Obama's Last Stand by Glenn Thrush

Author:Glenn Thrush [Thrush, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64509-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Another headache hidden behind the no-drama veil soon cropped up, in the person of the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Obama’s choice to head the Democratic National Committee.

After a long internal debate in early 2011, Obama’s team had picked Wasserman Schultz on her strengths as a battleground-state surrogate and fund-raiser. She was chosen over the former Ohio governor Ted Strickland, but the decision was a close one. Axelrod, people close to the situation told me, weighed in unsuccessfully at the last minute, pushing for a Latino candidate, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles.

From the start, Wasserman Schultz grated on Chicago. She insisted the DNC hire a handful of her top congressional aides. While she was a tough and effective cable warrior and a serious fundraiser, she tended to do better on MSNBC and struck too harsh a partisan tone when she crossed over to the Sunday shows, they thought.

By the spring, the simmering tensions briefly boiled into public view. GOP researchers discovered an old post from Wasserman Schultz’s liaison to the Jewish community, Danielle “Dani” Gilbert, in which she jokingly referred to herself as a “Jewbag.”

Obama’s aides demanded the chairwoman immediately fire Gilbert, people close to the situation told me. But Wasserman Schultz defended the twentysomething staffer, who turned out to be the daughter of a top Democratic donor and Florida power broker, Mark Gilbert. She won the skirmish but lost the war—eventually becoming marginalized. Her fate, to be fair, has been shared by many a party chief in an election year, but by spring some in Obama’s orbit were openly speculating about how much better things might have been under Strickland or Villaraigosa. No sooner had that speculation died down than Wasserman Schultz called Chicago to ask why her national TV appearances, especially on the Sunday shows, had dropped off.

The campaign dropped a bomb on her.

A focus group, secretly conducted by Binder’s company, was commissioned by the campaign to rank the relative effectiveness of various in-house Obama surrogates.

The results, which were made available to me, placed Robert Gibbs at the top.

Cutter was second (a later version of the poll placed Jen Psaki, who was soon to return to the fold as Obama’s traveling press secretary, third).

Axelrod did pretty well. Plouffe and Press Secretary Jay Carney, not so much.

Wasserman Schultz ranked dead last.

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