Obama's Communications Director on Diet Coke, Pundits, and What's Next

Dan Pfeiffer talks to The Daily Beast as the epic election comes to an end.

Dan Pfeiffer, communications director for Barack Obama, has been with the Obama campaign since before it began—on Day Negative One. Since then, the organization has grown from four to many thousands. On the eve of it shrinking back to zero, we caught up with him by phone in Chicago.

Q: Let’s start from the top. I’m sure you say you have lots of people on the ground, looking from problems with the polls I assume. And then you personally, how did you prepare?

Well, I didn’t prepare by sleeping, because I was, like many people here, in the office by 4:30 this morning. I’m basically in it for the long haul and I am drinking Diet Coke by the gallon.

Our first day of this campaign, February 10th, 2007, there were 500 reporters credentialed for an announcement and we’ve been under tremendous scrutiny every day since.

Q: About how many cases of Diet Coke are you guys going to go through tonight? Not to be product placement, but you know, just curious.

I personally will go through more than one. There will be tons of it in the Chicago headquarters today.

Q: Not personal level, but on a personnel level, what are the preparations going into today? Do you talk amongst yourselves, trying to keep the right mindset going into today?

I think that those of us who went through the primaries, we’ve now been through every possible situation in any sort of election. We’re ready for surprise wins, surprise losses, things that are closer than they should be and landslides where you never expect them. I think this is true of the McCain campaign as well, we’ve all been doing this for so long, we have sort of this steady mentality to get through the night.

Q: About how long have you been doing this?

I started on this campaign on what we call Day Negative One, which was January 15th, 2007, the day before Barack Obama announced his exploratory committee.