Politics: How To Run a Killer Campaign

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Politics How To Run a Killer Campaign The president's campaign manager explains how the Obama campaign did it. By John Dickerson Posted Thursday, Nov 15, 2012, at 10:21 PM ET Every morning when Barack Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina turned on his computer, he saw a snapshot of the state of the race. Campaign software engineers had built him a dashboard that showed how many doors volunteers had knocked on the night before, how many phone calls they had made, how much money had been raised, and what was moving on Twitter and other social networks. It also included a feed of traditional news feeds. "That allowed me to get a good sense in the morning of what was going on in our world." Messina says it was about 10 days before Election Day when he looked at those numbers and the early-vote tallies that he began to smile. "That's when I started to feel pretty good. I looked at the numbers and we were crushing it out there." Mitt Romney referred to himself as a "numbers guy," but in the end, the numbers betrayed him. Messina used the same label to describe himself, and in the end, he earned it. His obsession with measuring and collecting data paid off, but not because he abandoned the human aspect of politics—just the opposite. Messina's obsession with numbers was built on repeated bets about human nature. I talked to Messina as he drove west for some post-election relaxation about what lessons he took away from managing the 2012 enterprise, about team building, managing the information firehose, knowing when to take risks, when to adapt, and when to just ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Wrong Man for the Job Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 Her Banner Yet Waves	Advertisement
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