The Wabash Way To Run a Presidential Campaign
Between Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012, he was Deputy Director of Obama for America, helping to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Wabash Director of New Media Howard Hewitt visited Bird at the campaign headquarters to talk about his career, the election, and his future plans. Some excerpts from their conversation:
Talk about your path to the work you’re doing now.
How I got here? I went to divinity school!
I think everybody who gets involved in politics and leadership of a presidential campaign came through a circuitous way to get there.
This is not, “Go to law school and become a law-yer.” This is not, “Go to medical school and become a doctor.”
You go out there and say, “I believe in this candidate, or this issue,” and you take whatever oppor-tunities are open, knock on doors, work hard, get in and do something.
And you have to work for someone you believe in. In campaigns you have to be willing to work 20 hours a day. If you’re going to put on that T-shirt, put that bumper sticker on your car, you better believe in that person. You’re going to put all of yourself into it.
When I first worked for Howard Dean in 2004 I took a 50 percent pay cut because I believed in him. It was a dumb professional decision to take a pay cut for a job that ended nine months later. But I met people along the way who I worked hard for and with, and they went on and did something else, and they brought me with them because they thought I was good.
You began as a community organizer…
Being an organizer is the best job in all politics. You go out to the community and meet incredible Americans who want a better life for their kids, have interesting stories. You go to small towns, you go to big cities, you learn about America, and you learn about yourself and become better at interacting with people.
After the 2008 election, you continued working for Obama.
The 2008 election was just the beginning. The hardest part comes after you get elected, trying to get legislation passed in a place where a lot of people don’t want that to happen.
I believed it was important to keep our grassroots people engaged with that struggle. Organizing for America was a big reason we got healthcare passed, a big reason we got Wall Street reform passed, and a big reason we kept our people engaged and involved.
Then comes the 2012 campaign…
Because of the organizing we did in the states in 2008, [Obama Battleground States Director] Mitch [Stewart] and I believed we could bring that from the states to the national headquarters. We could make decisions based on what was best for the neighborhood team leader out there, as opposed to the easiest decision based on what DC was telling us was important.
We made a big commitment in 2011 that we would not just run the 2008 campaign again—that we would take what was best from that, learn from it, adapt, move. Part of our focus on analytics was to make sure we were being the best stewards of our grassroots fundraisers’ money—to make sure we were spending it on the right things.
This sort of analytical thinking is part of what Wabash is about. What I learned at Wabash was this: Don’t ever get comfortable, don’t ever think you know everything, and always be striving to learn, re-learn, use your experience. That philosophy was part of our campaign.
Many political observers were surprised by the election results.
They were surprised because they thought a different electorate would turn out than we did. We were validated on election day. Many who said people weren’t going to turn out were wrong.
It’s not because I’m a genius, it’s not because our campaign didn’t make mistakes—we had a great candidate, a great team, and we executed. We did all those things that no one paid attention to and made sure we turned those people out. And we had great analytics—we knew who these people were, and we engaged them in many ways.
A victory to savor?
The day after the election the President came and addressed our folks. It was moving. I think in 2008 we had the wind at our backs, but this time was a grind, much harder, and he knew the people in this room had been a big part of it. It was his last race, the last time he was going to stand in front of his campaign staff and address them.
He talked about being an organizer when he came to Chicago years ago. Then he walked around the office and hugged each person individually, hugged everybody. It was cool.
And your own future?
I want to keep doing political work for people and causes I believe in. I want to change the world in big ways, and I’ll figure out how to do that in my own way.
In January 2013, Bird and Mitch Stewart founded the consulting firm 270 Strategies “to bring the empowering Obama grass-roots model to your campaign.” Among their first projects is Battleground Texas, which aims to make the state competitive for Democrats within a decade by organizing around voter registration drives, redistricting efforts, and local political races. That got Stephen Colbert’s attention, and Bird appeared on The Colbert Report in February.