Obama: The 2008 presidential campaign scaled exactly like a successful startup
Barack Obama · President Barack Obama: When the moment chooses you, part 1 · Dec 21, 2021 · at 34:58
Former U.S. President Barack Obama compares the operational scaling of his 2008 presidential campaign to that of a successful startup.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It did end up being this strange process where, like a successful startup, what began with a credible campaign, but not a juggernaut, by the time we are finished with the primary into the general, we really have built a national juggernaut.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Barack Obama
Obama: Republican filibuster obstruction in 2009 was unprecedented in US history
“At the time, there was no precedent for the kind of obstruction that we had seen from the Republican Party. There was no precedent for the use of the filibuster to literally block everything.”
Obama: Single-payer healthcare would have been economically disruptive and politically impossible
“Not only politically would it be impossible to start from scratch, but economically be wildly disruptive. A lot of people work for insurance companies and a lot of people work for hospitals under current arrangements and doctors get paid in certain ways and so…”
Obama: Federal IT procurement is massively inefficient despite high-caliber talent
“The truth is, certainly at the highest levels of the federal government, people are just as smart and work just as hard, if not harder, than anybody in the private sector. But where there is massive inefficiency is technology and IT procurement. It's just mise…”
Obama: Administration's 2008 crisis decisions averted depression and drove record job streak
“The decisions we made at the time did not solve some of the broader underlying trends that I had actually campaigned on, like income and wealth inequality, but it did avert a great depression and stabilize the situation that would allow for painfully slow, but…”
Obama: Administration wanted a stimulus package twice as large as $800B Recovery Act
“As a consequence, we could not get enough votes to do more in the initial Recovery Act, as we called it, than eight hundred billion dollars. And I think Subsequently, people have said, ah, you know, you should have done twice as much. Well, yeah, we wanted to …”