The Machinery of Hope

The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo" — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be micromanaged by Ukman or anyone else from the campaign. They'll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they'll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They'll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters. "Instead of hoping that your neighbors vote," Ukman tells them in an unintentional twist on the campaign's central theme, "you're going to take them to the polls."

This scene in the rec center is being repeated in neighborhood coffee shops, high school cafeterias and public libraries across Texas. Over the course of the three-day weekend, the Obama campaign trained 4,000 precinct captains in more than twenty communities, from El Paso to Corpus Christi. This is the same grass-roots effort that has trounced the Clinton campaign — a classic top-down operation run by high-paid consultants — in ten straight contests by an average of more than thirty points. It has evolved into the mother of all get-out-the-vote campaigns, one that has enabled Obama to collect more votes in Virginia and Wisconsin than all of the GOP candidates combined.

In Texas, Tenorio is hearing from fellow Richards veterans who are backing Hillary Clinton, and they're worried. "They don't have precinct captains," she says. "They don't have a local organization, and they're still trying to get names. They're really scrambling to put it together — and here we all are."

The Obama campaign has actually worked to tamp down media coverage of its technological advances in organizing, avoiding anything that would cast the candidate as "the next Howard Dean." In Democratic political circles, Dean's short-lived campaign still carries heavy baggage: Howard Dean was the Internet. Howard Dean lost.

"They've been guarded," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank that promotes technology in politics. "It's been beautiful to watch them blending these new tools into the old-fashioned shoe-leather, door-knocking politics. But they don't talk about it. People like myself have to piece it together from its outer effects."

In recent weeks, however, the campaign has granted Rolling Stone rare access to its top strategists and organizers, who discussed in detail the mechanics of Obama's meteoric ascendancy. According to David Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist, the bottom-up ethos of the campaign comes straight from the top. "When we started this race, Barack told us that he wanted the campaign to be a vehicle for involving people and giving them a stake in the kind of organizing he believed in," Axelrod says. "He is still the same guy who came to Chicago as a community organizer twenty-three years ago. The idea that we can organize together and improve our country — I mean, he really believes that."

To execute this vision, Obama hired as his deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, a folksy veteran of South Dakota politics regarded as one of the top field strategists in the game. "We wanted to make sure we learned from Howard Dean's campaign," Hildebrand says. The most valuable lesson? "We didn't make the assumption that people signing up on our Web site meant that they were going to help the candidate or even vote for him. From the beginning, we had an initiative to take our online force offline."

Hildebrand actually flipped the equation, using the physical crowds Obama could draw to his rallies to bolster the campaign's e-mail list. In February and March of 2007, just after Obama announced his candidacy, the campaign set up huge rallies in cities from Los Angeles to Austin to Cleveland. In return for a ticket, supporters were asked only to provide their e-mail, zip code and telephone number — a practice that continues at every Obama megarally, where it has become routine for him to draw crowds in excess of 20,000.

"Events are not just an opportunity for us to put Barack in front of voters," says Hildebrand. "It's a chance for voters to be in a captive environment where we ask them to sign up and do more for Barack — to make phone calls, canvas, get out the vote. We don't want people to just come to an event — we want them to become part of this movement."