Democratic operative Steve Hildebrand goes rogue

"I was pretty much a zombie," Hildebrand recalls.

That evening, he stood with the masses in Grant Park as Obama delivered his victory speech. "I was out in the audience, and I wasn't listening to a word he said."

After Obama finished speaking, Hildebrand skipped a private meeting with the president-elect and senior campaign staffers, ran two miles to his new Chicago apartment and began packing. The next morning, campaign officials helped ship his belongings home. On Thursday morning he stopped one last time in Obama headquarters, where the only other official present was Bill Burton, who had commandeered his Herman Miller Aeron chair in his absence.

("It was a really nice chair," recalls Burton, now the president's deputy press secretary.)

"Get out of my chair," Hildebrand barked at Burton. "I'm moving home."

Back in Sioux City

The office building shared by Hildebrand Strategies and Herseth Sandlin are located across the street from antique shops and down the road from Deuces Casino, dusty railroad tracks and Ahler's Pro Body Shop. The nearby meatpacking plant emits wafts of a popcornlike odor.

His tongue lolling, Cooper greets visitors and roams the office under posters of George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey and Obama. Hildebrand considered it a good day: Obama had signed health-care reform into law hours earlier.

"It's something we've waited too long for," he says, as video of Obama signing the bill plays on a TV in the room's corner. He talks about how, when he was 5 years old and growing up the youngest of nine children in nearby Mitchell, his father died without health insurance when a tree he was bulldozing fell backward and punctured his lung. Several of his sisters are medical practitioners, and Hildebrand himself originally majored in nursing at South Dakota State before switching to political science.

But Hildebrand doesn't pretend he is satisfied, either.

"I'm disappointed that there's not a public option," he says, convinced it was an achievable goal if there had been "a serious push for it internally from Pelosi, Reid and the president."

The president is not absolved from blame, in Hildebrand's view, on a host of legislation.

"I didn't see him as rising to the occasion," Hildebrand says. "I didn't see him as bold. I hadn't seen him persuading the American people to the extent that he could have. If he was that person, Congress would follow suit. Instead, Congress held him back. He was bogged down."

He is especially frustrated about the lack of progress on gay rights, and he thinks a nationwide recognition of gay marriage is decades away.

"You think the president is going to get this Congress to do it? They're not going to," he says, adding he was disappointed by the president's failure to defend gay marriage during a referendum in Maine. "His leadership and voice could have made a difference."

When Hildebrand ran into the president in the West Wing last month, he did thank him for advocating a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," in his State of the Union speech, he says. A few days later, he returned to Washington to meet with Herseth Sandlin regarding "don't ask, don't tell." After a few minutes of conversation, Hildebrand says, she told him, "I didn't think that I was coming in here to be interrogated. I have other people in the gay community who I trust and I don't trust you."

She got up to leave and turned around.

"And I suppose I'll be reading this on a blog," she said, according to Hildebrand.

Soon after, Hildebrand made headlines by threatening to run against Herseth Sandlin himself if she cast a nay vote on health care.

"She irritated me to a point where I made the decision to defeat her," says Hildebrand, watching Cooper disembowel a stuffed animal.

But when she voted against Obama's bill, Hildebrand suddenly reneged. The reason, he says, is that he is working pro-bono to elect a liberal doctor from Rapid City. "He's a stronger candidate than me," he says.

This week, that candidate dropped out 20 minutes before the filing deadline.

The Recovery Room

Hildebrand is certainly aware that revealing his story could alter his stature. CNN might not play his pronouncements on a loop. Potential candidates might not seek his services. Obama's strategists may decide they can do without him in 2012. In short, Hildebrand's political impact may be diminished.

He seems fine with that. With the exception of unseating Herseth Sandlin, he says he has no more interest in working for federal candidates, whom he dismisses as "chuckleheads." The bulk of his business is now centered on issues he is passionate about -- climate change, campaign finance reform, gay rights. And personally, he is happier at home in Sioux Falls, where he is committed to living a normal life with his partner and content to speak his mind about the things he believes in.

After a lunch of enchiladas, Hildebrand climbs back into his black GMC Yukon, the rear window of which is adorned with an Obama '08 bumper sticker. ("The first ever," he boasts.) He drives past the old courthouse and then the gay bar where he and Pierce occasionally grab a pizza and beer. He pulls into a parking lot outside the Recovery Room, a neighborhood dive near the hospital, to join Pierce, who is drinking Buds with two old friends, Mary Von Bockren, 56, and her husband, Trent, 58.

The bar-size pool table in the corner of the room is empty and a woman puffs her cigarette next to a screen tuned to CNN ("Pres: 'It isn't always tidy.' ") They talk about how weird it is to see Hildebrand whenever he shows up on television.

"It's like, 'What?' " says Mary.

"It's a Jekyll and Hyde sort of thing," says Pierce.

They banter about the conversation Friday, which centered on whether Hildebrand would actually run against Herseth Sandlin ("He had no intention of running," says Pierce) and jokes about how much beer the Von Bockrens drank on St. Patrick's Day. Under fluorescent beer signs, Pierce teases Hildebrand, who had just gotten over a cold, that he is an especially needy patient.

"There's no place like home when you're not feeling well," says Mary.