David Plouffe Interview

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L.G.: So there was really no follow-through from kindergarten, when he first announced for the office? [The Clinton campaign had mocked Obama for writing an essay when he was in kindergarten saying that he wanted to be president.]

D.P.: Exactly. A big hiatus there.

L.G.: There is another aspect to this. In business, you don't have your competitors—say you're Pepsi and they're Coke —saying that actually Pepsi has poison in it. And if you drink it, you're going to die. So you don't have that aspect in real business because I think the Federal Trade Commission would step in.

D.P.: That's right. Exactly. In real business, there's no doubt that there's competition and you're fighting for market share. It's a much more genteel affair, trying to go from A to B. But in a campaign you've got arrows flying at you every day from your opponent, from the press. That's your goal every day, you're trying to accomplish something every day—a message you're trying to drive, voters you're trying to contact, money you're trying to raise. This isn't like shooting free throws. That's one of the things: Can you stay upright every day? You want to accomplish what you need to accomplish, and that's a very important difference between what we do and what business does. And it makes it more complicated.

L.G.: You mentioned not getting distracted. I guess one obvious distraction was the Reverend Wright affair. Can you think of anything else that reached that level?

D.P.: No doubt we had challenges. I think, first of all, getting the campaign up and running was a huge challenge.

L.G.: Tell me how you did that. Give me the timeline.

D.P.: You know we started really in January of '07. Here's why. We had a lot of great staff who gravitated to us, who were inspired to work for him, weren't in it for their own reasons, and so we were very quickly able to attract a great staff. From the very beginning it was clear there was going to be a pretty strong grassroots appeal, although no one could've predicted it would grow as large as it did. We had some assets, but it was a challenge. Listen, it was brutal to try to get this up and running in a matter of weeks. We had to find office space, we had to get accounts up and running, we had to raise some initial seed money, we had to get staff hired in all the states. And, again, almost anybody who runs for president spends years planning for this, right? So you kind of turn the key and you have a plan, and we didn't have a plan. As challenging as it was, I think in retrospect it made us a better campaign, because we didn't have some stale playbook we were following. We were kind of making it up as we were going along, but I think in a very effective way, because the electorate changes and technology and techniques change so we weren't wedded to any of the old ways of doing things.

L.G.: Give me a sense of what the candidate's involvement in all this was. You're C.E.O., he's chairman of the board. Tell me how down in the weeds he got and how that whole interaction worked.

D.P.: I think in the beginning, circumstances dictated it. We didn't have a lot of time to dilly-dally in  the beginning, we just had to move, make decisions, and move. I think that was helpful because then the organization, and he and I, developed a good way of working. I kind of got to know what decisions he would want to be involved in. He really spent a lot of time on policy decisions, what's his health-care plan going to look like, what's his energy plan going to look like? He spent a lot of time thinking about how he wanted to communicate things, then I got a sense of what decisions he'd want to be involved with, and what discussions. So I thought we had a very smooth way of operating, and part of it is because of that beginning period, we had to do a lot of things very quickly. I think a lot of it ended up working out well. He had confidence in the organization. Sometimes in an organization you can be really harmed by the inability to make decisions or to chew on things for too long, and we didn't have that luxury. The organizational mentality was, we're not going to dither, we're going to try and make smart decisions, and you have to know that not all of them are going to work out. But one thing that we didn't do in our campaign was revisit and that drives me crazy. If you run an organization, four weeks after we make a decision, "if we'd only done that"—you just don't have time for navel-gazing.

L.G.: Obviously Hillary was the front-runner, the prohibitive favorite to be the nominee when you got into the race. How did you view that campaign? Because obviously you've had relationships with and knew all the players in her campaign. For all I know you had worked with them in different races.

D.P.: Some of them. I would say we had a full appreciation for her strong standing in the race, and knew we were decided underdogs, and that informed most of what we did. When you end up in a competition like that, obviously it gets heated and you obviously want to win badly. You wake up every day trying to really do damage to them. We had a healthy amount of respect for her, and for their position in the race. They were as strong a front-runner as you'll find in American politics, and we didn't really dispute that. We thought we had a path to the nomination but it was a very narrow path. She had a lot of different ways to win and we only had one. We had to win Iowa, and then obviously we had to win this delegate battle, when it turned into a long race. We were huge underdogs. I think that sometimes gets lost years later—"Oh you raised all this money, you built this big organization." We were definitely a huge underdog in this campaign.

L.G.: Did you think at the time, if you can cast your mind back to the time you got into the race, knowing all the players in Hillary's campaign, did you think she had an Achilles' heel?

D.P.: Just that the country was looking for change and that Obama represented change more than she did, and it became clear as the campaign went on, that they probably didn't have as good a grasp about how this would unfold as we did. They ran much more of a national campaign, much more concerned about what the national press had to say. We were much more driven by what was happening in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Wisconsin—that was their Achilles' heel as far as their campaign. They were a very good campaign, they raised tons of money, they were very aggressive, they worked the press hard. She was a relentless and focused candidate. They had a lot of things going for them, and obviously if we had not won Iowa, we probably would've gone belly up—so Iowa was a high-stakes thing.

L.G.: I know that you use the pronoun "they" for Hillary's campaign, as though they were like a unified entity and not trying to kill each other behind the scenes all the time. I have to think that one advantage that you had over them is that you had a very collegial environment and they—which is I guess the standard operating procedure for presidential campaigns—were constantly at each other's throats.

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