Wicks went on to direct the Obama campaign's effort to win Missouri, a decided reach for any Democrat. But Wicks and her team of grass-roots organizers made it a real nail-biter, with Obama losing the state by just 0.1 percent of the vote.
After the election, Wicks worked in the Obama administration, becoming deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. She later became national Operation Vote director for Obama's 2012 re-election.
Wicks has been a political animal from a young age. In 1991 she was voted student body president of Foresthill Divide Middle School in Placer County. Something of a rabble-rouser, Wicks jokes "I was almost impeached for shaving off the bottom of my hair."
Some might underestimate a woman named Buffy. But don't be fooled: Wicks is a competitor. (Full disclosure: I know this from personal experience, having played water polo with her on the San Francisco Tsunami co-ed team).
She dipped her toe into the deep end of politics right out of high school, working for Democrat Katie Hirning of El Dorado County against ultraconservative Republican congressman John Doolittle in 1996. Hirning was trounced, but Wicks was undaunted and eventually found her way back to electoral politics.
The thought of helping to elect the nation's first female president while carrying a baby girl is "poetic," Wicks says. "There's something special about that."
Wicks says in the midst of 12-hour days, Clinton has been "so motherly, asking if I'm getting enough food and water." She and her husband, gun control advocate Peter Ambler, will not be naming their daughter Hillary, however. They've chosen Josephine, after her aunt, Kitty Jo.
