Handicapping Obama’s Oppo Team
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He’s been through the first minor skirmish of the ’08 wars. Does Obama’s team have the dirt-diggers, the counterpunchers and the wise guys he’ll need to go the distance?
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Richard Wolffe
Newsweek
Feb. 27, 2007 - It was Barack Obama’s first taste of 2008 blood. After Hollywood mogul David Geffen took a shot at Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Clinton camp hit back—demanding that Obama return money Geffen had raised for him, and calling on the Illinois senator to disavow Geffen’s remarks. Obama declined the invitation, and an aide pointed out that the Clintons, too, had benefited from Geffen’s largesse. But the incident left the chattering classes asking: does the rookie have enough muscle and experience in his entourage to trade blows with the battle-tested Clinton crowd?
The answer to that question leads, inevitably, to David Axelrod. “We all view it as a lesson in how easy it is to slide into the muck,” says Axelrod, Obama’s media adviser and chief strategist, of last week’s dustup. “We are a six-week-old campaign and we’re going to learn a lot of things along the way.”
He may be trying to help steer his candidate to a new kind of politics, but Axelrod knows plenty about the old ways. He covered politics for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a consultant, helping first Harold Washington and then Richard M. Daley win the Chicago mayoralty. And he’s punched his ticket nationally, having worked for Sen. John Edwards's 2004 White House bid and a number of rising Democratic stars at the state level—including newly minted Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Perhaps most helpful for the challenge ahead, he even did a stint inside enemy territory, working on Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign. In fact, he’s the only operative out there to have logged time with the top three Democratic contenders in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Axelrod says he’s ready to rumble. “There’s no doubt that there are times when shots are going to be taken at us that are going to require a tough reaction because they are on substantive things that directly relate to something Barack has said or done—or some distortion of what he’s said or done,” says Axelrod. “As my old friend Harold Washington used to say, politics isn’t beanbag.”
But his team is still in the process of figuring out when to fire, and when to keep the powder dry. “It’s a question of assessing the incoming and deciding, ‘Is this heading for the main engine or is it going to pass by?’ That is the process. If you are going to respond to something, respond to something substantive and real, not something contrived and meaningless.”
So what counts as “substantive” and “real”? Take a look at how Team Obama responded to a recent Los Angeles Times story about the candidate’s early work as a community organizer in Chicago. The L.A. Times quoted locals who said Obama had oversold his role in helping to improve a Chicago housing project—strongly suggesting that Obama had overplayed his part in his own memoir, "Dreams From My Father." The Obama campaign’s response: a point-by-point, annotated rebuttal, entitled “Just Because Someone Writes It, Does Not Make It True.”
That rebuttal—complete with testimonials from fellow community activists—was the work of the campaign’s research department. The group is headed by Devorah Adler, a former DNC research director who worked for the Clinton White House, and for former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. (She later joined the DNC’s research operation under Mike Gehrke, who headed up the "oppo" research effort for the Kerry campaign in 2004.) Axelrod says the team will do as much research into its own candidate as its rivals. “We have a long record—actually a longer record in public life than several of the other candidates—and the first order of business is when representations are made about that record, we are completely informed as to what Barack has said and done and written,” says Axelrod. “You’d be foolish to have a campaign without that operational capacity.
“Second, it’s important for us to know what other candidates have said and done because you need to understand where there are similarities and contrasts. The difference is about using your opposition research as a kind of offensive weapon on a day-to-day basis to try to besmirch your opponents.”
In selling that message, Axelrod will have help from a team that does not have deep ties to the candidate. Robert Gibbs, his communications director, is the longest-serving staffer, having joined Obama in 2004. Bill Burton, national press secretary, was at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for last year’s elections. He started the 2004 presidential cycle with Dick Gephardt, before joining the Kerry team after the Iowa caucuses. Dan Pfeiffer, another press secretary, worked for Daschle in 2004, and was part of Evan Bayh’s brief presidential bid. Loyal Democrats all—but a crew assembled from the ashes of other presidential campaigns faces a tough challenge against the wily veterans of Hillaryland.
Can Obama stick to the high road, and win? It’s an admirable goal. But his posse will be hard-pressed to stay that course once the serious dirt-dishing begins. Candidates, after all, sling mud for one reason: it works, much of the time.
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