Plouffe: Obama "Enormously Competitive" In Over A Dozen Battleground States
David Plouffe is a tough interview to get. When the Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Barack Obama's campaign manager last week, they relied on the Illinois Senator's description of the man in lieu of having direct access to the low-profile strategist.
But journalists in Washington, D.C. got a chance to take a crack at Plouffe Wednesday during a briefing he delivered at the DNC on the state of the general election race. The overriding theme of his address was confidence. Outlining the campaign's top priorities, Plouffe told reporters that, in addition to feeling good about their chances to hold onto the 252 electoral votes won by John Kerry in 2004, the campaign believes it has the financial resources, organizing strength, and candidate appeal that will help them contest over a dozen battleground states that together boast 199 electoral votes.
(That part of Plouffe's power-point presentation included Alaska, Nevada, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.)
Ticking off those states one by one in rapid fashion -- citing recent statewide polls, which Plouffe described as more useful than the national polls that routinely grab headlines -- the campaign manager repeated one phrase time and again: "we are enormously competitive."
Another of Plouffe's favored phrases had to do with states that he said were "behaving more Democratically" in recent years, leading the campaign to believe that the underlying partisan indicators of registration and enthusiasm could bolster their fortunes in Western states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. He also provided charts showing Obama's polling strength among Hispanics overall as equal to or better than Al Gore's in 2000, and much better than Kerry's 9-point advantage in 2004.
But another admission in Plouffe's address suggested a tension with his own "Democratic behavior" analysis. Specifically, when asked about the use of biographical TV ads currently being aired in 18 states, Plouffe admitted that there were "gaps" in the public mind about Obama, and that they had "elemental" work ahead in order to "re-tell and refresh" Obama's backstory. If that's the case, it's easy to see how more Democratically-inclined voters in battleground states might have doubts about Obama in particular, regardless of their increasing receptiveness to the party in general.
Still, Plouffe said the campaign "[knows] what's coming" on the matter of character questions that are expected to by raised by outside groups regarding Obama, adding that the campaign plans to "fight back aggressively, without letting the campaign become about that." More generally, Plouffe charged that John McCain does not have as many opportunities to pick off states won by Kerry in 2004, meaning that Obama will have a greater opportunity to play offense than the Republican nominee.
Plouffe's presentation indicated the Obama campaign's confidence in more areas than the fight with McCain, however. In a telling phrase, he revealed that the campaign intends to mount a "persuasion army" of more than one million volunteers whom Plouffe expects will hew closely to the campaign's talking points, and be run "in-house." Often, volunteer drives and state-to-state canvassing operations are run in a coordinated fashion by the national party committee, though it appears the Obama campaign is confident enough to take on that organizational burden as well.
Plouffe also indicated the campaign's intention to "reshape" the electorate by registering hundreds of thousands of voters out of demographic blocks that Obama performs well in, such as "young professionals" and African Americans. Noting that voter drives in smaller states could grow the campaign's overall vote share and propel them to victory, Plouffe mentioned renegade conservative Bob Barr's third-party campaign as a possible factor in making the race tighter in Georgia, taking as much as 4 percent of the vote "mostly out of McCain's hide."
The whole presentation was so relentlessly optimistic, several reporters wondered aloud what Plouffe saw as the major dangers for the campaign going forward. In response to a question about dissatisfaction on the left regarding some of Obama's recent positions -- such as the recent FISA compromise -- Plouffe said he had not really been aware of any major discord on that front. Asked about the current tumult over how many presidential debates Obama will have with McCain, Plouffe accused the GOP nominee's campaign of not "negotiating in good faith," due to their media-friendly public challenge for 10 town hall-style debates. But given the fact that one of the Obama campaign's central planks in international affairs calls for hard-nosed negotiations with implacable foes, Plouffe's explanation for stalled talks seemed like a convenient (if elegant) excuse.
Still, for a man who by all accounts is media-shy, it was, at the very least, a bold and confident performance.
June 25, 2008 05:47 PM