Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is heading to the White House to help out after his 14-month victory tour.
It must have dawned on him that you can’t Keep claiming credit for creating a juggernaut that changed politics forever when the hopeful masses are running around with pitchforks.
Plouffe, who extols the genius of his organization for 400 pages in “The Audacity to Win,” explains how he took a 46-year-old freshman senator to the presidency by channeling the desire of Americans for change into the candidacy of Barack Obama.
Now, Plouffe is going to go help clean up the mess he helped create.
By having Obama run as a shamanistic healer rather than as a politician with a program, Plouffe set up the president for a precipitous fall.
Before Plouffe gets to the White House, one guy he should call is Ed Gillespie.
In 2007, President George W. Bush asked Gillespie to become his counselor because Bush’s Texas political homeboys, Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove, were packing it in.
If Plouffe thinks spinning President Obama’s lousy first year is tough, he should try helping a president with a 30 percent approval rating win popular support for sending 22,000 troops to Iraq.
Like Plouffe, Gillespie had been seen as a strategy star. He helped craft the Contract with America with Dick Armey and studied the dark arts of campaign operations under Haley Barbour.
Gillespie was the communications adviser to Bush in 2000, was a founder of a big, bad lobbying firm, and then served as chairman of the Republican National Committee for the 2004 election cycle.
Gillespie’s book on how conservatives can win elections, “Winning Right,” was published three months before Democrats clobbered the GOP in the 2006 midterms.
Gillespie got a front-row seat for the clobbering, too. He served as senior adviser to the campaign of then-Virginia Sen. George Allen.
Allen’s loss to Jim Webb was not a 10-megaton explosion like the Massachusetts election that blew up Obamacare, but the defeat of a heralded presidential contender signaled how bad the party’s problems had become.
One month after Allen’s loss, Gillespie volunteered to become the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia.
“Not many people can say they went from national chairman to state chairman. That’s kind of the wrong career direction,” Gillespie told me. “But that’s where we needed to focus. That’s where the answers were.”
Gillespie spent six months really learning how state politics works and how to help rising stars like then-Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell.
After going to the White House to help Bush, a unique vantage for seeing the GOP’s electoral collapse, Gillespie returned to Virginia to open a consulting firm and kept thinking about how to build a successful political operations in the states instead of in Washington.
The Plouffe model for channeling political energy in 2008 was a top-down, national effort. In office, it has been the same: Tell your friends to support Obamacare. Get out to vote for Martha Coakley/Jon Corzine/Creigh Deeds. But the millions didn’t respond.
The desire to recapture the energy Obama once had will mean a return to the old strategy of demonizing your foes and promising breakthroughs just beyond the horizon.
But Plouffe should take note of what Gillespie is doing today: taking over as chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee.
He will focus on winning the statehouse races this year that will decide the direction of the redistricting after the 2010 census. Gillespie figures that 57 state legislative races will have an effect on 120 seats in Congress for the next decade, and he wants to help make sure the new districts lean Republican.
But beyond the cold calculus of Gerrymandering, there’s also the issue of what to do with millions of Americans who are angry as rattlesnakes over what’s going on in Washington.
Gillespie doesn’t want to send tea partiers e-mails telling them to invest their hopes in someone else, he wants them to run for their state house of delegates or get involved in local politics — not foot soldiers in someone else’s revolution, but field commanders in their own movement.
Gillespie points to Sen.-elect Scott Brown, who got mad about taxes and spending, ran for the state legislature, and was ready to pounce when an opportunity arose.
“When the social conservatives came into the party in the 1980s, the country club Republicans were a little uncomfortable,” Gillespie said. “Now some people say we can’t incorporate this new energy. I disagree. We’re looking at the people who will be the farm team for the next generation of national leaders.”
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
