Profile of Stephanie Schriock, campaign adviser to Sen. Al Franken

Mandy Grunwald, a veteran campaign consultant and longtime Franken intimate, calls Schriock "spectacular . . . one of the best campaign managers I've ever worked with, and I've been doing this a long time." But what has clinched the current acclaim for Schriock is her planning for something few campaign pros have had to plan for: Weeks before Election Day, Schriock sensed that the vote could be close and drew up a road map for a recount.

She trained some 2,000 volunteers to bird-dog the state canvassers in every jurisdiction as officials hand-sorted nearly 3 million ballots. Schriock marshaled hundreds of attorneys, turning party headquarters into a law firm. Field staffers who had been door-knocking for Franken became paralegals prepping his legal exhibits.

"She ran the decathlon," Schumer says of those miserable Minnesota months. For Schriock, though, the most dreadful part was shedding staffers near the holidays, when money got tighter and the prospects got dicier. "Every week was a week when we were just laying people off," she says quietly.

Now, after guiding Franken through a tumultuous race and recount, Schriock is the talk of Democrats back in Washington, who speak of her in almost heroic terms. Schumer calls her "a saint," crowing about the party's 60th seat and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

"Stephanie's one of the absolute stars of American politics now," says White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who's spent years in Montana and predicts that Franken's campaign will make new opportunities for "my girl," as he chummily calls her. "She has gotten to the place where she has a full-court game."

Schriock got her first taste of politics growing up in Butte, Mont., a multiethnic copper-mining town with a mighty union, and a boisterous Democratic haven rising in a vast conservative terrain. In the 1980s, after a long strike, the mine shut down and hundreds of jobs disappeared.

"At that moment, I knew that at some level, in some way, I've got to be involved in politics," Schriock says. "You just realized that your livelihood could change in a split second and you don't have any control over it unless you organize and you come together."

So she got involved. At Butte High School, she ran several times for class president -- "there might have been some lollipops involved," she jokes -- but to no avail. Then she made her move in a run for student body president and won. After graduating from Minnesota State University in Mankato with a degree in public administration and business, Schriock got hooked on campaigns, later landing a finance job at the DSCC and a stint as chief fundraiser in Howard Dean's innovative, Web-savvy presidential run.

But in politics, where some staffers have a sense of self that rivals the candidate's, Schriock is the selfless if not egoless conductor behind the scenes making sure the trains run on time and to the right stations, former colleagues say. She is both feared and loved by her subordinates.

"She inspires people to work hard and do well, but people are also terrified of not succeeding," says Matt McKenna, Tester's campaign spokesman.

On the Franken campaign, Schriock talked shop each evening with the candidate before they called it a night, forming a bond that kept Franken's spirits high. The two, even as they now part professionally, display an intimacy forged in difficult moments that they now, of course, can laugh about. They toss back and forth some details of the night Franni Franken, who hails Schriock as "a warrior and a goddess," nervously and repeatedly asked her husband and his top aide whether the votes coming in were landing in their column. "What's going on?" she kept asking the campaign manager. "Are we gonna win?"

"It's really close," the methodical Schriock says she told the candidate's wife. "Very, very, very close."

Al Franken trusted Schriock not just to soothe his spouse but to call shots in his own political game, comparing her to longtime Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. "She's like a coach who makes you a better person," Franken says. "It's like, 'I don't build athletes; I build human beings.' You know?"