Whether or not Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic presidential nomination could depend on the political skills and persuasive powers of Matthew D. Nugen, a behind-the-scenes political veteran at the age of 36.
Nugen, the campaign’s political director, is in charge of the effort of persuading superdelegates to support Obama.
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The nearly 800 at-large delegates - an assortment of elected officials and party dignitaries - could provide the margin of victory for Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
According to the Associated Press, Obama leads Clinton in the number of pledged delegates - those people chosen by caucus or primary voting - by 119 votes, 1,617 to 1,498.
Clinton leads in the number of superdelegates, however. She has 249 by the AP’s count, while Obama has 213. (Different news outlets have somewhat different numbers.)
But these numbers represent an improvement for Obama, who has been gaining superdelegates of late.
Clinton lost one yesterday with the resignation of Eliot Spitzer as governor of New York. Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, was already a superdelegate for Clinton.
Harold Ickes, a long-time associate of the senator and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, is leading the superdelegate hunt for Clinton.
Nugen has been called “Obama’s Ickes,” but a profile of him in The New York Observer, suggests that he has a different, quieter style than the famously combative Ickes.
“Matt is the unassuming guy that you don’t realize he’s got stroke until you see Obama come in, and he is right there,” Moses Mercado, a superdelegate committed to Obama, told the Observer’s Jason Horowitz.
Horowitz stresses in his story that there’s a reason why Nugen, who works with Jeff Berman, Obama’s director of delegate operations, prefers to downplay his own importance.
At least on paper, the Obama campaign says the superdelegates should reflect the outcomes of the primaries and caucuses in their states.
Consequently, the campaign should not be lobbying superdelegates to go against these votes or to commit before primaries are held.
However, the campaign needs the superdelegates as a kind of safety net. Consequently, it’s quietly, but aggressively courting their votes.
In these cases, it’s often Nugen who ends up making the key calls, Horowitz wrote.
“He knows all these players pretty well,” Brad Queisser, a former DNC official told Horowitz. “In a superdelegate list, he probably has a personal relationship with 80 to 85 percent of those people, and that has to be valuable in a presidential campaign.”
Nugen, who is African-American and a graduate of the University of Missouri, has held several positions with the Democratic National Committee. Before he joined the Obama campaign last year, he was director of Chairman Howard Dean’s office.
Earlier, he worked on the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman. He also was the deputy chief operating officer for the 2000 Democratic National Convention.
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