Can Obama's Army Convert to a Peacetime Force? Plouffe Responds

"Thank you for prying yourselves away from Going Rouge." That was David Plouffe's way of welcoming us to a conference call to discuss his own version of a campaign memoir, the newly released The Audacity to Win. (Check out Colin Delaney's helpful short guide to reading the book for the chewy digital bits.) The point of these "blogger calls" gets fuzzy as the months go by, where it's never quite clear to either principle or participant if the bloggers on the call are press, activists, some hybrid of the two, or something else entirely. Plouffe got a mix of questions from angry advocates, progressive press, interested technology writers, and more.

Including a hard ball from me. Or, at least, a question meant to dig out Plouffe's thinking on whether strategy behind the methodical plod to the White House he details so carefully in the book has an resonance now that we've a President Obama, big problems to solve, and no metrics so gloriously measurable as winning Iowa, raising half a billion dollars online, or knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors. The Obama campaign was soaring, no doubt. But a presidential election has a structure to it that government can't match. You know long in advance when each primary state will vote (well, there was the Florida/Michigan dustup of this past election season -- which Plouffe calls "Florigan" -- but that was a fairly unusual case.) You know where and when your parties nominating election is going to be held many months ahead. There are delegates to be racked up, electoral college votes to secure. There are things to measure, milestones to achieve. Campaigns are a bit like baseball that way.

And governing, it might be fair to say, is somewhat more like soccer. Nothing happens for a long time. People mill about. And then, wham! Something changes the game entirely. You put your best players on the field, but strategy is generally something reserved for set plays and making the coach feel like he or she is actually playing a role in the match. There's a reason we don't keep real stats. So I asked, Plouffe, is it possible that what he cooked up for Organizing for America, a strategy of checking boxes and amassing wins, simply doesn't translate to changing the country to the legislative process without a huge amount of misplaced energy, at least in the near term?

"You're right," said Plouffe. "I wish health care could be done by winning an election. I wish 51 percent of the people could vote for it and it would be it." That said, Plouffe argued that the battle over passing health care reform through Congress isn't the only natural barometer of OFA's relevance and its ability to succeed. "Obviously," he continued, "there are going to be many meaningful parts of his governing that aren't going to go through the legislative arena." Still, the Obama for America-style web of volunteers can, said Plouffe, help advance Obama's legislative agenda by answering their neighbors' questions about his plans and building local momentum behind them.

There's no ignoring, though, that OFA 2.0 is not the organization it once was, and hasn't been since that first morning after Obama won the election last November. "We had a huge campaign," said Plouffe. By one metric, Plouffe argued, OFA is more than it ever was. Contrary to expectations outside the campaign that supporters would wander away from the OFA email list post-election, "the truth is, said Plouffe, "our list has grown a bit." Still, the organization simply doesn't have the institutional might it had during its first incarnation. During the campaign, said Plouffe, "ninety percent of our volunteers lived within 10 miles of a campaign office. Now we're in a situation where you have one or two offices in a state. We have a skeleton staff." Plouffe argued that shriveled OFA actually creates more opportunity for the organization to be grassroots led. "We're more dependent on our volunteers than before," he said. "What's happening on the ground in all fifty states is very, very meaningful."

Plouffe doesn't shy from the idea of Organizing for America as volunteer-driven organization is indeed something novel, an approach distinct from how Obama for America ran. Plouffe was asked during the call why -- for an ostensibly people-powered effort -- the campaign put so much energy into directing its efforts from a centralized core (made up, according to his book, of Obama, Plouffe, strategist David Axlerod, and communications director Robert Gibbs) and going so far as to marginalize the efforts of 527s and other outside organizations. Plouffe didn't mince words. "We wanted to control the campaign. We didn't want to outsource our efforts. We wanted to control the message of the campaign." Referring to outside groups and activists, Plouffe said, "these folks don't understand the strategy of the campaign, because they're not on the inside. We had the strategy, the goals, and the metrics." Plouffe recalled his time working at the DNC during the Kerry presidential campaign, when the two efforts ran side by side with little coordination. "That's no way to run a railroad."

That sentiment was echoed by Obama campaign new media director Joe Rospars at PdF Europe last week. "The bottom up stuff," argued Rospars, "needs to be enforced from the top down."

Having driven the train that delivered Barack Obama to the White House, Plouffe is understandably pretty confident in his game. A blogger on the call asked Plouffe what he made of comments by Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist Mark Penn where Penn argued that it was old media, not new, that propelled Obama ahead of his own candidate. Penn doesn't come off well in Plouffe's book. At all. In fact, Plouffe suggests that Penn didn't understand the basic arithmetic behind how delegates to the Democratic convention were awarded. "Well, what did he say specifically?," asked Plouffe. Being told, that silence we heard on the call was Plouffe not batting an eye. "It might not surprise you," said Obama's campaign manager, "that I don't consider Mark Penn an expert in technology or organizing."