The Obama Campaign Is Not Kidding Around [View all]
from Andrew Romano at Newsweek: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/inside-president-obama-s-reelection-machine.html
Jan 2, 2012 12:00 AM EST
Team Obama has quietly built a juggernaut reelection machine in Chicago.
The Obama campaign is not kidding around. I recently visited its headquarters in Chicago, and I can personally vouch for how much it’s not kidding around. Yes, there was a blue Ping-Pong table in the middle of the office—custom-made, evidently, because the Obama 2012 logo was emblazoned on it. (Twice.) There were printouts of people’s nicknames—Sandals! Shermanator!—where corporate nameplates usually go. There was a mesh trucker hat from South Dakota, which was blaze orange and said “Big Cock Country” on the crown. There was a cardboard speech bubble (“nom nom data nom”) affixed to an Uglydoll. There was miniature air-hockey table. A narwhal mural. A stuffed Rastafarian banana.
But do not be deceived. There was also a chaperone following me everywhere I went and digitally recording everything anyone said to me. Ben LaBolt, Obama’s press secretary, and Stephanie Cutter, his deputy campaign manager, closed their doors as I walked by. An underling clammed up when I asked what she and her colleagues do on the weekends. At one point my minder agreed to let me out of her sight for a few milliseconds, but then I got too close to a big whiteboard covered in hieroglyphic flow charts and she instantaneously materialized at my side, having somehow teleported the 50 yards from where I’d last seen her. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “You can’t look at that.” The next day it was covered by a tarp.
In short, the place is intense; Obama’s minions are very serious about lots of things, including the business of reminding themselves not to be so serious . . .
While the GOP candidates have spent the last year parading and pirouetting on Fox News, the president’s team has been quietly, methodically channeling their worry back into the campaign—and creating something, I discovered in Chicago, that will be even bigger, even smarter, and even more surprising than their revolutionary 2008 operation. Before my chaperone apprehended me near the whiteboard, I noticed a photograph taped to a developer’s Mac. “Everyone chill the fuck out,” it said. “I got this.” I knew the line; it had first appeared on a JPEG of Obama, scowling and resolute, that went viral in September 2008, during one of the Democratic Party’s inveterate panic attacks. But the president wasn’t in this particular picture. In his place was the operative in charge of getting him reelected: campaign manager Jim Messina. No doubt it was a comforting mantra for the developer, and for the rest of the twitchy Chicago crew: chilled-the-fuck-out-or-not, Messina’s got this.
Who knows? It may even turn out to be true . . .
The president’s greatest advantage, Messina explained, is time. Without a primary war to wage, his staff has been able to dedicate the past 10 months exclusively to general-election preparations—a head start not only over 2008 (and previous incumbents) but over a bumper crop of clumsy Republicans who have been too distracted by 2011’s 13 televised debates to bother with old-fashioned chores such as fundraising or field organizing. “We now have people on the ground all across the country who’ve spent four years, five years in our system and know how to do this, who believe in this guy, and who are trained,” Messina told me. “That’s just a huge piece of business. [Mitt] Romney and [Newt] Gingrich don’t have operations on the ground in these states . . .”
read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/inside-president-obama-s-reelection-machine.html
(Greg Ruffing / Redux for Newsweek
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