L.G.: Did you have to drive that message home by making an example of anyone? Not to get into specific people, but did you have to fire anybody?
D.P.: Sure, well, I mean we fired people obviously, but from the very beginning we did spend some time saying, this is the way we're going to operate. We're just not going to have a bunch of the typical campaign B.S. We're not going to talk to the press about things we shouldn't talk about. We're going to respect each other and we're going to have a sense of mission. And, again, I think being an underdog helped in that regard. We had to be feisty and almost perfect to win the primary. And we weren't perfect, but we didn't have a lot of time to navel-gaze and worry about what job we were going to have in the presidential administration, because it was such a far-fetched enterprise in the beginning.
L.G.: Did you actually have a meeting where you and Obama sort of laid out the ethos of the campaign, where you said all those things explicitly?
D.P.: It wasn't a meeting. It was just a consistent and present part about how we talked about the campaign in the beginning. And so when people came on in the general election, a lot of new people came in but there was an existing ethos. So people had to kind of adapt to it, and that was a challenge obviously, because you were disrupting to some extent the great chemistry we had-but it took hold.
L.G.: How did you discipline salaries and compensation? Because traditionally, if you look at, say, Mark Penn [Hillary Clinton's chief strategist], I don't know how much Mark was pocketing but you see that they had outstanding bills approaching $10 million to him.
D.P.: People on the campaign could not make more than a certain amount-$12,000 a month. There were salary bands, so there wasn't a lot of eventfulness about what people got paid. If you were a deputy you got paid X, if you were an assistant, you got paid Y. We were very aggressive with our consultants in terms of their piece. From a fiscal management standpoint, Obama was very clear that he did not want to end up with a debt in the primary or the general, so we just planned accordingly. We didn't spend beyond our means.
L.G.: So the highest salary on the campaign was $12,000 a month?
D.P.: Pre-tax, yeah. In other campaigns, they can make a lot more than that, and people working in Senate races and governor's races made a lot more than that.
L.G.: You've made more than that.
D.P.: No doubt, it was a financial sacrifice for many on the campaign, but I think it helped. There wasn't any drama around compensation.
L.G.: What about percentages of ad buys?
D.P.: We had a cap, an aggressive arrangement-
L.G.: What did you cap it at?
D.P.: Well below industry standards.
L.G.: Because arguably, somebody could still get a very handsome fee. Say for the sake of argument, you spent $350 million on advertising. Even a niggling 1 percent of that is $3.5 million.
D.P.: That's why you have caps, so that people can't make more than a certain amount. So that if your spending does increase, their profits don't increase.
L.G.: What was the cap on that?
D.P.: I can't remember-it differed by firm based on what they were doing. But we made sure to protect ourselves. That ended up being, I think, wise, because we obviously raised a lot of money but the firms did not make more. My view of this is that working on a presidential campaign is obviously arduous but it's a unique opportunity. My view is you shouldn't have to pay market rate for people's services. And that's the general approach, and it seems to have worked out well.
L.G.: As reporters, we love covering campaigns, and especially presidential campaigns, because they're just a great source of gossip and behind-the-scenes drama. How did you stop that? Everybody was amazed at how little that was occurring from the Obama campaign.
D.P.: I think, first of all, we attracted the kind of people that weren't in it for themselves, they were in it for the cause. And that can't be overstated enough. Then I think, you instilled from the get-go, we don't tolerate, we don't want our business out there publicly. But I think without that core group of people, who had the right reasons for being there, who were very loyal, we couldn't have done it. We had a really great esprit de corps, and I think the culture of the organization from the get-go was, a leak could not be tolerated, it wasn't who we are. Any time there was a story we didn't like, we let it be known, so we did take some corrective action. And I think eventually that really became known throughout the organization-that we don't leak. Even as we grew, when we added staff it was a challenge, but there was enough of us being around through the primary that our culture is what people became indoctrinated in. It was a big deal. This isn't through some perverse desire for secrecy. I do think the press plays a very important role, so we were free with the information we thought needed to be. But the way we made decisions and processed stuff, if it didn't really serve voters, if it didn't really serve us, we tried to be careful about that.
L.G.: You personally had a limited degree of contact with reporters.
D.P.: I did talk to reporters, but only when we thought it served a purpose. I did plenty of it, but I didn't spend my day on the phone with reporters, unless our press folks or I thought it served a purpose.
L.G.: At one point during the primaries, you sent out a memo which had a great impact, and what you said was, that it was virtually impossible for Hillary to catch up.
D.P.: Yeah, we did that in mid-February, and I did a conference call with reporters. That was out of character for the campaign, and for me, because we were fairly provocative. We thought the race was not being covered in an accurate fashion. It was being covered as a dead heat, and the reality was, we had turned a corner on the campaign, where it was extraordinarily unlikely that we would not win. So we thought it was important to send that message to the press, and to the superdelegates, at that point it was more and more about superdelegates. And we needed it to take hold-in fact, this was not a tied race, we had gained a foothold that was going to be very hard to shake loose.
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