Retooling at the White House

This is worth a read. I've always liked and admired Plouffe. And this made me laugh out loud:

Plouffe’s take is a bit more sanguine, but far from Pollyannaish. “The president right now is sitting with a job approval rating of just over 50 percent, despite the economy,” he says. “In a presidential-election-year electorate, the Latino vote is playing a stronger and stronger role. So from an Electoral College standpoint, right now I’d rather be us than the other side. That said, we live in an enormously close, 50-50 country. So we should assume—and it may be hard for me to take this approach if Sarah Palin is their nominee, but I will try—that whoever runs against us is a deadly serious threat and we’ll be in a very close election. You have to assume that you’re gonna have to do everything right to get 270 electoral votes.”

The article, the cover story of New York Magazine, is a good piece of reporting, not withstanding that the author was one of the two authors of Game Change (which can never be the definitive report of the campaign because it omitted entirely the Michigan and Florida delegate controversy)