The Audacity to Win: everything flows through the prism of strategy

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

“Everything in the campaign flowed through the prism of strategy.”

And that is the line that sums up the Obama ’08 success. Whatever free-wheeling they did, whatever crisis emerged, and however they were buffeted by the news agenda and their political adversaries, the campaign always returned to its basic strategy (see a post I wrote on this from September 2008.)

David Plouffe’s Audacity to Win presents lessons that go beyond politics. At one point, faced with a Clinton campaign swiveling like an off-balance ice skater grasping at anything at all to regain some composure, Plouffe declares that he’d rather have one bad strategy than eight good ones.

Well, history is written by the winners. I doubt that Mr. Microtrend himself, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Mark Penn, will be writing about his campaign strategy. If he did, we’d all have a giggle. Political communication works on the basis of unifying messages that resonate in different ways with different groups. Mark Penn in his wisdom decided to do it a different way: pitch a cacophony of messages in the hope that by blowing on lots of dog whistles each with a different pitch, the voters would come running. The result? The inevitable winner, Hillary Clinton, lost. And David Plouffe doesn’t let Penn forget it.

Remarkably, the campaign was incredibly ramshackle at times. The benefit of the mass campaign events were discovered almost by accident: Obama emerges from an early debate in which he’s struggled, demanding that the campaign puts aside some time so that they can formulate a healthcare policy; David Axelrod’s lost lap-tops and mobiles could furnish several schools with an IT suite each.

Through it all the strategy remains intact. At points, it even has its own arrogant swagger. Plouffe looks on in disbelief as the Clinton campaign doesn’t even seem to have read the rules of caucus/primary season. So while Obama’s campaign loses Texas in terms of popular votes, he emerges with more delegates through a sophisticated caucus operation. Clinton’s tries to dismiss Obama’s caucus successes; but it’s the delegates, stupid. Plouffe bangs that drum right until the very end and the media – including the analytically conservative New York Times – accept it. Later in the campaign, Plouffe and Axelrod muse over whether the McCain campaign’s decision to move out of (almost) must win Michigan is a ruse. It’s not. Plouffe stares on in disbelief at the ineptitude of his opponents.

Barack Obama has a habit of being lucky with his opponents. A few months ago I wrote of the ‘curse of Barack Obama‘ following the perversity of one of his possible 2012 opponents, Mark Sanford. Well, in Hillary Clinton the unbeatable candidate with the woeful campaign and John McCain, the icon with erratic disposition, he was about as lucky as he could be.

Let’s be honest, Obama should not have won the 2008 election. But both his opponents gave him the opportunity to do so. The credit goes to the candidate, Plouffe, Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, Peter Rouse and so many others – including 13 million or so active supporters – in seizing that opportunity just as effectively as you could imagine any campaign doing.

The campaign largely remained true to its ‘no drama’ ethos. Its leading players remain professionally close throughout. Plouffe and Axelrod seem to have an (anal) kid brother-capricious older brother relationship. At one point it boils over, and the two have a stand up row, with Plouffe icily reprimanding Axelrod:

“I didn’t realise discipline was situation dependent. You don’t want to let down your buddies in the press. We aren’t going to do something in the closing weeks that is not strategic.”

Ouch. And that’s the relationship right there although, this instance is the only time it seemingly overflows. In true ‘no drama’ fashion they apologise to one another.

But the one voice that comes through in Plouffe’s account – unsurprisingly – is that that of the candidate. Constantly, he insists on the highest standards of campaign probity. When the campaign produces a dossier on Hillary Clinton’s political links to India, entitled D-Punjab, Obama is dismayed: it jars with the type of campaign he wants to see. At a fundraiser, David Geffen, a former Bill Clinton supporter, says of the Clintons:

“Everybody in politics lies, but [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

The Clinton campaign demands that the Obama campaign criticises and disowns the remarks. Instead, they point out the David Geffen was a lifelong friend of the Clintons; had spent nights in the White House during the Clinton presidency; and so they should take it up with him. The candidate is on a flight when these comments are made and is livid when he disembarks:

“Can I not get on an airplane anymore without you guys launching cruise missiles?”

Again, he dresses down Axelrod and Plouffe when they launch a broadside at John McCain over his involvement in the Keating Five scandal in the late 1980s. The ad goes out without the candidate’s approval. He’s furious. He is honest over his own mistakes, but he lets Plouffe and Axelrod know his displeasure when the campaign falls beneath the high standards he has set.

Plouffe’s book reveals enough of the human element of the story to keep it interesting. There is enough political meat for the political junkie. He has penchant for (American) sporting metaphors that some may not warm to (though I have to confess that I quite like them). On just a couple of pages we get such unfamiliar sayings as “at the red light moment, you’re alone with the ball. You either make the shot or you miss it” and “we hold to block and tackle well” – and there are many more of these.

This team, despite their swagger and machismo, are remarkably endearing. Plouffe’s book could have been pretty dry fare. It’s not. It’s lively, insightful, and provides broader lesson about strategy in politics and beyond. This campaign will still be written about in fifty years’ time.

And remember, if you want to know more about the deep political and historical roots of the Barack Obama campaign, you can always try Barack Obama: the movement for change.

Next week, Anthony will be assessing Obama’s first year in office.