ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្តបិទមុខ

Campaign manager David Plouffe got the first black president elected. Now he's moving on to something even more difficult, and potentially more important.

When you have been to the moon, you can't come back to Earth and stand in line at Starbucks. You can't order a coffee, and pay for it, and drink it beside someone wearing Sarah Palin glasses and a cruise visor. The regression to mediocrity is stunning and sapping. You would die inside.

After de-mooning, Buzz Aldrin got depressed and divorced. He drank and he returned to the Air Force. But the Air Force doesn't fly to the moon; it's glad to clear the clouds.

Campaign consultant Paul Begala landed Bill Clinton the most powerful job on the ground. That's a moon trip, too. Once, Begala sent Buzz Aldrin a fan letter. What Begala wondered — because it's the same question that bedevils the people who get other people elected president — is what you do after you come back down. What in the world do you do now?

"Buzz was the second man on the moon, and the guy comes back and he can't get out of bed in the morning," says Begala. "What the fuck do you do after you get on the moon? What the fuck do you do?"

There is a picture of large-eared David Plouffe in his college newspaper. It's 1988 at the University of Delaware, and there's a story on the student who, two decades later, would design a black man's winning campaign for president that at its most linear was described by its opposition as "perfect." At its most cultish, it was "breathtaking," "golden," "justice."

The seven-hundred-word article is about beer pong. Plouffe and his college roommate were prolific. "For two years," says Barack Obama's campaign manager, "that's all we did." Classes, he wasn't that into them. He never graduated.

Today Plouffe, forty-one, is wearing a bargain-colored henley shirt and smiling into his grouper sandwich. It's a cold day in early December in Washington, D. C., and Plouffe's face has a windburned clean to it. Life has become the whirlwind that happens when you have publicly done something very good, or bad. His mouth becomes a cartoon shape when he smiles, a sunny crescent.

"You have to use a paddle, or you can use a saucepan, but where do you think the word pong comes from? It's not just about the ball," he says. In fact, if you think it's just about the ball, you're missing most of the game.

An old college buddy says that Plouffe was far more skilled at the hanging out and drinking than at the game. He also loved Roger Clemens and the Democratic party. Originally from Wilmington, he cleaned chimneys and sold knives during college summers.

This is not the sort of man who looks as if he's good at asking for money. He's calm and has a pent-up grin. He says "Listen" a lot. It's moderately jarring. It makes you think that what he's about to say is essential, so come closer. "Listen." But really it's only a blinking cursor, a half beat of an inflection.

You might describe this shy middleman by not describing him. He has a widow's peak, which today has been gelled into rigid formation, and the teeth of a man who has never smoked a cigarette. He's small and lean and always seems to be folded into a gesture of lanky politeness, arms crossed, and legs. He wears T-shirts under his button-down shirts, like the small boys in high school did to feign bulk with cotton. On his first appearance on Fox News Sunday, he swallowed hard in between answers. He looked thirsty.

He is a modest champion, puppy-loyal, and wholly inoffensive. His friends and colleagues, both in and outside the party, unfailingly call him brilliant and kind and inspiring and inspired. "If he wanted to go invent cold fusion, he'd figure out a way to do it," says Jim Messina, who ran the campaign's budget and is now deputy chief of staff to Obama. Others suggest that General Motors, bleeding America in Detroit, could clot the hemorrhage by popping Plouffe in as CEO.

Here at this lunch table, David Plouffe is soft-spoken, and he is quick. He is nice to the waitress, but she is barely there, invisible on his radar, and the clang of the dishes and the laughter of lunchtime are inaudible. He keenly concentrates on describing his strategy. He is focused, meditative. He is yours for this hour, because this is what he has allotted. He is exact, and he is frank.

But also, David Plouffe is very quiet. No, not quiet, because quiet isn't strong enough. Try reticent. David Plouffe is preternaturally reticent. Some might even say secretive.

"He is such a guarded person, intensely private," says David Axelrod, Plouffe's partner and Obama's campaign strategist and now senior advisor. "The one thing I would say, if he ever invites you to a friendly game of poker, you shouldn't go. You never know what's going on in his head. . . . He's got eyes that are like headlights, and you know that he's taking in everything that he's seeing."

These are the qualities — the poker face and the hush, in the service of his also-quiet master — that helped him make winning Barack Obama the presidency look not just easy but preordained. Yes, there was some luck to it. A once-in-a-lifetime candidate, a fast-unspooling economy, a low point for national self-esteem, an opponent who, aside from a brief moment over the summer, was all but inept. But still, it takes impossible talent to make it look so easy. It takes genius and discipline. A campaign-season's worth of silence.

But David Plouffe has something else now. Something that Aldrin lacked, something that eluded Begala and Carville and Atwater and even Karl Rove, who rode his success into the White House. A magic beanstalk that will keep you on the moon, even while you're back down at Starbucks.

David Plouffe has a list.

It was Plouffe (rhymes with bluff) who gathered the president's unprecedented thirteen-million-name contact list, which has grown into a fulsome pulsing beast, and it is Plouffe who now owns it and keeps it under lock and key. Plouffe sent those thirteen million people an e-mail in mid-November and they replied, Yes, I still want to be involved, and yes, David Plouffe, I'll have house parties when you tell me to. Here is who I am socioeconomically and socially. I am boxers; my next-door neighbor is briefs. Now the president has instructed him to make that list a new lever of government.

No president has ever entered office with this much information. The closest thing to it, Begala says, were direct-mail lists like Ronald Reagan's back in 1980. But, he says, "it's a different thing than Reagan writing, 'Send me thirty-five bucks if you want to fight the Commies.' " This list is granular. And it is flexible and transferable to myriad media outlets — even those not yet invented. Begala believes it could potentially "revolutionize progressive politics."

The idea is a national operation, likely named Organizing for America, that will resemble Obama's grassroots operation in reach and love. It will be as finely tuned as the campaign behemoth and funded the same way — no money from third parties. If Obama has a policy initiative he wants to push, or a message he needs to disseminate, or a gaffe he wants to bat down, he will call David Plouffe and Plouffe will unleash the many-million-mouthed dog, just as he did all across America for these past two years.

If you believe in Obama and in the need for change and for a new, streamlined, hyperlinked Democratic party, then this is a watershed idea. It is a mechanism that could truly morph the power structure in Washington — waking up the unused, overslept public, as Plouffe successfully did on the campaign, and making an end run around lobbyists and interest groups.

But if you are part of the Old Guard — part of the pre-Obama DNC or a liberal interest group like the Center for American Progress or labor or the environmental lobby — which has spent years trying to figure out a way to rouse and organize the Democratic machine, then this new initiative might give you pause. Because if Plouffe runs it like he ran the campaign, unless you join the ticket and stay on message, you will be left on the bench, asking Sarah Palin for a light. It is a new Democratic take on the old Bush maxim: Either you will be with Organizing for America, or you will be against it.

"The outside groups are worried about being bulldozed," says one well-placed Democratic source. "The question is, is this shortsighted on behalf of Team Obama? This is the strategy they adopted during their campaign, which was no independent expenditures, no 527's, no outside groups. They would be command central on messaging. And it was a strategy that paid off . . . [because] everything went Obama's way. You can't count on that going forward."

The fear is that the Obama machine will ignore any groups or messages not in sync with the administration. Or worse, that if for some reason Organizing for America falters, there will be a vacuum.

Perhaps it's a silly fear. Misplaced. I mean, just look at David Plouffe sitting there, courteously sipping his Diet Coke from a straw, talking about the right way to get a small white ball into a red cup. He just got Barack Obama elected president.

You can trust David Plouffe. The president sure as hell does.