Campaign Inc.: How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House

9. Lead from Within

155| 9. Lead from Within August 4, 2008: There were grumblings in a recent meeting about Barack riding in a better bus. It was a modest upgrade, but there are those who think he should keep traveling “scrappy.” My response was that we had to treat our candidate a little more like the next president of the United States. He needs to start seeing himself bigger, and we all should as well. It’s one of the important ways we can help ready him for the highest office in the land. Open for Business Around the first week of July, the paper came off the windowed fishbowl , indicating that we had finally settled on a plan. If the campaign felt stalled at the beginning of June, things were now quickly falling into place. After weeks of wracking my brain over what to do about our space concerns, I decided we needed to stay together and crowd the eleventh floor. The space would get tight and more than a little bit uncomfortable for all of us, but I felt passionately that our organizational edge was based on streamlined communications and unity at headquarters. I caught a fair bit of grief at times for that decision, but whenever any of my colleagues complained, I simply offered to show them the spacious option available to their team on the nineteenth floor. That silenced any further complaining. Nobody wanted to leave eleven. They just wanted others to go. Marianne and I finished the core budget and were only waiting on the individual state spending plans to be returned from the field department for final review and sign-off. It had been an exhaustive, bottom-up process that featured multiple working-group and interdepartmental reviews, layered over the traditional department head submissions. Plouffe wanted many sets of eyes on each proposal. Budgeting by committee was a little bit of hell for me, but inviting wider involvement clarified roles, eliminated duplication, and injected transparency into 156 | chapter nine the process. Despite the challenge, at the end there was a feeling of real ownership by all of our key stakeholders. Hilde had also completed the reorganization and consolidation of our field and political departments. He called the new unit “270,” so named for the number of delegates we needed to win the White House. He divided the country up into six regions and formed workstations in headquarters to service each, called “pods.” The pods were configured with a staffer assigned from every one of the HQ departments to work alongside each other. Much like the Ops Desk design, the idea was that there should be an easy link from the state point of contact to the regional pod designee for any specific work function. Everyone sitting in the pod was, therefore, positioned to seamlessly access the services and support within their departments in HQ on the requestor’s behalf. We now asked staff to uproot from long-held seats in a wholesale shuffle to accommodate the new organizational model. This led to a huge moving day when large garbage barrels and file boxes suddenly dotted the campaign shop floor. Most memorable was the shocking volume of trash that was discovered collecting in unseen holes over the course of sixteen months. This further validated Steve’s contention that the place needed to be spiffed up a bit and get a professional makeover. He wanted HQ to take a step toward looking like the office of the nation’s next leader. Staff also needed to view themselves less as rugged campaign operatives and more as employees of the future president of the United States. Cleaning house was a symbolic act that helped facilitate that paradigm shift. People even began to dress differently after that day, replacing their flip-flops and ball caps with business attire. Here Come the Pros Late in June, Steve and I began to prepare the announcement that new, high-profile arrivals would be joining us in the coming weeks. Some would be political campaign rock stars. These were people who had worked in past presidential and senatorial campaigns, Kerry ’04 communications wizard Stephanie Cutter among them. Others were less familiar but highly regarded, folks like Patrick Gaspard and Brian Bond, both with credibility in the Labor and LGBT communities respectively. From the earliest days of the campaign, I tried to prepare my teams for 157 lead from within | this moment. Part of running...