According to an August 2008 statement by Deputy Campaign Manager Steve Hildebrand, the Obama campaign had "large-scale operations in 22 states, medium operations in many others, and small staffs in only a handful of states,"[1] with several thousand paid operatives on the ground between Obama staff and Democratic Party staff. That month, these numbers included "about 200 paid staffers working in Florida and more on the way, 90 in Michigan with plans to expand to 200 by August, at least 200 each eventually in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and 50 in Missouri with plans to expand to 150."[1]
Inner circle
David Axelrod, media strategist. Founder of Chicago-based AKP Media. Handled Obama's 2004 Senate race. Consultant to Chicago Mayor Daley and Rep. Rahm Emanuel.
David Plouffe, campaign manager. Partner, AKP Media, lives in Washington.
Robert Gibbs, communications chief. Spokesman for Obama's Senate and political operations.
Anita Dunn, handled communications and policy. Principal with Washington-based Squier, Knapp, Dunn Communications.
Steve Hildebrand, Deputy Campaign Manager. Runs South Dakota–based political consulting firm and is an Iowa specialist.
Joel Benenson, Chief Pollster, runs the New York City–based Benenson Strategy Group.
Ricki Seidman, Communications Director for Joe Biden
Foreign policy
By July 2008 the Obama campaign had some 300 persons working on foreign policy, and organized along bureaucratic lines like a "miniature State Department."[5] Notable among these people are:
Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration.
Anthony Lake, Clinton's first national security adviser, who was criticized for the administration's failure to confront the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and now acknowledges the inaction as a major mistake.
Greg Craig, a former top official in the Clinton State Department; also served as Clinton's lawyer during his impeachment trial.
Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy for President Clinton and the first President Bush, now a member of the Obama campaign's Middle East team.[6] He has advised the Obama campaign on legal issues, including the rights available to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.[7]
Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has organized his 40-member nuclear nonproliferation team into eight working groups.
Philip H. Gordon, also of Brookings, is in charge of Obama's Europe team.
Sarah Sewall, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and former Clinton Defense Department official who wrote the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the new counterinsurgency manual Gen. David Petraeus revised for the military, is advising on counterinsurgency strategy.
Karen Kornbluh, 44, served as policy director in Obama's Senate office, having joined in 2002 after working for the Clinton administration and the New America Foundation in Washington.
Daniel Tarullo, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and a former senior economic adviser in the Clinton administration
Jim Johnson, tapped by Obama to lead his vice presidential search committee. However, Johnson soon became a source of controversy when it was reported that he had received loans directly from Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, a company implicated in the U.S. subprime mortgage lending crisis.,[14] and resigned abruptly on June 11, 2008.[15]
