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

Q: How many people were on staff at that point?

I was in an office with four people and no Internet at the time.

Q: And how many people are on staff today, approximately?

We’re—we’re in the thousands.

Q: Wow. What’s the hardest thing that’s happened over this past year and a half? Campaign-wise. Although if you want to talk to me, you know, open up, that’s fine too.

[Laughs] My personal life? I think the hardest thing’s been, the fact that every day of this campaign has been on Broadway. There’s never a point where we got to, um, sort of—

Q: You didn’t open in Hartford?

Every day of the campaign’s been on Broadway. 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. And that’s not typical for a presidential candidate, a lot of times you start out, you’re in a minivan with your candidate, you’re lucky if there’s one reporter from the local paper following you. We’ve had to do this under the Klieg lights every day for a very long time.

Q: That is unusual for a campaign to start out like that, so you had no real models to go on, it seems like, heading into that kind of coverage. Were there some things you learned along the way?

We are, I think, rightfully seen as one of the best-planned, most-organized campaigns in history. There’s no question, there was no model to follow, we had to make it up as we went along. And we had a strategy to get from that office with four people in Washington D.C. to today. But it required quite a lot of improvisation and I think what we’ve learned more than anything else was to always focus on the long game and not get caught up in the short term news cycles and the ups and downs in the moment. It’s true of our campaign, of Senator Clinton’s campaign, of John McCain’s campaign, in any given moment, someone is telling you your campaign is about to collapse, it’s over, it’s the biggest thing in the world, and turns out you wake up the next day and it really wasn’t the biggest thing in the world. You just got to stay focused and not panic.

Q: Well today the long game is the short game.

That’s right. We have—today, finally we are at a day where what happens actually will decide the election.

Q: And you know the only poll that matters, that happens today.

That’s right, though I try to avoid clichés like that.