David Plouffe: The Audacity to Win

David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager for the 2008 Presidential election, told the Fairfield community on Wednesday evening that he believed the key ingredients to Obama’s success were that his campaign remained agile and constantly held a strong composure when dealing with adversity throughout the entire journey of the campaign.

Exactly one year ago today on a brisk November 4th evening, the Obama Campaign warmed up with delight and relief after winning 270 electoral votes. Barack Hussein Obama was elected to be the 44th President, as well as the first African American President of the United States.

Before David Plouffe began tonight’s special event, a moment of silence was held for John Orman. Orman was a politics professor at Fairfield, as well as a loyal friend to the Fairfield community. He had an authentic way of igniting student’s minds, and would have especially enjoyed tonight’s rare occasion of meeting Plouffe.

At the beginning of his speech, Plouffe said, “Everything had changed, however, news media states America has gotten worse.” “Our campaign was one of the largest campaigns ever constructed, we went from being the biggest long shot, to architecting victory.”

Before Plouffe was Obama’s campaign manager, Plouffe attended the University of Delaware, however he did not complete his education before he set out on a career in politics. He began his political career when he went to work for Senator Tom Harkin’s 1990 re-election campaign. He later worked as a state field director for Harkin’s unsuccessful 1992 Presidential campaign. That same year he successfully managed Congressman John Olver’s first re-election bid in Massachusetts.

In 1994, Plouffe managed Delaware Attorney General Charles M. Oberly’s unsuccessful campaign against Senator William V. Roth. He then worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Plouffe led a national campaign that raised a record $95 million for house races across the country. Beginning of 2003 Plouffe and fellow AKP&D Message and Media partner David Axelrod worked on Obama’s 2004 Illinois Senate campaign, beginning his association with Obama.

Not many people believed in “No Drama Obama”, however the campaign committee continued to believe in their theory for success and had much hope for their strategy to work. Plouffe said, “We had to do things unconventionally and make risky decisions.”

When Plouffe was asked about his Campaign team he said, “We built the strongest campaign in history and raised over $750,000,000. When one of us failed all of our enterprise failed, we sort of held hands, hoping for the best. It was like a koom-bay-yah core of us. We all had political experience and were not naïve.”

Shirley Hochheiser, a Stratford resident, and Liam Burke, a Fairfield resident, were both delighted to learn about the interworkings of the core members to the Obama campaign and how tightly knit they were with each other. Hochheiser was especially inspired by his optimistic points and beaming personality.







Reflective Essay-

Since I had to do other homework before this deadline story was written, this is the latest I have stayed up writing one. Personally, I am a bit apprehensive to turn this in due to the fact my editing abilities at 12:45 probably aren’t at their peak. Luckily, David Plouffe was a very interesting speaker so it was easy to write about him once my first paragraph was complete.

I found the first paragraph to be quite hard for some reason, probably because I didn’t know what my angle was, and kept going back and forth with how I wanted my story to flow. He kept mentioning how unified the Obama campaign was so that was definitely something that I wanted to focus on in my story. He was a great communicator and was very professional when speaking to the Fairfield community. This made it very easy to write quotes from him.

I wish he mentioned his background more rather than the book because since the book had literally just come out, obviously a small percentage of the room had actually read it. I would have benefitted a lot more if he told us how he got to where he was and how he ended up with such an impressive role in today’s society.

The lead was hard because I did not know which of the 5 W’s I wanted to start out with. I figured since he is famous it would be okay to start out mentioning his name, and if I were reading this article, right away I would like to know who I was reading about. I liked how he talked in a way that no matter how little or much someone knew about politics, they could appreciate what Plouffe was saying and remain interested throughout his whole speech.

I did the hourglass method because I think that it would be the most beneficial for this type of story because even the parts that may not be as important (mainly his background information) were still very important because most readers would like to know how this distinguished 42 year old man got to where he is now.