Obama 2012 Headquarters Upbeat but Phasers Set to Kill. [View all]

[RandySF]

For all the feel-good vibes and lusciously designed graphics, what the strategists here have built is a giant killing machine. They've had the money—a cool $61 million at last disclosure—and the time to assemble the biggest, baddest campaign infrastructure they could imagine. If you look past the start-up style ping-pong table with the stenciled 2012 logo and tune out the chirpy greetings of volunteers answering phones, you'll notice the team in the darkened southeast corner, the guys with the earlobe plugs and scraggly beards bent over MacBooks. New talent from Silicon Valley, these are the software engineers who are building proprietary data-collection, communications, and reporting systems that could drastically increase the campaign's ability to target swing-voters. And then there's the row of offices that line the eastern wall, secluded chambers where Deputy Campaign Managers Stephanie Cutter, Julianna Smoot, and Jen O'Malley Dillon, spend their days plotting ways to out-fundraise, out-communicate, and out-organize the other guy, whoever he may turn out to be.

Axelrod has just returned from several days of fundraisers and media engagements around the country. ("Left for dead at the checkout counter at Tiffany's" he'd cracked of a newly resurgent Gingrich, trotting out a line he'd been polishing here for days.)

I ask one advisor—who, like nearly everyone, will address strategy only anonymously—the question of the week: Are you doing anything differently to prepare for Gingrich? She laughs. "Depending on which month you'd stopped by, you would've been asking 'Are you ready for Bachmann? Are you ready for Perry?' We're built to win," she says, "irrespective of who the nominee is going to be. We don't get to pick that guy."



http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201112/barack-obama-presidential-campaign-dispatch#ixzz1gN0Th22u