David Plouffe

If he were less shy and had a funny accent, David Plouffe would be every bit the household name that James Carville is-perhaps even going on Oprah and taking cameo roles in Hollywood movies. Plouffe is, after all, "the unsung hero" of the "best political campaign in the history of the United States of America"-which is how Barack Obama described him before a global television audience, in the mother of all shout-outs, on the night he was elected Leader of the Free World.

At 41, Plouffe (rhymes with "no fluff") will probably never top his historic achievement of managing the campaign that gave this nation its first African-American commander in chief. The juggernaut Plouffe led, which grew to a payroll of 5,000 before Election Day, raised record amounts of cash from millions of small donors, defeated the once-invincible Hillary Clinton machine, and crushed the flailing Republican nominee, John McCain. Obama's success was so overwhelming that it's hard to remember those early days when the freshman senator from Illinois was the longest of long-shots and the darkest of dark horses in a country still troubled by issues of race.

But, as the press-averse Plouffe told Portfolio.com in an exclusive interview, Clinton might well have won the nomination if she had just competed in the far-flung caucus states that handed Obama his insurmountable delegate lead in February and March. "We woke up every day wondering, is today the day they're going to show up in Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State?" Plouffe said. "And every day they didn't, that enabled us really to build up our strength there."

Lloyd Grove: Just to begin, I'll do one small bit of full disclosure: I used to be married to your wife's sister, so that makes us ex-brothers-in-law once removed. But, hey, we're all ex-brothers-in-law in the family of man.

David Plouffe: In some way, if you do the charts deep enough, yes, that's right.

L.G.: The goal of this interview will just be to get you to teach us a little bit of Presidential Campaigning 101 and also to give us a couple of insights from your own experience in this last campaign. You've been involved in several presidential campaigns before. You did [Iowa Senator Tom] Harkin in '92, you've done [Missouri Representative Dick] Gephardt. Walk me through your previous presidential campaign experience.

D.P.: Those were the two, then I did a lot of the work for the D.N.C. [Democratic National Committee] during the general election of 2004. We, meaning David Axelrod and I, did a lot of the advertising-like McCain this time. The R.N.C. [Republican National Committee] was more of a major actor than the McCain campaign was, because they were in the federal system. We did a lot of that work in '04 for the D.N.C. Gephardt was '04. The other thing is I spent a lot of '97 and '98, when Gephardt was planning on running against Gore, as you might remember. I spent two years doing a lot of planning and work on that. It gave me a lot of understanding of Iowa and New Hampshire and how the process works, that early states were of paramount importance, that if it got into a long, drawn-out affair, it was going to be a delegate-by-delegate battle, and also that the way the media covered the race did not reflect how the race might be decided. So that took a lot of discipline not to play their game but to play our own.

L.G.: Okay, why don't you give me a sense of the scale of things? Basically a presidential campaign is a business. It's a public company of which you were the C.E.O., and it's only a temporary company, and the goal is to get 50 percent market share plus one. I guess in the primary phase it's less than 50 percent. But give me a sense of the scale. You had 1,000 on your payroll? How much money came in and went out?

D.P.: There are business analogies. One is, we're a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don't have quarter after quarter to succeed. You either win or lose on Election Day. It is a very accelerated environment. For us particularly, because we weren't planning to run for president, he got into this very unconventionally. It's like taking off while you're fixing the wings on a plane. You're up on the high wire, but by the end we raised over three quarters of a billion dollars, over $750 million dollars. We had over 5,000 employees, we had millions of active volunteers. So it was a big organization. The most important thing for me as a manager was the senior staff. If you don't have strong senior staff, you're going to struggle, and I was blessed to have a strong senior staff. And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.

L.G.: And what were those metrics?

D.P.: It depended on the job. If you were a fundraiser it was how much money you raised. If you were a field organizer, it was did you recruit enough volunteers? If you were in the operations part of the campaign, were you processing things quickly enough? We were kind of a service organization in some respects to the states. We had a whole team in Chicago there to serve the states, who were out there in the battleground and war zones. And so we can't afford to have any delays in what they need. People who are cutting lists, data people-it all has to be both accurate and quick. I think we were a very agile organization, even as we got big we kind of maintained that insurgent feel and that's very important. I think we were much more nimble than Clinton or McCain.

L.G.: Clearly. Walk me through the different units of the campaign. There's the ground game, media, communication-just tell me how you thought of the organization.

D.P.: There are the states, which were always critical, and within the states, there's a state director, the ground game, and people doing press in the states. We viewed the campaign as essentially 16 different campaigns, because every state is different. We had communications people in Chicago, we had research people in Chicago, we had a big new media and technology department in Chicago. We had a fundraising department, we had a scheduling and advance department, which is critical because we obviously had Obama and Biden and their staffs out there every day. We had a vice presidential staff, we had an operational staff that administered the campaign. Those would be the main areas.

L.G.: How much money is allocated to the various units of the campaign? One always hears that paid advertising takes significantly more than 50 percent-putting commercials on the air, radio, and television. Can you break down the percentages?

D.P.: Well, we spent obviously a lot of money on TV, but as a ratio of our spending, it was much lower than historically is done, and that's because we spent a lot of money in the field and on the ground. And, in fact, when we did our baseline budget, the field was fully funded because we thought it was very, very important. If we were to raise excess funds, we bolstered the field a little bit, but it went in advertising. Our first priority was the ground operation because we thought that was essential to us winning. It's very much, I think, a unique approach. In a lot of campaigns, the media gets funded first, then if you have extra money that comes in, you bolster the field and things of that sort. And we kind of did it in reverse.

L.G.: Can you give me a rough breakdown of percentages?

D.P.: Well, no. I would say that it's lower.

L.G.: One always hears historically it's almost 70 percent that goes to media.

D.P.: Right, the playbook is 70 to 75 percent, and we did much less than that. Under 50 percent.

L.G.: What gave you the chutzpah to think you should break the model, and spend more than 50 percent on non-media?

D.P.: First of all, we knew that we had to get really good turnout, and that we thought a human being talking to a human being in a state is the most effective in communication. So we needed an organization that was able to facilitate that. Secondly, a presidential campaign is a very well-covered enterprise, people are talking about it all the time, they see it on the newscast, they're reading about it online. In many respects, advertising in a senate race or governor's or congressional race can have more impact because those races aren't front and center for people. I always believed that advertising was very, very important. I think we went right in and it was very helpful-makes it meaningful because people have 100 percent knowledge of the candidate and are following pretty closely. So I thought we could afford to trim a little bit. Now we ended up raising a lot of money, so our point levels were very big in September, October, but we could've won without that. Then the McCain campaign likes to say, "we were outspent, that's why we lost on TV"-and I think that's complete malarkey.

L.G.: You think it had more to do with the good luck you had with the economy tanking and the fact they didn't really have a ground game?

D.P.: Well, and they careened from message to message, strategy to strategy. We had one message, one strategy. We won all three debates. When was the last time one candidate won all the debates? Maybe Clinton in '92, although I think one of them was a tie. We had big moments in the campaign.

L.G.: So David, as far as you're concerned, you're still in Spin Alley, huh? Still telling me Obama won the debates.