Strategy Was Based On Winning Delegates, Not Battlegrounds

The message -- of unity and hope -- did not come out of nowhere. David Axelrod, a Chicago campaign consultant, long ago hatched the idea that Democrats' campaigns should revolve more around personality than policy.

The money turned a seat-of-the-pants enterprise into a vast operation that occupied the 11th floor of a skyscraper on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, where 20-somethings tossed footballs, computer whizzes designed interactive Web sites and older volunteers filled an entire call center, not to place calls but to receive them from Democrats who were eager to help.

Then, while the public battle played out in Iowa's farm towns, cities and at its colleges, the senator's staff huddled in Chicago to map out a strategy that would counter Clinton's strength, by blunting her advantage in states such as California, Ohio and Pennsylvania, then beating her where she wasn't.

Senior advisers, including Plouffe and delegate specialist Jeffrey Berman, diced the country into 435 congressional districts, the basis for pledged-delegate allocations. They examined each district under different scenarios -- for instance, before and after former senator John Edwards left the race. And they identified quirks that Obama could exploit -- such as the fact that in districts that awarded an even number of delegates, the take was generally split evenly, if the winning margin was kept reasonable.

The campaign leadership had wanted no distractions before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, so the planning in Chicago was done in secret. But on the night of Jan. 4, as Obama's Iowa staff staggered into his Des Moines campaign headquarters, still ragged from celebrating the senator's improbable victory there, field director Paul Tewes took it public.

Everyone on the payroll in Iowa would be assigned to another state, he announced. Hotels had already been booked and rooms in the homes of volunteers arranged. Marygrace Galston, who had helped oversee the ground-game deployments, gave staff members until 6 p.m. to say whether they were accepting their new assignments.

Obama's team left Des Moines and fanned out -- to Idaho, to Alabama, to Alaska, places that had never seen a Democratic presidential primary campaign. The months ahead would have other key moments. The late-night standoff in Indiana last month deprived Clinton of a strong victory to offset her crushing defeat in North Carolina -- and ultimately left Obama's big delegate take intact. Edwards's endorsement of Obama on May 14 helped sap what momentum Clinton had from her landslide win in West Virginia the day before.

And Obama supporters in Michigan and Florida quietly helped scuttle proposed revotes in both states that were Clinton's best shot at changing the dynamics of the race.

But all those moments simply provided the bookends for an organizational feat that brought the expanding army of a little-known senator to virtually every hamlet in the country.

"It's the story that hasn't been written yet, how Obama did everything right, targeting caucuses, targeting small states, avoiding the showdowns in the big states where he could," said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, who watched the strategy play out in microcosm in his own state, "and how in the end Clinton did so much so wrong."

Focusing on Small States

From May through the summer of last year, more than 750 volunteers learned the do's and don'ts of canvassing, working phone banks and recruiting others to help at what came to be known as "Camp Obama," led by Carson, a little-known strategist, at one of the campaign's offices in Chicago's Loop.

Meanwhile, Steve Hildebrand, a longtime caucus-state strategist, was learning the lay of the land in the first four states of the race: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.