Stop micromanaging

Plouffe to Clinton: Stop micromanaging

In an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast, Barack Obama’s master strategist says Trump will be the nominee – and a dangerous one, at that.

By Glenn Thrush

A couple of days before Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary by nearly 50 points, David Plouffe eased back in his chair at an anonymous Capitol Hill hotel and declared that the woman he helped defeat in 2008 had, oh, a 98 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.

He felt pretty, pretty confident about her odds against Donald Trump, too (predicting she could win by “an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points”). But Barack Obama’s puckish, intensely competitive former campaign manager, arguably the most successful Democratic strategist of his generation, offered a who-the-hell-really-knows shrug when asked to offer a similarly precise estimate of Clinton’s odds of beating Trump.

“I don’t think we know yet, and I think all of us should have learned by now not to get out over ourselves with Trump,” Plouffe told me during an episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, in which he offered far-ranging opinions on Clinton’s self-defeating tendency to doubt her own staff, Trump’s role as an Uber-like disrupter and Bill Clinton’s not-quite-Obama-level status in the presidential pantheon.

“My sense, though is this: that he could completely implode,” Plouffe said of his favorite topic — Trump — tacking on a massive caveat: “So you say, well, how could someone, you know, really ferociously and viciously attack the last former Republican president and get into a worldwide verbal tango with the pope and come out OK? Well, he did. … The Trump thing is a living, breathing, growing organism. There are no rules for how you deal with it.”

Plouffe, the archetypal no-drama Obama adviser credited with implementing Obama’s delegate-hoarding strategy eight years ago, has been informally advising Clinton and her staff as needed. Last year, POLITICO reported that he had quietly met with the soon-to-be-candidate at her Washington mansion, tracing her steps, state-by-state, and offering counsel on how to avoid the rending internal dissension that helped scuttle her race against Obama.

Plouffe, several people in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters told me, speaks regularly with campaign manager Robby Mook, despite a demanding executive post at Uber that demands he travel almost constantly. Mook was checking in with Plouffe daily — sometimes multiple times a day — during Clinton’s narrow and bitterly won victory in the Iowa caucuses, they told me. Part of the problem he has identified is the sheer number of people the Clintons talk to on any given day, and the unerring certainty that each had in the quality of their own advice compared with what Mook and his team offered.

And here is where the 48-year-old Delaware political marketing whiz — who was trying to be as tactful as possible in his public dispensing of criticism — described what he believes to be the biggest danger to Clinton as she grinds through the primary headlong into a bellowing, full-steam Trump.

“I think you build your team, and you stick by your team, and you run,” said Plouffe. “It's got to be very hard for the Clintons. They’ve been on the scene for decades. So any time things go wrong, they have dozens of people, you know, in their email box, and probably calling, saying, ‘Told you so. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this.’ ... You’re going to have your valleys, and that’s always a test. And if the thing you do is sow internal tension and allow voices from the outside to really, I think, affect the campaign in a negative way, you may not win.”

Early on, it seemed as though the Clintons were headed to the same dark place they inhabited for much of 2008. Both were in a sour, question-everything mood in the days after her microscopic victory in Iowa, when it was clear Sanders was about to deliver a humbling and decisive win in New Hampshire. There was talk of accelerating a re-evaluation of staff that had been expected after Super Tuesday, or after she secured the nomination. (Some in Clinton’s orbit even floated the nonstarter idea that Plouffe abandon his lucrative Uber gig and jump aboard the campaign.)

Despite the finger-ointing, Clinton decided to stay the course and was rewarded with game-changing victories in Nevada and South Carolina — and Plouffe hopes she doesn’t get itchy-scratchy when things go south, as they inevitably will, in a general election fight. “I think what you do need to figure out whether it’s one voice,” Plouffe said of the campaign’s overall strategy — and please do away with Clinton’s propensity to summon the clans for 10-to-20-person conference calls anytime things go wrong, he urged.

“There has to be — you know, there’s the big call, and the big meeting, and then there’s the real meeting and the real call,” he added. “You can’t make decisions with 10 people. It’s impossible. So you’ve got to figure out, and, you know, the question is, who is she talking to? And listen, they’ve got enormous [talent]: Joel Benenson [pollster and strategist], Mandy [Grunwald, Clinton ad-maker and all-around adviser], [adman] Jim Margolis, Jen Palmieri [communications director]. ... These are super-smart people. So I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know, is there a missing person from the outside … you’ve got to commit to something.”

The test, he says, will come during the general election, when some old Clinton hand panics and demands that either Hillary or Bill scuttle Mook’s strategy to address some crisis, real or imagined. “There will be moments when there’s some bad, bull---- public poll that comes out that shows them tied in Pennsylvania, and, with all due respect, Ed Rendell will call, and say, ‘You've got to [abandon] Virginia and come here for three days.’”

At this point, Plouffe is almost certain Trump will be Clinton’s opponent: He says it’s already “too late” for Republicans to consolidate behind Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, even assuming one or the other would drop out in a fit of suicidal altruism. From here on out, Trump basically needs to not implode. “Remarkably, this is completely in his control. If he can land the plane, he wins,” Plouffe says.

While he professes to be alarmed by the developer-turned-reality-star in his capacity as an “American citizen,” he gets a little giddy (not a natural Plouffian state of being) at the process of reverse-engineering The Donald’s Teflon candidacy. “If you end up with a Trump-Clinton matchup, that will be one for the ages” — and one he’s pretty sure, though not entirely convinced, she’d win in a walk.

“I think that’s a likely possibility: that Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump by an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points,” he says. “But if that’s not the case and he’s competitive, where he’ll be competitive is in the Upper Midwest, in the Ohios, the Wisconsins, maybe Pennsylvanias of the world — maybe Iowa and Minnesota even, potentially.”

Plouffe is quick to say, “From an Electoral College standpoint, I don’t see a Trump path,” but he’s equally quick to say the greatest threat posed by Trump is his unpredictability. Plouffe is a guy who likes to make a plan and stick with it, and Trump makes that a near impossibility. “Trump is a wild card, and you just don’t know,” he adds.

The greatest danger is that the public continues to give Trump license to change his positions any time he likes, with minimal recrimination, and that will allow him to take popular stances outside the narrow confines of GOP orthodoxy. Plouffe thinks he’ll show openness to taxing the rich, nod toward the reality of climate change, even recognize some federal government role in providing health care to the poor.

The idea of deconstructing Trump appeals to Plouffe, but the aspect of his old job he misses most is playing around with the numbers. He thinks Clinton’s greatest advantage is a sophisticated data-gathering operation capable of targeting voters, one by one, in swing states, undermining Trump’s scattershot populist messaging.

Plouffe comes by his numeracy naturally. His father, a Massachusetts native, was a physics major who joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain, where he worked in intelligence, and Plouffe earnestly says that he can’t talk about what his dad did before retiring and taking a job with DuPont.

The son inherited the father’s love for math — he fondly recalls solving calculus “puzzles” as a kid — and like many political pros he grew up a baseball box-score fanatic and, later, a devotee of Sabermetrics. But he was also a passionate fan and, like many kids in Delaware, followed the Phillies as a young boy and idolized their Hall of Fame third-baseman, Mike Schmidt. As any one who has ever worked with (or against) him knows, Plouffe is also very, very competitive. As a pre-teen, he merged all of his passions into an obsession with a 1970s-era board game, “All-Star Baseball,” that combined probability, cards with the names of his favorite players and the thrill of pure chance — in short, all the elements of modern politics.

Yet for Plouffe, politics is ultimately about loyalty, in his case an abiding loyalty to Obama that’s apparent even as he dives enthusiastically into a role as public Clinton booster and private unpaid adviser.

His old competitive instincts toward Clinton have been mostly, but not entirely suppressed. He speaks glowingly of her toughness and smarts. But when I ask Plouffe if he regrets playing hardball with Bill and Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, he grins. “Not one bit,” he says. “Not one bit.”

When Plouffe compiles his list of “consequential presidents” over the past century (the purpose is to place Obama near the top) he ticks them off, one by one. “Well, clearly Franklin Roosevelt. ... Maybe you throw in the combined Kennedy-Johnson years … and then Barack Obama, I think, on that level — and Reagan, of course.”

I interrupt. “Not Bill Clinton?”

“Bill Clinton was a very good president,” he replies, “very good.”