Obama's Brain Trust

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On the June evening in St. Paul when he captured the Democratic nomination, in between shout-outs to his daughters and his grandmother, Barack Obama paid tribute to a political operative most Americans have never heard of. "Thank you to our campaign manager, David Plouffe," Obama said, "who never gets any credit but has built the best political organization in the country."

Obama isn't exactly known for understatement. But in describing the machine that Plouffe and his political team have built, the candidate was actually far too modest. By marrying online technology to grass-roots activism, Obama's brain trust mobilized 1.5 million donors, raised more than $250 million, derailed the Clinton juggernaut and built something new in Democratic politics. "The size and scale and sophistication of the Obama enterprise — it's like a multinational corporation compared to the mom-and-pop nonprofits of previous Democratic campaigns," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the progressive think tank NDN and a veteran of Bill Clinton's 1992 run. "And it isn't just bigger — it's a better model, it's more democratic, it taps into the power and passion of everyday people."

It's also remarkably disciplined: Obama's top advisers outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton's organization with no leaks, no nasty infighting and virtually no public credit for their efforts. By all rights, Plouffe and the other chief architects of Obama's machine should be household names on par with James Carville and Karl Rove. And yet, with the exception of chief strategist David Axelrod, who has emerged as an affably low-key spokesman for the campaign, Obama's brain trust works in near anonymity from the campaign's headquarters on the 11th floor of a smoked-glass skyscraper two blocks south of the Chicago River.

That obscurity is by design. Members of Obama's inner circle are largely unknown to the public because the second rule of the campaign is: All credit accrues to Obama. The first rule? Don't talk about Team Obama. As senior adviser Valerie Jarrett puts it, "We aim for you to not know about the inner workings of the campaign because there's not much to know other than: It works."

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The Obama campaign, like the candidate himself, is paradoxical. The same machine that has given unprecedented control to tens of thousands of volunteers at the grass roots has also set a new benchmark in Democratic politics for tight-lipped, Fortune 500 professionalism at its highest rungs. To use a computing metaphor for the Obama machine: The software may be open-source, but the CPU — humming high above Michigan Avenue — remains, quite literally, a black box.

In many ways, this split is a reflection of Obama himself. In public, Obama comes across as a political Superman who can inspire stadium-size crowds of supporters. But behind the scenes, Obama is as mild-mannered as Clark Kent — and he has built his senior team to reflect his quiet, down-to-business self. "The tone starts at the top," says Jarrett. "When Barack walks into the room, there's never tension. And he wanted to make sure that the team he selected was also drama-free. He wanted to make sure that tone permeated the campaign."

The drama-free approach proved to be in sharp contrast to the Clinton campaign, which was beset by leaks and infighting among factions of overbearing strategists (Mark Penn), know-it-all advisers (Harold Ickes), egotistical flacks (Howard Wolfson) and self-important campaign managers (Patti Solis Doyle) who battled noisily — and publicly — over message, budget, access to the candidate and prestige. From Day One, Obama was determined that his campaign would be different. In the winter of 2007, when senior staffers gathered for one of their first meetings in Chicago, the candidate laid out his expectation. "Most campaigns are chaotic," Obama told them. "I want a campaign that is buttoned up like a business. If people have problems, they work it out. It's not a 'we're gonna work this out on page 2 of The Washington Post.' "

Obama underscored the theme again in June, when he addressed his entire Chicago staff after finally wrapping up the nomination. As he spoke, staffers poked their heads above gray, corporate cubicles in what could easily be mistaken for an E-Trade office rather than a presidential campaign headquarters.

"When I started this campaign," Obama told them, "I wasn't sure that I was going to be the best of candidates. But what I was absolutely positive of was that there was the possibility of creating the best organization. The way great things happen is when people are willing to submerge their own egos and focus on a common task. That's my old organizing mind-set. It's not just a gimmick, it's not just a shtick. I actually believe in it."

The story of how Obama assembled his top advisers — and how he got them to work together as a team — offers a glimpse into his approach as a chief executive who manages an organization of nearly 1,000 employees. Obama has built "an amazingly strong machine," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management. "People expected a more ad hoc, impromptu, entrepreneurial feel to it. It has been more of a well-orchestrated symphony than the jazz combo we expected."

Indeed, in merging the talents of powerful Washington insiders and outside-the-Beltway insurgents, Obama has succeeded at a task that has traditionally eluded Democratic candidates: forging an experienced inner circle who set aside their differences and put the candidate first. "The whole point is that it's not about any of these guys," says longtime GOP strategist Frank Luntz. "They feel blessed. They see it as how lucky they are to be working for this man, at this time, in this election. This is the dream team for the dream candidate. I waited all my life for a Republican Barack Obama. Now he shows up, and he's a Democrat."

THE DASCHLE MAFIA

Of all the powerful and understated members of Obama's inner circle, the most anonymous, Pete Rouse, may well be the most indispensable. As a candidate, Obama has made a virtue of not being versed in the "ways of Washington." But the first-term senator's audacious leap into presidential politics would not have been possible without the steady guidance of a gruff D.C. fixer with decades of experience on the Hill.

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For nearly 20 years, Rouse served as chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a position that earned him the nickname "the 101st Senator." "His office inside the Daschle suite was the epicenter of the Democratic caucus," says Jim Jordan, who managed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Daschle and Rouse before leaving to run John Kerry's presidential campaign. "It was a superb organization, and Tom's a rare political talent. But Pete was the skeleton over which it was all built."

Ironically, Rouse would never have been available to Obama if it hadn't been for Karl Rove. In the same election that brought Obama to Washington, Daschle became the first minority leader ever unseated — by 4,000 votes — in a campaign masterminded by Rove. But in defeating Daschle, he gave an unwitting assist to the man whose candidacy threatens to destroy the cynical politics that Rove perfected.

"Barack arrived at a point of transition for the party, in that Senator Daschle was leaving the Hill and Dick Gephardt had decided to leave politics," says Cassandra Butts, a top Gephardt policy adviser and close friend of Obama's from Harvard who helped lead his D.C. transition team in 2004. "There was this wealth of talent that was looking for a place to land."

In Rouse, Obama identified a senior partner who could guide his dizzying ascent through the ranks of the Senate — and beyond. Butts arranged a meeting at the restaurant of the Mandarin Oriental. "It was very much us selling Pete on why he'd want to work for a freshman senator who was, like, 99th in seniority," she recalls. Initially, Rouse declined the offer. Crestfallen over Daschle's defeat, he was leaning toward leaving the Hill. "But Barack went back at him," says Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, for whom Rouse also once served as chief of staff. "He told him, 'I really want you to do this.' And Pete reconsidered."

With Rouse as his wingman, Obama suddenly had the juice to make his move legislatively. In conjunction with David Axelrod, Rouse drew up a "strategic plan" for Obama to bring to Congress the kind of bipartisan legislation that had been his hallmark as a state legislator. Drawing on the across-the-aisle relationships he had cultivated under Daschle, Rouse enabled Obama to partner with Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, to increase funding to round up and scrap more Soviet-era arms, and even with Sen. Tom Coburn, the archconservative from Oklahoma, in passing a bill that makes all federal earmarks and contracts searchable. In less than two years, Obama built a substantive track record. "That's just indescribably hard on the Hill," says Jordan. "Pete understood how important this kind of post-partisan legislation was for fleshing out Barack."

In the fall of 2006, when Obama began to flirt with a presidential run, Rouse already had a plan in place that he had worked out during Daschle's own abortive run in 2004, and he quietly set about recruiting all the old hands. "The Daschle team came in to work with Obama through Pete Rouse," says Durbin. For starters, Rouse brought Daschle's campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, into the fold. The unflappable, buzz-cut South Dakota consultant, habitually decked out in jeans and cowboy boots, became the architect of Obama's masterful field campaign, rising through the ranks to become deputy campaign manager. Hildebrand's partner, Paul Tewes, ran Obama's Iowa campaign and is now charged with reshaping the Democratic National Committee in Obama's image.

But Rouse's most important "get" was the friend with whom he had first started out in politics as fellow legislative assistants in the early 1970s. "Tom Daschle — in no small part because of Pete's urging — was one of the first to endorse Senator Obama," says Durbin. By persuading Daschle to join the Obama bandwagon a year before Iowa, Rouse secured the establishment credibility needed to undermine Clinton's aura of inevitability. (That Daschle chose Obama over four other former Senate colleagues is a testament not only to Rouse but to Obama, who endeared himself to Daschle in 2004 by contributing $85,000 from his Senate war chest to the South Dakotan's re-election battle.) In turn, Daschle brought with him a network of 85,000 proven donors. The woman charged with asking them to part with their money was another Rouse hire, former Daschle finance chief Juliana Smoot. In all, some 25 members of the Daschle team hold key positions in the Obama camp, including deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer and consultant Anita Dunn, who helped run Bill Bradley's campaign in 2000.

Daschle himself remains the most mysterious member of Obama's team. During the primary campaign, he played a key role in twisting the arms of undecided superdelegates. But when pressed for more details on his day-to-day influence, he says only, "I'm involved somewhat in strategy and some of the campaign questions as well."

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"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 AXIS OF AXELROD

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.

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Plouffe began his political career after dropping out of college to work as a field operative for Tom Harkin, staying through the Iowa senator's 1992 presidential bid. He was later hired as Dick Gephardt's deputy chief of staff and managed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2000 before joining Axelrod's consulting firm as a partner. Unlike Axelrod, however, Plouffe is in politics less because of idealism or ideology than a vicious competitive streak.

"David is a very driven Democrat, not a committed leftist or centrist — he wants to win," says Steve Elmendorf, who served as Gephardt's chief of staff. "David is one of the most organized and disciplined people I've ever met in this business. A lot of great political strategists can't manage anything. David is both a good strategist and a very disciplined manager. He doesn't get distracted."

Given how much has gone right with the Obama campaign, it's easy to overlook how flawed its Plan A was. It was a classic momentum strategy: Win Iowa and the rest of the states will fall like dominoes. Just before the Iowa caucus, Plouffe — who, unlike Obama, is a man of few words — rallied the troops with a crisp address, delivered in his stern, pitchless voice. The logic seemed impeccable: "We're gonna win the caucus, then we're gonna win New Hampshire, and on the night of February 5th," he said, cracking his puckish sideways grin, "Hillary's gonna give her concession speech."

Plouffe was wrong about New Hampshire — but instead of digging in his heels, he made a precise and nimble pivot that proved crucial to Obama's victory. Realizing that the momentum strategy was shot, he immediately began deploying operatives to Maine, a state that did not caucus until five days after Super Tuesday — a shift that Clinton failed to make until the morning of February 6th. Thanks to the extra month of organizing, Obama went on to win Maine by 18 points, part of a decisive victory streak in 11 states.

Plouffe had also prepared for the long haul, by crafting a strategy that focused on winning delegates, not just states. "David has got one jones," says Bill Carrick, who worked with Plouffe on Gephardt's 2004 presidential bid. "He has an absolute, insatiable appetite for numbers. Whether it's media buying or polling or voter ID, he will massage numbers, dissect numbers. He is absolutely the quintessential numbers junkie." Driven by his obsession, Plouffe built his own delegate-counting apparatus — a network of operatives positioned inside county courthouses — that could provide him with election-night snapshots of the delegate math without relying on official party pronouncements.

That delegate-counting apparatus turned out to be essential, given the Democratic Party's esoteric and complex rules for divvying up pledged delegates based largely on the differing margins of victory in each and every one of a state's congressional districts. While the Clinton strategy was focused on winning the overall popular vote in big states, Plouffe was parsing data on every district in the country to identify the pivot points that would allow Obama to maximize his delegate haul, even in states he lost.

The strategy paid off after Clinton won the Nevada caucus on January 19th, and the Associated Press went live with a story saying she would take home the most delegates. Jeff Berman, another Gephardt veteran who oversaw delegate-counting for Obama, rushed over to Plouffe at the Chicago headquarters with a giant book of Nevada legal code. "We're going to win the delegates in Nevada!" he said, citing the arcane delegate-selection process in one of the state's congressional districts. Berman knew that Obama had won the popular vote in a key part of the district that still hadn't publicly reported its results, giving him a 13-12 edge in delegates statewide.

"Are you sure?" asked Plouffe.

"Positive," said Berman.

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The race to shape the news was on: Plouffe dispatched Berman to make his case to the AP and marshaled a conference call with 200 political reporters. As a result, the AP revised its numbers — and the New York Times headline the next morning qualified Clinton's win with a caveat: "Obama 2nd, but Takes 1 More Delegate."

With that, the primary battle shifted to what would become known as "the math." "It was quintessential Plouffe," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "Because it wasn't huge and flashy. It was a nuts-and-bolts thing that had massive impact on the coverage from there on in."

In this trench warfare for pledged delegates across hundreds of congressional districts nationwide, Plouffe had a skill set that left his counterparts in the Clinton campaign hopelessly outmatched. After all, he had cut his political teeth by slicing and dicing these same districts while managing the DCCC in 2000, and he had returned to the effort as a top consultant in 2006. Working closely with Axelrod, Plouffe helped regain control of the House for Democrats. The experience left him with a gut instinct that rivaled the best research his staff could produce; he often came up with numbers off the top of his head that ultimately proved as accurate as those produced after hours of analysis by campaign workers.

Just as important, Plouffe proved tough on the budget. While the Clinton campaign burned through millions on overpaid consultants and suites at the Bellagio, Plouffe kept expenses to a minimum. Although the campaign has ended up creating the most formidable money machine in all of political history, it started as a shoestring affair. Pete Giangreco recalls cursing Plouffe every time he had to drive from Chicago to Iowa, because the campaign manager refused to fly even the most senior-level consultants to Des Moines so more money could be devoted to field organizing.

"Plouffe is the world's stingiest person," says Larry Grisolano, a top deputy who directs the media budget. "He is very, very disciplined about how the campaign's resources are spent — and even when he spends money wisely, he gets a scrunched-up look on his face, like it's a chore to let the money go."

THE KITCHEN CABINET

While Obama has recruited both Washington insiders and Chicago outsiders to his campaign, he has also rounded out his inner circle with some of his oldest and most powerful friends. Two in particular have been pivotal to the campaign's success. Julius Genachowski, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Obama, is the high-tech entrepreneur behind the campaign's unprecedented use of high technology to empower grass-roots activists and helped to churn out campaign contributions. Obama's background of door-to-door organizing and law professoring was not exactly a path to high-tech proficiency, and according to those who know him best, Obama is far from a techie. But in Genachowski — who helped Barry Diller build a new-media empire — Obama found a personal Internet evangelist, someone who convinced him that the Web had powerful implications for his core ideas about empowerment and connecting people.

For starters, Genachowski persuaded the campaign to hire a chief technology officer from the private sector (Kevin Malover, one of the pioneers of the online travel site Orbitz), as well as a new-media director from the political realm (Joe Rospars, a founding partner of Blue State Digital, who was one of the ringleaders of Howard Dean's Internet revolution). This cross-pollination of the political and new-media worlds continued with the hire of one of the wunderkind founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, whose unofficial campaign title is "Online Organizing Guru" and whose fresh face and Zac Efron hair recall an extra from High School Musical 2.

With reassurance from Genachowski, the campaign has learned to embrace the chaos that goes along with empowerment. "There's constantly stuff going on that is totally viral, that we have absolutely nothing to do with," says Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager. "People just create stuff out there and things happen." The campaign even allows activists to access and update the campaign's voter-contact database as though it were Wikipedia. It's an approach that occasionally leads to some garbled data entry, but on the whole it allows the campaign in Chicago to monitor the success of its voter outreach in real time. "I don't ask the field directors in the state for a typed-out report on what's happening," says Jon Carson, one of Plouffe's top deputies. "I can get online and tell you how many contacts they made in, say, Pennsylvania last night, because it's logged in the voter file. There's less of the old-fashioned bureaucracy and more actually knowing what's going on."

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Genachowski, who now runs his own technology investment firm, is quick to point out that credit for Obama's online machine goes to the campaign team that spent 15-hour days building it. But the vision was undeniably his. From the beginning he was insistent that the campaign invest in tools that were professionally built and that could scale along with the campaign — no matter how big it got. His philosophy was simple: "If we don't build it, they won't come." He credits Plouffe for taking the leap of faith required to invest, on the front end, in pricey technology with no guarantee of return, and in ramping up the investment as the tools began to prove their worth.

The second influential friend in Obama's brain trust is Valerie Jarrett, who joined the campaign in the summer of 2007. At the time, insiders say, Obama didn't appear to be catching on with voters, and the mood among staffers was "Aw, man, this isn't working. These guys just aren't doing it right. They're just gonna run a bunch of ads, and then it's gonna be over." Axelrod and Plouffe were counseling patience, but the national poll numbers showed them 30 points behind Clinton.

It was a combustible moment, and it could have sparked the kind of backstabbing and infighting that have destroyed so many Democratic campaigns. But Obama pre-empted any uprising by bringing Jarrett to the table to be his voice on the senior team when he wasn't in the room. Instead of an implosion, there was a change in course. Obama began to draw sharper contrasts between himself and Clinton, and the campaign began to gain ground. "Everybody kind of just swallowed and worked things out, and the warship didn't really have a dent," recalls one insider.

Jarrett, a longtime deputy to Mayor Richard Daley, met Obama in 1991 when she hired his wife, Michelle, as an assistant to the mayor. A well-connected Chicago insider, Jarrett is the most influential woman and African-American in Obama's inner circle. Her primary role is to pierce the bubble of the campaign — to shoot straight with the candidate and to give the two Davids some push-back on strategy. Accomplishing the latter task is easier than it sounds: Jarrett has known Axelrod for more than 15 years and worked closely with him on Daley's mayoral campaigns. Described as "the other side of Barack's brain," Jarrett plays the same role for the candidate's wife. "I help form a bridge between Michelle and the campaign," she says.

Jarrett describes her relationship to Obama as fraternal. "I don't have a brother," she says, "so he is like family to me." Indeed, Jarrett's personal relationship with Obama gives her a subtle, calming influence that others can't match. When Obama was cooped up in the office of his Hyde Park home after the Rev. Wright fiasco, writing the speech on race that would rescue his campaign, she reached out to him to give him a chance to let off some steam.

"He was under a lot of pressure because he decided to do this speech on very short notice," she recalls. "So Sunday night, I know he's up writing this speech — Barack does a lot of his writing late at night because the house is quiet and Michelle and the girls are asleep, and that's when he thinks best. And I had heard this hilarious story about a friend of ours, and I thought, 'Well, I'll send him an e-mail. If he's focusing on his speech and he doesn't want a distraction, he can ignore it. But if he wants a break, he can lighten the mood a little bit.' He called, we had a very good laugh, and then we went back to work."

Jarrett also helps Obama with humanizing touches that — for all of the candidate's transcendent stage presence — sometimes elude the former law professor. The vivid anecdote with which he closed his speech on race — about the white campaign organizer named Ashley who, as a child, ate mustard-and-relish sandwiches during her mother's battle with cancer — was a story Jarrett had picked up on the campaign trail in South Carolina and related to Obama on a late-night flight to Georgia.

Last December, a smirking Mitt Romneyblasted 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."

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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."

[From Issue 1056-1057 — July 10, 2008]

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INSIDE BARACK OBAMA'S INNER CIRCLE
The senator has demonstrated his skill as a chief executive by assembling and managing one of the most effective teams of top advisers in politics

	David Axelrod Age 53 Nickname Ax Joined Obama In 1992, when Obama was an organizer Title Chief strategist Masterminded "Politics of hope" Little-Known Fact Wrote 1993 Bill Clinton line about a "symphony of hope" Friends With Hillary Clinton, who supports his family epilepsy foundation Evil Twin Karl Rove Next Act Co-author, inaugural address
	David Plouffe Age 41 Nickname Plouffe Daddy Joined Obama In 2004, as Axelrod partner during Senate campaign Title Campaign manager Masterminded Obama's strategy in caucus states Little-Known Fact Never graduated college Friends With With Dick Gephardt, his former boss Evil Twin Clinton attention hog James Carville Next Act Clinton attention hog James Carville
	Pete Rouse Age 62 Nickname The 101st Senator Joined Obama In 2005, after the defeat of former boss Tom Daschle Title Chief of staff Masterminded Obama's rapid rise as a senator Little-Known Fact Obsessed with cats; likes cat-shape sugar cookies Friends With Top Republican senators Evil Twin Dick Cheney Next Act White House chief of staff
	Valerie Jarrett Age 51 Nickname The Other Side of Barack's Brain Joined Obama In 1991, after hiring Michelle Obama to work for Chicago's Mayor Daley Title Senior adviser Masterminded Campaign's revival in summer of 2007 Little-Known Fact Born in Iran Friends With Vernon Jordan, her great-uncle Evil Twin Bush family fixer James Baker Next Act Mayor of Chicago
	Julius Genachowski Age 45 Nickname No known alias Joined Obama In 1989, at Harvard Law Review Title Technology adviser Masterminded Obama's online juggernaut Little-Known Fact Staffer, Iran-Contra investigation Friends With Barry Diller, the online media mogul Evil Twin GOP "micro-targeter" Ken Mehlman Next Act First Cabinet-level chief technology officer
	Tom Daschle Age 60 Nickname The Wizard of Oz Joined Obama In February 2007, offering campaign its first major endorsement Title Campaign co-chair Masterminded Persuasion of the superdelegates Little-Known Fact Ex-Air Force intelligence officer Friends With Bob Dole, his partner at the Bipartisan Policy Center Evil Twin The Wizard of Oz Next Act Secretary of health

Photos: Getty (Axelrod, Jarrett, Daschle), Arbogast/AP Images (Plouffe), Chicago Tribune/MCT/Landov (Rouse) and Yael Tzur/Israel Sun/Landov (Genachowski)