Obama's Conversation Starter: Joe Rospars
NationalJournal.com's Amy Harder recently sat down with Joe Rospars, President Obama's new media campaign director. Here's a snippet...
Long after dozens of Obama For America campaign diehards had gone home, Joe Rospars and Sam Graham-Felsen were still staked out on the 11th floor of a nondescript Chicago office building one night in March 2007. As usual, they were working long hours, blogging, tracking supporters and otherwise keeping Barack Obama's new media operation alive. But that night they were also waiting for someone special to arrive -- the campaign's 75,000th donor, a milestone that, at the time, seemed grand.
Rospars, then 25, had recently come on as the campaign's new media director, overseeing a team of fewer than a dozen Web specialists. From the start he was committed to recognizing donors, not money, recalls Graham-Felsen, who ran the campaign's blog. So when the donation came in, Graham-Felsen remembers Rospars saying, "Let's give that guy a call." The donor's story was spotlighted on the blog and e-mailed to thousands of supporters. The blog post was signed by Graham-Felsen, and the e-mail came from campaign director David Plouffe. Not from Rospars, even though the idea was his. That's how Rospars wanted it.
A few fun facts about Rospars: He spends a lot of time on Facebook; follows Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Shaquille O'Neal on Twitter; and has a MacBook Pro.
Read the full story here.
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