Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing

I had arranged to meet David Plouffe on Saturday afternoon at a Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. The night before, a copy of his new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, was waiting for me when I checked into my hotel at midnight. I flipped it open, read a few lines and was hooked. I spent the rest of the night reading it.

Plouffe has written the most important political book of the year (for reasons I'll get to in a moment). It's also completely gripping. It reads like a thriller. Even though you know how it ends, you quickly get caught up in every twist and turn of perhaps the most remarkable campaign in American history.

Along the way, I found myself tearing up when I read about the campaign volunteer who had scrimped and saved ("Grabbed some ramen on the weekends... Didn't take the girl to a movie") so he could donate ten dollars to Obama, and laughed at the funny-in-retrospect tales from the trail (like David Axelrod's BlackBerry crashing at a crucial moment because of glazed donut getting stuck in the trackwheel.)

But it's not the insider look at the past that makes the book so important. It's what it shows us about the present -- and the effect it could have on the future.

Plouffe's book arrives at a crossroads moment for the administration -- exactly one year after the election, and one year before the 2010 midterms. A lot has happened in that year, as the audacity of winning has given way to the timidity of governing. But in recounting how the campaign team -- and the candidate -- not only had the audacity to win but was able to keep that audacity alive, day in and day out over the long nearly-two-year slog of the campaign, Plouffe has also shown the Obama White House the way forward.

The book is a powerful reminder of what the country voted for last year -- and could serve as the trigger for Obama and his team to refocus and remember why the election mattered so much.

Most of the attention the book has gotten so far has focused on the so-called "sexy" parts -- the saga of Reverend Wright, the furor over Bittergate, how Obama came to pick Biden over Hillary for VP. All of which is serving to obscure the key takeaway from the book: the fact that everything in the campaign flowed, as Plouffe puts it, from Obama's conviction that "the country needed deep, fundamental change; Washington wasn't thinking long-term... the special interests and lobbyists had too much power, and the American people needed to once again trust and engage in their democracy."

Plouffe hits this theme again and again in the book. And it's the first thing we talked about when we met (me looking bleary-eyed from my night of reading and underlining and writing in the margins; Plouffe looking relaxed and refreshed, a far-cry from the profoundly exhausted look he had the last time I saw him, in the midst of the presidential run).

The book is "not a victory lap," he tells me. "It's a reminder of how and why we won. We never forgot why we were running. That was our North Star. And we held that North Star in our sights at all times. We made many mistakes along the way, but we always remembered that we were running because, as Barack put it, the dream so many generations had fought for was slipping away."

Axelrod -- or "Ax" as Plouffe refers to him throughout the book -- summed up at the beginning of the campaign the core elements of the message that would guide them: "change versus a broken status quo; people versus the special interests; a politics that would lift people and the country up; and a president who would not forget the middle class."

Running a different kind of campaign became "shorthand" for the campaign. Whenever they found themselves drifting towards standard political behavior, they'd ask themselves: "If we do this, how is that running a different kind of campaign?"

As Plouffe told me: "We made sure that everyone we hired internalized our core message and defaulted to those touch points when making decisions. For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to remain faithful to its principles all the time."

Plouffe kept returning to the mistakes they made, but only to highlight the campaign's saving grace -- its ability to course-correct, a vital survival mechanism for any successful campaign. Or successful White House.

Early in the book, Plouffe describes a tense meeting with the candidate in April 2007, after it became clear that Obama was having a hard time connecting with voters turning out to see him. Ax, Plouffe, and Peter Rouse were brutally honest with him. And the candidate agreed about the need "to find his authentic voice and reconnect with the fundamental concerns that drew him into the race in the first place. He had run to challenge the bankrupt and conventional politics of Washington, not master it."

Then there was the senior staff meeting after their dismal showing in Pennsylvania, where Obama announced: "I want us to get our mojo back. We've got to remember who we are."

Plouffe also mentions the difficult decision made right before the Iowa primary to decline John Kerry's offer to endorse Obama -- a move campaign insiders felt was the wrong message to send to voters looking for change. "In the end," writes Plouffe, "the tough decision we made was unquestionably the correct one. Just about every time we took the road less traveled, we benefited."

That included the decision, which Plouffe fought hard for, to have the campaign headquartered in Chicago because "D.C. is a swamp of conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck a campaign down, and we needed to think differently." Maybe the answer to the last nine months is to move the White House to Chicago.

Indeed, reading the book, I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"

How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?

How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he "would not forget the middle class" choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?

I'm referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House official I spoke with -- later confirmed by sources in the White House and on the Hill -- Summers was against the extension. And it took a lot of Congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president to overrule him.

And, according to another senior White House official, when foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning meeting, Summers' response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.

Nothing can be done -- pretty much the opposite of "Yes we can," isn't it?

According to Plouffe, "reform is in Obama's DNA." Then how do you have in your inner circle a man who has "nothing can be done" in his DNA? Unless, of course, the problem on the table has to do with Wall Street, in which case "everything can be done, has been done, and will be done."

Obviously, an administration needs to hire people who weren't part of the campaign. But the danger comes in hiring those who don't even share the goals of the campaign. That's why The Audacity to Win is so desperately needed right now.

It reminds us that, not that long ago, the conventional wisdom was that Candidate Obama didn't have a chance and that Hillary Clinton's nomination was inevitable. That's the same conventional wisdom that tells us that President Obama doesn't have a chance at really changing things and that the ultimate victory of the entrenched special interests is inevitable.

But the Obama campaign didn't buy into the conventional wisdom then: "We had a mountain named Hillary Clinton in our path that we had to find some way to scale, get around, or blow a hole through," writes Plouffe. And the Obama White House doesn't have to give into the conventional wisdom now. It just has to get its mojo back.

One way the White House can do this is to have everyone there read Plouffe's book, filled as it is with page after page after page of reminders of who put Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

"We knew who we were," writes Plouffe, "a grassroots campaign to the core. We started with our supporters on the ground and they led us to victory." This grassroots effort "was a prime motivator for Obama to run, the belief that the American people needed to reengage in their civic life... Obama felt in his gut that if properly motivated, a committed grassroots army could be a powerful force. Over time, the volunteers became the pillars that held the whole enterprise aloft."

I asked Plouffe what happened to the 13 million people on the campaign's email list -- a list he compares to having "our own television network, only better, because we communicated directly with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win."

"Volunteers have made 300,000 calls to Congress to support the president's health care plan, and held thousands of events around the country," he told me. "But it's hard to maintain the intensity of the engagement."

Of course it's hard. But, as he puts it in the book, "Obama had ignited something very powerful in young people throughout the country. If that spark could be preserved, I was convinced we'd be a much stronger country for it."

And no amount of rationalizing and sugarcoating can change the fact that the spark has not been preserved. And that we are a less strong country for it.

One of the reasons Plouffe gives in the book for the campaign deciding to forgo public funding was that, as he writes, "most painfully, taking the federal funds meant losing control of our secret weapon: we would have to largely outsource our entire grassroots ground campaign to the DNC." Which is exactly where the grassroots list -- rebranded as Organization for America -- is housed now. Painfully.

Plouffe talks about how the Obama team knew that in order to win, it would have to "attain the holy grail of politics -- a fundamentally altered electorate. We had to expand the electorate or we were cooked." With the help of their grassroots army, they did just that. Among people who had never voted before -- or who hadn't voted for a long time -- 71 percent voted for Obama.

Plouffe feels genuinely connected to the movement he helped unleash. "So many of the people," he told me, "who gave their heart and soul to the campaign were people who had given up on the system because they no longer believed they could trust politicians to deliver or really change anything. It is imperative for our democracy that these people are not disappointed. If they become disillusioned, they won't be coming back for a long while."

"I feel such an obligation to them," Obama told Plouffe during the campaign. "They believe in me. In us. In themselves. What keeps me going day after day? Besides a clear sense of why I am running for president, it's them, our volunteers. It is a special thing we've built here and I don't want to let them down."

I asked Plouffe if the president had read the book. "He read a couple of sections in it," he replied, "and even discovered a couple of things he didn't know."

Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end -- and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.

Then he can complete the journey from The Audacity of Hope and The Audacity To Win to The Audacity to Govern.

So, one year after the election, what do you think Candidate Obama would think of President Obama? Tweet your response (our Twitter hashtag is #OneYearLater), or post it in the comments section.

 

Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff

Comments

[abdiver12]

The problem with Obama is that he's trying too hard to be everybody's president, trying to emulate Lincoln who appointed his enemies to cabinet posts. Obama would do well to remember that though Lincoln reached out a hand to his enemies, he also WENT TO WAR with the South when necessary and would not settle for anything less than victory. And make no mistake, we are still at war with the South and the Republican Party though no guns are involved this time. The only issue is, do we have a president with the courage to lead us to victory like Lincoln did? The war did not end with the 08' election.

[PhilipTaylor]

"Too B1G and EV1L TO FAIL" has to be a thing of the PAST!

"I refuse to live in a Country LIKE THIS and I am NOT LEAVING (MM)!"

Signed, Every American on Main Street and in Urban Centers!

We can TURN THIS CORNER IN AMERICA!

It is Time to DOWNSIZE G0LDMAN, M0RGAN, JPM, BofA, and C!tigroup!

"Too B1G and EV1L TO FAIL" has to be thing of the PAST!

[Patrician]

A simple question: which of his promises has he broken? None of us know enough to judge the financial landscape although we pretend we do. But I have seen him working, making progress, every day he has been in office. I finished Plouffe's book. I now have proof to respectfully disagree with you. Candidate Obama morphed into President Obama in about as seamless a transition as one could make. I am enormously proud of him. But, see, I never believed the myth he could walk on water. I fear that when we sound like Republicans, we actually hurt his many objectives he hopes to accomplish in office. I am afraid of broad brush statements. I do better with a fine brush, looking one by one at the legislation in play or having made its way through the house. How about the historic passage of health care reform in the house yesterday? We all forget he has southern Democrats, who vote like Republicans, and Blue Dogs and republicans that vote as a block except for one brave one, Mr. Cao. I am for Obama.

[MrDemocrat]

Anyone who says anything negative about Obama should be locked up. Let's trash democracy and install a thugocracy. To do so, we'll amend the Constitution to eliminate free speech and then beat down anyone who disagrees with Obama. Let's make it happen!

[MrDemocrat]

Wrong, the country needs to burn all of its history books and make grade students learn from new history books that have America starting from the day Obama was elected. Let's face it, America had no history prior to Obama being elected. All those who disagree, are Republicans.

[steffi]

Wall Street needs to feel some pain otherwise Main Street will continue to suffer and will express that suffering come 2010, 2012.

[cbat]

For those fairweather dems wo are threatening to stay home in 2010 or 2012 or voiting republican, stay home and when the Republicans get back into office, screw this country again, then who are going to blame, Obama or yourself.

See this is where Dems do not learn the lessons of the past. Republicans are like vampires they can smell blood and dissent. They will use this so-called disappointment and lack of patience (less than a year) some of you have with Obama, they will use it against us and we will again fall for the great republican lie.

Republicans do not know how to govern, they never had, but they know how to win elections, Dems and independents will be their next victims in 2010. Some of you are so quick to make a political point, that are willing to sell out this country to the Republicans again.

The republicans will not magically become some new party in 2010 or 2012, they are who they are.

Just imagine for one moment if more us chose not to stay home when Bush was elected(despite the cheating), just think how many American lives and jobs would have been saved.

[RhodaA]

To Arianna:

"When FDR and LBJ were trying to pound Social Security and Medicare through Congress against fierce resistance from Republicans and conservative Democrats, Democrats to their left expressed pretty much identical sentiments about the inadequacies of both bills in their original form. They were so horribly flawed and compromised, that they thought it would be better to pass nothing than to pass bills that were far from perfect. Fortunately, bills don't have to be perfect the first time because Congress actually has the power to reshape laws after they're enacted. Thanks to this virtually unknown power of Congress, both Social Security and Medicare were expanded and improved in subsequent years and, in every case, it was vastly easier to make them better than it was to enact them in the first place; because it also turned out that the hard part is getting Congress to accept the concept. Once they did, the rest followed. Just as Democrats to the left of LBJ failed to learn anything from FDR's experience with Social Security, today's perfectionistas have failed to learn anything other than what their dogma tells them. The people who wanted it perfect the first time are a big part of why we're here at the 21st damn century trying to catch up to where Europe was by the middle of the 20th. Ted Kennedy was one of them in the early 70s and he went to his grave regretting it."
-- NCSteve, TPM:

[mmm611]

What strikes me is that the problem, if there is a problem, isn't Obama, but that we have a Democracy. Have you ever tried to get three people to agree on anything, let alone 425 in the house and 100 in the Senate?

You can plead and wish all you want, but getting these people to vote your way can be very difficult, especially when a large amount of them will vote against you only because you're a Democrat.

[Gdebs]

We need to switch to a parliamentary system that has party discipline. We need to know who to blame.

[Bardmess]

2010. The change we need to hope for is in Congress. Could we please focus on that?

[WritusMaximus]

Faith is to Religion as Facts are to The Truth.

Looks like a lovers' spat to me. Arianna just recently was a critic---she did her homework and reviewed the facts, took Obama to task for "forgetting" his principles/values. Today Arianna is a believer. My money is on Arianna once again turning on Obama, I mean, "turning on" as going against, and NOT as in a sexual way---for all of you nasty-minded folks out there!

By the way, IMHO (and I am unanimous in my assessment) Obama didn't change---many folks' perceptions of him were the ones that changed.

[QuiteSeriously]

"Even after last year's election, many insider lobbyists and partisan operatives really thought that the old formula of scare tactics, D.C. back-scratching and special-interest money would still be enough to block any idea they didn't like. Now, they're desperate. Because, tonight, you made it crystal clear: the old rules are changing -- and the people will not be ignored.

In the final phases of last year's election, I often reminded folks, "Don't think for a minute that power concedes without a fight," and it's especially true today. But that's okay -- we're not afraid of a fight. And as you continue to prove, when all of us work together, we have what it takes to win."

Quote above is from Barack Obama on House pasing Health Care Reform. Too timid?? Then we better elect more progressives to Congress, because for all its flaws the current bill just BARELY passed the House and who know what will happen in the Senate.

[Samina Mamon]

She continues ...
We will not negotiate on our country’s sovereignty and defence. And these are not mere slogans. They are based on facts which we read out of your conditionalities which do exist. And here are the facts Secretary Clinton:
1. The most controversial clause in the bill pertains to giving US ‘direct access to Pakistani nationals associated with such networks’. The explanation given in the note is equally unacceptable because it wants ‘cooperative efforts’ to combat proliferation to continue. This cooperation mentioned is intrusive since it demands ‘direct access’. Secretary Clinton, we have already handled our proliferators and believe in non priliferation. This we consider a breach of our sovereignty.
2. The reference to Pakistan military and intelligence agencies being involved in giving support to terrorists in the past is equally offensive. This is a clause which enables the Indian lobby to target Pakistan and hold it responsible for all future terrorist acts in the region.
3. The other issue pertains to the fact that President Obama’s regional security strategy will include working with ‘relevant governments and organizations in the region and elsewhere.’ The strategy which could include RAW and Mossad would be imposed on Pakistan for US national interest not Pakistan. And as such we cannot give the authority of making Pakistan’s security strategy to a US President.
4. There are references to expansion of Container Security Initiative at various Pakistani ports which we consider a security hazard.

[Samina Mamon]

Hi, Just wanted to mention - these are hard times in which the president and his administration is facing new kind of challenges, thus in my opinion not a time to go run another country. My case in point article addressed by our public rep in the parliments which reflects the strong opinion of 'A Nation' unwilling to be delt the same way. Its the 'Other Side of the Coin' and the one I wish your readers to also be aware of. http://www.ahmedquraishi.com/article_detail.php?id=844
Pakistani Woman Politician Refused To Meet Clinton
By: MNA Marvi Memon (who refused to meet US Secretary of State in Islamabad. she explains why in an 'open letter'.)

Dear Secretary Clinton,
Whilst the message from you and your government is that of peace and friendship, the Kerry Lugar Bill passed by your legislative branch has been one of the main stumbling blocks in this mission. The assumption that Pakistanis have misunderstood the bill is equally faulty. Pakistanis have read the bill and understood your intent to micromanage Pakistan, to curtail Pakistan’s nuclear expansion program and to direct the war against extremism in Pakistan from White House.
What follows below is an understanding of the bill which needs to be amended if relations between US and patriotic Pakistanis have to be established. Your assertion that if we have issues with the bill we don’t need to take the money is ‘spot on’; patriotic Pakistanis have rejected your mere $1.5 billion.

[J G H]

One of Obama's laudable goals is interfering with his other goals - reducing partisan bickiering in Washington. He has made the attempt, but the Republicans have not been willing to meet him even a quarter of the way. Only complete conversion to the teabagger's agenda would get Republican votes, and even then FOX and Limbaugh would probably find some way to fault him. He needs to state clearly and openly that he has tried to work with the GOP but that until they become more flexible, he is shelving that goal and pursuing the rest of his agenda.

I might add that I would have to say that I do not support any of the health care bills. They do not go nearly far enough; single payer is the goal, and extremely robust public option open to all is the minimum compromise. Unfortunately, polls make it seem that lack of support for the health care bills is support for the GOP, when I think their whole position amounts to criminal negligence.

[jaxjive]

I am hoping, now that the health care reform has passed the House, Obama can start getting to the rest of his formidable agenda. Like jobs for Americans, taking another stab at reforming the bankers, getting us out of Iraq and, hopefully, Afghanistan. We can worry about revisions to the health care reform later. Obama HAS been too timid. He now needs to put his shoulders back, stand up and act like the president most of us thought he would be. We don't need another bully like Bush, but we DO need a leader like FDR.