Obama’s decision to not “follow the old playbook” during the 2008 elections, campaign manager David Plouffe said Wednesday night at Fairfield University, was arguably his best decision from the entire campaign.
Plouffe’s strategy of creating his own approach to campaigning for Obama was likely the reason behind Obama’s current presidency. Rather than using tactics proven to be successful in previous campaigns, Plouffe formulated his own ideas to employ in the race. In his speech last night, Plouffe said, “We were seen as an extremely strategic campaign.” This image was realistic and appropriate, he acknowledges.
“We took risks,” he said. “But they worked out, so they don’t seem like risks anymore.”
Though the campaign “risks” have slowly since disappeared from the minds of the voters and politicians, their effects have been significant. The campaign did a variety of aspects of their race differently than their competitors, Plouffe noted, including their use of technology, their targeting of various voter groups, and their ability to become media figures for their individuality in campaigning techniques.
“We knew where we were heading… [and] had a clear sense of our strategy,” he said. But Plouffe also noted that “we weren’t cut from the same cloth” as the other campaigns. He noted that the entire concept of ignoring older, more conventional campaign tactics in favor of newer and bolder plans had a great potential of failure.
Unlike their competitors, the Obama campaign focused on increasing support and outreach in unconventional ways. Plouffe explained that recent technological advances across the country allowed the Obama campaign to reach out to new groups of voters that were usually ignored or underappreciated by other campaigns.
Obama’s internet website generated a great deal of publicity when its online monetary donation feature became one of the most successful in history.
The Obama campaign raised $750 million over the course of the presidential race. $500 million of that money was contributed solely online by a variety of donors, and the majority of the people who contributed money also dedicated their time and energy to the campaign as well.
“These people were the campaign,” Plouffe said. He continued, saying that although technology was highly useful, “Grassroots was our message army.”
The campaign arranged for numerous media interviews and paid for a great deal of advertising, he said, but the most important part was the volunteer grassroots component of the race. The relationships between the campaign volunteers and their fellow community members allowed Obama supporters to encourage their peers to become actively involved with their country and register to vote – and vote for Obama.
Such “person-to-person relationships,” said Plouffe, were the heart of the campaign and were crucial to its success.
He noted that the grassroots aspect of the race would have been rendered useless had it not been for the recent technological advances across the country – and the Obama campaign’s ability to employ such tools to their advantage.
Now that the campaign is over, Plouffe said he is proud of his accomplishments as campaign manager. Yet he also admitted that initially he didn’t even want to be the campaign manager for Obama’s presidential race before the core advising campaign group was formed.
“I knew [Obama] was going to ask me to manage and I dreaded it,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it - I agonized over” whether or not to accept Obama’s request.. After encouragement from his wife, however, Plouffe finally accepted the position and joined the campaign team.
“It was such a joy to be a part of,” he said looking back on his time spent campaigning. “[It was] the kind of politics you idealize…we had a lot of fun.”
Not just fun, but successful as well – it was exactly one year ago on the night of Plouffe’s speech at Fairfield that Obama was announced as the 44th president of the United States. As for the future of Obama’s presidential position, Plouffe predicted that the 2012 race will be even more drastically different than the 2008 race was. He didn’t reveal all of his plans, but did mention that the group is “thinking long term,” leaving a great deal of opportunity for a new, even more radical campaign in the future.
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