Magic touch of dream team head who steered Obama to Oval Office

By Abiya Ochola

Senator Barack Obama’s win may not have been easy were it not for his well-oiled campaign machinery, comparable to none in modern political history.

After being declared winner in the historic elections that ushered American politics into a new era, Obama paid glowing tribute to his campaign team.

David Plouffe headed the team, composed of thousands of volunteers.

Obama could not have picked a better person than this genius strategist. He joined the Obama team way back in 2003, when the President-elect was running for Senate.

Plouffe, born in 1967, is a long-time Democratic Party campaign consultant and a partner at the party-aligned campaign consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media, which he joined in 2000.

Financial juggernaut

According to Wikipedia, Plouffe was raised in Wilmington, Delaware and attended St Mark’s High School. He was a political science major at the University of Delaware, attending from fall 1985 through fall 1988.

Plouffe plunged into politics about a semester short of graduating 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, for which he was paid $30,000 (Sh2 million) per month. In the same year, he successfully managed Congressman John Olver’s first re-election bid in Western Massachusetts.

Plouffe has managed other politicians, including Delaware Attorney General Charles M Oberly’s and Bob Torricelli’s and was Richard Gephardt’s Deputy Chief of Staff. In 1999 to 2000, as executive director of the DSCC, Plouffe led a national campaign that raised a record $95 million (Sh7 billion) for House races across the country.

It is no wonder that Obama raised a financial juggernaut that dwarfed McCain’s.

Beginning in 2003, Plouffe and fellow AKP&D partner David Axelrod worked on Obama’s 2004 Illinois Senate campaign, beginning his association with Obama.

His compensation for the Obama campaign could be $150,000 (Sh11 million) according to OpenSecrets.org.

He is credited with the campaign’s successful overall strategy in the race (primarily against Hillary for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, to focus on the first Caucuses in Iowa and on maximising the number of pledged delegates, as opposed to focusing on states with primaries and the overall popular vote).

Axelrod praised him: "David Plouffe has done the most magnificent job of managing (the best) campaign that I’ve seen in my life of watching presidential politics. To start something like this from scratch and build what we have built was a truly remarkable thing."

Plouffe also maintains discipline over communications in the campaign, including controlling leaks and releasing information about the campaign on its terms.

Averse to publicity himself, Plouffe’s control over the internal workings of the Obama campaign successfully avoided the publicly aired squabbles that frequently trouble other campaigns.