The man behind Obama's campaign
Updated on 28 June 2009
Felicity Spector finds out the strategy behind Barack Obama's successful presidential election campaign from the man behind it all.
Jim Margolis knows how to win. As the senior strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign he helped to deliver the model election victory. At least that made up for 2004 when he wasn't so successful at the helm of the John Kerry campaign.
But now a senior partner at the top Democratic consulting firm GMMB, Mr Margolis came to London this week to share some of the secrets of his success.
A clip from the speech that first propelled Barack Obama into the public eye, his 2004 Convention keynote, revealed just how consistent his message has remained. Buzzwords like 'unity', 'reform', 'honesty' and, of course, 'hope'. They informed his rhetoric back in '04 and they still inform it today.
But this campaign was about more than a rhetorical theme. The aim was, after the Kerry defeat, to expand the electoral strategy beyond a few battleground states to ones which had been stubbornly Republican for years.
To expand the electorate, reaching out to people who'd never voted or grown disillusioned with politics, above all, to young people. To embrace new technology and merging it with the message, so it became part of the new movement for change.
"This campaign," says Margolis "would not have been possible 10 years ago."
The internet and social networking has moved with lightning speed. The Obama campaign amassed some 15m people on its email list and sent out a total of a billion email messages.
There were three million online donors giving an average $75 each. And three million calls to potential voters or supporters were placed on peoples personal phones.
This, then, was all about inclusion and empowerment: making people feel part of something bigger than themselves. In campaign-speak, it's known as 'laddering': reaching out to people on their terms and then taking them from mere curiosity to activism.
So while there were 8.5m visits to the Obama website, 35,000 volunteer groups were created which held more than 200,000 events outside the confines of the official campaign.
There were 80m hits on Obama-related videos on Youtube, but a massive 442,000 users created their own content in support of his campaign.
The '08 campaign, while incredibly disciplined and tightly organised (those key messages, about change, reform, honesty and unity rarely wavered) was also incredibly decentralised, allowing grassroots efforts to flourish and expand beyond all expectations.
All this didn't come cheap, of course. The campaign spent some $720m: $450m of it on ads, outspending John McCain in every battleground state.
Unlike traditional campaigns, they weren't confined to the usual 30 second attack ad. Instead they ran from one or two minutes, to the half hour special which ran across most networks in election week.
There were even virtual ads, inside video games, exhorting people to go out and vote.
And, unusually, there were barely any attack ads at all: the negative vibes didn't work so well against Hillary Clinton in the primaries, providing one of the few wobbly moments for this otherwise exemplary effort.
So apart from a few jibes poking fun at McCain's seven houses, the main strategy was to depict the Republican candidate as out of touch and four more years of Bush.
So what now? Beyond the excitement and the intensity of a highly contested political race, is this a strategy that can work in Government?
"The movement hasn't ended," says Margolis, "and it's better to listen than to talk."
Obama for America has become "Organising for America" - a vehicle, he says, to invite people into a conversation with the administration and to take the message out on the road (hence, the pledge to continue holding Town Hall meetings on policy outside Washington at least one day a week).
For the last word, a memory from that heady election night back in November. Margolis was chatting to the President-elect right before he went out on stage in Grant Park to deliver his victory address.
Margolis wanted to know whether he felt daunted by the sheer scale of the task he was about to inherit: wars, terrorism, economic crisis. "It's at moments like this," Obama told him, "that we have the greatest opportunity for change."
Talk about a winning strategy. Even on what must have been the most exciting and exhausting night of his life, Obama's campaign message didn't waver for a second.
