to bring about change in nonlegislative ways, trying to open government back up to the people—in all those ways you’re well suited to the job in normal times, but maybe even more so in extraordinary times.
“But let’s snap back to the task at hand,” I continued. “Or this conversation will go down in infamy.”
It was hard not to think about the future, and even though we had an election to close out, Ax and I became more and more concerned about what would come next. We were utterly confident in Obama’s capabilities, or his ability to put together a top-flight cabinet. But with the torrent of problems he would inherit, he would need a strong chief of staff. Without that, the promise of his candidacy would be sorely tested. Someone needed to be in charge, and right away, so his or her input would be reflected during the transition period if we won, when personnel decisions and priorities are established.
In my view, we needed that person in place the day after the election. The campaign would be over, and the structure we had spent two years building to surround Obama would cease to exist. We already had a transition process in place, managed by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, in close consultation with Pete Rouse. They had been working for three months to present Obama with different options for administrative structure, cabinet short-lists, and a process to decide how to sequence legislative priorities. All this would be invaluable, and John and Pete had done heroic work. But we needed to make a decision on who would be tasked to head up the staff and run the ins and outs of government during and after the transition.
We needed a chief of staff who would be an uncommon leader, someone tough, with a huge bandwidth and the ability to transact business at the highest domestic and international levels. This need was made even more pressing by the worsening economic situation. We were facing an emergency. Obama would need a strong general.
Ax and I were convinced only one person could play this role—Rahm Emanuel, at the time the number three leader in the House and a legendarily intense Democratic operative. In baseball, a five-tool player refers to someone who excels at just about everything. Rahm was a five-tool political player: a strategist with deep policy expertise, considerable experience in both the legislative and executive branches, and a demeanor best described as relentless.
Obama thought about a range of people for this job, but before too long settled on Rahm as his first choice. When Obama first broached the idea with Rahm, he was turned down flat. Rahm knew to take the job would mean derailing a career tha
t was heading toward a sparkling culmination with a role as Speaker of the House. And he had young kids and was very clear-eyed about what this would do to his family. When Obama suggested that the White House could be a family-friendly place, Rahm pushed back hard: “There’s only one family White House service is good for—the first family.”
I panicked at the thought Rahm might not go for it. The gap between him and the next best contender was a gaping chasm. But eventually he came around. I talked to him the weekend before the election, and while he was still officially mulling the chief of staff role, I could tell he had made the decision in his own mind. He was saying things like, “This is how I think we’ll need to deal with Congress,” and going over various personnel and cabinet ideas.
I felt a huge sense of relief. Even with all of Obama’s skill, leadership qualities, and vision, he would need this spoke in the wheel, a partner in conceiving, executing, and staying on track in all his priority areas—and, of course, someone who could be trusted to manage the unexpected crises and events that visit every White House with great frequency.
I signed off my conversation with Rahm by saying, “Enjoy your afternoon, Mr. Chief of Staff.”
“Fuck you,” he replied. For Rahm, famously profane, it was like saying “See ya.”
Election Day seemed like it lasted for a thousand days, but they were calm ones, at least. There were no major problems, only minor polling-place snafus, rain in Virginia, and some internal-reporting database breakdowns. But our huge and finely tuned organization was cranking on all cylinders. It looked like our turnout would be engorged in many places, and the GOP turnout modest.
The exit polls suggested an Obama landslide, but we had seen that movie before. We would wait until the actual votes came in before celebrating. The exits, if accurate, suggested that many of the narratives we fought through during the campaign would be turned on their heads. We looked to be winning Latino voters by almost forty points, a historic gap, and were doing better with white working-class voters than any Democrat since LBJ.
I spent the day in our Chicago HQ’s boiler room, watching as the prediction machines starting firing up. As the media announced the early results, we were winning what we should win, McCain was winning what he should win, and all the battlegrounds were either too early or too close to call.
Indiana and North Carolina polls close early in the evening, and as we saw the raw votes coming in and compared them to our goals and projections, we knew we were headed for a very good night. The preliminary tallies suggested both states would be close finishes. In our wide-map electoral strategy, both of these states sat on the outer edges of necessity; states like Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada were much more likely and important. If we were going to be this close in these two longer-shot states, reason dictated that in friendlier turf, we should have more breathing room.
Someone at Fox News, of all places, sent our press staff an internal memo shortly after 8:00 p.m. EST. Based on the exit polls and the actual vote results Fox’s number crunchers were looking at, they would be able to call the election for Obama at 11:00 p.m. EST. This was hard to get my head around. I felt like we were in a period of suspended animation, maniacally focused on crunching the data coming in even though it appeared the work would not be necessary. We had won.
All the networks called Pennsylvania when the polls closed at 8:00 p.m.—a devastating rebuke to McCain’s last-gasp Pennsylvania strategy. He would now have to run the table to win.
Then, the big news: Ohio was called for Obama. I sent an e-mail to my wife at that moment that read simply, “We won.”
With Ohio’s result, the election was over. As long as there were no surprises out west in states that looked comfortably in our column, like California, Oregon, and Washington, we would be over 270 with a bunch of states still to be decided, many of them now looking like they would fall into our lap.
At 11:00 p.m. EST, on November 4,2008, Barack Obama was declared the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Ax and I began our walk across the street to the Hyatt to join the president-elect. Our two-year odyssey was over. A new one was beginning, for Barack Obama, the country, and the world.
Epilogue
For me, the afterglow of winning a presidential campaign was fleeting. At about 1:00 a.m. in the same hotel where three hours earlier Obama and his family first learned he would be the forty-fourth president of the United States, Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and I sat down with a camera crew from 60 Minutes. The interview was to focus on how we put together the campaign that yielded such an improbable victory, and it would run the next Sunday.
We were all exhausted. The campaign was finally over, but rather than cutting loose at last, we were going to be conducting an interview that would be seen by tens of millions of viewers around the world who would be watching to gain insight into Barack Obama, no longer our candidate, but America’s new president-elect.
Given those stakes, it was perhaps ill advised for us to engage in some modest revelry. But after the two-year war we had just endured, putting off a valedictory brew any longer was simply not acceptable. Gibbs was losing his voice and fighting off a cold, and he and Anita smartly demurred. But Ax said he would join me for a nip. So we took our coffee cups, filled them with a little beer, and kept them in front of us during the interview. It could not have tasted better, and we seemed to handle Steve Kroft’s probing questions just fine.
After the interview wrapped up, we left the hotel and lingered outside. Of course this would not be good-bye forever, but it was the end of the unique experience we had just shared. And as brutal and unrelenting as the campaign had been, it was a pleasure to have gone through it with these three colleagues and the rest of our team. We had truly become a family.
We already knew that Ax and Gibbs would be going into the administration. Anita and I would not be (though Anita did relent and agreed by the summer of 2009 to serve as White House communications director). This split would filter down through the rest of the staff. Some members would move forward with Obama on his journey, working night and day to fulfill the promise of his presidency. The rest of us would be helping in smaller and less time-consuming ways.
We exchanged embraces and my last hug was with Ax. We didn’t say much and didn’t have to. He simply said, “The pleasure of a lifetime, brother.”
“Wouldn’t have wanted to walk the road with anyone else,” I responded.
And with that, the Obama for President campaign came to a close.
My flight out of O‘Hare the next morning was scheduled for 6:00 a.m., so I just stayed up and watched the coverage of our victory. The history nerd in me had a lot to appreciate about the particulars of the results, notably the victory we appeared to be headed toward in good ol’ Nebraska 2, which marked the first time the state’s electoral votes had ever been divided. I left for the airport at 4:30 and arrived at the security screening area in a fatigue-induced daze, carrying two pieces of luggage and my computer bag. The security officer told me I had one bag too many and would have to go back and check it. If I did that, I could miss the flight. So I asked if I could lose a bag in the trash can. The guard looked at me quizzically and said, “Your call.”
It was no decision at all. My wife was now three days overdue, the baby could come any moment, and I had promised my son I would be there on Wednesday to take him to school—for the first time in two years. I could not miss that plane. So I got on my knees, ripped open one bag, pulled my computer out and threw it in a suitcase, and started frantically rooting through the rest of my things. Finally I tossed one bag, much of its remaining contents, and a few clothes to boot in the nearby garbage. Now everything would fit in two bags.
Just then someone in line behind me said haltingly, “David Plouffe?”
I looked up to find a man I didn’t know with a concerned expression on his face. “Yes?” I asked, perhaps a bit impatiently.
“Are you okay?” he replied. “We won
, you know.”
I laughed. I must have looked like a madman, sleep deprived and unshaved, tossing my possessions into a garbage can. It was a long way from the dignified pinnacle of a few hours before. And somehow it felt terrific. I stood up, picked up my two bags, and smiled. “Never been better.”
I made the flight and two days later, in the early morning about fifty hours after the announcement of our victory, our daughter made her debut. May she always have such exquisite timing!
There was no question of my joining the administration. After the past two years and with a new baby to take care of, being a ghost father and husband was not an option. I had first discussed this with Obama in the spring, when I flirted with leaving as campaign manager after the epic march of the primaries. When I agreed to stay I told him flatly, “If we win, I have to be gone November 5. We have a baby coming and I have to dig in with my family.”
And I did just that. While many of my colleagues from the campaign were working around the clock on the transition and inauguration and agreeing to administration jobs, I had ample time, albeit it usually at 4:00 a.m. with a baby sleeping on my chest, to reflect on some of the lessons of the campaign, and what they might mean moving forward.
We were essentially a start-up business. We had had nothing when we began—no lists, no equipment, no talent pool just waiting for the green light. Our candidate had had little experience on the national stage and almost no relationships or experience in the states that would decide our fate. It was an enormous challenge to launch this effort, under intense scrutiny, while we were still trying to get the phones turned on and the computers up and running. But that formative period created our identity, and many of the principles and decisions we employed at the outset were instrumental in allowing us to win. I presume these ideas would have some value to any enterprise.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 49
