Fascinating article on Obama's campaign manager, Plouffe

[Hamlette]

By October of 2007, we in the press had decided that, if Barack Obama was going to make a move, he had better do it soon. Unfortunately for Obama, so had some of his most influential donors. As they gathered at a Des Moines art gallery for a quarterly meeting, these moneymen were visibly anxious. Why wasn't Obama closing the gap in Iowa? Shouldn't he go negative on Hillary?

It fell to campaign manager David Plouffe to quell the panic. He ticked off the number of offices Obama had in Iowa and the dates they'd opened. He listed the precincts where Obama would do well among backers of non-viable candidates. The following day, Plouffe's team played a video of Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, which the campaign had flooded with supporters. He even put the moneymen through a simulated caucus, in which they chose among breakfast foods rather than candidates.

snip

It was a spectacular display of intimate Iowa knowledge. "At the end of that people felt, 'Okay, ... you're right, we are going to win Iowa,'" recalls Kirk Wagar,

snip

The rail-thin, flinty-eyed Plouffe is militantly averse to publicity, a trait the senator values. . . . John Lapp, a former Gephardt colleague, told me he recently arranged for Plouffe to appear in Details magazine's list of the 50 most influential people under 45. Plouffe instructed an aide to get him out of it.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f746721e-74d7-4313-9231-7e75e5d56fbb&p=1



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[Zueda]

1. Is this piece from the future?

That article has a post date of Wednesday, May 07, 2008.

[Hamlette]

2. odd, my guess is its the date of the magazine it will appear in n/t

[Cha]

3. That was totally interesting, Hamlette.

Glad I found it again..I remembered seeing it earlier and then lost it.

Now I know more about who is sending me some of those encouraging emails from TeamObama.