Plouffe Piece-The commander of Obama's nerd army.

[babylonsister]

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f746721e-74d7-4313-9231-7e75e5d56fbb

Plouffe Piece by Noam Scheiber
The commander of Obama's nerd army.
Post Date Wednesday, May 07, 2008



By October of 2007, we in the press had decided that, if Barack Obama was going to make a move, he had better do it soon. Unfortunately for Obama, so had some of his most influential donors. As they gathered at a Des Moines art gallery for a quarterly meeting, these moneymen were visibly anxious. Why wasn't Obama closing the gap in Iowa? Shouldn't he go negative on Hillary?

It fell to campaign manager David Plouffe to quell the panic. He ticked off the number of offices Obama had in Iowa and the dates they'd opened. He listed the precincts where Obama would do well among backers of non-viable candidates. The following day, Plouffe's team played a video of Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, which the campaign had flooded with supporters. He even put the moneymen through a simulated caucus, in which they chose among breakfast foods rather than candidates.

It was a spectacular display of intimate Iowa knowledge. "At the end of that people felt, 'Okay, ... you're right, we are going to win Iowa,'" recalls Kirk Wagar, a member of Obama's national finance committee. And it was quintessential Plouffe. Beginning with Harkin's 1992 campaign for president, Plouffe has served multiple tours in Iowa and become the de facto president of a small fraternity of operatives who pride themselves on mastery of the state's demographics, geography, and procedural rules. If political strategy tends to attract nerds--think Karl Rove's obsession with the election of 1896--Iowa attracts the nerdiest of the bunch.

It's often assumed that the limits of such political nerd-dom roughly coincide with the borders of Iowa and New Hampshire--that presidential campaigns become momentum-driven, television-saturated affairs once they leave the early states. There's no doubt something to this--the Obama campaign has been running on a mix of soaring rhetoric and media buzz since January. But, under Plouffe, the tedious work of crunching numbers and scouring precinct maps has remained a central campaign obsession. Plouffe has run the entire Obama campaign as though it were the Iowa caucus writ large. And it's brought Obama to the brink of the nomination.

more...

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f746721e-74d7-4313-9231-7e75e5d56fbb

[But....]

1. Picking capably people...

is a good skill for a president:evilgrin:

[JPZenger]

2. XM Radio Plays Conference Calls to the Press

XM Radio's POTUS channel broadcasts the conference calls each campaign has with the press. The Hillary calls are bombastic with false claims and exaggerations and repetitions of weak attacks. The calls with Obama's staff sound nerdy, but they are straight forward and get right to the heart of the matter.