David Plouffe memoir: Excerpts
From Mike Alllen’s Playbook, exclusive excerpts from “The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory” — $15.09 on Amazon – by DAVID PLOUFFE, campaign manager of Obama for America:
“The remarkable Obama for President campaign, led by a once-in-a-generation candidate, had the audacity to win — and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom again and again. We talked to voters like adults and organized a grassroots movement of average citizens the likes of which American politics had never seen.” (p. 3)
JUNE 2007: “Our research team had put together a document that highlighted the voluminous examples of Hillary Clintons’ expressing tacit support for outsourcing. We knew this could cause huge problems in Iowa with blue-collar voters … The document on outsourcing was titled ‘Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab,’ after an incident when Hillary Clinton was in India and she jokingly told a local official that should be her title because of her ongoing political interest in many things Indian. It was stupid and snarky; these research documents historically do not see the light of day, so communications staff doesn’t treat them as though their language will be repeated. They are considered off-the-record and rarely get sourced. As a result, we were sloppy. But we got burned, and the New York Times broke the story that we were moving the D-Punjab document around the press world. [Jeff Zeleny’s “Political Memo,” at the bottom of A10 on Saturday, June 16, 2007, was headlined, “A New Kind of Politics Closely Resembles the Old.”]
Read entire article at Mike Allen's Playbook in Politico
“The remarkable Obama for President campaign, led by a once-in-a-generation candidate, had the audacity to win — and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom again and again. We talked to voters like adults and organized a grassroots movement of average citizens the likes of which American politics had never seen.” (p. 3)
JUNE 2007: “Our research team had put together a document that highlighted the voluminous examples of Hillary Clintons’ expressing tacit support for outsourcing. We knew this could cause huge problems in Iowa with blue-collar voters … The document on outsourcing was titled ‘Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab,’ after an incident when Hillary Clinton was in India and she jokingly told a local official that should be her title because of her ongoing political interest in many things Indian. It was stupid and snarky; these research documents historically do not see the light of day, so communications staff doesn’t treat them as though their language will be repeated. They are considered off-the-record and rarely get sourced. As a result, we were sloppy. But we got burned, and the New York Times broke the story that we were moving the D-Punjab document around the press world. [Jeff Zeleny’s “Political Memo,” at the bottom of A10 on Saturday, June 16, 2007, was headlined, “A New Kind of Politics Closely Resembles the Old.”]