Note
From an interview last Tuesday night: David Plouffe (Obama's campaign manager) was asked how big a role Obama played in his campaign. "Well, no one had a bigger role, you know. The great thing about our campaign was we didn't have a lotta discussion about what our message was or what he wanted to do," Plouffe said. "From the beginning, he knew exactly what he wanted to say. And it's one of the reasons we were successful. A lotta campaigns will spend hours every day wondering about how to change their message. And he was pretty clear about what he wanted to say, where he wanted to take the country, and either people would accept it or they wouldn't." Quite a contrast from the McCain campaign, always trying to figure out how to please who.
I also enjoyed this from Obama's strategist Axelrod: "My fundamental concern for him wasn't whether he had the capacity, 'cause I think he's the smartest guy that I've ever worked with or known," Axelrod said. "But it was whether he had that pathological drive to be president. You know, so often, what defines presidential candidates is this need to be president, to define themselves. He didn't have that. And, you know, we told him, 'You're gonna have to find some other way to motivate yourself.' And he did, which was what he could do as president.
They talked in the interview about the weekend in March that the incendiary Jeremiah Wright tapes surfaced and were played over and over. Obama remained calm; he decided to make a speech on race; there was no discussion amongst the staff about what to do. And I love how Obama's fundamental criticism of Jeremiah is a restatement of what Obama is all about - that people working together can make progress on hard problems. He said: "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."
Have you visited change.gov?