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Obama for America
"Obama 2012 Strategy Briefing" +
6:14 web video from April 25, 2011.
Jim
Messina,
Campaign
Manager: Hey everybody this is Jim
Messina, President Obama's campaign manager in the 2012 campaign.
You know as the President does his day job, he needs all of us around
the country to take the reins of this grassroots operation and build
this together. And as you have that conversation at the local
levels through the "I'm in" campaign we have a set of shared beliefs
and shared values that we'll use to bind us together and that we'll use
to build this campaign. So as we start I wanted to take a minute
to give you our strategic framework for the campaign, and tell you
where we think things are today and the challenges that are in front of
us.
So let's go. Here's how we're going to win. Expand the
electorate. Build something new. Grow the grassroots.
Measure our progress every single day. And fight for every single
vote.
[Click... How we win: Expand the electorate] Look at the last
election, for example. [In] 2008 you all did this and changed
American politics forever. New people who signed up to vote for
the first time ended up voting for the President by 38.69 to 31.
That made real differences in very close states across this
country. We've got to do that again in 2012.
[Click... Keep the expanded
map] 2004 election results. Looks pretty red,
doesn't it? Looks pretty bleak after that. A lot of us woke
up the day after 2004 and thought to ourself, has the country gone away
from us?
[Click... Keep the expanded
map] Now look at 2008. Look at all the blue
states. In many ways it goes back to what we talked about earlier
— a lot of new voters, a lot of first time voters; we persuaded a lot
of people to come over to our side; we expanded the electorate.
[Click... Why 2012 will be
different from 2008] Why 2012's going to be different than
2008. Let's talk about a little Supreme Court case called
Citizens United. You've all heard of this, but what it has done
is fundamentally change the way campaigns are funded. Outside GOP
groups from fundraising, zero, almost zero dollars in 2008. $70
million in 2010 when the Republicans took over the U.S. House of
Representatives. They've already announced $120 million campaign
to defeat your President. We have to compete with that, we have
to understand it's going to be there, understand that what you all are
going to build will be even stronger than that.
[Click... Why 2012 will be
different from 2008] This is not 2008. We've got to
assume every single day that we need to build something new, better,
faster and sleeker. Republicans are going to be fired up to take
on President Obama, and so we all and all of you out there have to take
the reins of this thing and really build it together.
[Click... How we win: Build
something new] [The] 2008 campaign was the most special
thing a lot of us have ever been a part of. But if we just run
that same campaign, you know we stand a good chance of losing.
We've got to run
a new campaign that's connected to the grassroots, that spends a lot of
time talking to folks neighbor to neighbor, person to person, voter
to voter. Let's be very clear. This campaign is only going
to be as strong as the grassroots.
[Messina on camera]
That's what the President believes, that's what the Vice President
believes, it's what you all believe. It's why 2008 was so
special. But in 2012 we have the opportunity to make 2008 look
prehistoric.
[How we win: Build
something new] To do it at a bigger scale, to do it with
new technologies, to do it at the grassroots, on the doors, on the
phones, on your computers, a whole bunch of different ways and really
reinvent this campaign.
[Click... Grassroots will
build to the election] Grassroots will run this
campaign. The first thing is to launch this. The "I'm In"
campaign is very much important. All of you saying, Hey, I'm in,
and having one-on-one conversations with your friends, your colleagues,
your neighbors, people on your Twitter feeds, your Facebook, your email
lists, and having a real conversation about what this campaign should
be, what it looks like in Wisconsin, what it looks like in Iowa, what
kind of issues should we talk about, what the President means to folks
— I think that's very important.
The second thing is listening and planning. We're going to
have a series of listening sessions across the states [on camera] where we just
shut our mouths for a little bit and listen to our folks. You all
built this. You all were the smartest, wisest campaign in
American history in 2008; you have a lot to teach each other as we
built this. The next session will be planning. We need to
build a plan that works for 2011, and at the end of the year we'll go
re-plan again, make sure we're ready, and go after it hard in 2012. [off
camera]
And third is building the teams. This is the thing you build
last time that was unlike anything in American political history.
We need to build neighborhood teams. We need to build teams
online and offline that really combine to be the grassroots outreach
arm for the President that he can't do.
And the fourth of course is contacting voters, having the
discussions with them, persuading them that Barack Obama's the right
thing. those discussions aren't going to just be on the doors;
they're going to be viral, they're going to be online, through text,
many different ways that we're going to invent together in the next
year.
[Click... How we win:
Measure
our progress] This is the thing I'm passionate
about. This campaign has to be metric driven. We're going
to measure every single thing in this campaign. You can hold us
accountable; we can hold you accountable. We're going to measure
our door knocks, our phone calls, how many people sign up, our e-mail
lists; we're going to measure everything. I'm going to make
people here measure political outreach calls. We ought to
measure, control and adapt everything. If something's working,
we're going to go do a bunch of it. If it's not working, we're
goig to go throw it out.
We ought to not be wed to any single thing that we've done
before. We ought to just measure, grow, and adapt.
[Click... How we win: Work
for
every vote] Every single day when we wake up, we ought to
[got to?] know that this campaign's going to be won or lost by a single
vote in the precincts. You know what you all built when you
started out down 30 points in the polls in 2007 ought to be how we do
this. We ought to not act like an incumbent. We ought to
act like an insurgent campaign that wakes up every single day trying to
get every single vote we can. So every single day we got to go
and scratch and claw for those votes.
[Click... What you can do
now] Let's talk about what you can do. Go to
BarackObama.com, go to Facebook, and sign up to be in on the
campaign. And ask all of your friends and family to do the same
thing. Donate $5 or 10 to help us get started. We're going
to have field offices and staff across the country, and to get that
started we need your help. Then take the conversation
offline. Talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, talk to
your colleagues [on camera] and start the conversation. That's
going to be the conversations that win this election, door to door,
person to person, water cooler to water cooler. Let's start this
thing together to build the biggest grassroots campaign in American
history.
Notes: In this
video/PowerPoint presentation, campaign manager Jim Messina, speaking
to supporters, sets out the need to run a "new, better,
faster and sleeker" campaign in 2012; in fact he envisages building
"the biggest grassroots campaign in American history."
"If we just run
that same campaign [as in 2008], you know we stand a good chance of
losing," he states.