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

2. Stick to the Plan

29| 2. Stick to the Plan july 7, 2007: The irony of working for a media-dependent, communications-driven organization is the noticeable isolation I feel from the general news events of the day. I work in a bubble. A small screen on the building’s elevator rotating the day’s top headlines serves as my primary news source.Whatever it delivers during the eleven-story ride is my fix. Chicago, Iowa “The states are unhappy.” That was the first thing Steve Hildebrand told me when I joined the campaign. Steve was very specific with his concerns about a lack of responsiveness at headquarters to our staff in the early states. He was particularly worried about Iowa and asked for my help in straightening out the problem. His request was important because our leadership team was dedicated to a simple strategy for securing the Democratic nomination: win Iowa. Despite the fact that we’d trailed well behind in the polls from the outset, we believed that if we prevailed in Iowa, the force of that win would propel us through the early contests and on to victory. David Plouffe was supremely confident from the earliest days that Barack Obama was ideally suited to such a strategy. David often referred to the senator as the perfect momentum candidate. Though the polling numbers coming out of the Hawkeye State were daunting, Plouffe felt certain that as voters got to know Senator Obama they would quickly warm to him. To help us overcome our long odds, Steve Hildebrand was brought on at HQ as our top field and political staffer. He also had the distinction of being the “Early States” director, meaning that he oversaw the strategy and build-out of the first states that would host primary contests in January 2008. They were Iowa (January 3), New Hampshire (January 8), Nevada (January 19), and South Carolina (January 26). Paul Tewes 30 | chapter two was hired as the Iowa state director. Steve and Paul had been business partners before the campaign and ran a highly regarded political consulting firm together. Both were aggressive organizers with long histories in Iowa politics. Steve was adamant that our Chicago headquarters staff had to stay focused on serving the needs of those four important bases. He made it clear that we worked for the states and not the other way around. As someone who’d never really been much of a creature of national headquarters, I was an easy mark for his sermons. I’d had a long career running mostly state-based organizations and community campaigns, so Steve’s philosophy was one I wholly agreed with and applauded. With an initial fundraising target for 2007 set at $50 million, the first budget we constructed reflected our commitment to this early state strategy. It was a spending plan that was supposed to take us through the end of the calendar year, but it wasn’t a national budget. It didn’t even fund the twenty-two states and the U.S. territory that were scheduled to have contests on February 5, a big day on the 2008 election calendar known as Super Tuesday. Instead, our money was to be spent only on those first four January races. At David’s direction, we dedicated the money we hoped to raise to building and operating the early states and Illinois. This triggered weeks of haggling with a dozen national HQ department leaders and the four early state heads. In that lineup, however, often to the consternation of the other state directors, Iowa was always considered to be first among equals. Not surprisingly, this was where the bulk of our early-state resources were targeted. Even the national headquarters and our Illinois field operations just down the street from us were viewed largely as appendages of our neighbor to the west. Jon Carson, then the Illinois state director, was building a program that had a mission not of identifying local support for our own statewide election on February 5, but of getting volunteers from Illinois across the state line every weekend. And at headquarters, we were so deliberately trained on Iowa that I may as well have listed “Chicago, Iowa” as my work address. We were all in for Iowa. 31 stick to the plan | The Ops Desk Steve’s heartburn over the lack of support for the states was, therefore , something of an organizational crisis. Fortunately, I...