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Marc Ambinder has an interesting post on the management secrets of Barack Obama. To some degree, I think this is the sort of thing that gets written when campaigns are humming along nicely, then forgotten when times are tougher and dissension erupts, but it's certainly the case that the Obama organization has, thus far, been extraordinarily well-managed: No leaks, no infighting, few off-message comments, little independent celebrity for staffers, etc. That said, I disagree with Marc on one point:
in November of 2006, Obama had a handful of wealthy Jewish donors from Chicago ready to raise money, a few Democratic strategy types who stood ready to put a campaign together, and not much of anything else. The challenge was immense, and the folks who joined the Obama campaign early on -- this was when Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner -- came aboard because they believed in Obama the challenge, not because they expected glory or material rewards. Salaries weren't competitive with the Clinton campaign's either. Obama attracted a large number of ideological Democrats who either had reason to dislike the Clintonian influence over the party or who believed that Obama stood at the crossroads between history and hope.That was true for some of them, to be sure. But for a lot of folks, if you were a skilled political operative who wanted to work on a presidential campaign but you weren't a Clintonite, Obama was really the only plausible game in town. The Clinton campaign was a fairly set operation, and if you weren't already a made man (or woman) in it, it was extremely hard to get a top spot. As I understand it, Steve Hildebrand, for instance, went to the Clintons first, and was turned down for a job. He then went on to win Iowa for Obama, and effectively end the Clinton machine. And lots of folks had similar experiences. In some ways, Obama really benefited from the Clinton's having such a set political universe. If he'd run against an establishment candidate who didn't have a preexisting presidential campaign network, he probably would have missed out on a lot of talent.
