Obama's Brain Trust

"Think about that," says Jordan. "Here's a man who was the most important member at his party for several years. How many political figures who have ever had his stature and his power are willing to cheerfully play second banana and not be secretly calling The New York Times to talk about how really important they are?"

The low profile that Rouse and Daschle continue to maintain speaks volumes about the campaign. The Obama campaign would not make Rouse available for an interview. "He is the last person in the world that would want this article to mention his name," says Durbin. "Those kinds of people are few and far between in the political business."

The two Davids who split top billing in the Obama campaign are a study in contrasts. David Axelrod, the senior strategist, is a wordsmith who coined Bill Clinton's "bridge to the 21st century" and who has organized Obama's campaign around the "politics of hope." By contrast, campaign manager David Plouffe is a boyish numbers junkie whose every third word, when he is not on conference calls with reporters, is fucking (as in "this is going to be fucking amazing" or "we're going to fucking get this done"). Yet Plouffe's organizational genius in the primary battle with Hillary Clinton proved as pivotal to securing Obama's nomination as any catchphrase or commercial that Axelrod produced.

There is little by way of hierarchy to Obama's inner circle, but Axelrod, by virtue of his 16-year relationship with Obama, carries the greatest weight. "David is the first among all equals," says Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic caucus and one of Axelrod's closest friends from their Chicago days. On a day-to-day level, that means Axelrod is, as one top deputy put it, "the biggest elephant in the room" when deciding how to respond to a crisis like the one presented by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"Ax" left his gig as the top political reporter for the Chicago Tribune to work on the campaign of the late Sen. Paul Simon more than 20 years ago, but he still looks like a rumpled newspaperman on the night desk. His consulting offices in Chicago, overlooking an el stop 20 blocks from Obama headquarters, are a veritable museum of American politics, with memorabilia ranging from the sacred (an 1823 copy of the Declaration of Independence) to the profane (a framed copy of The National Enquirer revealing "Obama's Shocking Secret: He's Strom Thurmond's Love Child!"). As an adman, Axelrod believes that finely crafted policy proposals are meaningless unless voters can connect with a candidate on a personal level. "People are used to being bombarded with messages, but biographical material is the only way they can make the judgment whether what they're hearing is genuine," he says. "So when Barack talks about economic issues, the fact that he started his adult life as a community organizer in the shadow of closed steel mills, the fact that he passed on the Wall Street jobs to work as a civil-rights lawyer — all of this authenticates the overall message of the campaign that stems from who he is."

In emphasizing authenticity, Axelrod represents a dramatic break from Bob Shrum, the media strategist who doomed Democratic prospects in 2000 and 2004 by attempting to sell moderates Al Gore and John Kerry as people-vs.-the-powerful populists. "There isn't a more sensitive lens in public life than the presidential campaign," Axelrod says. "Everything you are, every crag, everything about you, ultimately, is known. It's better to run as you are than try to maintain a fiction and end up being exposed for something else." In another contrast to Shrum, Axelrod doesn't believe his consulting team has a monopoly on ad talent. For the general election, he has split up the ad duties among six firms, which will tweak Obama's message for regional audiences, and has outsourced the black, Hispanic and youth votes to three niche firms.

From the beginning, Axelrod has given his ad staff a clear direction: "Forget everything you ever learned about politics. This guy is different. This race is different. And if we do the same old thing, we're going to debase the thing that makes us unique." For those working under Axelrod, many of whom are veteran Democratic staffers used to the old way of doing things, the long-term approach has taken some getting used to. "You think about your response to attacks twice more than you normally would," says political direct-mail operative Pete Giangreco, a veteran of six other Democratic presidential campaigns. The emphasis, he adds, is "Let's not try to win today in a way that screws us up for tomorrow. With Obama, you have to do this horrible thing: You have to treat voters like adults."

The Obama campaign office occupies the entire 11th floor of a high-rise. You would expect the campaign manager's office to be an extravagant corner-window affair, or at least afford a righteous panorama of the Chicago River. But David Plouffe's office is a nondescript glass-enclosed box with a shitty view. Unlike Axelrod's suite across town, there's nothing on the walls but a map of the country divided by media markets and a sheet of white poster paper with a cryptic series of numbers scrawled in Sharpie.