The Machinery of Hope

The turnout at the early rallies emboldened Obama's strategists to start imagining a truly different kind of campaign. At first, Hildebrand and Temo Figueroa, the campaign's field director, wrestled with how to harness the nationwide groundswell of support without taking their eyes off Iowa, which they considered a win-or-go-home state. But then the campaign's first-quarter fund-raising numbers rolled in — $25 million. Suddenly, Hildebrand and Figueroa could afford to build the kind of fully participatory field campaign Obama had envisioned — one that set its horizons beyond Iowa and Super Tuesday. According to Hans Riemer, the campaign's youth-vote director, "The mantra was, 'If the same people show up that always show up — we're gonna lose.' We needed to build a new coalition of voters."

Riemer is no stranger to turning out young voters; he's the former political director of Rock the Vote. In most Democratic campaigns, the youth-vote coordinator is a symbolic post, not staffed until the general election, and often by one of the candidate's kids. Riemer, by contrast, has two deputy directors, has youth-vote staff in every state, and answers to the campaign's top brass.

"Steve Hildebrand, in shaping the campaign strategy from the outset, saw that there was an amazing opportunity here with Barack and young people," says Riemer. Turnout has been astonishing: In Iowa, as many people under thirty caucused as did senior citizens. In every contest, the youth vote has at least doubled and often tripled previous records. Riemer is quick to point out that these successes aren't just the result of the campaign organizing young people but of young people organizing themselves. "When I arrived at the Obama campaign," he says, "there were 175 Students for Barack Obama chapters already in existence" — a group that had started on Facebook in 2006 before morphing into a sophisticated grass-roots organization. "My responsibility was to nurture it and work with them on their political strategy."

As summer approached, Hildebrand and Figueroa gave the campaign's unorthodox field operation a test run. While John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were busy barnstorming Iowa and New Hampshire, the Obama campaign sent out an e-mail asking its supporters to sign up for a day of old-fashioned door-knocking and precinct-walking across the entire country. The result: On a Saturday in early June — six months before anyone would cast a ballot or attend a caucus — more than 10,000 Obama supporters hit the pavement in all fifty states to persuade their neighbors to back Barack.

"That was a very important test for us," says Hildebrand. "Can we make this work offline? We said to our online supporters, 'We love you, but we need you to actually go to work in your neighborhood.' Their online support was only great if we could translate it into activity within their community."

At the same time, the campaign was developing a new high-tech toolbox to enable its supporters to keep the momentum going — both online and off. With the help of one of the founders of Facebook, the Obama campaign created, MyBo, its own social-networking tool, through which supporters could organize themselves however they saw fit. Today, the network claims more than half a million members and more than 8,000 affinity groups. Some are organized by state (Ohioans for Obama), others by profession (Texas Business Women for Obama) and still others by groove thing (Soul Music Lovers for Obama).

"We put these tools online as a public utility," says Joe Rospars, the campaign's twenty-six-year-old director of new media, who served as one of Howard Dean's chief online organizers. "We said to our supporters, 'Have at it.' "

That move unleashed supporters to mobilize on their own — and they did, in unprecedented numbers. Before long, the campaign had transformed hundreds of thousands of online donors into street-level activists. "Obama didn't just take their money," says Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000. "He gave them seats at the table and allowed them to become players."

Equally important, Obama didn't build his machine by sucking up to the online activists who had been courted by Howard Dean — he built it from scratch. "I kind of admire that he hasn't wasted a lot of time kissing ass to make a bunch of bloggers happy," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential blog Daily Kos. "I can't blame the guy. He's got other ways to reach people."

For Axelrod, a veteran of old-school politics, tapping the potential of the Internet meant changing the established notion of how a campaign runs. "Part of this new era of politics has been learning how to surrender command-and-control aspects of the campaign," he says. "If you really want grass-roots participation, then you have to give folks at the grass roots some autonomy to do this in their own way. We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to do things. The challenge was: How do you marshal them in an organized fashion?"

Cuauhtémoc "Temo" Figueroa hardly looks like the kind of guy who would lead an army of grass-roots supporters. A compact forty-three-year-old with a shaved head and a stockbroker's wardrobe — gray-pinstriped dress shirt, impeccably knotted silver silk tie — Figueroa still speaks in the foulmouthed vernacular of the kickass union organizer he used to be. These days, as national field director for Obama, he serves as Gen. Patton for the campaign's growing legions of activists.

This afternoon, Figueroa is in San Antonio, where he has been working all day recruiting Hispanic politicians who support Obama to get down to Texas. Their endorsements, he tells them straight off, don't mean shit to him. He wants them to come to the Rio Grande Valley and go to work: speaking at Elks clubs, attending church picnics and baptisms, reaching out to Spanish-language weeklies that never get any love.

"I always give people at least ten things to do," he tells me, sitting in a tamales-and-margaritas joint along the river, where he has set up a makeshift field office for the day. "Because either it'll scare them off, or they'll start doin' a handful of 'em. Right?"