David Plouffe

I’ve been wondering if that paragon of White House fable fabrication may be on lysergic acid… obviously slipped into his cornflakes by a stealth Tea Party type bent on destroying the Wrong House narrative.

The spin just won’t fly any more. We keep hearing the misadministration’s grandiose statements, just chock full of loaded and misleading terminology. No matter how many times they bleat their Marxist diatribe, no matter how often they disguise their true intent with the language of obfuscation… nothing but nothing will put lipstick on this pig.

Mr Plouffe has announced, “People will not be voting based on the unemployment figures in 2012″. Excuse me while I say, “What?” What universe spawned people like Plouffe and the legion of Obama apologists? Wait! That must be the answer. It’s an alien invasion (another one) and they’ve taken over the administration… lock, stock and vacation schedule.

Eight million jobs lost since the Anointed One assumed his throne. I heard an outrageous statement by some brain-damaged hack that new layoffs had virtually come to a halt. This dude hasn’t been out to California lately, has he? We’re still shedding jobs and businesses at a frightening rate. He threw that desperate thread out there as a ‘comforting indicator’ of the ‘recovery’. Excuse me? I should do an entire article on that alone… great title opportunity, too… “The Recovery That Barack Built”.

Somebody convinced that poor boob that the government’s carefully massaged math was something other than pure fantasy. I guess we can’t be too harsh on poor old David, either… he’s got plenty of company.

Here it is, David. This upcoming election will very much hinge on employment… or far more likely, the lack of. You and the other minions of the Darkside are about to meet the American people… and we’re really sick and tired. But, far more than that, we’re mad… we’re more than mad… the undercurrent in the country is rage.

We have an enraged and highly-motivated populace who intend to see the moral, social and economic destruction stopped… and stopped now. No more compromise, no more deals.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2011

Before the new year, Micah Sifry came out with a provocative, much-discussed piece on the failures of the Obama organizing model in government. At once, the piece is a surprising indictment of the Administration's modus operandi from one of its supporters, but the reasons the indictment came about are not surprising at all. Like 43 similar outfits before it, the Obama White House is essentially a top-down operation.

Indeed, it's easy to dismiss Sifry's ideal of autonomous, almost leaderless political movements as essentially incompatible with the work of government. The contrast between the populism of the Obama campaign and the unmet promises of the Obama Administration is an easy one to make, but I suspect there's a tad of inflated expectations at work, borne of a misunderstanding of the fundamental motives of Obama for America and the community organizing spirit that seem to lay behind it. Sifry is disappointed that the fervor and "bottom up" organizing of the campaign hasn't translated to the White House, but when has the excitement and lofty goals of a campaign ever translated fully into the drudgery of running the federal government? Is such a transference even possible?

Probably not. The job of a campaign is not to transform the ethos of governance. The job of the campaign is to win the campaign. The job of the Administration is to transform the ethos of governance. Whether one leads to the other is entirely extrinsic to the campaign since the White House involves a totally different set of actors, more likely to be experienced government hands like Rahm Emanuel than Alinskyite field organizers. We can discuss what is and is not personally important to Obama as a community organizer all we want. But the imperatives of governance are completely different than those of a campaign, as Obama learned taking office in an economic crisis and George Bush learned after 9/11. 

Rather than buck the tide of conventional "top-down" politics, the campaign's "bottom up" grassroots emphasis was actually top-down perfected for the Internet era -- a logical and sensible response by the campaign to Obama's celebrity. 

In the end, the campaign did not have to make any hard decisions that allowed supporters to organize in new ways. Rather, I would argue, the supporters made the decision on their own, as expressed in the tremendous and early self-organized action for Obama early on, and the campaign would have been brain dead not to play along. (Many campaigns are still blind to this, even today, but the default baseline position for a campaign at the national level is to play along when supporters start doing massive amounts of stuff on their own.) 

The campaign's decision to default to open is expressed in Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's book, The Audacity to Win. At the outset, it wasn't clear that Obama's campaign would be anything other than a traditional exercise. As Plouffe writes early on, 

We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.

Though it's ultimately clear where the campaign came down at the end of the day, Plouffe doesn't really evince bold conviction that the new media guys were right from day one. Here we see the traditional top-down playbook lingering on within the Obama campaign. Now, if Obama the community organizer started out running a fairly traditional campaign catering to the donor class, and in fact, ran a fairly textbook Senate campaign in 2004, what changed in the heat of the campaign? Plouffe doesn't seem to indicate that there was any altruistic, philosophical instinct to buck the finance team's approach, beyond a general sense that what the online people were doing seemed to be working. If there was a sudden epiphany by Axelrod or Plouffe to buy into bottom up, community organizing methods, it was probably a transactional, reflex response to the 20,000 person crowds, the e-mail signups, and the online fundraising. When you have a candidate like Obama, "letting go" and being bottom up is not simply a noble, unconventional, damn-the-consequences move. It's pretty darn profitable, generating more signups, more activity, and more money to feed the top-down parts of the campaign.

Now, what happens when the campaign goes away? What happens when the enthusiasm inevitably ebbs and the hard work of governing begins? The immediate benefits of a bottom-up strategy become less clear. You revert to traditional instincts, where powerful obstacles stand in the way of getting things done -- even amongst your base, and the wielding of massive political machinery cannot be left to amateurs. Either way, the decision to go "bottom up" is a traditional reflex response by smart people who realize they can get more done with bottom-up than with top-down in a campaign. And the reversion to "top-down" is a similarly calculated response to the fact that the financial and organizational benefits of bottom-up do not seem to apply to an Administration. Plouffe admitted this much in his interview with Ari Melber in defending the decision to downgrade New Media in the White House. Now, this may be wrong, short-sighted, or ignoble, but BOTH the bottom-up Obama campaign and the top-down Obama Administration were calculated strategic decisions made in response to specific situations of the moment. Let's not kid ourselves that the community organizing rhetoric was how they actually intended to govern.

Many of the tactical postmortems on the Obama campaign have been focused online. But it's worth remembering that that is only one piece of the puzzle. The fact is that Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign. A couple of parts really stand out from the Lloyd Grove interview of David Plouffe:

L.G.: How much money is allocated to the various units of the campaign? One always hears that paid advertising takes significantly more than 50 percent—putting commercials on the air, radio, and television. Can you break down the percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, we spent obviously a lot of money on TV, but as a ratio of our spending, it was much lower than historically is done, and that's because we spent a lot of money in the field and on the ground. And, in fact, when we did our baseline budget, the field was fully funded because we thought it was very, very important. If we were to raise excess funds, we bolstered the field a little bit, but it went in advertising. Our first priority was the ground operation because we thought that was essential to us winning. It's very much, I think, a unique approach. In a lot of campaigns, the media gets funded first, then if you have extra money that comes in, you bolster the field and things of that sort. And we kind of did it in reverse.
 
L.G.: Can you give me a rough breakdown of percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, no. I would say that it's lower.
 
L.G.: One always hears historically it's almost 70 percent that goes to media.
 
D.P.: Right, the playbook is 70 to 75 percent, and we did much less than that. Under 50 percent.
 
L.G.: What gave you the chutzpah to think you should break the model, and spend more than 50 percent on non-media?
 
D.P.: First of all, we knew that we had to get really good turnout, and that we thought a human being talking to a human being in a state is the most effective in communication. So we needed an organization that was able to facilitate that. Secondly, a presidential campaign is a very well-covered enterprise, people are talking about it all the time, they see it on the newscast, they're reading about it online. In many respects, advertising in a senate race or governor's or congressional race can have more impact because those races aren't front and center for people. I always believed that advertising was very, very important. I think we went right in and it was very helpful—makes it meaningful because people have 100 percent knowledge of the candidate and are following pretty closely. So I thought we could afford to trim a little bit. Now we ended up raising a lot of money, so our point levels were very big in September, October, but we could've won without that. Then the McCain campaign likes to say, "we were outspent, that's why we lost on TV"—and I think that's complete malarkey.

Paid advertising can have a dramatic impact on high valence issues that are getting short shrift in the media. I've seen this enough to not be a hater on paid advertising. That said, even Senators and Governors races have enough of an earned media component these days to dilute the value of TV ads even in downballot races.

When you're spending 70% or more of your budget on any one thing, be that advertising, field, salaries, online, etc., that does not make for a very well balanced campaign. At some level, a certain laziness about how to spend money kicks in. Since the basics of a campaign -- staff on the ground, websites, office space -- come relatively cheap compared to points on TV, there is a much greater tolerance for waste on the airwaves than there is in any other area of the campaign. A lot of this, particularly at the local level where candidates are even more reliant on consultants, is driven by consultants preferring commissionable advertising over non-commissionable field efforts. Morton Blackwell has been preaching this gospel for years.

So Obama decided to something radical in the context of traditional campaigns. They decided to construct their entire budget around field. This proved to be a wise investment, as it was the nose-to-the-grindstone focus on caucus states that won them the primary and their massive investment in field in the general that shifted the electorate 3-4 points in their direction. That turnout wasn't dramatically up from 2004 misses the point. Every serious person who's looked at this agrees that their turnout was way, way up, and ours was down. So: a relative wash in overall vote count but a sea change beneath the surface.

Should TV people have something to fear? Ultimately, David Axelrod was not lacking for funds. If given a choice between a bigger piece of a smaller pie and a smaller piece of a much bigger pie, TV consultants would be stupid not to take the latter. But that will require a fundamental shift in how we look at Republican campaigns: from staid, establishment-only affairs towards a more freewheeling, participatory, and bottom-up culture consistent with our capitalist philosophy. And it will require different types of candidates, not just a change in tactics.