Sixty days out from the convention, John McCain shakes up his campaign staff- then leaves on a junket to South America. It's an interesting contrast to Barack Obama's campaign, profiled in the new Rolling Stone:
Last December, a smirking Mitt Romney blasted Obama as "a guy who has virtually no experience of an executive nature, leadership nature — never run anything." At the time, the line had bite. But in light of the way Obama has turned a high-tech political startup into a $250 million operation with 1,000 employees, such criticism has been rendered quaint. "Barack has created a new paradigm for campaigns," says Daschle. "He's taken it to a level that nobody's ever seen before. The campaign itself proves to me that far more important than experience is judgment and the capacity for good leadership."
Obama began this campaign with a clarity of purpose and a transformative vision for American politics. He wanted to be a game-changer. The team he built had little experience electing a president — and that was exactly the point. He assembled the next generation of stars — creative, diligent and, above all, hungry operatives who did not, like Clinton strategist Mark Penn, believe that they knew how to elect a president based on past successes. Far from being groomed or prodded into fitting someone else's mold of a candidate, Obama built his own team, one tailored to his strengths and capable of compensating for his weaknesses.
"Hillary belittled Obama for his messy desk without understanding that he's a great leader," says Sonnenfeld, the Yale leadership expert. "But that's what we're electing here. He knows how to delegate. He understands how to hold people responsible for execution without just being consumed by boxes and charts."
As an executive, Obama does not have an impulsive leadership style. When he's running a meeting, Jarrett says, he does more listening than talking, asking questions and taking the temperature of everyone in the room. "Regardless of where you fall in the hierarchy, he listens to you as though you are the campaign manager. He focuses, he prods, he pushes, to make sure that he fully understands your position. That sets an important tone as well: When you go into a meeting expecting to learn and not dictate, it fosters camaraderie."
But when Obama makes a decision, there's no second-guessing. And though the campaign tries to learn from its mistakes, it doesn't dwell on them. The Obama campaign had hoped to deliver a knockout punch by winning the Texas primary. Afterward, when the top staff rode home on the bus with Obama, there was no yelling or finger-pointing — just a determination to regroup and take care of business in Wyoming and Mississippi. "He doesn't do a lot of looking in the rearview mirror," says Jarrett.
Obama's capacity to listen, be decisive and delegate sets a tone that permeates the campaign, much to the relief of staffers who survived the Gore and Kerry campaigns. "People know that when they make their pitch as to what they think the strategy should be, that Plouffe and Axelrod are taking it all in," says one staffer. "There's not this kind of constant sniping attempt to push your agenda through. There's this trust that we all know our pieces. Other campaigns waste so much time on second-guessing and wondering what's really gonna happen — who's really in charge. There's none of that around here."
That's because, ultimately, the buck stops with Obama. "Barack has a fine manner of being personally very close to his staff," says Jordan, who managed the Kerry campaign and is close with several members of Obama's inner circle. "But there's always an invisible but real line there. The authority he exerts is so natural and so real and so unmanufactured that nobody ever forgets — even on the plane late at night when they're feeding each other shit — who the boss is."
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