The Republican brand has some problems. I woke up, thinking about some Rolling Stone articles about how Obama won the primary. There is a great take down in The Atlantic about how Clinton lost it, but these one talks about the positive campaign that Obama put together.
As I awoke this morning, I was thinking about it because I wanted to tell my brother, someone who may have never voted for a Democrat, that if Obama wins, he should look toward the campaign that Obama has run for insight into how he would govern.
Obama is the head of an organization that sprang from nothing to more than 1000 employees and countless volunteers with a budget of $250 million in very short order. This organization gets a lot of praise for its ability to get stuff done. How does it function?
Obama underscored the theme again in June, when he addressed his entire Chicago staff after finally wrapping up the nomination. As he spoke, staffers poked their heads above gray, corporate cubicles in what could easily be mistaken for an E-Trade office rather than a presidential campaign headquarters.
“When I started this campaign,” Obama told them, “I wasn’t sure that I was going to be the best of candidates. But what I was absolutely positive of was that there was the possibility of creating the best organization. The way great things happen is when people are willing to submerge their own egos and focus on a common task. That’s my old organizing mind-set. It’s not just a gimmick, it’s not just a shtick. I actually believe in it.”
2) he found good people
For nearly 20 years, Rouse served as chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a position that earned him the nickname “the 101st Senator.” “His office inside the Daschle suite was the epicenter of the Democratic caucus,” says Jim Jordan, who managed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Daschle and Rouse before leaving to run John Kerry’s presidential campaign. “It was a superb organization, and Tom’s a rare political talent. But Pete was the skeleton over which it was all built.”
“Barack arrived at a point of transition for the party, in that Senator Daschle was leaving the Hill and Dick Gephardt had decided to leave politics,” says Cassandra Butts, a top Gephardt policy adviser and close friend of Obama’s from Harvard who helped lead his D.C. transition team in 2004. “There was this wealth of talent that was looking for a place to land.”
In Rouse, Obama identified a senior partner who could guide his dizzying ascent through the ranks of the Senate — and beyond. Butts arranged a meeting at the restaurant of the Mandarin Oriental. “It was very much us selling Pete on why he’d want to work for a freshman senator who was, like, 99th in seniority,” she recalls. Initially, Rouse declined the offer. Crestfallen over Daschle’s defeat, he was leaning toward leaving the Hill. “But Barack went back at him,” says Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, for whom Rouse also once served as chief of staff. “He told him, ‘I really want you to do this.’ And Pete reconsidered.”
3) they operate on the data, not hunches
Given how much has gone right with the Obama campaign, it’s easy to overlook how flawed its Plan A was. It was a classic momentum strategy: Win Iowa and the rest of the states will fall like dominoes. Just before the Iowa caucus, Plouffe — who, unlike Obama, is a man of few words — rallied the troops with a crisp address, delivered in his stern, pitchless voice. The logic seemed impeccable: “We’re gonna win the caucus, then we’re gonna win New Hampshire, and on the night of February 5th,” he said, cracking his puckish sideways grin, “Hillary’s gonna give her concession speech.”
Plouffe was wrong about New Hampshire — but instead of digging in his heels, he made a precise and nimble pivot that proved crucial to Obama’s victory. Realizing that the momentum strategy was shot, he immediately began deploying operatives to Maine, a state that did not caucus until five days after Super Tuesday — a shift that Clinton failed to make until the morning of February 6th. Thanks to the extra month of organizing, Obama went on to win Maine by 18 points, part of a decisive victory streak in 11 states.
4) Obama seems to be about doing the right thing
In other politicians, charisma often seems like compensation for some deeper, irreducible need: Bill Clinton comes so close, and listens so closely, because he wants to be hugged; George Bush slaps backs and gives his best friends nicknames because he, the draft-dodging son of a fighter pilot, needs to be the manliest creature in the room. With Obama, the charisma seems to stem from a remarkable ease with himself. When Frank Luntz, the conservative political consultant, walked into the young senator’s office for the first time, Obama sat on the couch and gestured for Luntz to take the big, formal chair behind the desk. “I’ve been in many, many senators’ offices, and never once have I been offered the senator’s chair,” Luntz says. “I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘If I knew you any better, I’d be lying down.’ What he was saying was that he was so comfortable with who he was, there was no need for any pretense or power trips.”
5) Obama listens to people, but is decisive
As an executive, Obama does not have an impulsive leadership style. When he’s running a meeting, Jarrett says, he does more listening than talking, asking questions and taking the temperature of everyone in the room. “Regardless of where you fall in the hierarchy, he listens to you as though you are the campaign manager. He focuses, he prods, he pushes, to make sure that he fully understands your position. That sets an important tone as well: When you go into a meeting expecting to learn and not dictate, it fosters camaraderie.”
But when Obama makes a decision, there’s no second-guessing. And though the campaign tries to learn from its mistakes, it doesn’t dwell on them. The Obama campaign had hoped to deliver a knockout punch by winning the Texas primary. Afterward, when the top staff rode home on the bus with Obama, there was no yelling or finger-pointing — just a determination to regroup and take care of business in Wyoming and Mississippi. “He doesn’t do a lot of looking in the rearview mirror,” says Jarrett.
As I was in my post slumber quiet time, I wondered when John Thune, the man who beat Daschle was up for re-election. I found a candidate for Senate, Joel Dykstra, in South Dakota, but there is no party affiliation on his website. He is a Republican.
Think about this turn of events: a Republican doesn’t put that label on a web site in South Dakota.