Obama's Hard Edge
The New York Times profiles White House political adviser David Plouffe.
"Fiercely data-driven, Mr. Plouffe revels in the company of spreadsheets, lists, maps and the Baseball Almanac. Fiercely competitive, he once decked a colleague in a friendly touch football game for taunting him. Fiercely unsentimental, he expends zero amazement over his career climb from selling knives door to door to a first-among-equals status in the White House's closed circle."
"People inside Mr. Obama's political apparatus say Mr. Plouffe is most in tune with the President's thinking in terms of his unsparing focus on the middle class and his abandonment of the bipartisan bridge-building efforts that have mostly failed through his first term... Mr. Plouffe approaches campaigns with a tribal sense of good-vs.-evil, rarely seeing much humanity in opponents."
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/ ... _edge.html