Strategist David Axelrod Manages the Obama 'Brand' | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008

CHAPTER 7
The Final Days
11/7/2008 12:00:00 AM
VII.The Obama campaign ran the biggest, best-financed get-out-the-vote campaign in the history of American politics. It wanted to turn out minorities and the young, groups that traditionally stay away from the polls. For the cautious, self-consciously virtuous Obamaites, this worthy goal posed some special challenges.
The Obama Uprising
Eleanor Clift 11/7/2008 12:00:00 AM
The morning-after emphasis on race in the wake of Barack Obama's resounding victory is appropriate, given our history as a country. It was not that long ago when dogs were unleashed and firehoses turned on black people for wanting to integrate public facilities or attend college. But Obama's election has significance way beyond race. The way he raised money and mobilized voters represents a taking back of the country, a grassroots movement, even an uprising, that will have echoes far into the future.
CHAPTER 5
Center Stage
Evan Thomas 11/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
In midsummer, the Obama campaign's computers were attacked by a virus. The campaign's tech experts spotted it and took standard precautions, such as putting in a firewall. At first, the campaign figured it was a routine "phishing" attack, using common methods. Or so it seemed. In fact, the campaign had been the target of sophisticated foreign cyber-espionage.
CHAPTER 4
Going Into Battle
Evan Thomas 11/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
McCain was not a natural orator on the stump. He had trouble reading from a teleprompter, and he had an odd way of smiling at inappropriate times, flashing an expression that looked more like a frozen rictus than a friendly grin. During one early debate, he smiled broadly as he discussed crushing the enemy in Iraq. McCain could be moody, and he did not try very hard to disguise his moods. One of his advisers used the word "heady" to describe the candidate. He meant that his speaking style was easily swayed by his emotions. McCain could look hot or riled up (his traveling buddy Lindsey Graham particularly affected his moods, for better and for worse), or he could appear wooden, even sullen. McCain was bored by dreary presentations of his own polling data, but he could get agitated reading about other people's polls in the press. His staff tried to keep away overstimulating distractions, but it was hopeless. During the campaign's low-budget period, when the candidate was traveling on the cut-rate airline JetBlue, he would get wound up watching political talk shows on the small video screen facing his seat.
CHAPTER 3
The Long Siege
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
III. In the days after his wife's back- from-the-brink victory in New Hampshire, Bill Clinton was full of righteous indignation. The former president had amassed an 81-page list of all the unfair and nasty things the Obama campaign had said, or was alleged to have said, about Hillary Clinton. The press was still in love with Obama, or so it seemed to Clinton, who complained to pretty much anyone who would listen. If the press wouldn't go after Obama, then Hillary's campaign would have to do the job, the ex-president urged. On Sunday, Jan. 13, Clinton got worked up in a phone conversation with Donna Brazile, a direct, strong-willed African-American woman who had been Al Gore's campaign manager and advised the Clintons from time to time. "If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service," he told her, ranting on for much of an hour. Brazile kept asking him, "Why are you so angry?"
CHAPTER 1
How He Did It
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.