The Duc Pond

OK, I don’t know if Obama’s presidential campaign was the best run ever, but it was pretty damn smooth. The New Yorker goes over how Obama won. One particularly interesting moment that stuck out to me as a sign of intelligent leadership:

According to an aide, Obama said something to the effect of “This is ridiculous. We met with Stalin. We met with Mao. The idea that we can’t meet with Ahmadinejad is ridiculous. This is a bunch of Washington-insider conventional wisdom that makes no sense. We should not run from this debate. We should have it.”

Newsweek has an extremely long (7 chapters; read ‘em all), but very interesting behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign from within both the McCain and Obama camps. One key source of infighting within the McCain campaign was between Mark Salter, who thought that McCain’s legendary heroism should be held above the fray of dirty politicking, and Steve Schmidt and his Rovian counterparts who felt that those tactics were necessary to win. There’s so much good stuff in this series that it’s hard to pare it down to a few quotes, but I will share this interesting scene:

Obama’s chief of staff, Jim Messina, had slept only a few hours when his cell phone rang. It was still dark on the morning of Aug. 29. Messina and a few other staffers had gone to a bar to carouse after Obama’s speech.

“Get your ass up,” said the voice on the other end. “They picked Palin.”

Messina could not mistake Plouffe’s flat, no-nonsense voice, but he was still groggy. “F––– you,” he said. “Why are you waking me up? Stop teasing me.” “I’m serious,” said Plouffe. “Get up and get your team together.” Messina stumbled out of bed, thinking that Republicans must really be panicking, that they would never pick someone like Sarah Palin unless they were desperate.

And some more background on the organizational sophistication of the campaign:

The geeks at new Media, working with the field department, had created a program that would allow a “flusher”—the term for a volunteer who goes out to round up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. The New Media magicians dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station. “I have no idea how [Project Houdini] will work,” Steve Schale, the campaign’s Florida state director, told NEWSWEEK a week before Election Day. “But if it does work, it will redefine get-out-the-vote … It’s an amazing, fascinating tool, and if it works, it will be the model that everyone uses going forward.”