Without a victory in Iowa, Barack Obama's campaign would have ended very quickly, according to campaign manager David Plouffe who spoke at Dominican University last week as part of a tour promoting his newly released book, The Audacity to Win. If he didn't win the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton would have been impossible to stop, and a loss in New Hampshire would have sealed it.

Plouffe said they looked closely at Iowa voters and their past performance in charting the campaign's strategy. In the 2004 election twice as many people over 65 turned out as under 30. They decided that if they were going to win, they needed a new electorate. They quickly started building a different group of voters: Independents, Republicans, more diverse and younger. They organized at high schools throughout the state. Iowa became a laboratory for almost everything else they did in the campaign. If you look at only people who voted in the Bush-Kerry election four years earlier, Obama barely edged McCain 50-49 percent. In 2008, first-time voters and those who hadn't voted in a long time went for Obama 71-27 percent.

One of Plouffe's themes was that they defied conventions and took risks. They committed to the only strategy they thought might work and maintained the discipline of staying with it. They measured success by their internal metrics, not by polls or commentators or the nightly news--"they were evaluating a different campaign than we were running." He says this approach is the same Obama is taking as president. For instance, what he cares about is getting the votes in Congress to pass healthcare, consistent with his principles, and not what reporters and commentators are saying on CNN.

A key decision was an early Obama mandate to have a grassroots campaign. When the Obama campaign started it didn't have money, endorsements, lists, a deep talent pool or national campaign experience. They developed a Web site and used technology to facilitate organizing and fundraising. They poured resources into organizers and developed an unprecedented army of volunteers. They based their campaign on expanding the electorate person by person, with friends and relatives asking friends--because "that's what people trust." They were on radio and e-mail, at soccer fields, community centers and front doors. And they coordinated their weekly message across all contact points to leverage its power.

They eventually raised $750 million from 4 million people. By the fall they had an e-mail list of 13 million names that, Plouffe pointed out, allowed them to communicate with more people than the reach of NBC News and all the cable channels combined. He believes that many people got all their information online.

Other Plouffe observations:

Barack Obama is self-aware to a degree Plouffe has rarely seen in a human being. Plouffe often had a short list of things that Obama could improve, and invariably Obama would tick them off himself.

Running against Hillary Clinton was like playing a chess game where they had to think many moves ahead each time they took an action. With McCain, it was only one move.

He was so impressed with the massive number of young people who joined the campaign and says they are ready to lead. We have to keep them involved, he asserted. He hopes that one of the lessons people take from Obama's success is that if Barack Obama can win the presidency, then they can come from a non-traditional background and win city council elections.

The president has forbidden discussion of the 2012 election. He doesn't want to make tough policy decisions through the prism of a campaign. The focus is on getting (good policy) things done.

Healthcare: The president believes we will be in big trouble (vis-a-vis foreign competitors) if we continue to spend twice as much on healthcare as other Western countries do (for a system that system ranked 37th among nations by the World Health Organization). "If our party can't get this done, we deserve what we get." The final analysis of the success of healthcare reform is not going to take place via a spin war. People are directly affected and will draw their own conclusions.

As much as they threw out old playbooks in crafting their strategy for the 2008 election, Plouffe says his book, which describes the campaign in detail, will be a dusty playbook when the 2012 election arrives.

Share your Obama '09 memories with Sam at schapman@pacificsun.com.

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