In my career, I had worked on a presidential campaign, a gubernatorial campaign, two Senate campaigns, and a ballot initiative. I thought I had seen it all—or at least most of it—but what awaited me in Chicago was like no campaign I had ever seen.
This was not a typical Democratic campaign.1
I didn’t fully grasp what was so different about it until years later.
In a dreary meeting room in a nondescript hotel in San Jose in 2013, President Barack Obama was meeting with some of the most important players in Silicon Valley. Around the table were founders and executives from the most important tech companies in the world. These were titans of industry meeting with the leader of the free world. It should have been riveting. But somehow it wasn’t. The conversation was focused on reforms to federal government information technology procurement rules, not exactly the stuff West Wing episodes are made of.
This meeting, like many others, was a response to the catastrophic failure of Healthcare.gov, the website where people were supposed to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. When the fate of your signature domestic policy accomplishment depends on a website and the website doesn’t work, it’s time to pay a visit to Silicon Valley.
I was “backbenching,” which is a White House term for staff who are in meetings with the president but didn’t make the cut for the table,2 and I was buried in my BlackBerry3 catching up on endless e-mails.
At one point, one of the attendees told the president that we needed to bring a “start-up” mentality to government. I perked up because I knew this would get a strong reaction from the president. He spent his life being lectured by business leaders, particularly those on Wall Street, who have little understanding of and even less experience with politics and government.
Instead of getting annoyed, the president declared: “You know, my 2008 campaign might have been the greatest start-up in history.”
It has become somewhat in vogue in recent years to draw comparisons between Silicon Valley start-ups and presidential campaigns. By the simplest definition, every campaign is a start-up. Start from zero, raise money, rapidly build a staff and operation, and then scale it to meet demand. But truth be told, presidential campaigns had been run the same way for the last forty years. Organized the same way, funded the same way, and run the same way. By 2008, we had moved into a digital world, yet campaigns (particularly Democratic ones) were analog anachronisms.
The fact that Obama 2008 functioned as a start-up wasn’t some specific choice we made. It was the only option available to us.
We had some top tech talent on the campaign, including Joe Rospars, who had been one of the leaders of Howard Dean’s Internet-driven campaign, and Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate from Harvard and a cofounder of Facebook.4 Obama was more Internet savvy than most politicians, but he had no particular experience in the tech industry. David Plouffe, our campaign manager and the architect of our effort, had spent his career in politics, not tech. We were traditional political operatives, frustrated with traditional politics, working for a nontraditional candidate. We ended up adopting a nontraditional campaign strategy for a very simple reason: a traditional campaign strategy would fail for Obama.
Our competitors in 2008 ran a slightly updated version of the losing campaign that John Kerry had run four years prior, and Al Gore had run four years prior to that.
You get the point.
Instead of the top-down, hierarchical campaigns fueled by rubber chicken dinners and geriatric party activists that had led to a mounting series of losses for the Democratic Party, Barack Obama took a different approach. He melded decentralized grassroots organizing and Internet-based enthusiasm with the most advanced technological tools and sophisticated data available. Our campaign forever changed how campaigns are run in the modern world. Campaigns are now massive data-driven entities that raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time. They set up tech-incubator-style engineering shops staffed by alumni of Google and Facebook. Along with all this firepower come huge logistical and organizational challenges that stress the management skills of the candidates and their senior teams.
As Democrats try to figure out why we lost the most winnable election in history and how we will win the most important election in American history in a few years, it’s worth going back to Obama’s 2008 campaign to see what worked.
For all the sexy data and tech, the killer oppo and gut-punching negative ads, and the inspiring speeches, nothing matters more than the fundamentals. You can get the fundamentals right and still lose, but you can’t get them wrong and win.
There are five building blocks for any successful campaign:
The Obama 2008 campaign got these right (maybe not on the first try every time, but we got there eventually). How we navigated these challenges not only helps explain the unlikely election of Barack Obama, but also paints a path forward for future campaigns as Democrats try to return from the wilderness.
In that first interview, Obama told me, “I have a great life. I don’t need this, and if I lose, I will just go back to my life in Chicago.” At the time, I was struck by the confidence in Obama’s voice and saw this sentiment as a real strength in an industry where the overly cautious tend to lose.
Before too long, I learned that what Obama told me wasn’t entirely true. Obama does not like to lose at anything—golf, basketball, cards, Scrabble, and most certainly campaigns. The president’s personal assistant or “body guy,” Reggie Love, a former Duke basketball player, once brought a Nerf basketball hoop into the anteroom of the Oval Office and the president would challenge visitors to a shoot-off and not start the next meeting until he had won.
But there was an essential truth in that statement. Obama wanted to be president; he didn’t need to be president. Many—actually most—people who seek the presidency do it out of a desire to fill some insatiable internal need for approval and adoration or to work out some deep-seated psychological issue dating back to childhood. Obama was different. He was incredibly comfortable in his own skin and had done the hard work of self-discovery and self-actualization as a young man grappling with his identity and the father he never really knew. He could afford to lose, and this gave us a strategic advantage over Clinton in 2008 (and Romney in 2012). The candidate least afraid of losing normally wins.
Obama’s have-no-fear attitude infected all of our thinking and planning. Most people think that the motto of the 2008 campaign was “Yes, We Can” or “Hope and Change”; it was actually something we abbreviated to the family-friendly “WTF.” This was our motto and our attitude. When faced with a choice between something safe with less upside or a higher-risk, higher-reward option, we always chose the latter.
We weren’t supposed to be in the race to begin with, let alone have a chance to win, so we were willing to take big risks. To use a Plouffe-ism, we believed we were best when we were on the high wire.
We would often one-up each other trying to come up with the craziest ideas. We took risks, because we had great confidence in Obama and were too green not to have tremendous faith in ourselves.5
Should we put the president on Meet the Press the Sunday before the Iowa caucus with the notoriously tough interviewer Tim Russert? Yes.
Should we do the first ever international campaign swing?6 Yes. Should we stop in Israel? Definitely. How about going to the West Bank? Absolutely.
Presidential campaigns are massive organizational efforts, and the better you do, the bigger the campaign and the more complicated the task. This was probably truer for the Obama campaign than any in modern history. No campaign had to go from a standing start to fully operational more quickly or under greater scrutiny.
It’s easy to look back on our historic victory and forget that we started from the bottom.7 But there was nothing glamorous about the early days of the Obama campaign.
On Martin Luther King Day, 2007, I arriveed at Obama’s Senate office to meet Robert Gibbs and Bill Burton. As I walked from the Metro to the Hart Building, where Obama’s office was, I tried to soak in the moment. It was hard not to notice the powerful symbolism of going to work to elect the first African American president on MLK Day.
In about twenty-four hours, we were going to release a video to the world announcing that Obama was launching a presidential exploratory committee. Technically, setting up an exploratory committee means that a candidate is taking a step toward a race, but has not made a decision. This was bullshit and everyone knew it. In 99 out of 100 cases, the candidates have already explored the race and are running. For all intents and purposes, we were about to announce Obama’s presidential campaign. That’s certainly how the rest of the world would see it and how they would grade our performance. There’s no such thing as opening off-Broadway when your name is Barack Obama and you just announced a challenge to the ruling Democratic political dynasty.
The media was in complete freak-out mode about a possible Obama run. Burton and I had spent the night before hiding from one of the Associated Press’s most dogged reporters who was trying to confirm rumors that Obama was running and we had joined the campaign.
No serious candidate had ever had such a short runway between even contemplating running for president and actually running for president. All eyes were on us.
John Edwards had been running for president nonstop for four years; the people around Hillary Clinton had been building a presidential campaign apparatus for at least a decade. Obama had decided a few weeks earlier, had no national political apparatus or network, and a ragtag group of staffers willing to bet their careers by taking on the Clinton machine. We had done none of the work that normally happens before an announcement. We knew the announcement was going to create a massive tsunami of interest, and we did not have anything near the necessary infrastructure to handle that interest.
Why not wait until we had our shit together?
We couldn’t afford to. There is nothing more valuable in a campaign than time. You can always raise more money, hire more people, or run more TV ads. But Election Day can’t be moved, and every minute wasted is one you will never get back. We were less than a year from the Iowa caucus, which was going to be make or break for our campaign. After Hillary Clinton’s losses in 2008 and 2016, it’s easy to forget what a political juggernaut the Clinton machine was in January 2007. Every day they were sucking up some of the best political and fund-raising talent as well as endorsements from key political leaders. The longer we waited, the bigger head start we gave her. John Kerry was the other factor pushing us to a quick announcement. Kerry had yet to rule out running again in 2008, and many of his key supporters were waiting for him to make up his mind before committing to another candidate. We knew that many of those Kerry backers were skeptical of Clinton and interested in Obama, but if Obama wasn’t in the race yet, a lot of those folks would end up in the Clinton campaign. So ready or not, we had to announce.
Plouffe described our situation as bolting the wings on the plane as it took off. It was terrifying and tremendously exhilarating.
The plan was to meet at the Senate and drive over together to the temporary office space we had rented to house our operations before the whole campaign moved to Chicago in a few months.
We hit some speed bumps right out of the gate.
First, because it was MLK Day, the Senate wasn’t in session, and Burton and I were locked out of the building and couldn’t get anyone on the phone to let us in. We decided to wait around the corner because we didn’t want to be spotted by any reporters wandering around Capitol Hill. After freezing our asses off for a while, someone came down to let us in.
Finally inside, Gibbs, Burton, and I were joined by Tommy Vietor, Gibbs’s deputy on the Senate staff, who was going to be heading to Iowa to work on the campaign, and Jon Favreau.8
We quickly realized that we were supposed to send the announcement video to the press via e-mail tomorrow, and we had neither a contact list of reporters to send it to nor a campaign e-mail account to send it from. We also had no staff to help us gather and input this information into a campaign database, so we slowly went name by name through our BlackBerry contacts, adding every reporter whose e-mail address we had to the list. This was far from perfect, and when we sent out the video making this historic announcement (from Gibbs’s Hotmail account), we missed some of the most important reporters in politics.9
When we arrived at our new digs, which were essentially a windowless room with card tables for desks, there were a handful of other soon-to-be staffers setting up the office. Once we received the final version of the video, we decided to watch it and then do a test run of the process for sending it out. We plugged in the laptop and pulled up the video and…no Internet. We tried several different Ethernet cords—nothing. Pretty hard to e-mail out our big announcement video without the Internet. We sat there until Bill took matters into his own hands and went to Staples right before it closed and bought us a new router and somehow managed to install it.10
We got the video out the next day, and all of a sudden our small team of about twenty people was inundated with thousands of media requests, interviews, and résumés. There was nonstop global press interest in Obama’s candidacy and yet we were still a team of about twenty people working in two tiny offices—the windowless office that I was in with the communications and scheduling staffs and another equally spartan office that was above a Subway sandwich shop and smelled strongly, consistently, nauseatingly of baking bread.11
Everyone was working around the clock to build the campaign infrastructure, plan a massively complicated announcement tour, and turn as much of the interest in Obama into assets as possible. People who would have senior roles on the campaign were doing the work of interns: answering phones that wouldn’t stop ringing, data entering an endless flood of résumés and speaking invitations, and building the sort of basic databases of supporter information that campaigns for class president had, but we didn’t.
Despite our most valiant efforts, the enthusiasm for Obama greatly outpaced our own operation. A few weeks after the announcement video went out, the Democratic National Committee was holding its winter meeting in Washington and all of the prospective 2008 candidates were asked to speak. This invitation posed a couple of challenges for us. First, the other candidates had been honing their pitch on the trail for years, and Obama would be debuting his campaign message in front of all the party pooh-bahs. The expectations for his performance were through the roof. A poor performance could really damage his candidacy. Second, the core message of the campaign was going to be that change came from grassroots activism outside Washington. Obama’s raison d’ être was that change came from the outside in, not the inside out, and we were starting the campaign talking to the ultimate group of political insiders. Not to mention this was a roomful of people who had been close to the Clintons for decades but whom Obama had never met. This no-win situation was the first of what we would come to call “shitburgers” over the years.
Despite these concerns, skipping the event wasn’t really an option. This would signal to the media and the party that we weren’t ready for prime time, which would be bad for any candidate but particularly for an upstart freshman senator new to national politics.
To communicate our outsider message and lessen the focus on Obama’s DNC remarks, we came up with what we thought was a brilliant idea. After the DNC meeting, we would hold a rally at George Mason University, which was in Virginia right outside DC. Our goal was to demonstrate the enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy particularly among the young people who had been forming Facebook groups for months, urging Obama to run. If he received tepid applause in the room, we would be able to show the world an alternative picture in the same news cycle. Our advance staff, which was the best in the business but tiny at the time, booked the atrium of a building on the university campus.
After Obama’s speech to the DNC meeting (which went fine enough), we arrived on campus and hordes of students were in line waiting to get into the speech. They had apparently been waiting all day and were getting antsy. Inside the building, people were jammed into every inch of the floor and were basically hanging from the rafters. We could have easily filled an NBA arena. We had totally underestimated the demand to see Obama.
In rallies like that, the staff built a buffer between the audience and the stage, so that during the event, the media could go into the buffer to get close-up photos and video, and afterward, the candidate could go “work the ropeline” or shake hands with the audience. This was an important way to keep the speaker safe, and it was pretty standard for a rally of any size. In this instance, the setup broke down as excited and enthusiastic fans climbed over the fence into the buffer and were swarming Obama. It was pure chaos. The line between rally and riot had gotten dangerously blurry.12
This was before the Secret Service started protecting Obama. Security was being provided by George Mason. They were a group of very large and aggressive men with a style more akin to nightclub bouncers than security professionals, who started physically manhandling the audience.13 I entered into the chaos in the buffer, not out of some heroic attempt to help Obama, but it happened to be the fastest way out and I was growing concerned I was going to be left behind without a car (and before Lyft) in suburban Virginia. This was also the first event I had ever staffed Obama at, and it was an absolute shitshow.
Several times I was accosted by security types as I tried to catch up to the senator and at one point came upon a near-physical altercation between a news photographer trying to do his job, an Obama staffer, and a very large George Mason security official who could easily have been mistaken for an NFL linebacker suspended for steroid use. That photographer was Pete Souza, who would go on to be the White House photographer and chronicle all eight years of Obama’s presidency from the inside. Pete did not back down or flinch under the threat of severe violence from this very large man. I would see this toughness many times over the years when foreign governments would try to curtail his access to Obama as we traveled the world with the president. Pete is one of the nicest guys on the planet, but one of the most dangerous places in the world is between Pete and the shot he wants.
There were two take-aways from this fiasco: One, the demand to see, hear, and be near Obama was more fervent than we had imagined. It was more like being on the road with a rock star than a political candidate. Two, we were far from ready to manage that demand. There are stories in the tech world about Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz working out of a small house in Palo Alto and staying up all night in the early days of their company trying to keep their servers from crashing because so many more people than anticipated were using Facebook. We were in a similar situation. Small operation, huge and rapidly growing demand. Zuckerberg believed at the time that if the servers crashed and people couldn’t join or access Facebook, the company could fail. The Obama campaign was in a similar boat.
We were weeks away from a multistate “announcement tour,”14 which would include massively complicated logistics and an event in front of the old State Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois, which would have a crowd perhaps twenty times larger than the one that got out of control in Virginia.
For all the excitement around Obama’s candidacy, there was also massive skepticism from the media and the political establishment. By deciding to run as a freshman senator with no previous national political experience, Obama was putting his thumb in the eye of a lot of conventional political wisdom. This was a precocious decision, and as much as the media loved writing about his rise, they were chomping at the bit to write about his fall. They were dying to pivot to the narrative that Obama had flown too close to the sun. A single mistake on the announcement tour could end the campaign before it started.15
In order to successfully scale an enterprise like a presidential campaign or a tech start-up, you’ve also got to build a culture.
As the Obama campaign became the Obama phenomenon, we needed people and we needed them really fast. A number of our staff were veterans of the Kerry campaign, which was known for a poisonous culture of leaks, backstabbing, and jockeying for power and access. This was not something we could risk repeating. We didn’t.
Our team eventually became known as “No Drama Obama.” Loyal to one another, total commitment to a cause, empowerment and inclusion, and no leaks. People who didn’t adhere to these principles didn’t get through the door, and the few that did ended up working a backwater field office in a noncompetitive state.16
If you ask anyone involved from President Obama on down to a field organizer in Story County, Iowa, they will tell you that our culture was one of the things of which they were proudest. The margin of error for our campaign was so small and the odds of beating Clinton so steep that we couldn’t afford to fight her and ourselves at the same time.
So how did we build this culture, and what lessons can be learned from it?
First and most important, our culture was a reflection of the man we served. Obama is at his core a really chill guy and I mean that in the most presidential way. He is a nice guy who expects his team to be nice to one another. This trait comes from how he was brought up. Obama may have been born in Hawaii, but he is “Midwestern Nice,” which comes from his grandparents and their Kansas roots. He engendered loyalty to him and our cause by being loyal to his team. There were many times in the campaign where people, including some of our top donors, wanted the lot of us fired and replaced by people with more “DC experience,” and every time, Obama stood by his team. We didn’t know if we were going to win or lose, but we were going to do it together. If the person at the top of any organization does not reflect the values you want in the culture of that organization, it won’t work.17
Second, our culture was not an accident. Obama, Plouffe, and Axelrod set out to build a very specific kind of campaign culture. It was as important as how much money we raised or how good our press coverage was. We measured our success and failure by whether we adhered to some of the rules we set out in the beginning.
Barack Obama famously hates leaks. The press has twisted this into something more sinister than it is. There are very legitimate issues around the ways in which the Department of Justice pursued leak investigations, but the leaks Obama truly hates are not those leaks; it’s the everyday leaks that fuel much of political journalism. Let me give you a sense of how those reporter-source conversations go:
Reporter: Hi, Anonymous White House/Campaign Official, I am writing a story about the president’s decision-making process on issue X. I don’t know if you were in the room for the conversation…
Source: I’m so glad you asked. Of course I was in the room. The president relies on me in these sorts of situations. Let me tell you about the advice I gave the president…
These aren’t leaks out of malice—trying to stick a knife in an internal adversary—like the ones that have been so prevalent in the Trump White House. These aren’t leaks of principle trying to bring some government malfeasance to light. They are leaks of vanity.
Whenever there was a leak of a pending policy decision or a detailed readout of some internal deliberations, Obama would ask some version of the question: “Can you imagine being so insecure that you need to call a reporter to show them how influential you are?”
We didn’t need or want those people.
Now compare that work environment with the Trump White House, whose leaky ship has been a stimulus package for legacy media organizations. There have been leaks about the most sensitive conversations in the Oval Office and mundane but malicious leaks about White House intrigue. In my life in politics, I have never seen a group less loyal to the boss or one another. The fish rots from the head. Trump had never demonstrated loyalty to anyone other than himself, and, therefore, his staff feel they could be fired and publicly embarrassed at any minute so they are playing a version of the Game of Thrones. If Sean Spicer (reputation RIP) thinks Steve Bannon (dignity RIP) is leaking about him without consequences, he is going to leak about Steve Bannon to protect himself. It spirals from there.
Over the years, people—even those within the Obama campaign and White House—wondered why we took the no-leaking thing so seriously.
This is why.
The greatest campaign or company cannot succeed without a well-thought-out and well-executed strategy. Strategic planning and execution is the hardest part of any endeavor, and this is particularly true in politics, where we have so many people with the title “strategist” and so few people who deserve that title.
In the early days of the Obama presidency, at one of those moments when the Washington insiders were kvetching about their new president, David Plouffe told the media that Barack Obama is a “Chess Player in a city of Checkers Players.”21 I have come back to or repurposed this quote many times over the years when describing why Obama was so successful as a candidate and a president.22
In politics, coming up with the strategy is a lot easier than having the discipline to stick to it. Especially in our currently insane media environment, it’s easy to find yourself chasing the news of the day or the latest shiny object or switching to a new strategy because the pundits and insiders say you should. Avoiding this was referred to as playing the “long game.”
Barack Obama’s decision to run (and our belief that he could win) was not capricious. It was a leap of faith, of course, but we had theories about the political landscape heading into the election that combined with Obama’s tremendous political talent to give us a level of optimism far exceeding that of the pundits or what our meager standing in the polls told us.
Like my new colleagues, I had learned much more about what works in politics from the many campaigns I’d lost than from the handful I’d had a part in winning. When I did my pro-con list to hone my thinking about working for Obama in 2008, I laid out my best case for why he could win:
There was massive, grassroots enthusiasm for Obama. I had seen that firsthand on that fateful trip to New Hampshire for Evan Bayh.
After eight years of Bush, a disastrous war in Iraq, Katrina-style incompetence across government, and a cynical politics of fear, people were desperate for change. People were channeling that desire for change into a freshman senator from Illinois. He was young, cool, and represented something different from the usual politics. Perhaps most important, unlike almost every other Democratic politician of consequence, he had proudly opposed the Iraq War and accurately predicted the consequences of this ill-considered policy decision. The question was how to channel that enthusiasm into actual votes.
The blowhards on Fox News loved to use “community organizer” to diminish Obama’s qualifications for the Oval Office, but his years as a community organizer advocating for social and economic justice on the streets of the South Side of Chicago were a huge asset. Obama intuitively understood the importance of political organizing. While most candidates I’d worked for were more interested in what TV ad the campaign was airing or what the polling said, Obama always wanted to know what the organizers were hearing at the doors or on the phones. He got it.
That’s why Barack Obama’s first move was to hire David Plouffe to run the campaign. Plouffe’s background was in political field organizing, and he had deep respect and affection for the organizers who knock on doors, make phone calls, and register voters. He cut his teeth as an organizer in Iowa for Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential campaign. Plouffe’s first move was to hire three of the best organizers in the Democratic Party, each of whom had deep ties to Iowa—Hildebrand, Mitch Stewart, and Paul Tewes. The four of us had worked together in two Senate races in South Dakota, and I knew they were the best in the business. This was not going to be an orange hat–type campaign.
These factors allowed us to develop an overall strategic plan that was so simple and clear that every member of the campaign team—whether they sat in senior staff meetings at HQ or worked in a field office in rural New Hampshire—could recite in their sleep.
Win Iowa, come in at least second in New Hampshire, survive Nevada, win South Carolina, and get launched into Super Tuesday with momentum.23
The simplicity of the strategy—in conception, if not execution—made it easier to make strategic decisions. We knew it was win Iowa or go home, so every day for every decision, we asked ourselves, “Does this help us win Iowa?” If the answer was no, we didn’t do it.
Strategy, organization, and culture are all great, but there is still nothing more important than the message.
The perfect message is the holy grail of politics. People obsess over it, millions are spent to find it, and almost no one ever nails it.
There was an exchange at the initial strategy meeting that explains Obama’s success in 2008 and beyond. Over mediocre sandwiches and diet sodas, we started plotting out the campaign in detail. We talked about fund-raising strategy, a possible announcement tour, and which politicians we should target for early endorsements. At one point we started talking about message. There was some discussion of the key policy issues, about positioning the race as a battle between change and the status quo, polling, and so on. Pretty much par for the course in a political strategy meeting like this one.
In mid-discussion, Obama cut us off:
“There are only two campaigns that I can think of where the message really worked. My Senate campaign and Deval’s race. They worked because the campaign was the message.”
This caused some confusion among the people at the large conference room table. How could the campaign be the message? This ran counter to how a lot of us thought about political messaging. The rule of thumb was that you shouldn’t talk about the campaign; you needed to talk about issues and policy positions in poll-tested, made-for-TV sound bites.
Obama tried to explain that the message of his 2004 campaign was about people coming together (Yes, We Can) to work for change. Newly elected Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick had run a similar race and, like Obama, upset a more favored, established candidate. As our collection of political consultants and pollsters debated the merits of Obama’s point, it became clear that people still didn’t get it.
At that point, Cornell Belcher, a well-respected pollster who was new to Team Obama, decided to speak up:
“It’s like Jay-Z said. I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man. You’re not the message man, you’re the message, man.”
I would like to say that everyone in the room recognized Jay-Z’s famous line from the remix of the Kanye West song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but that wasn’t close to the case. I mean, one of our pollsters with a confused look on his face was wearing a calculator watch. What more do you need to know?
Obama, who is a true hip-hop fan, looked around the room and laughed and proceeded to explain Jay-Z/Cornell’s point. Obama and his movement represented two things: Hope and Change, and that would be the message. I am confident the guy with the calculator watch is still confused about why Jay-Z helped explain our message strategy.
Cool Jay-Z anecdote aside, Barack Obama had recognized something about how political messaging was changing. Political messaging in a presidential campaign, especially in the age of social media, is about more than the words that come out of the candidate’s mouth or adorn a bumper sticker. The message is the story of who the candidate is and why they do what they do.
The mistake most politicians make is that they start with the focus-group-tested sound bite instead of the larger story.
Hillary Clinton struggled with this throughout her 2008 campaign. Her campaign changed messages like most people change socks. It was the worst of what I call lowest common denominator campaign strategy. No one on the team can agree, so you take a little from column A and a little from column B, meld it together, so people will stop fighting, and the meeting can end. This was most comically evident in Hillary Clinton’s final tour of Iowa in late 2007.
If she won Iowa, she would knock Obama and Edwards from the race and essentially clinch the nomination.24 The importance of this moment should’ve focused the collective minds of the Clinton campaign to produce their best work. And what message did they come up with to meet this monumental moment?
“The Big Challenges, Real Solutions: Time to Pick a President Tour”
Each of those words individually means something (I think); together they are pure pabulum. This slogan was so laughably long that it barely fit on the side of the bus Clinton was using to travel around Iowa in the days before the caucus.
Obama (and Jay-Z) put us in the neighborhood of where we needed to be, but in the summer of 2007, we were struggling in the race. Clinton had stolen our early momentum, and our scrappy young campaign team was at times struggling to compete with the Clinton political machine. We were down by twenty to thirty points in some of the national polls.25 At the end of August, Obama was headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a little family vacation to rest up for the final sprint to the Iowa caucus. Our grand plan was to take the time while he was on vacation and prepare to hit the reset button on Labor Day. The plan was to hold a big rally in New Hampshire on Labor Day Weekend, where we would debut a new slogan.
The brain trust got together to bounce ideas off one another to find a way to pithily condense our argument for Obama and against Clinton26 into something that would fit on a placard. It didn’t go well.
The pollsters and ad guys formed a working group to figure something out, while the rest of us focused on putting together the New Hampshire trip and the rollout plan. We were under an onerous deadline for such a big decision. It was a holiday weekend, and if we didn’t get the slogan figured out by Friday morning at the latest, we wouldn’t be able to get the signs printed in time. As the clock ticked down, Alyssa Mastromonaco, whose team was responsible for ensuring that signs got printed, was getting more nervous, repeatedly poking her head into Plouffe’s office to see if he could light a fire under the process.
The word around the campaign was that the process was not going well. This was confirmed a few hours before the deadline, when Plouffe’s assistant sent out an e-mail to the whole staff—hundreds of people in HQ and in all the primary states—asking everyone for suggestions for a slogan.
It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so damn alarming. Eventually the team settled on something like “Better Together.” It’s unclear if this came from the brain trust or the suggestion box. Either way it was terrible and was soundly rejected by Obama, who said, “Is that the best we can do?” The reboot was put on hold and those signs never saw the light of day.
A couple of weeks later at a meeting in the same conference room in DC where we had the Jay-Z conversation, we settled on “Change We Can Believe In”27 as the campaign slogan that would become synonymous with Obama in the coming months. That slogan worked because it was closely connected with our Change message and contained a subtle contrast with Clinton, who had a trust problem with voters, particularly compared with Obama.
The lesson here is that you can’t fabricate a message. It can’t be inorganic or forced; it has to flow directly from the candidate. Polling and focus groups can help you understand how the voters will receive your message. They can help you choose which words work best, but they can’t create your message. The sound bite comes from the story, not the other way around.
All of our messaging was designed to address the fact that people wanted change, and our job was to convince them that Obama was the right vehicle for that change—that he had the values, smarts, experience, and strength to bring that change.
Our success and Hillary’s failure in having a resonant campaign message would be a harbinger of things to come in 2016.
I spent Election Day 2008 holed up in the “Boiler Room” a few floors above our campaign headquarters in a skyscraper in Chicago, monitoring reports on turnout and anecdotes from polling locations in the handful of states that would decide the election. I was cautiously confident. The night before, I had buttonholed our data and field people and made them tell me that we were going to win, primarily so I could get some sleep.28 But even their certainty based on polling and early voting data was not enough to give me 100 percent confidence.
Most campaigns fail. Barack Obama is arguably the best politician in recent history, but if we reran the 2008 campaign 100 times, Obama would probably lose at least 90 times.
Campaigns are often victims of circumstances beyond their control. This is often referred to as an October Surprise. The final stretch of the 2008 campaign was rocked by a historic financial crisis sparked by the collapse of major banks such as Lehman Brothers. In 2012, the attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi and Hurricane Sandy upended the final days of the campaign, and in 2016, FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about Clinton’s e-mails may have tipped the race to Trump.
A campaign’s ability to survive these events depends on how well they have tended to the things they can control, and ultimately that’s the lesson for campaigns and start-ups. The only way to seize your moment is to take care of the things you can control. We did so in 2008, and that was the difference.
Everything went right for Obama on election night. We were winning by more than we’d expected, but I wasn’t going to relax until we got the magic number of 270 electoral votes. As the night went on, I got an e-mail from someone at one of the major television networks saying that the network had seen enough in the exit polls in the state of Ohio to declare Barack Obama the next president of the United States at 10:00 p.m. I had to read the e-mail a couple of times. It was hard to process the words “Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.”
As the clock ticked toward ten, Axelrod, Plouffe, and I gathered with a few others around the TV in the boiler room. As ABC Anchor Charles Gibson declared Barack Obama the winner, we shouted, high-fived, and awkwardly hugged. Then we just stood there and looked at one another. Not sure what to do next, we hugged again. This time it was even more awkward.
By the old rules of the game, Obama never should have won. But he—and we—had changed the way the game was played.
The Obama campaign had the most improbable of journeys—one I had almost missed. My life would never be the same. I will never forget the joy and pride we all felt as we gathered in Grant Park on an unseasonably warm night to hear Obama’s first words as president-elect of the United States. The possibilities seemed endless.
Little did I know what would await us.
The easy part was over.
1 I know this because it didn’t do the thing Democratic campaigns typically do: lose.
2 Being at the table is great, but if you need an opportunity to get work done, sit backbench. Some of my most productive hours in the White House were in National Economic Council policy discussions. (Apologies to the Econ Team.)
3 My addiction to my phone will be a running theme in this book as it is in my marriage.
4 There was something surreal during the campaign about getting personal tech support for our personal use of Facebook from one of the guys who started the company.
5 Getting your ass kicked in DC for a few years can beat that attitude out of you, which is when you know it’s time to leave the White House.
6 Technically, Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen visited Europe during his 1948 campaign, but I refuse to acknowledge it despite the repeated entreaties of this book’s fact-checkers.
7 Drake may be Canadian, but I quote him often in discussing American politics because in the Trump era anything goes.
8 This is where Pod Save America was born. Insert Praying Hands emoji here.
9 This did not go over well. Turns out reporters really don’t like missing news.
10 To this day, Bill Burton cites this example to claim that without him Obama never could have run. He’s not right, but he’s also not wrong.
11 No one who spent a lot of time in that office has eaten a Subway sandwich in the past decade.
12 It’s worth noting that the Obama advance team ended up being the best that ever was.
13 Political Pro-Tip: Physically harming your voters is a bad idea.
14 Even though we had done an “announcement” video, we still needed to do an in-person “announcement” tour, even though we had already “announced.” Politics is weird.
15 The announcement tour went off without a hitch although President Obama believes to this day that we tried to kill him by making someone born in Hawaii speak outside in 17-degree weather.
16 The message was not subtle.
17 The fact that Obama had no preexisting political network was a hidden advantage. When we made a decision, he didn’t get endless calls from unaccountable “advisors” trying to undo or question the strategic decision.
18 Or Olivia Pope from Scandal or Kent from Veep, depending on your pop culture tastes.
19 Hard to run against Washington from Washington.
20 Two exceptions were the choice of Joe Biden as VP nominee and our quarterly fund-raising numbers. Plouffe held those secrets so tightly I am confident that no amount of enhanced interrogation techniques could have pried them loose.
21 For the generation raised on the PlayStation, chess is more complicated than checkers.
22 Another way to put it (in another tortured chess metaphor), he sees the whole board, or several moves ahead (I can’t be stopped).
23 History will show it didn’t work out exactly this way, but pretty damn close.
24 And the White House, because whoever ended up becoming the Democratic nominee would be favored to win, since the incumbent Republican president was about as popular as the Ebola virus.
25 National polls are irrelevant to everyone other than donors and pundits, who feel about them the same way Sean Hannity Feels about Trump.
26 By this point, Edwards had faded and the race was seen as Obama versus Clinton.
27 It ended up being perfect, but at the time there was no “Aha” moment. It felt like the best choice from a mediocre menu.
28 It didn’t work.