POLITICO- The 2008 Obama campaign may have epitomized racial diversity, but gender was another story. While Hillary Clinton was defining a new place for women in politics two decades after a woman ran Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign, the three most visible figures for Barack Obama — David Plouffe, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs — were male.

There were several women in positions of authority on Obama’s campaign team — but his testosterone-fueled Chicago operation was so male-dominated, one female aide to Republican John McCain accused the campaign of “boys’ club bullying … better suited for a frat house than a serious campaign about serious issues.”

The 2012 campaign promises to be different — maybe.

Obama’s campaign manager, top spokesman and chief strategist will once again be male, but two women, Julianna Smoot and Jen O’Malley Dillon, have been picked as deputy campaign managers, essentially sharing the number two job in what promises to be a billion-dollar campaign.

Smoot, with her gilded fundraising connections and networking skills, is tasked with mobilizing a nationwide network of power players. O’Malley Dillon, a former top party official, is helping build the dozens of state organizations needed to activate Obama’s grass-roots support.

Both will bear significant day-to-day operational responsibilities, and they will alternate running the Chicago headquarters when campaign manager Jim Messina is on one of his frequent road trips, a senior campaign official told POLITICO.

Their titles and the roles they will play — along with the choice of Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee — are a tacit acknowledgment of past shortcomings and a recognition the Obama effort has to better reflect a crucial voting bloc this time around.

While the White House downplayed the notion that the two women were placed at the forefront of the campaign because of their gender — “Julianna and Jen are in top positions because they are two of the best in the business, not because they are women,” said Jen Psaki, the White House deputy communications director — the symbolism has not been lost on those outside the campaign.

“They’ve lived with the criticism for a few years now that they’re a boys’ club,” said one top Democratic consultant. “I think they felt the pressure all along to get more women in the mix, and now there’s a definite shift.”

“They needed it,” added Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. “They desperately need women to have more of a presence visually in the same way that Donna Brazile was omnipresent for [Al] Gore and the way so many aides were for Hillary. They’re learning the lesson that you’ve got to have women in high places.”

Smoot and O’Malley Dillon are hardly newcomers to Team Obama. They proved themselves in critical — though relatively low-profile roles — during the 2008 campaign.

Smoot, a charm dispenser with a rolling North Carolinian drawl, helped bring in a record-shattering $745 million as finance director during the 2008 cycle and was later recruited to serve as White House social secretary after a highly publicized security breach ruined Obama’s first state dinner.

“When there’s any kind of problem, nobody is better than Julianna at fixing it, and she proved that as social secretary,” said a senior administration official who has worked alongside Smoot.

O’Malley Dillon, a veteran of four presidential campaigns, was battleground states director for Obama before serving for the past two years as executive director at the DNC.

To read the Politico story, click here.