Obama's Brain Trust

The race to shape the news was on: Plouffe dispatched Berman to make his case to the AP and marshaled a conference call with 200 political reporters. As a result, the AP revised its numbers — and the New York Times headline the next morning qualified Clinton's win with a caveat: "Obama 2nd, but Takes 1 More Delegate."

With that, the primary battle shifted to what would become known as "the math." "It was quintessential Plouffe," says Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "Because it wasn't huge and flashy. It was a nuts-and-bolts thing that had massive impact on the coverage from there on in."

In this trench warfare for pledged delegates across hundreds of congressional districts nationwide, Plouffe had a skill set that left his counterparts in the Clinton campaign hopelessly outmatched. After all, he had cut his political teeth by slicing and dicing these same districts while managing the DCCC in 2000, and he had returned to the effort as a top consultant in 2006. Working closely with Axelrod, Plouffe helped regain control of the House for Democrats. The experience left him with a gut instinct that rivaled the best research his staff could produce; he often came up with numbers off the top of his head that ultimately proved as accurate as those produced after hours of analysis by campaign workers.

Just as important, Plouffe proved tough on the budget. While the Clinton campaign burned through millions on overpaid consultants and suites at the Bellagio, Plouffe kept expenses to a minimum. Although the campaign has ended up creating the most formidable money machine in all of political history, it started as a shoestring affair. Pete Giangreco recalls cursing Plouffe every time he had to drive from Chicago to Iowa, because the campaign manager refused to fly even the most senior-level consultants to Des Moines so more money could be devoted to field organizing.

"Plouffe is the world's stingiest person," says Larry Grisolano, a top deputy who directs the media budget. "He is very, very disciplined about how the campaign's resources are spent — and even when he spends money wisely, he gets a scrunched-up look on his face, like it's a chore to let the money go."

While Obama has recruited both Washington insiders and Chicago outsiders to his campaign, he has also rounded out his inner circle with some of his oldest and most powerful friends. Two in particular have been pivotal to the campaign's success. Julius Genachowski, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Obama, is the high-tech entrepreneur behind the campaign's unprecedented use of high technology to empower grass-roots activists and helped to churn out campaign contributions. Obama's background of door-to-door organizing and law professoring was not exactly a path to high-tech proficiency, and according to those who know him best, Obama is far from a techie. But in Genachowski — who helped Barry Diller build a new-media empire — Obama found a personal Internet evangelist, someone who convinced him that the Web had powerful implications for his core ideas about empowerment and connecting people.

For starters, Genachowski persuaded the campaign to hire a chief technology officer from the private sector (Kevin Malover, one of the pioneers of the online travel site Orbitz), as well as a new-media director from the political realm (Joe Rospars, a founding partner of Blue State Digital, who was one of the ringleaders of Howard Dean's Internet revolution). This cross-pollination of the political and new-media worlds continued with the hire of one of the wunderkind founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, whose unofficial campaign title is "Online Organizing Guru" and whose fresh face and Zac Efron hair recall an extra from High School Musical 2.

With reassurance from Genachowski, the campaign has learned to embrace the chaos that goes along with empowerment. "There's constantly stuff going on that is totally viral, that we have absolutely nothing to do with," says Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager. "People just create stuff out there and things happen." The campaign even allows activists to access and update the campaign's voter-contact database as though it were Wikipedia. It's an approach that occasionally leads to some garbled data entry, but on the whole it allows the campaign in Chicago to monitor the success of its voter outreach in real time. "I don't ask the field directors in the state for a typed-out report on what's happening," says Jon Carson, one of Plouffe's top deputies. "I can get online and tell you how many contacts they made in, say, Pennsylvania last night, because it's logged in the voter file. There's less of the old-fashioned bureaucracy and more actually knowing what's going on."