THE AUDACITY TO WIN
The Obama the Campaign Knew
Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, after a town hall meeting with veterans in San Antonio in March 2008.
One year after Barack Obama was voted into the White House, does the public want to relive the marathon 21-month campaign that began long before the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire and churned on through the seemingly endless calendar of primaries and the general election? After useful campaign books by Richard Wolffe (“Renegade: The Making of a President”) and Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson (“The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election”), is there anything illuminating left to say about the long, winding road to his historic victory?
THE AUDACITY TO WIN
The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory
By David Plouffe
Illustrated. 390 pages. Viking. $27.95.
¡OBÁMANOS!
The Birth of a New Political Era
By Hendrik Hertzberg
341 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
David Plouffe, shown in 2007 at the Chicago campaign headquarters of Obama for America.
Hendrik Hertzberg
In the case of Hendrik Hertzberg’s new book, “¡Obámanos!,” the answer is a definite no. Although some of Mr. Hertzberg’s political pieces for the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker and his blog entries at the magazine’s Web site, newyorker.com, were insightful at the time, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to go back and reread them now in book form — unless you really crave some transient acid flashbacks to the campaign and the waning years of the Bush administration.
“The Audacity to Win” by the former Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, is considerably more interesting. While Mr. Plouffe doesn’t serve up a lot of news and obviously retraces lots of familiar ground (including the by now tiresome debates about the debates, the gas tax and the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries) he gives readers a visceral sense of the campaign from an insider’s point of view.
And while reporters and political analysts have long since deconstructed the reasons for Team Obama’s win (from the candidate’s determination to bridge the red state-blue state divide; to his campaign’s mastery of the Internet; to the country’s craving for change after two terms of President George W. Bush), Mr. Plouffe provides a detailed and revealing account of exactly how he and Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, created and executed the blueprint that turned the junior senator from Illinois — this “skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name,” as the candidate once described himself — into a formidable political force who redrew the electoral map and defeated the huge, clanking Clinton and G.O.P. machines.
Mr. Plouffe chronicles how their little insurgent force — “packed in three to a desk in temporary space” — grew from a tiny start-up facing truly long-shot odds into a fully formed campaign that drew volunteers from across traditional political lines, raised record amounts of funds online from small donors and built a viral grass-roots operation. He describes the narrow pathway to success the campaign would have to trace to win. (In retrospect, many rivals would describe its execution as almost flawless.) And he recalls his team’s determination, in the face of myriad distractions, to try to stay focused on its overall strategy: win Iowa; push hard in other caucus states; build a small but insurmountable delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton; and in the general election go on the offensive by picking a wide set of target states “so that we could lose some and still win the presidency.”
Mr. Plouffe was a wizard at the delegate arithmetic that enabled Mr. Obama to secure the Democratic nomination and the Electoral College arithmetic that would defeat the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, and he tends to write in these pages like a math nerd — purposeful, uninflected, utilitarian prose without a lot of poetry. Unlike Mr. Axelrod, he is not particularly adept at articulating Mr. Obama’s worldview, but instead tends to lapse into boilerplate campaign-speak. (“The people of our campaign made this victory a reality. There is no more effective courier for a message than people who believe in it and have authentically embraced it.”)
He makes no effort here to put the campaign in context with Mr. Obama’s tenure thus far in office — for instance, he does not address why the successful use of technology to connect with potential voters has proved far less effective in galvanizing grass-roots support for health care reform — and in griping about media coverage, he frequently makes gross generalizations about the press.
On the plus side, however, Mr. Plouffe does an effective job of capturing the dedication of the volunteers he helped weld into an organization, even as he conveys the relentless pressure and stress of the campaign: when home, he notes, he often fielded phone calls from a spartan bathroom, the only place in his family’s small apartment where he could talk late at night without waking his wife and son.
He offers some acute assessments of the larger dynamics at play in the 2008 race, and he is frank about missteps that the Obama campaign made along the way — like failing to do early self-research on potential problems (including the explosive comments of Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.); becoming complacent after Iowa and losing the New Hampshire primary; and failing to go “in for the kill in Texas” and instead “splitting our resources with Ohio,” which insured that the primary race would drone on through Pennsylvania.
Mr. Plouffe is candid in his thoughts about the vice presidential pick, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., noting that for all his experience and savvy, he was “known to test even the Senate’s standard for windiness, taking an hour to say something that required 10 minutes”; he also notes that Mr. Biden shared “his belief that McCain valued unpredictability above just about everything” — an observation that would be borne out with the Arizona senator’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.
On Senator Clinton as a possible vice presidential selection, Mr. Plouffe quotes Mr. Obama’s saying that he thought she had a lot of what he was looking for — “smarts, discipline, steadfastness” — but worried that Bill Clinton might “be too big a complication”: “If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”
As for Barack Obama himself, Mr. Plouffe’s portrait simply amplifies what most readers already know about the president from earlier books and news reports: that he is an idealist who is also a pragmatist — cool, self-confident, deliberate, with a predisposition to take “the long view of things.” In addition, he is depicted as someone accustomed to being in control: when Mr. Plouffe first met him during his 2004 Senate race, he writes, Mr. Obama was “having a hard time allowing his campaign staff to take more responsibility for both the campaign and his life.”
“You just have to let go and trust,” Mr. Plouffe recalls saying, reminding Mr. Obama that he had “to be the candidate. Not the campaign manager, scheduler or driver.”
Mr. Obama is quoted as responding: “I understand that intellectually, but this is my life and career. And I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it. It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known in my political life. But I hear you and will try to do better.”
As in Richard Wolffe’s book “Renegade,” Mr. Obama emerges in these pages as a clutch player who can hit the three-point buzzer beater but who does not really like to practice. “Preparing for the convention speeches illuminated one interesting contrast between Michelle and Barack,” Mr. Plouffe writes. “Michelle wanted a draft of her speech more than a month out so she could massage it further, get comfortable with it and practice the delivery. Barack was always crafting his at the 11th hour. In this regard, Michelle was a concert pianist — disciplined, regimented, methodical — and Barack was a jazz musician, riffing, improvisational and playing by ear.”
