He was the man behind President Barack Obama’s campaign, the one who helped keep everything on track, the face in the background that helped with the making of history. And now he’s coming to speak at Fairfield.
David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, will be speaking in the Oak Room on Wednesday as part of Fairfield’s OPEN Visions program to promote the release of his book, “The Audacity to Win,” which chronicles the lengthy campaign process that led to Obama’s election as president.
“I started as a very low-level campaign staffer, kind of knocking on doors,” Plouffe said in a phone interview about his beginnings in politics. “I just started down the track, working different elections and managing house races and senate races, culminating in the Obama campaign last year.”
Plouffe explained that he had met Obama when Obama was running for Senate in 2004. When Obama started thinking about running for president, he came to Plouffe.
“I think he wanted a group of people around him that were close to him and that he trusted,” Plouffe said.
And thus begin Plouffe’s important role in helping to shape Obama’s journey from candidate to president.
“Starting in 2007, most of the political community didn’t think we would win,” said Plouffe. “We thought we had a narrow pathway to victory. We were very clear-eyed about how hard it was going to be. It’s an improbable American story.”
Plouffe said that there were many things throughout the campaign that helped them achieve a victory, including Obama’s strong visions of what he wanted to accomplish as president and the help of volunteers along the way.
“He understood very clearly from day one what he wanted to say in the campaign. He knew who he was and the idea he wanted to talk about,” Plouffe said.
But it wasn’t always easy, and the campaign team needed to rely on each other and its experiences to deal with the setbacks that came along. Asked if there was anything that he would have done differently, looking back, Plouffe said that “we were fortunate to be part of an endeavor that got most of the good things right.”
“We made a couple mistakes in the primary in terms of how we approached certain states,” he continued. “But we just came to be enormous believers in internal communication, making sure that our staff and our volunteers knew what was going on in the campaign while we were making the decisions that we were making.”
Still, that was the one area Plouffe felt could have been improved, if given a second chance. “We didn’t know enough about the primary, so when we were going through a tough time, we were not doing a good enough job of telling our supporters directly what our status was and why. So I think internally we weren’t communicating enough with our volunteers.”
And Plouffe said that it was the volunteers who, in addition to Obama being “an extraordinary leader,” helped make Obama’s presidency a reality.
“They did a lot of great work for us,” Plouffe said. This is one of the points he hopes to make for readers with “The Audacity to Win,” and how it was the average person who made huge contributions as well.
“The power of what happened on the ground, the average people, they organized our campaign. I just want to make sure that all the people that worked so hard, that they’re in the book, they’ll see themselves in the book,” he explained. “And if that happens then I’ll feel I’ve accomplished my goal.”
Plouffe also asserted that he did not even consider writing a book about the campaign until after Obama was elected president.
“I didn’t really start thinking about it until after the election,” he said. “It’s clear that this election victory was a significant moment in American history and I think that we felt that it should be captured in some way, and captured accurately. What I tried to do was capture what happened through our eyes.”
“In the primary we had so many ups and downs, we grew to learn not to prematurely celebrate,” Plouffe said. “There’s no doubt that things looked good in the end, we just kept focused on keeping our heads down. Of course we felt good about things but we just kind of put those thoughts aside. We were all elated on election night, it wasn’t something we expected to happen. To see it come to fruition was kind of a magical moment.”
“I’m doing all I can from the outside to help, obviously,” he assured. “And I could not be more proud of the job [Obama] is doing as president.”
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