David Plouffe on The Audacity to Win

Most of the high-ranking members of the Barack Obama campaign are now working in the Obama administration, but David Plouffe, his campaign manager, while doing some advising for the administration, is not. What’s he doing? Among other things, writing a book, called The Audacity to Win, which will come out from Viking in November, making it the first insider’s look at the campaign. (What’s he not doing? Running campaigns. When I asked him if he had any candidates running this fall, he said, “Nope. I’m done.” He’ll work for the reelection of his two best-known clients, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and the president, but otherwise, no more campaigning. It is hard to imagine what further mountains you could climb after the perfect race of 2008.)

Plouffe is still working on the book, but he stopped by the Amazon offices yesterday to talk about the book and the campaign, and we have a few videos to share. Plouffe kept a pretty low profile during the campaign (although he did get a high-profile shout-out from his boss in his Grant Park victory speech, when he credited Plouffe and David Axelrod, with understandable hyperbole, with running “the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics”), so I had less of a sense of him beforehand than I did of Axelrod, but in person he’s much like his candidate: analytical, good-humored, level-headed. He was accompanied by his editor, Wendy Wolf–in fact, after their visit they were going to spend the afternoon in an editing session at their hotel. They both report that he has come a long way fast in figuring out how to write his first book.

I picked out a few clips to post here from his talk and from a few questions I asked him afterwards, but I also asked him, after my Flip ran out of memory, about his favorite political books. Here are his picks:


• What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer. His easy favorite, which he’s read at least four times (which adds up to 4,000+ pages), and which he recommended to staffers for its insights into the Iowa caucuses. A classic political book about one of the least memorable campaigns in modern history (the 1988 primaries, involving Bush Sr., Dole, Dukakis, Gephardt, Hart, and–whaddya know–Joe Biden).



• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. So familiar a template for the Obama team that I’m not sure anything else can be said about it! 



• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson’s gonzo persona threatens to overwhelm his work, but this one is a real, meaty politico’s book.



• Primary Colors by Anonymous/Joe Klein. Admitted almost as a guilty pleasure (maybe ’cause it was valuable opposition research during the primaries).




And here’s Plouffe himself.

On how the campaign used focus groups and what they told them about, for instance, Joe the Plumber:

On the perhaps unintended side effects of the National Popular Vote proposal that’s gaining steam:

More after the jump…



On the influential role in politics (and business) of people talking to friends and family:

On rolling the dice in big campaign decisions (the 30-minute ad and the outdoor acceptance speech in Denver):

And in response to a question of mine about the democratic nature of the Iowa caucus (on one hand, a tiny demographically unrepresentative slice of the country getting an outsized role in deciding the president, but on the other hand, a real example of face-to-face discussion and campaigning):

–Tom