How Obama Did It

Barack Obama was campaigning last October in South Carolina when he got an urgent call from Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who leads his campaign's finance committee. About 200 of his biggest fund raisers were meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, and among them, near panic was setting in. Pritzker's team had raised money faster than any other campaign ever had. Its candidate was drawing mega-crowds wherever he went. Yet he was still running at least 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls. His above-the-fray brand of politics just wasn't getting the job done, and some of his top moneymen were urging him to rethink his strategy, shake up his staff, go negative. You'd better get here, Pritzker told Obama. And fast.

Obama made an unscheduled appearance that Sunday night and called for a show of hands from his finance committee. "Can I see how many people in this room I told that this was going to be easy?" he asked. "If anybody signed up thinking it was going to be easy, then I didn't make myself clear." A win in Iowa, Obama promised, would give him the momentum he needed to win across the map — but his backers wouldn't see much evidence of progress before then. "We're up against the most formidable team in 25 years," he said. "But we've got a plan, and we've got to have faith in it."

More than seven months later, that faith has been rewarded. The 2008 presidential campaign has produced its share of surprises, but one of the most important is that a newcomer from Chicago put together by far the best political operation of either party. Obama's campaign has been that rare, frictionless machine that runs with the energy of an insurgency and the efficiency of a corporation. His team has lacked what his rivals' have specialized in: there have been no staff shake-ups, no financial crises, no change in game plan and no visible strife. Even its campaign slogan — "Change we can believe in" — has remained the same.

How did he do it? How did Obama become the first Democratic insurgent in a generation or more to knock off the party's Establishment front-runner? Facing an operation as formidable as Clinton's, Obama says in an interview, "was liberating ... What I'd felt was that we could try some things in a different way and build an organization that reflected my personality and what I thought the country was looking for. We didn't have to unlearn a bunch of bad habits."

When Betsy Myers first met with Obama in his Senate office on Jan. 3, 2007, about two weeks before he announced he was forming an exploratory committee to run for President, Obama laid down three ruling principles for his future chief operating officer: Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama. Myers was struck by how closely Obama had studied the two campaigns of George W. Bush. "He said he wanted to run our campaign like a business," says Myers. And in a good business, the customer is king. Early on, before it had the resources to do much else, the campaign outsourced a "customer-service center" so that anyone who called, at any hour of the day or night, would find a human voice on the other end of the line.

Meanwhile, Obama's Chicago headquarters made technology its running mate from the start. That wasn't just for fund raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter lists — normally a closely guarded crown jewel — to volunteers, who used their own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend minutes of their cell-phone plans to contact every name and populate a political organization from the ground up. "The tools were there, and they built it," says Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. "In a lot of ways, the Dean campaign was like the Wright brothers. Four years later, we're watching the Apollo project."

Even Obama admits he did not expect the Internet to be such a good friend. "What I didn't anticipate was how effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grassroots base, both on the financial side and the organizing side," Obama says. "That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet." But three other fundamentals were crucial to making Obama the Democratic nominee:

A Brave New Party
In most presidential elections, the Iowa caucuses are an anomaly. Competing there is a complicated, labor-intensive undertaking that, once finished, is cast off as an oddity and never repeated. But in 2008 it became for Obama the road test of a youth-oriented, technology-fueled organization and the model for many of the wins that followed. It was also a challenge to history. The iron rule of Iowa had always been that caucusgoers tended to look the same year in and year out: older people, union households, party stalwarts — just the kind of folks who would seem more inclined to back Clinton or John Edwards — trudging out into the cold night for a few hours of political conversation. Instead, Obama saw the Iowa caucuses as a chance to put a stake through Clinton's inevitability. "Mission No. 1 was finishing ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa," recalls Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "If we hadn't done that, it would have been hard to stop her."

But counting on new voters had proved disastrous for Dean in 2004. The Obama campaign knew that it would have to build a network of Iowans rather than supporters brought in from other parts of the country, says Plouffe, but "we didn't have to accept the electorate as it is." At bottom, Obama built a new party in 2008. It was difficult. Not until the morning of the caucuses did the campaign reach its goal of 97,000 Iowans pledged to support Obama that it thought it would need to win. Then came the real question: Would these people show up?

Show up they did, shattering turnout records. Obama prevailed with a surprising eight-point margin over Edwards, who came in second. Obama counts Iowa as his biggest victory, the one that foreshadowed the rest. "Voters under 30 participated at the same rates as voters over 65. That had never happened before," the Democratic nominee says. "That continues to be something I'm very proud of — how we've expanded the voter rolls in every state where we've campaigned. I think that means we can put into play some states that might normally not be in play."

The Iowa playbook, as everyone now knows, hasn't always worked. In Texas, for instance, the grassroots operation counted on more African-American voters than actually turned out. In California, organizers expected more young voters. But while Obama rarely managed a clean win against Clinton in the big states — the ones that will count most in the fall — he kept winning delegates even when he lost primaries. By April, it became almost mathematically impossible for Clinton to catch him.

1. How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?
2. The Outrage Game Bites Obama
3. An Italian Snags the Flatiron
4. Bright Lights May Hold Off Dementia
5. Sleeping Your Way to the Top
6. Were African-Americans at Iwo Jima?
7. Sleep All Day!
8. Can't Sleep? Turn Off the Cell Phone!
9. Inside Obama's 50-State Fight
10. How to Live With Just 100 Things

You will need to install or upgrade your Flash Player to be able to view this Flash content. Also, Javascript must be turned on.

Grab it! to put Quotes of the Day on your personal page or blog