WASHINGTON — Early in the presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton asked former New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli whether the little-known political operative running Barack Obama's longshot campaign was any good.
"I warned her," said Torricelli, who was in a position to know.
The operative, David Plouffe, had helped Torricelli win his Senate seat in 1996. It was one of the most toxic campaigns in memory -- "unrestricted chemical warfare," Rutgers political scientist Ross K. Baker called it -- and Plouffe demonstrated a talent for devising a campaign strategy, staying with it under fire and doing what it took to win.
Today, still largely unknown, the fiercely competitive 41-year-old Plouffe stands at the center of one of the best-funded, best-organized Democratic presidential campaigns ever. And just as it was against Clinton, unconventional audacity is the hallmark of his plan to beat John McCain -- audacity and Plouffe's characteristic determination to keep close tabs on every phase of the campaign while maintaining one of the lowest profiles in national politics.
On the audacity front, conventional wisdom holds that Democratic presidential candidates must focus on battleground states such as Ohio and Florida because they can't win a bundle of states across the South and the West that have gone Republican for decades.
Yet Plouffe plans to have Obama make a serious effort to carry some of those states even as he holds onto every state that Sen. John F. Kerry won in 2004 and goes all-out in the battleground states.
The same rejection of the orthodox marked Plouffe's approach to the nomination battle. He was both architect and enforcer of a strategy that ignored others' advice and gave primacy to the Iowa caucuses, then plowed resources into smaller states that chose delegates after the mass of contests on Super Tuesday.
As for Plouffe's public profile, in a campaign inner circle marked by facelessness, no senior aide makes a greater point of avoiding public view than he does. David Axelrod, the mustachioed strategist who shapes Obama's message, often acts as a campaign surrogate. Plouffe almost never does.
Yet he has a hand in virtually every aspect of Obama's world: field organization, advertising and fundraising, including the delicate task of drawing erstwhile Clinton supporters into the fold.
