'Renegade' CliffsNotes
POLITICO obtains a copy of former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe's new book about the 2008 campaign.
Photo: AP
The flood of books devoted to the 2008 campaign and President Barack Obama begins in earnest this week with the release of “Renegade, The Making of a President,” by former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe.
Wolffe’s account of the Obama campaign isn’t to be officially released until Tuesday, but POLITICO obtained a copy earlier this week.
Herewith are some of the book’s most fascinating nuggets:
No Shrum Moment:
Before the election had been called, but when it looked promising for Obama the then-candidate called his top adviser, David Axelrod.
“What’s going on?” Obama asked.
“Look, I’m not going to say congratulations yet, but boy, it looks awfully good,” Axelrod replied.
Axelrod, Wolffe notes, wanted to avoid a repeat of 2004, when John Kerry’s top adviser, Bob Shrum, told the Massachusetts senator prematurely on election night that he wanted to be the first to say, “Mr. President.”
Pritzker Veers Off-Message (A little):
The impressive fundraising Obama demonstrated in 2007 was largely a result of the usual high-dollar contributors " not the small-dollar donors the campaign liked to hold up to the press.
“It wasn’t the Internet,” admitted Penny Pritzker, Obama’s national finance chair.
Talking To Himself:
The revamped stump speech Obama gave to Iowa Democrats at their Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in November of 2007 was borne out of a speech Obama scribe Jon Favreau had written for the candidate earlier that month in South Carolina.
Favreau trimmed the original version and sent it to Obama who had to memorize it for what became a pivotal moment leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
Aides were concerned that Obama was not prepared to give the speech, but he largely got it right on his first run-through a day before the dinner.
“None of Obama’s aides knew that the candidate had been rehearsing in his Des Moines hotel room all week,” Wolffe writes. [Press secretary Robert] Gibbs had walked by his room a couple of times, heard a loud television behind the door, and wondered what was going on. Obama had turned the volume up to practice the speech to himself, out of sight and earshot of even his closest staff.”
Michelle As Strategist:
The morning after Obama lost the early-March Ohio and Texas primaries, campaign manager David Plouffe suffered through an uncomfortable car ride with the candidate and his wife, Michelle Obama.
The future first lady, writes Wolffe, “threatened not to return to the campaign trail until they had come up with a new strategy.”
Says Plouffe: “I think she was pissed at both of us.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23218.html 