He’s weak on verve, strong on cohesion
Robby Mook keeps Clinton camp united
PHILADELPHIA — It took a while, but Donald Trump finally hit on an insulting caricature for Hillary Clinton’s earnest, 36year-old campaign manager.
Trump likened Robby Mook this week to the vile compulsive liar that Jon Lovitz played on “Saturday Night Live” decades ago, whose exaggerations about personal achievement and life experience grew increasingly absurd with each utterance. Trump even did a half-decent impression of the character Wednesday while mimicking Mook talking on television about the possibility that Russia tried to help Trump by stealing sensitive Democratic Party emails.
It made for a sharp sound bite. The problem for Trump is that Mook is not nearly so interesting.
Few people who have risen so far, so fast in a presidential campaign are so uncolorful, and for Clinton, that has been a godsend.
Amid all the turmoil that surrounds Clinton’s run and her personal dealings — from the FBI investigating her email to scrutiny of the lucrative speaking fees paid her by Wall Street — one problem that she has not had to deal with is lack of campaign discipline.
Mook, the first openly gay campaign manager for the presidential nominee of a major party, has been key in holding it together. His career success reflects the changing nature of campaigns, where swashbuckling strategists are becoming less of an asset than disciplined data nerds who can build a loyal and effective campaign operation the way a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur might.
Mook’s restraint is re- Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, left, approaches politics with data and precision. flected even in what he eats for breakfast every day: a f ruit and vegetable smoothie. He stays away from the boxes of pizza that tend to linger around campaign offices. His unending appetite for collaboration has been known to exhaust colleagues, who find themselves in meetings at all hours. But the system has engendered enviable loyalty among the troops.
“The idea that your purpose is to shut others out so you are the only one let in (the campaign inner circle), I think, is a mistake,” Mook said of his management style at a breakfast hosted by Politico.
The payoff in terms of loyalty was clear when the campaign managed to keep Clinton’s final choice of running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, from leaking last week before an announcement was made — a feat almost unheard of in modern campaigns.
Mook didn’t learn politics by doing the circuit of Washington internships and low-level staff jobs.
He went to the garbage dump. That’s where Mook lingered to educate himself about the electorate back when he was a student volunteer for local candidates. It proved, he said, a surprisingly effective place to make connections with voters and gain insight you can’t get while walled off in a campaign office.
“Where I grew up in Vermont, there is no municipal garbage removal,” he said. “You have to bring your trash to the dump every weekend. Something like three hours on Saturday morning the entire town goes in. It is actually a very efficient place to do politics. I would go to the garbage dump, get petitions signed, give out literature, talk to voters.”
The child of a physics professor at Dartmouth, Mook approaches politics with the precision of an academic. Unlike others in Clinton’s orbit during her 2008 run, he did not underestimate the power data and social networks had to transform politics. When he