Yes We Can (Can't We?)

Team Obama has quietly built a juggernaut reelection machine in Chicago. Andrew Romano goes inside.

by Andrew Romano | January 2, 2012 12:00 AM EST
The Daily Beast

The Obama campaign is not kidding around. I recently visited its headquarters in Chicago, and I can personally vouch for how much it’s not kidding around. Yes, there was a blue Ping-Pong table in the middle of the office—custom-made, evidently, because the Obama 2012 logo was emblazoned on it. (Twice.) There were printouts of people’s nicknames—Sandals! Shermanator!—where corporate nameplates usually go. There was a mesh trucker hat from South Dakota, which was blaze orange and said “Big Cock Country” on the crown. There was a cardboard speech bubble (“nom nom data nom”) affixed to an Uglydoll. There was miniature air-hockey table. A narwhal mural. A stuffed Rastafarian banana.
Obama re-election campaign office

Cranking at Obama headquarters in Chicago. Officials there boast that they are building an operation that will put their previous effort to shame. “Our efforts on the ground and on technology,” campaign manager Jim Messina says, “will make 2008 look prehistoric.”, Greg Ruffing / Redux for Newsweek

But do not be deceived. There was also a chaperone following me everywhere I went and digitally recording everything anyone said to me. Ben LaBolt, Obama’s press secretary, and Stephanie Cutter, his deputy campaign manager, closed their doors as I walked by. An underling clammed up when I asked what she and her colleagues do on the weekends. At one point my minder agreed to let me out of her sight for a few milliseconds, but then I got too close to a big whiteboard covered in hieroglyphic flow charts and she instantaneously materialized at my side, having somehow teleported the 50 yards from where I’d last seen her. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “You can’t look at that.” The next day it was covered by a tarp.

In short, the place is intense; Obama’s minions are very serious about lots of things, including the business of reminding themselves not to be so serious. But then I would be intense, too, if I were the Obama campaign. With 10 months to go before Election Day, the president’s job-approval rating is loitering around 46 percent, which is a problem, because the incumbent party has lost the last five times its president started Election Year below 49 percent. Likewise, no president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 has been reelected when the unemployment rate is as high or higher than it is now (8.6 percent), and no president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 has won a second term when GDP growth is as slow or slower than the current pace (2 percent). While none of these afflictions is fatal in and of itself, Obama has to overcome all three of them at once. No other modern president has even attempted this daring feat, let alone survived it.

(More here.)