PHILADELPHIA — When you think about it, the 2016 Democratic National Convention is just a big, sprawling, staggering expensive Rube Goldberg contraption built for the sole purpose of making a skeptical America trust Hillary Clinton.

The speeches (especially by that other husband-and-wife act, the Obamas) have been well-received, the Sanders-vs.-Clinton disunity that was supposed to cripple the party melted in the cascade of cheers as Bernie ordered the faithful to get into line. But restoring the trust of voters is in the hands of Clinton and Clinton alone, as even one of the main architects of the Hillary Trust Machine, campaign manager Robby Mook, admitted on the eve of her big closing-night speech.


“She has acknowledged that she needs to earn the trust of voters, and that this is something she needs to focus on … the convention is the beginning of that process,” the sunny-edgy 35-year-old told me during an interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast on Wednesday, a few hours before President Barack Obama’s rousing speech rocked the Wells Fargo Center.

Then he offered a surprisingly candid concession: The best way for her to restore that connection is for people to actually observe her president-ing, which isn’t exactly the way this process works.

“I don't think people will fully appreciate who she is until, knock on wood, she's elected president, because when she is president, I think she will be phenomenally successful because she's a work horse,” he said.

“All you need is a time machine,” I said.

“Well, no, look at her — as a U.S. senator, she was phenomenally popular,” he shot back. “She had very high job approval as secretary of state. Her job approval was in the 70s. You had Republican senators saying what a great job she was doing. So I'm very confident she's going to be a phenomenal president. She — she's going to be much more successful in the public eye when they see her actually able to produce those results, which really is what drives her popularity.”

Mook said he is “confident” Clinton will be able to make the connection. He believes her numbers have been driven down not just by her own missteps on emails or Goldman Sachs paydays, but by a concerted GOP effort to rip her reputation.

“I think the Republicans have been spending millions of taxpayer dollars trying to make it part of the public discourse, and you heard [House Majority Leader] Kevin McCarthy go out and say that literally,” he added. “That’s what he wanted — you know, the purpose of the Benghazi Committee was to drive her poll numbers down, absolutely.”

Did they succeed? “I think that they've had some success in terms of distracting voters from what really matters,” he added.

Just as he walked into POLITICO’s convention hub, news broke that Donald Trump had just asked Vladimir Putin to use his DNC-hacking prowess to find the 30,000 emails Clinton reportedly deleted before turning her hard drive over to the feds. Mook was one of the first Clinton officials to publicly link the e-break-in to the Russians — and while he joked about donning “a tinfoil hat,” he wasn’t shy about suggesting more sinister connections between the Republican nominee and Putin.

“It does appear that the Russians broke into the DNC. It does appear that because the Russians had this information, they were the ones that released it, and they did so at a time that would create maximum damage for our campaign,” Mook said of the WikiLeaks dump that eventually led to the ouster of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“It's troubling today that Donald Trump seems to be encouraging this kind of espionage … this is something that's incredibly disturbing, and my hope is that the — that the government is putting the full throw weight of law enforcement and national intelligence to stop something like this from happening in any election in our country, because if we can't rely on our elections to be run by the voters, not by foreign countries, then we're really in trouble,” he added.

He wouldn’t say the incident was on a scale with Watergate, but he made a case for investigating Trump’s connections to Putin, a winking autocrat the GOP nominee has openly admired for his shirtless-on-a-steed bravura.

“I find it disturbing that last week Donald Trump said that the U.S. does not necessarily need to come to the aid of our Eastern European allies if the Russians make aggressive actions,” he said, ticking off his list finger by finger. “I found it disturbing that for some reason that nobody seems to have explained, they removed aid for the Ukraine from the platform, someone inexplicably. Then, repeatedly, including today, Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin, praised his regime, even in the context — for example, on ‘Morning Joe,’ in the context of him killing journalists. That's frightening that he — that he gives so much respect to a leader like that.”

Mook’s position as leader of Clinton’s Brooklyn-based organization represents, in itself, a recognition by the candidate that she needed to run a very different campaign than her groundbreaking but ultimately unsuccessful 2008 primary effort. Mook is a team builder with the brio of freshly minted camp counselor who rose from being the happiest camper in the tent. In reality, he’s one of his party’s best ground-game operatives, a confident field organizer who ran some of Clinton’s most successful Midwestern operations in 2008.

He’s also proven resilient: Hillary and Bill Clinton have been steadier stewards this time, but they are tough bosses, and they cast a jaundiced eye on their entire command, Mook included, after the onion-skin-thin win in Iowa and blowout Sanders win in New Hampshire. With a little help from informal counselor David Plouffe, Obama’s political brain, he recovered — and his early-2015 planning in the first four states proved decisive. Iowa sucked, but it was a win — and the Sanders camp, flush with cash but outclassed on the ground, couldn’t quite make it. New Hampshire was followed by Clinton’s big win in Nevada and a 40-plus-point blowout in South Carolina, powered by her popularity with black voters.

That last data point took Mook (a penny-pinching planning freak who monitors the climate control in the Cadman Plaza headquarters like a Depression Baby with a new air conditioner ) by surprise. Nobody really expected the race to hinge on race, with Sanders foundering among African-American voters, he told me.

“What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” said Mook.

Mook comes off as a breezy nervous wreck (When I told him I was writing a story about a potential staff shake-up during the New Hampshire slog, he laughed, tapped on my shoulder and said, “We’re all on borrowed time”) but he’s also got a confidence that allows him to maneuver in a tough environment that rattles operatives with years more experience. He’s got a gambler’s propensity for pushing the chips onto the green: In 2008, he pushed Clinton out onto the stage to claim victory in the still-undecided Indiana primary — this year he did the same with the boss in Iowa, even though his data team gave her no more than a 60 percent chance of winning late into caucus night.

His strategic role within Clinton’s campaign grew steadily as she marched toward victory, gobbling up most of the big, diverse states while Sanders crushed it in Wyoming, the Dakotas and the white Northwest. And he played a central role in the endgame negotiations with Sanders’ team that led to a (thus far) harmonious reunification of the party in the City of Brotherly Love.

The critical relationship has been between Mook and Jeff Weaver, the canny comic-book store owner who ran Sanders' insurgency with daring and a middle-finger defiance, especially after it was disclosed that his staff had gotten an illicit glimpse at Clinton’s DNC-administered data file. In private, Mook and Weaver kept in touch — and while Mook got testy when Weaver called to say the breach wasn’t intentional and wasn’t damaging — the two eventually settled into pilot-copilot agreement to land Air Bernie safely on the deck.

“We would see each other occasionally or talk or text — so, that was really important,” said Mook — adding that he eventually developed serious “chemistry” in private with the guy who was savaging his candidate hourly on basic cable.

In the end, it was another chemistry that lubricated the pact that made the Philly love-in possible.

“He's super witty, and very dry,” Mook said of Weaver. “What makes him good on television makes him, like, fun when you're with him.

“You get a little wine in him, he gets even better.”