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.
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 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.
CAMPAIGN 2008
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue
Jon Meacham 10/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
It was a grand evening. On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1985, at the Plaza Hotel, William F. Buckley Jr. rose to toast the president of the United States on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of National Review. Charlton Heston was the master of ceremonies; the audience included William J. Casey, Nancy Kissinger, Roy Cohn and Tom Selleck. Thirteen months earlier Ronald Reagan had been re-elected, carrying every state in the Union except Walter Mondale's Minnesota. "As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels," Buckley said to the president. "As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you." Buckley was 19 when America dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, he said, and he had just turned 60. "During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60 … will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong."
FACTCHECK.ORG
Belittling Palin?
Justin Bank 9/11/2008 12:00:00 AM
The ad says "they said she was doing 'what she was told.' " But the Obama adviser who's being quoted didn't accuse Palin of meekly following orders. What he actually said is that she made a false claim about Obama's legislative record and added, "maybe that's what she was told."