senator added, “After he gets elected they’ll be the first ones asking, ‘Can we get to the ball?’ ” Strautmanis politely changed the subject. “So what are you working on, policywise?” he asked.
After the meeting, Strautmanis admitted to seeing some benefit. “I think we should do it,” the Obama aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter. “It’s just part of the culture here, and what will it cost? A couple of hundred grand? … For a lot of people, if they don’t get it, they just flat-out won’t engage.” (The Obama campaign ultimately refused to provide any walking-around money, though as Politico reported, some was provided by local sources.)
In some ways, the technological challenges were less complicated for the young vote getters of Team Obama. On Election Day, campaigns need to find a way to turn out supporters who have not yet voted. This means matching lists of supporters with lists of voters appearing at the polls. During the primaries, the Obama campaign was able to update its lists every three hours, a pretty impressive frequency.
But not good enough. 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.”
In past presidential campaigns, Democrats relied on loose organizations of volunteers and labor unions to get out the vote. This time around, the Obama campaign was as tightly run as the old Karl Rove Republican machine. In the battleground state of Ohio, “instead of volunteers assembling at 200 parking lots at union halls, we have 1,400 neighborhood teams in the state that we have spent six months recruiting and training and managing, said Jon Carson, the overseer of Obama’s national network of volunteers. “We’ve taken the best of those volunteers, and they’re giving us 40, 50, 60 hours a week. They’re empowered, and we made them accountable. I can tell from here in Chicago; did you make the phone calls, the door knocks?”
With five days to go, the campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, looked less anxious than usual. Indeed, he almost seemed well rested. Speaking with a NEWSWEEK reporter at an Obama rally in Sarasota, Fla., he smiled, exhaled audibly and said, “I’m sniffing the finish line.” Gone, for the moment at least, was the melancholy slump of the shoulders and the guarded look in his eyes. Obama was leading in red states like Virginia and even threatening McCain in his home state of Arizona. The night before, some 35 million people had watched a powerful, if slick and gauzy, half-hour infomercial on Obama that aired in prime time on every network but ABC. The cost—$4 million—was a trifle for an organization that was outspending its opponent’s campaign on TV by about three to one and had raised $150 million, a record amount for one month, in September. Axelrod had traded in his usual hiking boots for a pair of comfortable-looking slip-on loafers. He looked nearly presentable.
Speaking to a reporter a few days earlier, on Oct. 26, he had marveled at his opponents’ missteps. He had been surprised by the choice of Palin. He called it an act of “message suicide,” noting that the McCain campaign had spent the month of August trying to persuade voters to choose experience over celebrity, then “in one fell swoop they throw experience out the window, they hitch their wagon to this celebrity they’re creating—and plainly [McCain] didn’t put ‘country first’.” Axelrod said he regretted “overreacting” to the “celebrity” ad in August, but when Palin gave McCain a brief surge in the polls in early September, he was happy that Obama had essentially ignored the advice of Democratic wise men, which he said was “You have to destroy her.” His think-first instinct was standard Obama operating procedure. As he put it: “You can’t judge the impact of the storm in the middle of the storm. You have to let the storm pass.”
By this point, Axelrod’s mind meld with Obama was so complete that the two men barely needed to speak. Eric Holder recalled that from time to time during the deliberations over choosing a running mate, Obama would catch Axelrod’s eye, just for an instant, seeking some sign of approbation or disapproval. Axelrod’s phone would routinely ring shortly before midnight, the hour when Obama liked to do his deep thinking. (Axelrod would know it was Obama calling by his ringtone: the tune to “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder.)
It was hard to overstate Axelrod’s feeling for the candidate. When the political consultant had first met with Obama in Chicago to discuss a potential presidential run in 2006, Michelle had asked her husband what he could “uniquely” contribute if he was elected. Obama answered that, right off the bat, the day he was elected, “the world will look at us differently—and I think a lot of young people across the country will look at themselves differently.”
To Axelrod, the romantic who read old Bobby Kennedy speeches for fun, this was the sort of transformation that he (along with a lot of ’60s liberals) had spent his whole life dreaming about. At the time of that meeting with the Obamas in 2006, Axelrod had been “so disgusted with the state of politics, so disillusioned—we were about to elect a governor [Rod Blagojevich], he was an old client of mine and a friend, but he was disappointing—I wanted to be involved in something that reminded me of why I got into this work in the first place,” he recalled. On Sunday, Oct. 19, Axelrod had been lying alone on his hotel bed watching “Meet the Press” when Colin Powell movingly endorsed Obama. Axelrod had thrust his fist in the air and became choked up.
Mark Salter, McCain’s closest aide, had become increasingly isolated during the final weeks of the campaign. On the morning of the last debate, he had found the candidate stewing in his hotel room. McCain had become riled up after watching some conservative […continued on page 3]