The Machinery of Hope

Figueroa's goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves."

To turn well-meaning students and nurses and social workers into self-sufficient organizers, the campaign has put nearly 7,000 supporters through an intensive, four-day seminar known as "Camp Obama." Starting last March, the campaign solicited applications from its most dedicated supporters and asked them to travel to Chicago on their own dime. In exchange, these "campers" would learn the art of organizing from master teachers, including Mike Kruglik, who, a quarter-century ago, helped train a fresh-faced community organizer named Barack Obama.

"Early on, there was some question as to whether this was a good investment," says Figueroa. "But all of those questions went away very quickly; you just saw how fired up people were after finishing that." Responding to demand among activists, the campaign quickly took Camp Obama on the road to Super Tuesday states: New York, Georgia, Idaho, California, Missouri, Arizona.

To staff the seminars, the campaign brought in Harvard professors, union organizers, religious leaders — each of whom was free to tweak the curriculum. "You had the best, most brilliant folks from faith-based organizing, online organizing, community-based organizing and union organizing all collectively coming together to work on Camp Obamas," says Figueroa.

The result was a network of trained organizers who became what Figueroa calls the campaign's "secret weapon." Early on, the volunteers essentially served as Obama's staff in key states where he didn't have employees. "It quadrupled the size of our operation in states that were going to be voting not only on February 5th, but February 9th, February 12th and here on March 4th," Figueroa says. "We had an anchor in those states for a long, long, long time."

Using the social-networking tools of MyBo, the volunteers began to create city- and statewide networks with names like IdahObama, groups that could be tapped later by the professional staff to organize down to the precinct level. In Maryland, the campaign was able to mobilize 3,000 volunteers in only three weeks, thanks to the months of groundwork by groups like Baltimore for Barack Obama.

A strategy that leans so heavily on the grass roots is not without risk. In February, right-wing blogs had a field day when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag. But the unique structure of the Obama campaign blunts the PR fallout of such off-message moments because it offers plausible deniability: "This is a volunteer office," the campaign wrote in a press release that forced a clarification from Fox, "that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign."

"There's no doubt that there's a downside to the Internet," Axelrod says. "Ugly, unfiltered things circulate virally, and we've had to deal with that. But it's a great democratizing force as well."

Obama's army of organizers has enabled him to repeatedly outman and outwit his opponents — especially in states that vote by caucus. "The Clinton campaign is the last, antiquated vestige of the top-down model," says Trippi. "The top cannot organize caucus states; the bottom can."

As Super Tuesday approached, the Obama campaign understood that the Clinton strategy was to try to deliver a deathblow by winning big states like California, New York and New Jersey through a traditional campaign driven by thirty-second TV spots and tarmac-to-tarmac appearances by the candidate and her surrogates. The Obama team was confident that it had both the ad budget and the precinct-by-precinct support to capture delegates in states like California, whether or not they won the popular vote. They also recognized that, even with her paid staff of 700, Clinton didn't have the manpower to compete against Obama's grass-roots organizers in the caucus states. "

So in the lead-up to Super Tuesday, Obama spent only a day and a half in California. "The decision was made to pull Obama out and send him to those caucus states and run up the score," says Figueroa. In Idaho, the Obama campaign ramped up its staff to twenty paid organizers split among five field offices. It also brought in the candidate to pack the Taco Bell Arena in Boise with more than 13,000 supporters — each of whom was added to the campaign's get-out-the-caucus list. The Clinton campaign, apparently, failed to hire a single staffer in the state. The result: Obama won with eighty percent of the vote, netting fifteen of the state's eighteen delegates. While Clinton was spending lavishly to win New Jersey with 600,000 votes, Obama more than offset his delegate loss there simply by mobilizing 17,000 Idahoans to caucus for him. "The Clinton campaign made a fundamental mistake by writing states off," says Hildebrand.

Having wrestled the Clinton campaign to a draw through Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign suddenly found itself in a dominant position. Thanks to the field campaign set in motion by Hildebrand and Figueroa, Obama had effective grass-roots organizations in place in each of the next ten states. Clinton, by contrast, had no plan, no money and no real grass-roots organization. Even worse for Clinton, the only state whose demographics truly favored her was Maine, a caucus. "Both campaigns thought it was better territory for her, and we were pretty nervous about it," admits Hildebrand. "She was spending a lot of time there, she had staff there." But demographics proved no match for Obama's field organization. Clinton lost Maine — by nineteen points.