This November 3rd, sheeple everywhere will mark the one year anniversary of 
Oct 30, 2009 04:07 AM
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Wed Feb 10
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This November 3rd, sheeple everywhere will mark the one year anniversary of Barack Obama's election. Glenn Beck will probably cry copious tears.
To commemorate the event, in addition to We the People, Edward Norton's HBO documentary that brought a tear to Obama's eye (aww, remember when everybody loved him?), campaign manager David Plouffe has a new memoir out called The Audacity to Win.
Writing about a race that included days that felt like "having your legs amputated in the morning and your arms at night", Plouffe's might be the more interesting of the two projects, especially as the excerpt suggests he doesn't feel the need to mask his true feelings about a great many issues. For example:
He was shocked by how serious Obama was about Hillary Clinton -
Neither Ax nor I were fans of the Hillary option. We saw her obvious strengths, but we thought there were too many complications, both pre-election and postelection, should we be so fortunate as to win. Still, we were very careful not to object too forcefully. This needed to be his call.
Eventually, Obama decided threesomes weren't his thing and inviting Hillary to the table would almost certainly bring Bill as well.
When you're in a room with Biden, only one man does the talking. And that man is not you.
Evan Bayh was so perfect, it was kind of creepy. And Tim Kaine was a nice guy who thought it was nice of them to meet with him but even he knew that it was a long shot.
Obama didn't think it was a great idea to start knocking Sarah Palin right off the bat. Plouffe disagreed but said alright.
"Look," I told him, "simply say that you're adding your own personal voice, one principal to another." He acknowledged that he understood and would watch his words. "We'll send out a personal statement from you and Biden," I said, "but it's important you not suggest we misfired on the original statement. Don't throw the campaign under the bus."
So guess what Obama did? He threw them right under that bus.
These are probably not the sort of things you're likely to see in We the People, which comes from a much simpler place:
Amy Rice: I watched his convention speech in ‘04 and I was really impressed with what he had to say. I felt for the first time that he was a politician of my generation. And if you think back at that time. the country was so divided. and he was saying something new and something different. "We're not blue states, we're not red states, we're the United States." I bought his book and read his story. and he has an incredible, modern-day story, and that's how the idea was conceived.
Edward Norton: When I watch it, one of the first things I saw that I was most pleased about was that it succeeded as a film apart from access to Obama. I think when it really started to gel for me is when these guys showed it to me, and things like the Iowa section-I really had never understood caucus politics until I saw it.
But taken together, the two perfectly feed the still-simmering fascination with the Obama campaign, even if the Presidency has taken the shine off Barack.
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