From the ArcaMax Publishing, Arianna Huffington Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/ariannahuffington/s-642822-513707
I had arranged to meet David Plouffe, Obama's former campaign manager,
on Saturday afternoon at a
Plouffe has written the most important political book of the year (for
reasons I'll get to in a moment). It's also completely gripping. It
reads like a thriller. Even though you know how it ends, you quickly
get caught up in every twist and turn of perhaps the most remarkable
campaign in American history.
Along the way, I found myself tearing up when I read about the
campaign volunteer who had scrimped and saved ("Grabbed some ramen on
the weekends... Didn't take the girl to a movie") so he could donate
10 dollars to Obama, and laughed at the funny-in-retrospect tales
from the trail (like David Axelrod's BlackBerry crashing at a crucial
moment because of glazed doughnut getting stuck in the trackwheel.)
But it's not the insider look at the past that makes the book so
important. It's what it shows us about the present -- and the effect
it could have on the future.
Plouffe's book arrives at a crossroads moment for the administration
-- exactly one year after the election, and one year before the 2010
midterms. A lot has happened in that year, as the audacity of winning
has given way to the timidity of governing. But in recounting how the
campaign team -- and the candidate -- not only had the audacity to win
but was able to keep that audacity alive, day in and day out over the
long nearly two-year slog of the campaign, Plouffe has also shown the
Obama White House the way forward.
The book is a powerful reminder of what the country voted for last
year -- and could serve as the trigger for Obama and his team to
refocus and remember why the election mattered so much.
Most of the attention the book has gotten so far has focused on the
so-called "sexy" parts -- the saga of the Rev. Wright, the furor over
Bittergate, how Obama came to pick Biden over Hillary for VP. All of
which is serving to obscure the key takeaway from the book: the fact
that everything in the campaign flowed, as Plouffe puts it, from
Obama's conviction that "the country needed deep, fundamental change;
Washington wasn't thinking long-term... the special interests and
lobbyists had too much power, and the American people needed to once
again trust and engage in their democracy."
Plouffe hits this theme again and again in the book. And it's the
first thing we talked about when we met (me looking bleary-eyed from
my night of reading and underlining and writing in the margins;
Plouffe looking relaxed and refreshed, a far-cry from the profoundly
exhausted look he had the last time I saw him, in the midst of the
presidential run).
The book is "not a victory lap," he tells me. "It's a reminder of how
and why we won. We never forgot why we were running. That was our
North Star. And we held that North Star in our sights at all times. We
made many mistakes along the way, but we always remembered that we
were running because, as Barack put it, the dream so many generations
had fought for was slipping away."
Axelrod -- or "Ax" as Plouffe refers to him throughout the book --
summed up at the beginning of the campaign the core elements of the
message that would guide them: "change versus a broken status quo;
people versus the special interests; a politics that would lift people
and the country up; and a president who would not forget the middle
class."
Running a different kind of campaign became "shorthand" for the
campaign. Whenever they found themselves drifting toward standard
political behavior, they'd ask themselves: "If we do this, how is that
running a different kind of campaign?"
As Plouffe told me: "We made sure that everyone we hired internalized
our core message and defaulted to those touch points when making
decisions. For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to
remain faithful to its principles all the time."
Plouffe kept returning to the mistakes they made, but only to
highlight the campaign's saving grace -- its ability to
course-correct, a vital survival mechanism for any successful
campaign. Or successful White House.
Early in the book, Plouffe describes a tense meeting with the
candidate in April 2007 , after it became clear that Obama was having
a hard time connecting with voters turning out to see him. Ax,
Plouffe, and Peter Rouse were brutally honest with him. And the
candidate agreed about the need "to find his authentic voice and
reconnect with the fundamental concerns that drew him into the race in
the first place. He had run to challenge the bankrupt and conventional
politics of Washington, not master it."
Then there was the senior staff meeting after their dismal showing in
Pennsylvania, where Obama announced: "I want us to get our mojo back.
We've got to remember who we are."
Plouffe also mentions the difficult decision made right before the
Iowa primary to decline John Kerry's offer to endorse Obama -- a move
campaign insiders felt was the wrong message to send to voters looking
for change. "In the end," writes Plouffe, "the tough decision we made
was unquestionably the correct one. Just about every time we took the
road less traveled, we benefited."
That included the decision, which Plouffe fought hard for, to have the
campaign headquartered in Chicago because "D.C. is a swamp of
conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck a campaign down, and we
needed to think differently." Maybe the answer to the last nine months
is to move the White House to Chicago.
Indeed, reading the book, I often found myself wondering what
Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what
the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters
worked so hard for?"
How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that
"the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were
getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American
people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?
How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that
"the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with
the same old players and expect a different result" become the
president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying
the same old politics, expecting a different result?
How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he
"would not forget the middle class" choose as his chief economic
adviser a man who recently argued against extending unemployment
benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great
Depression?
I'm referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House
official I spoke with -- later confirmed by sources in the White House
and on the Hill -- Summers was against the extension. And it took a
lot of congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president
to overrule him.
And, according to another senior White House official, when
foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning
meeting, Summers' response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be
done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.
Nothing can be done -- pretty much the opposite of "Yes we can," isn't
it?
According to Plouffe, "reform is in Obama's DNA." Then how do you have
in your inner circle a man who has "nothing can be done" in his DNA?
Unless, of course, the problem on the table has to do with Wall
Street, in which case "everything can be done, has been done, and will
be done."
Obviously, an administration needs to hire people who weren't part of
the campaign. But the danger comes in hiring those who don't even
share the goals of the campaign. That's why "The Audacity to Win" is
so desperately needed right now.
It reminds us that, not that long ago, the conventional wisdom was
that Candidate Obama didn't have a chance and that Hillary Clinton's
nomination was inevitable. That's the same conventional wisdom that
tells us that President Obama doesn't have a chance at really changing
things and that the ultimate victory of the entrenched special
interests is inevitable.
But the Obama campaign didn't buy into the conventional wisdom then:
"We had a mountain named Hillary Clinton in our path that we had to
find some way to scale, get around, or blow a hole through," writes
Plouffe. And the Obama White House doesn't have to give into the
conventional wisdom now. It just has to get its mojo back.
One way the White House can do this is to have everyone there read
Plouffe's book, filled as it is with page after page after page of
reminders of who put Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
"We knew who we were," writes Plouffe, "a grassroots campaign to the
core. We started with our supporters on the ground and they led us to
victory." This grassroots effort "was a prime motivator for Obama to
run, the belief that the American people needed to reengage in their
civic life... Obama felt in his gut that if properly motivated, a
committed grassroots army could be a powerful force. Over time, the
volunteers became the pillars that held the whole enterprise aloft."
I asked Plouffe what happened to the 13 million people on the
campaign's e-mail list -- a list he compares to having "our own
television network, only better, because we communicated directly with
no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number
of votes we would need to win."
"Volunteers have made 300,000 calls to Congress to support the
president's health care plan, and held thousands of events around the
country," he told me. "But it's hard to maintain the intensity of the
engagement."
Of course it's hard. But, as he puts it in the book, "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."
And no amount of rationalizing and sugarcoating can change the fact
that the spark has not been preserved. And that we are a less strong
country for it.
One of the reasons Plouffe gives in the book for the campaign deciding
to forgo public funding was that, as he writes, "most painfully,
taking the federal funds meant losing control of our secret weapon: we
would have to largely outsource our entire grassroots ground campaign
to the DNC." Which is exactly where the grassroots list -- rebranded
as Organization for America -- is housed now. Painfully.
Plouffe talks about how the Obama team knew that in order to win, it
would have to "attain the holy grail of politics -- a fundamentally
altered electorate. We had to expand the electorate or we were
cooked." With the help of their grassroots army, they did just that.
Among people who had never voted before -- or who hadn't voted for a
long time -- 71 percent voted for Obama.
Plouffe feels genuinely connected to the movement he helped unleash.
"So many of the people," he told me, "who gave their heart and soul to
the campaign were people who had given up on the system because they
no longer believed they could trust politicians to deliver or really
change anything. It is imperative for our democracy that these people
are not disappointed. If they become disillusioned, they won't be
coming back for a long while."
"I feel such an obligation to them," Obama told Plouffe during the
campaign. "They believe in me. In us. In themselves. What keeps me
going day after day? Besides a clear sense of why I am running for
president, it's them, our volunteers. It is a special thing we've
built here and I don't want to let them down."
I asked Plouffe if the president had read the book. "He read a couple
of sections in it," he replied, "and even discovered a couple of
things he didn't know."
Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the
millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he
should read the "The Audacity to Win" from beginning to end -- and
rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have
forgotten.
Then he can complete the journey from The Audacity of Hope and The
Audacity To Win to The Audacity to Govern.
=========
Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.