Late last month, President Obama's campaign team revealed what sounded like devastating news: It spent more money in May than it raised.
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By Charles Rex Arbogast, AP
Jim Messina directs President Obama's re-election campaign.
By Charles Rex Arbogast, AP
Jim Messina directs President Obama's re-election campaign.
But the next day, Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, didn't sound concerned about the campaign's burn rate or worried about his ability to raise enough money to stay competitive with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
"We knew how much we were going to spend before we spent it, and how much we wanted to raise," Messina said. Even as the campaign sends out solicitation notes on a near-daily basis warning supporters that Romney and GOP-friendly super PACs are setting a pace to outspend Obama, Messina expresses confidence. His team, he says, is deploying its resources smartly.
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Messina, 42, may be the most important member of Obama's political brain trust that you've never heard of.
David Axelrod, the campaign's messaging guru and longtime Obama confidante, is a familiar face on the Sunday shows. David Plouffe, who is perhaps Obama's most influential adviser in the White House, eschews the limelight but has earned fame for running Obama's successful 2008 electoral landslide victory over Sen. John McCain.
But Messina, who joined the 2008 Obama campaign as chief of staff, who served as deputy chief of staff during the first two years of the administration and now directs Obama's re-election campaign, has maintained a relatively low profile.
Yet among Democratic insiders he's a major presence, and there are strong opinions about him. Messina's admirers say he's a savvy political operative who, through meticulous data mining and social media, is directing an unprecedented grass-roots effort against potentially the most heavily funded challenger in presidential history.
"A lot of campaign operatives are bound by this Washington bubble-think, and Jim is not satisfied with that," said Jon Selib, chief of staff to Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and a friend of Messina. "He understands that winning means doing war."
But others complain that he heads a campaign where only the opinions of a tight circle of insiders are considered and that he has focused too much attention on attacking Romney's career and too little on explaining the president's vision for the future. As polls show the race tightening, Democratic strategists have become increasingly vocal in their concerns over whether the president and his advisers are on the right path.
"The ideological narrowness of the campaign that Messina and Axelrod are running precludes bringing in new ideas," said Doug Schoen, who was a top adviser to former President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. He calls this campaign one of the most insular in memory.
Messina, who is notorious for his salty vocabulary, politely waves off that charge. "Part of the reason we are (headquartered) in Chicago is to get away from the Beltway and all of their political spin and chatter and all of that," he said. "I think the real wisdom in politics is the talk in the states, and that's where we spend our time."
As Obama's deputy chief of staff, Messina was the White House's point man to Congress on Obama's landmark health care overhaul negotiations. He insisted on strict message discipline and chafed at pressure from liberal advocates, said Richard Kirsch, former executive director of Health Care for America Now, a group that supported the legislation. "He wanted us to push … for the president's health care bill, but if we were going beyond that, to provisions of the bill that we thought were important but the White House wasn't committed to, then he tried to squelch it."
Before Messina arrived in Chicago last year to launch the re-election campaign, he made it clear that he wanted to run a campaign different from any other. He visited innovators he admired — film director Steven Spielberg, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt — and picked their brains on utilizing technology.
"What we were was a kind of tech startup — we were very small and grew," Messina said. "I studied Silicon Valley firms and their layouts and how they did it," Messina said. "They're trying to create teamwork and make sure everyone's rowing the same way."
He came back to Chicago and built out a campaign headquarters that resembles a Silicon Valley start-up more than the nerve center of a political campaign.
There are no cubicles, workspace is organized in teams instead of departments, and his staff includes a number of tech-savvy recruits who don't have the typical résumé of a campaign hand.
Time will tell if Messina's strategies and his attempt to run an outsider's campaign for an incumbent president will be successful. And that time grows ever shorter.
