Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [29]
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In Chicago, the Obama campaign was “data mining” for voters. Using social networking and computer search engines, the Obama staff was gearing up to find Obama voters and get them out to vote. The Democrats had been learning from the Republicans—from Karl Rove’s “micro-targeting” at the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, which used tools like sampling viewers from the Golf Channel to find potential voters. “I think the Bushies in ’04 did a very good job on this,” said a top campaign official. “We took it to another level in ’08 and were going to make what we did in ’08 look like Jurassic Park.”
The manager of the Obama campaign, Jim Messina, wanted to see hard data on his computer screen every day—numbers of doors knocked on, phone calls made, and more esoteric data he was not willing to describe, lest he tip off the Republicans. “I get paid to worry,” Messina told us. “That’s my job. Like, I spend all my time worrying. If you ask one of my staff, I don’t go into their office and say, Great job. I’m like, Here’s my worry. What about this?”
With up to a billion dollars to spend on the president’s reelection, the Obama team was not likely to be short of resources. But the prevailing ethos at Obama headquarters, a fifty-thousand-square-foot space in one of Chicago’s tallest buildings, was to be cheap. “We don’t give people business cards. We make them buy them on their own. We don’t give people the Obama T-shirts. They have to buy their own T-shirts. We make people recycle their nametags. You only get one nametag for events, and if you lose it, you have to make yourself another, because nametags are expensive, they’re like a buck fifty, and I’m not spending a buck fifty because you lost your nametag,” the senior campaign official told us. He had been consulting with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, on how to create the right office culture. “You’ve got to make fun every day for your people,” the Google exec told him. “Last time,” said the senior official, “we had cubes and it wasn’t fun. This time we have an open setting, and people chipped in money to hire an artist to make a mural on one wall because people wanted a mural.” The campaign headquarters has a foosball table and a Ping-Pong table (Messina plays, to show he’s a regular guy) and parties once a month. But the staffers have to buy their own beer.
What the Obama campaign did not have was a message. In 2008, Obama had won on a promise to change Washington. When that quickly proved impossible, he tried to work with the powers-that-be in Washington to get things done. With the exception of the first stimulus bill and the highly controversial health care legislation, that didn’t really work, either.
The lack of a message was a source of considerable anxiety inside the Obama camp. “There’s a bit of casting about, throwing ideas at the wall,” said an Obama adviser. “Win the Future followed by We Can’t Wait followed by—who knows what comes next?” The adviser said that Mike Donilon, a White House adviser (and brother of Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser), has been strenuously urging that the president don a populist mantle. “Mike’s been arguing forcefully in the West Wing that this is not 1948—this is not Truman versus the Do-Nothing Congress, which really is what the We Can’t Wait message is.” The more effective historical analogy, goes the Donilon argument, is to 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt ran against “inequitable Big Business.” The adviser says that Daley’s diminishment as chief of staff (in early November he announced that he was already reducing his day-to-day role) reflects a significant leftward shift by Obama. Daley was a centrist who was supposed to bring compromise with Congress and business. The “new message,” says the adviser, is “to align more closely to the 99 percent” against the “the 1 percent”—the mantra of Occupy Wall Street.
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