David Plouffe Interview

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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If he were less shy and had a funny accent, David Plouffe would be every bit the household name that James Carville is—perhaps even going on Oprah and taking cameo roles in Hollywood movies. Plouffe is, after all, "the unsung hero" of  the "best political campaign in the history of the United States of America"—which is how Barack Obama described him before a global television audience, in the mother of all shout-outs, on the night he was elected Leader of the Free World.

At 41, Plouffe (rhymes with "no fluff") will probably never top his historic achievement of managing the campaign that gave this nation its first African-American commander in chief. The juggernaut Plouffe led, which grew to a payroll of 5,000 before Election Day, raised record amounts of cash from millions of small donors, defeated the once-invincible Hillary Clinton machine, and crushed the flailing Republican nominee, John McCain. Obama's success was so overwhelming that it's hard to remember those early days when the freshman senator from Illinois was the longest of long-shots and the darkest of dark horses in a country still troubled by issues of race.

But, as the press-averse Plouffe told Portfolio.com in an exclusive interview, Clinton might well have won the nomination if she had just competed in the far-flung caucus states that handed Obama his insurmountable delegate lead in February and March. "We woke up every day wondering, is today the day they're going to show up in Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State?" Plouffe said. "And every day they didn't, that enabled us really to build up our strength there."

Lloyd Grove: Just to begin, I'll do one small bit of full disclosure: I used to be married to your wife's sister, so that makes us ex-brothers-in-law once removed. But, hey, we're all ex-brothers-in-law in the family of man.
 
David Plouffe: In some way, if you do the charts deep enough, yes, that's right.
 
L.G.: The goal of this interview will just be to get you to teach us a little bit of Presidential Campaigning 101 and also to give us a couple of insights from your own experience in this last campaign. You've been involved in several presidential campaigns before. You did [Iowa Senator Tom] Harkin in '92, you've done [Missouri Representative Dick] Gephardt. Walk me through your previous presidential campaign experience.
 
D.P.: Those were the two, then I did a lot of the work for the D.N.C. [Democratic National Committee] during the general election of 2004. We, meaning David Axelrod and I, did a lot of the advertising—like McCain this time. The R.N.C. [Republican National Committee] was more of a major actor than the McCain campaign was, because they were in the federal system. We did a lot of that work in '04 for the D.N.C. Gephardt was '04. The other thing is I spent a lot of '97 and '98, when Gephardt was planning on running against Gore, as you might remember. I spent two years doing a lot of planning and work on that. It gave me a lot of understanding of Iowa and New Hampshire and how the process works, that early states were of paramount importance, that if it got into a long, drawn-out affair, it was going to be a delegate-by-delegate battle, and also that the way the media covered the race did not reflect how the race might be decided. So that took a lot of discipline not to play their game but to play our own.

L.G.: Okay, why don't you give me a sense of the scale of things? Basically a presidential campaign is a business. It's a public company of which you were the C.E.O., and it's only a temporary company, and the goal is to get 50 percent market share plus one. I guess in the primary phase it's less than 50 percent. But give me a sense of the scale. You had 1,000 on your payroll? How much money came in and went out?
 
D.P.: There are business analogies. One is, we're a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don't have quarter after quarter to succeed. You either win or lose on Election Day. It is a very accelerated environment. For us particularly, because we weren't planning to run for president, he got into this very unconventionally. It's like taking off while you're fixing the wings on a plane. You're up on the high wire, but by the end we raised over three quarters of a billion dollars, over $750 million dollars. We had over 5,000 employees, we had millions of active volunteers. So it was a big organization. The most important thing for me as a manager was the senior staff. If you don't have strong senior staff, you're going to struggle, and I was blessed to have a strong senior staff. And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.
 
L.G.: And what were those metrics?
 
D.P.: It depended on the job. If you were a fundraiser it was how much money you raised. If you were a field organizer, it was did you recruit enough volunteers? If you were in the operations part of the campaign, were you processing things quickly enough? We were kind of a service organization in some respects to the states. We had a whole team in Chicago there to serve the states, who were out there in the battleground and war zones. And so we can't afford to have any delays in what they need. People who are cutting lists, data people—it all has to be both accurate and quick. I think we were a very agile organization, even as we got big we kind of maintained that insurgent feel and that's very important. I think we were much more nimble than Clinton or McCain.

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