Obama Manager Plouffe Talks at MCLA
Last night we at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts had the great pleasure of hearing from and asking questions of David Plouffe, the legendary manager of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
He pointed out that on this the 100th day of Obama’s administration, he’d rather be here in the Berkshires talking with real college teachers and real students than in Washington, home of the artificial 100 days of measurement. We, of course, applauded.
Most of us – in millions of small, grass-roots, ways – were fundamentally important parts of the Obama campaign: talking with our friends and neighbors, discussing and debating the pro’s and con’s of the issues, registering voters, donating time and small amounts of money. Plouffe detailed how behind all the technology of the campaign (the emails, the social network sites, etc.) there were thousands and thousands of real people doing real work. I’ll not outline specific statistics, polling and funding trends etc. in this post b/c Plouffe will have a new book soon, about the lessons and strategies of Obama’s winning campaign. Given the articulate caliber of his talk tonight, as soon as it’s available I will strongly recommend everyone go read the book.
Over and over again something truly wonderful happened during our presidential elections, about which Plouffe was genuinely grateful and conversational: Students were incredibly active in Obama’s campaign. They were so involved that it inspired their peers to get involved too, even when they disagreed. I agree: I saw a lot more student activity with this recent campaign on all sides of the political spectrum than in previous election cycles, and that was refreshing and interesting. Plouffe pointed out that in many ways they were more proud of getting more and more people involved in national politics than anything else they did during the campaign. They figured that even if they lost, getting people involved would be good for democracy in general and not just good for their candidate.
Maybe you felt like this during the elections: what’s wrong with all the papers and major broadcast news shows? Why do they care so much about Michelle’s Arms or Sarah Palin’s glasses or McCain’s old angry youtubed outbursts? And why aren’t they leading mainly substantive discussions about policy proposals and the issues? And why do they have all the big news and trends so slowly — hadn’t we already heard about all this days ago on Facebook? We had. Mass media was painfully slow. Contemporary modes of communication – websites, social networks, cell phones, email – all had progressed so far since the last series of elections that none of the mass media had caught up or understood them. While pundits were watching mass media headlines to see which candidates were winning the press, Obama’s campaign was participating online instead. In her article for the North Adams Transcript, Jen Huberdeau put it this way:
He said people also receive their news differently than 10 years ago and have a distrust for the media.
“They go online and research things,” Plouffe said. “What matters to them is what their father, sister, neighbor or the guy at the diner has to say. By making sure our volunteers were well-versed, we were able to counteract the negative remarks on the ground level.”
One of the delightful aspects of the recent presidential campaign was just how wrong mass media venues were. The Obama campaign process demonstrated it over and over again. When some pundit on CNN or MSNBC or ABC or FOX claimed that Obama held a position on a policy, you could nearly instantly check the facts online, and more importantly, do so with the help of your friends and contacts in social networks. If you’d signed up for email notices from any of the candidates, you saw quickly a correction whenever an important point was lost on the media or another candidate. And, you had the tools to find out more in-depth information if you needed it. Never before have so many people had access to the texts of various legislation, content of proposals and budgets and policies. Recognizing this, the Obama campaign provided more and more internet tools for people to actively get information as well as to participate. They found ways to get people to talk directly with each other. Today the emails from Obama for America are rather annoying (imho), they seems like spam – but at their beginning they were refreshing correctives to mass media bluster.
The core concept that Plouffe emphasized was this: if the campaign had gone by and followed the numbers and simply acted on the electorate, they’d never have had the chance to win at all – they had to find ways to change the electorate, and not just in one state, but everywhere. This is where Obama’s experience as a community organizer came to the foreground: he knew that discussion, neighbors talking with each other, is how we today make up our minds. Most people tend not to trust mass media, CEO’s of big companies, and distant politicians – instead, we continue to place trust in each other, in family members, friends, and neighbors. And if you’re a news junkie who also pays attention to what people say and write online, then you notice that most of the talking heads are no more intelligent than millions of people who are not celebrities but who are your friends and neighbors. Thus, Plouffe generally focused on reaching out to people rather than mass media.
I had some questions in mind before Plouffe’s talk, that I was hoping he’d have some stories about, they were these (in bold), which in this post r followed by brief summaries of Plouffe’s responses:
How did your organization handle the more pernicious side of the Internet, such as fake websites, misinformation, purposeful misleads and the inevitably fierce, large-scaled rumor mills? He noted that they didn’t really bother except for occasionally correcting the facts in the most extreme cases. Instead they asked their supporters to combat these kinds of things themselves, and he focused on making sure that Obama for America sent out its messages frequently, providing more and more people tools for getting correct information.
Sure, you gave people a voice and tools to talk and to post comments online and to email you and each other, but was anyone listening to the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of messages you received? Unlike other campaigns which tracked email trends statistically only, Obama’s team acted like a politicians office, where individuals read emails – they divided the task up, sending the emails for reading to volunteers and staff who had expertise on the email’s main topic, then the volunteers distilled these messages and sent summaries on to staffers. By doing this the volunteers and staff got a lot more involved in the debates and problems, and everyone learned together what were the most effective ways to send Obama’s messages.
How did you move from getting people to think about, read and understand your message, versus bringing them to the voter booth – that is, closing the deal with a vote in your favor? It all goes back to the local, neighbor to neighbor relationship. They knew this strategy was working when over and over again half of all the people they contacted this way donated small amounts of money to the campaign. Speaking of campaign monies, Obama’s campaign was historic: not only did they gain huge amounts of money online, they found the average donations was $85, and most of that was from people under 30. Ironically, the first public candidate to solicit funding online was John McCain four years earlier, who had earned 1 million – about which most concluded that getting funds online wouldn’t generate that much. Obama’s supporters sent in $500 million, enough that the campaign was able to refuse monies from the government, from PACs and lobbyists – the citizenry truly owned this campaign, not Washington internal politics. And it was still more money than any other candidate.
How did you manage high-level consistency of your message, running a tight ship without too many leaks of discontent whereas other candidates clearly had misalignments and leaks and disagreements with their team members publicly displayed? Plouffe noted that this was really Obama’s doing, his leadership style at work. He set the tone of cooperation and collaboration immediately, while demanding consistency of message to the media. Plouffe noted that when mistakes happened, Obama was unusually quick to apologize and implicate himself in the problem, and then push for solving the problem rather than doing what most politicians do: hem and haw, blame someone, make excuses. When that happens, team members become disenfranchised, scared of retribution, and sometimes they talk with the press – backstabbing. Because of Obama’s even-keeled emphasis on problem-solving, team members felt they were valued, knew it was okay to make mistakes (so long as they also resolved them). That meant they all felt like collaborators working creatively together, and while they disagreed on many topics, they didn’t have the backstabbing that you normally see in campaigns.
Probably you’ve seen in my notes here how Plouffe’s talk sets the tone for Obama’s current work too – reinforcing the ideals of diversity of opinion, discussion, and problem-solving.
Plouffe was also careful to note that although this is what worked in Obama’s campaign, these same strategies might not be what works next time around, for a few reasons: first, the technology is changing so rapidly and effectively that it will have new formats and potentials in the near future such as far broader use of smart phones and unexpectedly useful web services like Twitter that were not predicted by anyone; second, world circumstances will likely be different and may require a different leadership approach than Obama’s; third, we just don’t know yet.
