Obama insider sheds light on team sacrifice
David Plouffe, Barack Obama's brilliant, wonky campaign manager, didn't want to talk about the dog.
But his editor made him do it.
And then I made him do it again during an interview for WTTW's "Friday Night" show.
Plouffe is on a national book tour promoting The Audacity to Win; The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory.
Anybody with a book better hawk it in a hurry before Sarah Palin's Going Rogue sucks all the oxygen out of the publishing world in the next few days.
Plouffe, unlike Palin, hasn't been spotted slipping into Oprah Winfrey's West Side studio for his own book chat with the Queen. And even if he had, camera crews would not have been there to stake him out or record the author's big, black SUV with tinted windows speeding into Winfrey's garage.
Nope. Plouffe is not Palin.
He's an inside guy, not an outside one.
A behind-the-scenes strategist, not an in-front-of-the-camera-candidate-star.
Which takes me back to the dog and Plouffe's reticence about telling the story of Marley, the Rhodesian ridgeback puppy. A puppy whom Plouffe and his wife, Olivia Morgan, jokingly referred to as their "firstborn."
Plouffe writes:
The morning after our Nevada office opening, my phone rang at 4:00 a.m. Vegas time. . . . It was my wife, her voice tight with concern. . . . "Marley woke me up, then collapsed by the bed," she said. "I am going to put the phone up to Marley's ear so you can talk to him."
"Good boy, Marley, everything will be okay, buddy," I promised him.
Plouffe's wife rushed to the vet and then called again.
Through sobs from the animal hospital, she asked me to say goodbye to Marley. That was all she could get out. I did so, barely holding it together on the outside, torn up on the inside.
"We just lost him," she whispered. "He is gone."
It was a very human moment, an example of how politics is brutal for families when one of them is consumed on the campaign trail.
But when I asked Plouffe to recount that story the other day, he seemed every bit as uncomfortable as he'd ever been.
"I actually hesitated to put that story in, or other stories about us, but I think it serves simply [as] a proxy for everybody else . . . the staff . . . the volunteers."
In other words, it's not about his family's sacrifices, it's about the whole team's sacrifices.
Plouffe, in 400 very readable pages, tries to avoid shining too bright a light on himself, or for that matter, on the deep, inner workings of the campaign.
It is, in that regard, a metaphor for the overall strategy of the Obama operation.
It offers a highly disciplined, highly controlled narrative with enough information to feel informed but not quite enough to truly see inside.
There's no question Plouffe is authentic in his belief in his candidate. And no question that Plouffe credits the architecture of the campaign in large part to his political partner, David Axelrod.
Axelrod and Plouffe are the Oscar and Felix of politics. "Ax" is the guy with doughnut crumbs stuck in the keys of his BlackBerry, and Plouffe is the guy with the alphabetized sock drawer. They are the yin and the yang of an extraordinary brain trust.
While Axelrod went into the White House with Obama, Plouffe stayed outside.
Are they still in campaign mode?
After all, there's this book. And there's the Organizing for America Web site at barackobama.com, through which Plouffe sends e-mails to 13 million of us all the time about the president's plans for America.
"No," said Plouffe. "We're not thinking about 2012."
Not, at least, until they decide to tell us they are.