The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE 2008 election, Jeremy Bird got a call from Jon Carson, who had organized Obama’s historic victory in the Iowa caucuses. Bird was a young field director who started in 2004 with Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, then worked to secure better pay and benefits at Walmart. He entered Obama lore for his efforts in the 2008 South Carolina primary. Carson asked Bird to come to Chicago after Obama won and head up a special project. Bird’s job was twofold: to make sure all the data from 2008 were preserved and updated, especially the storied Email List (which contained about 10 million email addresses of Obama supporters) and to prepare a five-hundred-page “What We Learned” document. The preparation and analysis of that document led to the development in 2012 of the largest and most sophisticated field organization ever.

  It was also one of the first such grassroots operations at a national level. For generations, Democratic presidential campaigns usually subcontracted much of their canvassing and GOTV (get out the vote) to local organizations and unions. Political machines like the one the Daleys ran for a half-century in Chicago were mostly focused on electing local candidates, not presidents. Precinct captainally prefer, say, Richard Nixon to George McGovern, but their jobs at City Hall were dependent on winning votes for their Democratic bosses and other local politicians. To carry their precincts, they might offer tickets to a big parade, some homemade brownies, or, most important, the promise of help if the reliable voter had some problem with his garbage pickup or other city service. Unions meanwhile worked the rank and file, and liberal groups canvassed in liberal areas. That was about it in the field pay at a lower tax rate than MPa, and these GOTV structures atrophied greatly over time. Candidates like Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 built good field organizations in primary states but relied more on paid and free media for their general election campaigns. From the 1960s through the 1990s voters grew accustomed to aerial bombardments of TV ads but infrequently encountered door knockers on behalf of presidential candidates, even in highly contested states.

  That began to change in 2004, when a coalition of Democratic groups formed Americans Coming Together, a field organization funded largely by the billionaire George Soros. In Ohio, the pivotal state that year, ACT did well for John Kerry but got beat by Karl Rove’s 72-Hour Project, which mobilized evangelicals and others for a big push on the ground in the three days before the election. ACT suffered in part because voters at the doorstep respond less well to canvassers representing groups than to those making a pitch for specific candidates, a problem the Koch brothers would encounter in 2012 as their super PAC–funded organizations tried fieldwork.

  When he first weighed running for president, Senator Obama told Axelrod that he would jump in only if they built a new type of grassroots campaign. Obama had personal experience with this kind of work; in 1992 he had spearheaded an effort called Project Vote that registered more than 150,000 black Chicagoans and helped make Carol Moseley Braun the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. By 2008 he was taking the ideas he developed on Project Vote and applying them in a much larger and more complex effort called Obama for America, which exceeded anything tried before in grassroots organizing on a presidential campaign. The results were spectacular but not permanent. Obama’s political organization, renamed Organizing for America (OFA), helped rally support for health care reform but proved no match on the ground for all the new Tea Party groups.

  In 2009 and 2010 the White House, distracted by national crises, let OFA wither. But Jen O’Malley Dillon, the executive director of the Democratic National Committee, and Mitch Stewart made a decision in this period that would have big ramifications for the 2012 campaign and the future of the party. They convinced party chairman Tim Kaine to invest heavily in analytics at a time when most people had barely heard the word. It gave the Democrats a head start on developing Big Data products that could turbocharge field organizing, media buying, and other functions of a campaign.

  The 2010 midterms were a disaster for OFA, as tens of millions of Democrats they had shepherded to the polls in 2008 decided to sit out this election. The no-show Democrats weren’t generally angry at Obama; in fact it was his absence from the ticket that caused many to stay home. The thousands of OFA volunteers and dozens of paid staff still on the ground after 2008 felt crushed by the results, but there were compensations. “Our people learned how to lose,” Bird said later. “It gave them humility. They were so much better after 2010 because they had to be better.” The same was true of Bird himself and a couple dozen other young but senior staffers who had suffered through 2010 at the DNC and now brought their combat experience back to Chicago. This continuity from 2008 would prove essential.

  In Washington, the White House finally began to work in harness with the Democratic Party. Taking a leaf from Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Meeting, Democrats organized a “Common Purpose Project” that held meetings every Tuesday at 5 p.m. at the Capital Hilton, where leaders of more than one hundred progressive organizations could share their policy ideas with senior White House aid David Axelrodves. Unlike Norquist’s meetings, the Democrats’ weekly “Big Table” confabs were secret. After an early leak, officials like David Plouffe wouldn’t return until total confidentiality was restored. Eventually, the Big Table, under the leadership of Jon Carson, became a little known but critical link between the White House and the liberal base.

  In Chicago, the focus was more prosaic. The first task was to bring back those who had unsubscribed from the Email List and to register the millions of kids who had turned eighteen since 2008. In the early going, the door knocks and other voter contact would be targeted on hard-core Obama supporters who might become committed volunteers again. Then came the establishment of neighborhood team leaders, with eight to ten precincts apiece under local, regional, and state directors. Eventually more than thirty thousand of them became full-time volunteers. Finally, there would be “persuasion” of undecideds and a massive GOTV campaign for early voting and on Election Day. The whole thing would be much better organized than in 2008, which had already been the best organized presidential campaign in history.

  The heart of the field operation was a small office off the Floor that Bird shared with Mitch Stewart, a South Dakotan whose work running Virginia for Obama in 2008 put that state in the Democratic column for the first time in a generation. By now the two were old roommates, having shared an office at OFA inside Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, and they developed various Oscar-and-Felix routines. Stewart liked to dip tobacco and was a Diet Coke fiend, which left Bird (and sometimes Stewart) confused over which old Coke cans contained soda and which tobacco juice. They had the walls repainted with an erasable surface so they could constantly diagram their complex field maneuvers, like Eisenhower and Patton planning the invasion of North Africa.

  The two were relentless about keeping the focus on the old interactions, not the new technologies that were helping them sharpen their focus on the voters they needed to contact. “All roads lead to the face-to-face conversation,” Stewart said. “It’s not about the math; it’s about helping those relationships.”

  AT THE VERY first all-staff meeting in June 2011, Messina poured it on thick. In a Montana version of Rahm Emanuel famously losing part of a finger while working as a kid at Arby’s, he told the story of how he was so eager to work for pathetic pay on an early campaign that he took a night job to support himself at a corn-processing facility. One night, he got his pinkie mangled in a corn machine. “It reminds me every single day of how badly I wanted to work in that campaign and how I resolved to be the first in every morning and the last out and that you do whatever the fuck it takes to win,” he told the staff. He explained that he wanted the campaign to be a family, but he hated complainers. Success was the only option; they had to be all-in, all the time, at any cost as they built “the largest grassroots campaign in American history.” Then he held up his pinkie and said that anything other than that kind of commitment was unacce
ptable.

  Messina had a tough act to follow. David Plouffe was not just respected in 2008; he was revered as the beau ideal of campaign managers, a disciplinarian who spoke with the voice of God. Messina couldn’t win that degree of loyalty, but he picked up many of Plouffe’s tightwad qualities. A billion-dollar campaign rationed staples and pens. Unlike in 2008, almost no one was granted a David Axelrodv TV in his or her workspace, which meant lower cable bills and less distraction from work. (Big TV events were projected on white walls.) Travel and lodging expenses were strictly rationed, and it wasn’t unusual to see people sleeping in the conference room before shipping out the next day for battleground states.

  Messina could be brutal; under Emanuel, he had learned from the master how to tell people off. At other times, he was malleable. Senior staffers used him to deliver messages to rivals whom they feared confronting themselves. The result was that it could be hard to tell if Messina actually wanted you to do something or was merely the instrument of someone else. Early on, the manipulation was too transparent. “If Jim says, ‘I’m not mad at you, Axelrod is,’ then Jim gets to play the good guy, though you don’t actually trust that he is,” said one senior staffer. Over time Messina won the respect of his team for his entrepreneurial skills in building and running such a complex organization.

  Messina claimed to have read around twenty books about campaigns before accepting the job, and he took two things away from them: Presidential campaigns always revolve around which candidate builds a bridge to the future, and they are always, at bottom, choices. Above all, Chicago had to keep 2012 from being an up-or-down referendum on Obama’s performance. The unofficial motto, repeated endlessly by Joe Biden, came from the reelection campaigns of the late Boston mayor Kevin White: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” In early 2011 Messina and Patrick Gaspard, who had left the White House to become executive director of the DNC, spread that message on what they called “the Apology Tour.” They visited big donors and progressive interest groups around the country with the message that they understood their disappointment with the president, but he would do better in a second term.

  The campaign knew that journalists visiting the Floor needed simple analogies to shape their stories. So from the start, Chicago made no secret of its theory that 2012 was most similar to 2004, when Bush held off Kerry despite widespread unhappiness about the Iraq War. This time, in Chicago’s view, Obama was Bush, and Mitt Romney, the man they assumed all along would win the GOP nomination, was Kerry, the out-of-touch Massachusetts elitist and flip-flopper. For “Boston,” as Romney’s team was called (his headquarters were in a nondescript office building on Commercial Street near Boston’s North End), the analogous year was 1980, when the challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, was running neck and neck with President Jimmy Carter amid an awful economy until their only debate, held the last week of the campaign, helped change the dynamic and Reagan won in a landslide.

  Axelrod didn’t want to take the 2004 analogy too far, and not just because he thought Obama was a great president and Bush a horrible one. He felt that “Romney makes Kerry look like Benjamin Disraeli,” a reference to the distinguished nineteenth-century British prime minister. Unlike Kerry, Romney wasn’t merely in favor of one policy idea (in Kerry’s case, funding the war in Iraq) before he was against it. He was for dozens of things before he was against them, and vice versa. It was more than could be explained by the usual flip-flops of politicians, Axelrod thought. From the beginning of 2011, he argued that Romney’s behavior was “almost pathological.” In more charitable moods, he ascribed it to Romney’s role in business as the guy who came in at the end of negotiations and said anything to close the deal.

  Chicago was worried all along about Romney">Taxpayer Protection Pledge,Pa’s background in business. It was enormously appealing in focus groups of undecided voters. But just as Rove had attacked Kerry in 2004 on his greatest strength (his heroism in Vietnam), Axelrod knew from the outset that he would take a leaf from Ted Kennedy’s 1994 campaign against Romney and go straight at his storied business record. Even before Romney opened his mouth, Chicago had plenty of material, starting with the notorious photograph of a young Romney and his partners at Bain Capital gleefully holding dollar bills.

  If it did nothing else, the Occupy Wall Street movement that erupted in 2011 popularized the concept of the top 1 percent. Romney called the protesters occupying a park in Lower Manhattan “dangerous,” but the real danger was to his campaign. He immediately became the poster boy for the 1-percenters, the embodiment of the Wall Street multimillionaires so many Americans had once revered and now resented. But that resentment burned the president too. Chicago winced as it watched focus group after focus group blast Obama for the bank bailouts.

  Axelrod didn’t like to admit he was playing class politics, but he did so early and often. He divided the Republicans into the Tea Party and the “Martini Party,” the right-wing anti-Washington social conservatives and the traditional corporate country club Republicans who cared mostly about their taxes. “When Romney says, ‘Elect me, I know how to fix the economy,’ ” Axelrod said in mid-2011, “I think every voter is going to say, ‘Fix it for who? Who are you fixing the economy for?’ ”

  Obama had been skittish about sounding populist notes in 2009, when the banks teetered on collapse. But now he didn’t hesitate to sign off on class-based attacks on Romney. He had respected McCain in 2008 even as he concluded that he was clueless about how to rescue the economy. At least McCain was a war hero and (usually) a stand-up guy. The president had no such feelings toward Romney, whom he considered an empty suit, a man with “no core,” as Plouffe, echoing the president, said on TV. This wasn’t a new view. As early as the 2009 economic crisis Obama would mutter to old friends that he’d be damned if he’d “let Mitt Romney step in and get credit for the good stuff that happens after we’ve been through all this crap.”

  AFTER GENDER, ON which the Democrats held an advantage with women and meant to keep it, the most basic way to analyze the American electorate was along racial lines. In 2008 Obama won 95 percent of the black vote, 66 percent of the Latino vote, and 43 percent of the white vote. Those figures were seen as the high-water mark, and the defining question for Chicago was how much slippage from there was survivable.

  For Messina, holding the Latino vote was the most important part of the equation. He calculated that if Obama fell below 56 percent there, he was finished. Remembering that Hillary Clinton had beaten Obama in every primary where Latinos were a major factor, Messina figured there were more Latinos they could get who hadn’t been enthusiastic for Obama in 2008. And the registration possibilities were immense. Florida alone had 150,000 unregistered Puerto Ricans, an exploding Mexican American population, and young Cuban Americans who weren’t as conservative as their parents.

  Messina told the president he wanted to hire a Latina, Katherine Archuleta, as his political director, and Obama said fine. He was thinking along the same lines. Later, at Valerie Jarrett’s urg the twentieth century,

  The true inner circle of the campaign to reelect Obama remained tiny, but at some point the troops would need their marching orders. So in September 2011 a series of White House political meetings, usually held on Saturdays, commenced with about two dozen people, roughly half from the White House staff and half from the campaign. The first meeting was held in the State Dining Room, where the president made two fundamental points about why he had to win. First, he said, they were doing the right thing for the country. Second, the stakes were higher than in 2008. Defeat would not only reverse what they had accomplished; it would hurt a lot of Americans who were already suffering enough.

  After David Binder, the focus group expert, explained why voters were disheartened over the economy, Joel Benenson made a poll presentation outlining how the campaign intended to draw a contrast with Romney over who was better on creating economic growth. Later Saturday meetings, usually held in the
Roosevelt Room, included lengthy discussions of how to mesh policy and the campaign and sequence the rollout of various initiatives. Everyone agreed that the fight that fall over the extension of the payroll tax holiday was the least appreciated big event of the whole election cycle. Congressional Republicans were arguing against tax cuts for ordinary Americans. Chicago couldn’t have scripted it better as a way to tee up the election year.

  If Obama’s instruction on policy was often “Don’t relitigate,” on politics it was more often “Tighten it up,” an expression favored by Romney too. As a former political organizer himself, the president knew campaigns could lose focus. In the weekend meetings that followed, he was fully engaged in the details of his campaign. In retrospect, the biggest decision to come out of those meetings was to go early and hard at Romney—$50 or $60 million in ad buys in the early summer of 2012, when Boston had little on the air.