There is a picture of large-eared David Plouffe in his college newspaper. It's 1988 at the University of Delaware, and there's a story on the student who, two decades later, would design a black man's winning campaign for president that at its most linear was described by its opposition as "perfect." At its most cultish, it was "breathtaking," "golden," "justice."

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The seven-hundred-word article is about beer pong. Plouffe and his college roommate were prolific. "For two years," says Barack Obama's campaign manager, "that's all we did." Classes, he wasn't that into them. He never graduated.

Today Plouffe, forty-one, is wearing a bargain-colored henley shirt and smiling into his grouper sandwich. It's a cold day in early December in Washington, D. C., and Plouffe's face has a windburned clean to it. Life has become the whirlwind that happens when you have publicly done something very good, or bad. His mouth becomes a cartoon shape when he smiles, a sunny crescent.

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"You have to use a paddle, or you can use a saucepan, but where do you think the word pong comes from? It's not just about the ball," he says. In fact, if you think it's just about the ball, you're missing most of the game.

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An old college buddy says that Plouffe was far more skilled at the hanging out and drinking than at the game. He also loved Roger Clemens and the Democratic party. Originally from Wilmington, he cleaned chimneys and sold knives during college summers.

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This is not the sort of man who looks as if he's good at asking for money. He's calm and has a pent-up grin. He says "Listen" a lot. It's moderately jarring. It makes you think that what he's about to say is essential, so come closer. "Listen." But really it's only a blinking cursor, a half beat of an inflection.

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You might describe this shy middleman by not describing him. He has a widow's peak, which today has been gelled into rigid formation, and the teeth of a man who has never smoked a cigarette. He's small and lean and always seems to be folded into a gesture of lanky politeness, arms crossed, and legs. He wears T-shirts under his button-down shirts, like the small boys in high school did to feign bulk with cotton. On his first appearance on Fox News Sunday, he swallowed hard in between answers. He looked thirsty.

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He is a modest champion, puppy-loyal, and wholly inoffensive. His friends and colleagues, both in and outside the party, unfailingly call him brilliant and kind and inspiring and inspired. "If he wanted to go invent cold fusion, he'd figure out a way to do it," says Jim Messina, who ran the campaign's budget and is now deputy chief of staff to Obama. Others suggest that General Motors, bleeding America in Detroit, could clot the hemorrhage by popping Plouffe in as CEO.

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Here at this lunch table, David Plouffe is soft-spoken, and he is quick. He is nice to the waitress, but she is barely there, invisible on his radar, and the clang of the dishes and the laughter of lunchtime are inaudible. He keenly concentrates on describing his strategy. He is focused, meditative. He is yours for this hour, because this is what he has allotted. He is exact, and he is frank.

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But also, David Plouffe is very quiet. No, not quiet, because quiet isn't strong enough. Try reticent. David Plouffe is preternaturally reticent. Some might even say secretive.

"He is such a guarded person, intensely private," says David Axelrod, Plouffe's partner and Obama's campaign strategist and now senior advisor. "The one thing I would say, if he ever invites you to a friendly game of poker, you shouldn't go. You never know what's going on in his head. . . . He's got eyes that are like headlights, and you know that he's taking in everything that he's seeing."

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These are the qualities — the poker face and the hush, in the service of his also-quiet master — that helped him make winning Barack Obama the presidency look not just easy but preordained. Yes, there was some luck to it. A once-in-a-lifetime candidate, a fast-unspooling economy, a low point for national self-esteem, an opponent who, aside from a brief moment over the summer, was all but inept. But still, it takes impossible talent to make it look so easy. It takes genius and discipline. A campaign-season's worth of silence.

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But David Plouffe has something else now. Something that Aldrin lacked, something that eluded Begala and Carville and Atwater and even Karl Rove, who rode his success into the White House. A magic beanstalk that will keep you on the moon, even while you're back down at Starbucks.

David Plouffe has a list.