A new batch of spending reports reveals an unprecedented transformation of Tim Kaine's DNC under Barack Obama. In his own image: Obama's DNC

The Democratic National Committee, often relatively inactive in the year after a presidential election, is ramping up its hiring and aggressively broadening its mission under the direction of Obama campaign veterans intent on applying the lessons of 2008 to races in 2010 and 2012.

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, the DNC chairman installed in January by President Barack Obama, has hired many of the top staffers, pollsters, ad makers and fundraisers who helped steer the Obama campaign, completing a takeover of the party machinery that began when Obama became the Democratic nominee 14 months ago.


A POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission records found that since the beginning of the year, the committee has paid at least $5.9 million to staffers and firms that worked on the campaign – but had little to no independent history with the DNC – to do a range of work that will boost the party as a whole, and also lay the foundation for Obama’s reelection campaign.

Financed in part by money left over from Obama’s record-breaking fund-raising operation, the DNC has built a staff of about 380 employees across the country – a hiring pace that puts it on track to far surpass the staffs assembled by Kaine’s predecessors.

The lion’s share of the hiring is to support a new organizing project called Organizing for America (echoing the name of his presidential campaign, Obama for America) created within the committee to perpetuate the grassroots mobilization that played a key role in Obama’s capture of the White House. The project acts as the custodian for the campaign’s 13-million email address list.

Paul Begala, who became a DNC consultant after helping guide Bill Clinton to victory in the 1992 presidential campaign, said Obama has earned the right to remake the DNC in his image. “Yes, this is an Obama-centered DNC,” he said, “but it ought to be. To the winner goes the spoils.”

In the months after Clinton’s 1992 election victory, the DNC had more than 200 employees but was aggressively paring down its payroll, according to Bobby Watson, a top committee official in Clinton’s early years. “I had to get rid of close to 100 people,” Watson recalled.

Former DNC chairman Howard Dean caught some flak from Democrats for trying to buck that trend after taking over in the months after former President Bush’s 2004 reelection victory over Democratic nominee John Kerry.

The former Vermont governor, who had challenged Kerry for the Democratic nomination, began hiring staff to work around the cycle – and around the country – on an ambitious initiative called the “50 States Strategy,” intended to put traditionally Republican states in play in 2006 and 2008 – an effort continued by Obama’s campaign that stretched the inferior resources of his Republican opponent, John McCain.

Organizing for America, which is still hiring staffers in the states, is based on a similar idea as Dean’s project. But FEC reports covering September 2005 show that Dean’s DNC had only 217 staffers at a comparable point in his tenure as chairman.

Tom McMahon, who worked on Dean’s presidential campaign and then became DNC executive director when he was chairman, said Obama’s DNC “has been effective at moving more quickly in the hiring process” because it had a “willing work force of organizers and volunteers who were already schooled in the Obama way of organizing,” as well as more money.

“They were able to hit the ground running faster and they hit the ground running with cash in the bank.”

That’s thanks in no small part to Obama’s record-shattering campaign fundraising operation, which in some ways reversed the traditional dynamic in which presidential nominees are dependent on their national parties’ resources.

To be sure, after securing the nomination, Obama did integrate the committee’s voter file and field workers into his campaign’s state operations, and also installed Paul Tewes, a top staffer, at the DNC to begin the overhaul. But unlike previous nominees, Obama, whose campaign raised $750 million, had plenty of cash left over after Election Day – $18 million at the end of the year – allowing him to keep the DNC closer than usual in the cash race to the traditionally better-funded Republican National Committee.

This year, the Obama campaign has given nearly $5 million to the DNC, both by writing checks and picking up the tab for all manner of expenses, including ads and travel (it even donated the unused miles racked up during the campaign to the DNC), bringing the committee within $7 million of the $62 million raised by the RNC.



The cash has helped pay a DNC staff led by McMahon’s replacement as executive director, Jennifer O'Malley-Dillon, who oversaw Obama’s field operation, as well as finance director Rufus Gifford, whose California-based fundraising firm raised tens of millions of dollars for the campaign, and Organizing for America honchos Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird, who helped lead the Obama campaign’s efforts in Virginia and Ohio, respectively.

The DNC has made big payments to key Obama consultants, including Obama’s top campaign pollsters: Joel Benenson, David Binder and Paul Harstad.

Their three firms had not collected a dime from the DNC between 2002 and the time Obama secured the presidential nomination, but have raked in a combined $2.2 million for polling work this year. Another $376,000 in payments went to the ad firm credited with developing Obama’s messaging and media campaign, AKPD Message and Media, which was founded by Obama political guru David Axelrod, who steered campaign strategy and – since taking a top White House job – has convened weekly political messaging meetings with his former partners at the firm, as well as O'Malley-Dillon, Benenson and other DNC consultants.

Team Obama even installed its own lawyer at the DNC, replacing longtime general counsel Joe Sandler with Bob Bauer, an Obama insider who is married to White House communications director Anita Dunn, another participant in the weekly political meeting. Bauer’s firm has pulled in $306,000 in legal fees from the DNC this year.

His hiring caused some grumbling among Democratic loyalists, who were upset to see Sandler go. Other party faithful have complained that Obama’s team is over-reaching by deploying Organizing for America in the states to lobby lawmakers – including Democrats – to back the president’s legislative agenda.

A number of state party chairs “were not, frankly, overly enthused by the plans to unleash OFA across the country,” Rhode Island Democratic Party Chairman Bill Lynch wrote in a letter sent this month to other party leaders. He argues that much of OFA’s portfolio should be left to state parties.

DNC press secretary Hari Sevugan, himself a former Obama campaign spokesman, called OFA “an unprecedented effort in the history of any party committee” and said it required the staffing boost reflected in the DNC’s financial reports. But he stressed that OFA’s mission “is not about looking forward to the next election. It’s about following through on the last election.”

The line is sometimes blurry, however.

For example, at the DNC, Sevugan blasts out emails to reporters highlighting the committee’s efforts to help enact healthcare reform and elect Democrats to lower offices, but also acerbically ripping potential 2012 GOP presidential candidates like Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin.



Then there are the legions of mostly young Obama devotees around the country who worked low-paying jobs on his campaign and have transitioned to new low-paying jobs for Organizing for America.

Though OFA boasts they’ve organized thousands of house parties around the country to rally support for Obama’s agenda, turned out Democrats to counter angry Obama opponents at this summer’s raucous town hall meetings and generated 300,000 phone calls to congressional offices supporting Obama’s healthcare plan, organizers for the group have also been instructed to focus on Obama’s 2012 reelection, according to a former regional director, Jeremiah Anderson.

“Even in the midst of training, they were asking us to start thinking about 2011 and what our areas would look like then,” said Anderson, 28, who left the job last month to attend to family issues and eventually return to school. “I thought that was cool, because I’m not that big of a fan of advocacy. I’d much rather work for a candidate.”

But Begala cautions that 2012 is still three years away.

“Re-electing President Obama is ultimately somewhere on the mind of everyone at the DNC, but job one is 2010,” he said.