Michael Tomasky: Obama's campaign guru David Plouffe speaks: It's turnout versus the news cycle: Obama's campaign manager says his ground operations will triumph over John McCain's attack ads: I spent part of Wednesday afternoon at a meeting arranged by Time magazine with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. He and deputy Dan Pfeiffer answer questions for about an hour. About 50 journalists attended.
Bottom line? I was mildly reassured. But only mildly. Plouffe exudes a serene confidence about the get-out-the-vote operation that he is in charge of building – and an unsettling lack of either awareness or concern about the campaign's two major problems in recent weeks: its absence of a central and compelling economic message, and the beating Obama has been taking from the McCain camp's attacks. Either he knows a lot of stuff I don't, or he's fooling himself a little.
Plouffe spent about the first 15 minutes talking about his field operation, and returned to the subject several times over the remaining 45 or so minutes. He said the campaign is focused on 18 states. They're especially concentrating on people he called "true undecideds" – people who aren't leaning one way or the other. The demographics of the true undecideds are favourable, he says: "We like where they are and who they are."
He argued that turnout in November will be high, and therefore, McCain "has to improve on the Bush 2004 numbers." He said, two or three different times, that he thinks it will be almost impossible for McCain to do that, because Karl Rove built a formidable turnout machine and spent a lot of time on turnout, while he sees no evidence that the McCain campaign is doing that, while the Obama team has already been working on this for months. "One thing we never run into out there is a John McCain field organization," he said. This was the single most striking sentence of the event – you could hear people scrambling to write it down and remarking on it to the people sitting next to them.
He turned many questions back to the field operation. For example, Jay Carney of Time asked whether there were any second thoughts about moving Obama's speech to the football stadium, given some of the criticisms. Pfeiffer said "no second thoughts." Plouffe kept talking about the Invesco Field move as an organizing tool, noting that all the regular Coloradans who will be able to attend have committed to going back into their towns and working hard through Nov. 4. In Colorado and everywhere, he said, "We're going to turn out a lot more votes than John Kerry."
He framed the contest as being about field operation vs. news cycle. "Their campaign," he said, referring to McCain's, "is all about winning the news cycle." He said his campaign's constant research shows that voters listen more to people in their communities they know and trust than they listen to attack ads or blowhards on television.
Well, it's all well and good. I don't doubt for a minute that the Obama ground game will be more formidable than any we've recently seen. On the other hand, the news cycle does matter, and Obama has lost about 23 out of the last 30 of them. Plouffe was not directly asked about this (I tried but time ran out), and it's true that "message" is really David Axelrod's department, not his.
But let me put it this way. The last 30 days have been very rough ones for this campaign. After running a tight and smart and brilliant primary campaign, they have seemed badly off their game ever since Obama returned from Europe – when the heavy McCain attacks started. The McCain campaign has effectively undercut some of the basic presumptions of Obama's candidacy. The Obama team has not seemed aware at times of how badly they appear to have been hurt. Plouffe didn't discuss this at all and even said the McCain's personality attacks "harm him with swing voters." He also didn't really have an answer when Joe Klein asked a question about the positive message the team is crafting on the economy.
Plouffe said this is all about "who's got the most credible path to 270" electoral votes. That's undoubtedly true. But traditionally, a superior turnout operation is worth 2%. Even if Obama's is worth 5%, that still means he needs to be within five points in Virginia and Ohio and Colorado and so on for the field operation to lift him over the top. And that means he has to craft a strong message and win more news-cycle knife fights than he's been winning. We'll get more answers to these questions Wednesday and Thursday nights. For whatever it's worth, Plouffe came off as a man who wasn't overly concerned.
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