But as the returns streamed in on Nov. 2, the promise of ACT and the other third-party liberal groups fizzled. ACT had invested heavily in mobilizing voters in Florida and Ohio, and John Kerry lost in both places. What happened? I asked Malcolm. Why had ACT failed?

Malcolm didn’t want to talk about failure. “We were very successful,” she said. “But we didn’t win the election. We turned out many, many, many voters, including a lot of first-time voters. It was a tremendously successful effort for democracy. But we’re all obviously very disappointed in the results.”

At the time, Malcolm’s answer was unsatisfying; given the totality of the loss it seemed disingenuous to call what happened on Election Day a success. But when I pressed her on it, asking in several different ways what had gone wrong, she was unmoved. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” Malcolm finally snapped. ACT hadn’t failed. ACT had in fact met all of its state voter-mobilization goals. John Kerry won more votes than any other presidential loser in history. ACT had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved in the group. The only problem was that the other side, the Republicans, was even more successful.

A month and a half has passed since I spoke to Malcolm, and in that time several observers have put forward the kind of sophisticated-sounding explanations for the apparent failure of liberal get-out-the-vote campaigns that I’d wanted Malcolm to offer shortly after the election. In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai suggested that ACT fundamentally misunderstood the electorate in Ohio — instead of trying to persuade suburban swing voters to consider Kerry (as the GOP had done for Bush, fruitfully), ACT spent its resources in liberal urban centers, where there simply weren’t enough Kerry voters to tip the balance.

More recently, the New Republic’s Peter Beinart skewered MoveOn, ACT’s progressive brother-in-arms, for dismissing national security threats, and in Slate Chris Suellentrop dismissed the group as being not “an organization so much as an outlet. It’s a network of aggrieved liberals, connected by the central nervous system of the Internet, and it enables its members to convince themselves they’re ‘doing something’ when they’re really not.”

There’s much to criticize about ACT, MoveOn, and the constellation of liberal groups that attracted so much attention and so many volunteers, and raised so much money and so many hopes, in the months before the election. They certainly weren’t the silver bullet. But many critics are too quick to dismiss the very real successes of the advocacy groups, the political, financial, logistical and emotional achievements that were required to bring hundreds of thousands of volunteers and paid staffers into battleground states, and to use these people in a way that boosted turnout.

Yes, John Kerry lost. But an amazing thing happened this year — grass-roots activism, online and in the real world, invaded the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Ordinary people, folks who’d never before expressed the slightest interest in politics, suddenly developed an abiding enthusiasm for the game. And personal contact, the online connections and the doorstep conversations of millions of citizens, became a primary method of campaigning.

There were, to be sure, many logistical snafus in the get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the various third-party groups — some major, most relatively minor. The most serious limitation seems to have been built into the design of the campaign: Because the third-party groups were barred under campaign finance regulations from coordinating their efforts with John Kerry’s official campaign, the entire liberal get-out-the-vote operation could never have proceeded as a coherent whole. Unlike the GOP effort, the Democratic campaign was intrinsically divided, split between two sides who weren’t allowed to speak to each other.

Despite those limitations, though, the core gambit worked: Hard as it may be to believe (and it is hard), the numbers prove that that San Franciscans and New Yorkers met with some success in their attempts to persuade Clevelanders and Miamians to go to the polls for Kerry. As Democrats remake their party, it would be a shame for them to discount the work of the activists, or to fail to keep the activist spirit kindled. Glitches can be fixed, and logistical failures can be addressed. Imagine what might have been had these groups not become involved in this political cycle.

“Look at what happened the last time a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts won the nomination,” notes Donald Green, the Yale political scientist whose research on get-out-the-vote efforts served as the blueprint for the liberal groups’ mobilization drive. “That was Michael Dukakis — he lost decisively.… The fact that John Kerry did as well as he did is only attributable to the incredible ground effort that the Democrats were able to muster.” The third-party groups, in other words, profoundly altered the physics of the presidential race. Without them, it would have been a blowout.

In the spring of 2004, Moira DeNike, a sociology grad student and dance instructor in San Francisco, attended her first John Kerry Meetup. She wasn’t overly impressed with what she saw. “I thought, this is nice if you’re looking for a bunch of people to talk about how we all agree that Kerry should win,” she says. DeNike, who was a political naif but nevertheless dead set on unseating the president, felt she needed a more constructive experience, something hands-on. After a bull session with a dancer friend, she hatched a plan — to raise a lot of money to send a lot of people to Florida, where they would help register a lot of new voters for Kerry — and a name: Dancers for Democracy. The money would come from dance — DeNike organized a series of dance-oriented fundraisers (an all-day workshop, a buffet dinner with dancing as dessert) which raised several thousand dollars, enough to send six people to Miami in the weeks approaching Florida’s Oct. 4 voter-registration deadline.

There’s something undeniably inspiring, in a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” kind of way, about DeNike’s entrepreneurial voter-mobilization enterprise. There’s a bit of hubris in it, too. Why did DeNike believe that she, personally, would be able to persuade people in Florida to register to vote? Why did she assume that she was even needed in Florida — that she, a dancer with no political experience, could become an asset to a major national political campaign?

Those are important questions, because what DeNike and thousands of other activists like her did during the 2004 campaign was in some sense not normal. In recent American elections, ordinary voters have not often set up their own political shops, raised their own funds, and sought out flaws in the system that they believed they could fix themselves. Of course, people have always volunteered in political campaigns, especially during tense political times — but the scale and scope of what we saw this year, and especially the sense the volunteers had that their own contributions might make a critical difference in the outcome, were novel.

DeNike says she felt a sense of mission, a thought that you hear from many volunteers across the land. She knew she could make a real difference in a swing state. “I felt like there might be a lot of people who would feel disenfranchised [in Florida], and I read somewhere that most people who don’t vote, don’t vote because they’ve never been asked to.” DeNike believed that if she asked them, they would vote.

DeNike’s instinct that she was needed in Florida turned out to be on the mark. After Dancers for Democracy raised enough money to send a team to Miami, DeNike phoned the South Florida ACT office to ask if she could work with the group on voter registration. But ACT told DeNike that the group wasn’t working on voter registration, and that instead it was working on a voter persuasion effort. So DeNike called the local Kerry campaign office and asked if she could work with them on voter registration. “And they too said that they weren’t focusing on voter registration. They said that there were other groups that were going to be focusing on that,” DeNike recalls.

DeNike had stumbled across one of the main operational flaws of the liberal get-out-the-vote effort — a lack of coordination between the Kerry campaign and its third-party surrogates. What DeNike discovered was that neither the ACT people nor the Kerry people were mounting a final new-registration push in South Florida because each believed that the other group would be handling it. That would seem to be a silly mistake — didn’t people know their roles? — but this sort of thing seems to have occurred often in the campaign, volunteers say. Because campaign finance laws prohibited the Kerry staffers from discussing their efforts with ostensibly independent groups such as ACT, the campaign and the outside groups were often duplicating each other’s work, or sometimes weren’t working on what needed to be done because they assumed the other side was doing it.

The coordination problem was especially pronounced during the last few weeks and days of the campaign, when the full force of get-out-the-vote canvassers, tens of thousands of people, were going door-to-door in battleground states. “We were knocking on doors and people would say, ‘You’re the third person who’s come by today,’” says Eric Rorer, a freelance photographer from Northern California who worked for the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio. Volunteers from the various groups were running into each other on the street, Rorer says, but they couldn’t pass the slightest information between themselves, even plans as to which houses they would tackle first. One ACT volunteer who canvassed in Miami says, “By the Friday before Election Day people were like, ‘Stop coming around!’ These people were being extremely over-canvassed — we were hitting them, MoveOn was hitting them, the Kerry people were hitting them, the Senate candidates were hitting them, there was a mayoral candidate that was hitting them…”

Nobody knows whether this “over-canvassing” problem — which was reported by just about every canvasser Salon spoke to — caused many (or any) voters to become so annoyed with the process that they decided to stay away from the polls. But Donald Green, of Yale, says the situation affected the progressive groups’ overall efficiency. “It was not easy for them to spread their resources intelligently,” he says. Successful door-to-door operations call for a well-planned series of visits to each household over a period of weeks. But instead of each household getting a first contact from a group, then a second contact, then a third, what happened in this campaign in many neighborhoods was that “lots of people were getting many first contacts,” each from a different group. “Some people got five first contacts.” That must have caused no small amount of confusion, if not anger, among voters.

If some neighborhoods in the swing states were being over-canvassed by progressives, other neighborhoods may have consequently been under-canvassed by those groups. Could the efforts of the third-party groups have been more fruitful if some of their door-to-door canvassing had been shifted from reliably Democratic urban neighborhoods to other areas — specifically, should ACT and MoveOn have concentrated on some of the suburban and “exurban” neighborhoods that the New York Times Magazine’s Bai calls the GOP’s secret weapon in Ohio?

“It’s a fair point,” says Thomas Gensemer, ACT’s director of Internet strategies. But conducting a get-out-the-vote operation in non-base suburban neighborhoods would have been difficult for ACT, he notes. Under federal campaign finance law (ACT is a 527 organization, an entity to which donors can contribute unlimited sums of “soft money,”) ACT could not call on voters to go out and cast a ballot for a specific candidate. In Democratic strongholds, this limitation worked out OK: The group didn’t need to sell voters there on the merits of John Kerry; all it had to do was make sure people got to the polls. But how could ACT have campaigned in areas where the voters’ preferences weren’t so certain? It wouldn’t have worked. As a third-party group, ACT had one key limitation — it was a “campaign without a candidate,” Gensemer says. “That’s why our mandate from the start was much more to go after base votes. I don’t know if you can do anything else in a 527 world when you’re not the actual candidate’s campaign. Getting out the swing voters was not the role of us and MoveOn and others.”

But if ACT and MoveOn could canvass only in the cities, why couldn’t the Kerry campaign have canvassed in the suburbs, spreading the door-to-door resources? The answer, again, is coordination: In key states like Ohio and Florida, the Kerry team couldn’t have shifted its resources to the suburbs because it couldn’t be sure what the third-party groups would be doing in the cities. It had no way of coordinating with them. So it too had no choice but to concentrate its mobilization efforts in the cities, where all the reliable Democrats were located.

The Democratic focus on urban Democratic strongholds, then, seems to have been a necessary consequence of its reliance on third-party advocacy groups. Republicans, it should be noted, didn’t face this problem. Because the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote operation was run in-house, not farmed out to soft-money third-party groups, canvassers could do as they pleased, without worrying about coordination failures, or prohibitions on how they could sell their candidate. If the Democrats faced any strategic mobilization disadvantage, Green says, it was this difference in their operations. Republican canvassers were selling a candidate, while canvassers at ACT were really selling an idea — broad progressivism — that they hoped would translate into action for their candidate. The match was not quite fair.

In the fall, after learning that neither ACT nor the Kerry campaign was focusing on registering new voters in South Florida, Moira DeNike wrote a passionate letter to ACT’s coordinator in Miami, detailing all the reasons why she and her band of dancers should be allowed to work on voter registration out of ACT’s offices there. The coordinator liked her letter, and ACT acceded to her requests. “They weren’t going to stand in the way of this group of nutty San Franciscans who wanted to come down,” she says — and anyway the registration effort she helped coordinate at ACT was exceedingly successful. In the week before the registration deadline in Florida, DeNike and the others working on new registrations in the Miami ACT office signed up more than 900 new voters.

DeNike says she wasn’t surprised by this success; she’d expected it. But other blue-coast volunteers who flew into Florida and Ohio to get out the vote did report initially feeling uncomfortable about their status as carpetbaggers in a contested land. It wasn’t just that the progressive volunteers weren’t locals — although many political analysts, remembering the Howard Dean campaign’s not-so-hot experience with invading political operatives in Iowa, had warned that voters in swing states might not take too well to outsiders telling them how to vote. But in third-party get-out-the-vote campaigns, the geographic distances between the volunteers and the locals often seemed secondary to the cultural distances — in many cases the volunteers who flew into the swing states were whiter and wealthier than the neighborhoods they were hoping to mobilize, and some volunteers reported being on guard about, or at least very aware of, the differences.

“They sent us to some 100 percent minority areas, places where being white and having a sticker on your shirt that said your name and walking around with a bunch of flyers — you stuck out like a sore thumb,” said a white 20-something volunteer from California who asked not to be named in this article. “And ACT sent us to some really bad places — there were people who were obviously prostitutes and drug dealers on the corner. But, that said, a lot of people there did appreciate the information. You took 30 seconds of their time, you told them about voting early, and then you went on your way.” Indeed, the volunteer added sheepishly, “in some sense I realized that I became much more comfortable with being around black people. I don’t consider myself a racist. I didn’t realize that I was uncomfortable before. But on my way back to the airport I noticed that.”

Rorer, who canvassed for the Kerry campaign in Ohio, says that he’d initially expected some criticism from the locals as well. “All the canvassers were white, and here we are walking in a lower-middle class black neighborhood,” he says. “I would have thought there would have been a sense of, What are all you white people doing in our neighborhood? But when people saw us they were like, ‘Kerry!’ — like pumping their fists! — and old women would come to the door and invite us in to eat.”

Several canvassers reported similar scenes, and ACT officials say they ultimately saw no real problem with using out-of-towners as their get-out-the-vote volunteers. Though they’d been wary of the possible culture clash, such disturbances never really occurred. Still, says Gensemer, “the quality of the contact when it’s a local canvasser is much better,” and one of the group’s goals for the future is to assemble a cadre of activists in the swing states to work on mobilization efforts, “which is what the right does infinitely better.”

A bigger problem with ACT, some volunteers say, was that in the rushed end to the campaign, the local offices became especially chaotic, and disorganization reigned. “Even with all of George Soros money, in the most contested state in the country, and in the largest county in that state — with all that riding on this effort, the level of organization was not impressive,” says DeNike of the Miami operations. “They had not done that much research. The offices were run by enthusiastic and energetic 20-somethings, and I loved them, but there wasn’t the experience that needed to be there.”

Another volunteer at the Miami ACT office told of his annoyance at being ordered to spend two whole days at Kinko’s to make copies of canvassing maps. This volunteer had spent a considerable bit of money and time to fly out to Florida to help get out the vote, “and here I was making copies — one day I literally copied 12,000 pages. They spent over $2,200 on copies that day.”

Meanwhile, in the final weeks of the campaign, ACT began hiring a large number of local people on a day-labor basis to help with the door-to-door canvass. But volunteers said that ACT put in place no real method of monitoring these paid staffers’ progress — it did not ensure sure that they were rewarded if they worked well, or they were not rehired if they didn’t. ACT essentially hired anyone who showed up every morning on a first-come, first-serve basis (the pay varied, though many people said they made between $50 and $100 a day.) The trouble with this arrangement was that ACT wasn’t building “a core group of committed people,” one volunteer said. “And to be honest I heard a lot of volunteers who worked with the paid people from the community say that the paid people weren’t effective. And they would have been more effective if ACT had trained them better, or cultivated the sense that they were working for a cause,” rather than for a day’s wage.

Looking over ACT’s work, it’s possible to find many similar logistical and operational flaws. For instance, Bonnie Maslin, a psychologist from New York who canvassed with ACT in the last two days of the campaign in Ohio, said that her canvassing group was given flyers to affix to people’s doorknobs, but none of the houses in the neighborhood she was in had accessible doorknobs — they all had screen doors. Another difficulty: Many of the doorbells in poorer neighborhoods seemed to be broken, and consequently few people came to the door in those areas.

Volunteers emphasize that they don’t believe that any of those problems contributed to Kerry’s loss. They were simply the kinds of flaws you’d expect to see in an effort like this, and it’s a testament to ACT’s operational prowess that the effort worked as well as it did. “We were never really expecting we’d have 120,000 contributors” to the get-out-the-vote effort, Gensemer says.

Gensemer’s right. Despite the problems, from an operational point of view what the various third-party groups accomplished in the months before Nov. 2 seems quite extraordinary. Still, notwithstanding the agility with which ACT and other groups expanded to accommodate the demand of thousands of volunteers, and the enthusiasm and hard work of many of those volunteers, the plain fact is they lost. And now, in defeat, the groups are being asked to explain themselves — which is a difficult thing to do because, it turns out, many volunteers and staff at those campaigns genuinely find it hard to conceive of what happened on Nov. 2 as a failure.

And by many measures, the effort was not a failure. In Ohio, Kerry won 554,000 more votes than Al Gore won in 2000. In Florida, Kerry beat Gore’s total by 544,000. In all of the urban centers where ACT and MoveOn and the other groups concentrated their door-to-door activities, Kerry’s share of the vote went through the roof.

There were other wins for the advocacy groups. ACORN, a group that aimed its efforts at minority voters in Florida, scored a huge win with the minimum-wage ballot measure it sponsored in the state — the amendment passed with 71 percent of the vote. The League of Conservation Voters, meanwhile, strongly opposed the Republican senatorial candidate Pete Coors in Colorado, and it won that race.

Compared to the presidency, those may seem like small victories. But for the thousands of activists who participated in the race, perhaps there’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure in small victories. At the moment, just a month after the election, the future of the various groups that launched the historic get-out-the-vote campaign this year is, at best, cloudy. ACT and MoveOn say they’re determined to stay strong and relevant. But people close to some key funders of the groups point out that the legal landscape isn’t clear — many expect that the Republican Congress will attempt to shut down the 527 soft-money exception, a move that could devastate a group like ACT.

Even without the question of funding, there are difficulties. During the campaign, ACT, MoveOn and other influential progressive groups — labor unions, liberal interest groups — worked roughly in parallel, sharing ideas and resources and a common mobilized base, all in an effort to vanquish a common foe. But with the campaign over, the groups have fewer incentives to work together, and differences over how to proceed — and who gets to control what was created during the past year — are bound to emerge.

We may already be seeing the early fissures. On Thursday, MoveOn took an aggressive posture in the battle to control the future of the Democratic Party, demanding in an e-mail memo to members that the party rid itself of “elite Washington insiders.” Democrats “can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers,” wrote Eli Pariser, the executive director of the MoveOn PAC. “In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”

MoveOn could not be reached for comment for this article. But it’s hard not to wonder if Pariser’s line about Washington elites was a subtle dig at ACT — a group that is, after all, headed by some of the party’s most insiderish insiders, Steve Rosenthal, Harold Ickes and Ellen Malcolm. Asked whether ACT had any sympathy for MoveOn’s call to banish insiders from the party, Gensemer balked. “We don’t have grandiose goals of taking over the party,” he said. “The vast team of political professionals we’ve put together understand what our role is now. We’re following to see what happens with the DNC. We have our thoughts, we’ve learned a lot, but we’re not a reactionary force.”

Even if ACT, MoveOn and other progressive groups manage to continue working well together, and the vast infrastructure they amassed this year remains relatively intact, there is still the matter of the activists — those people on the ground who decided during the course of the year to join the political scene. Can those people be reactivated to fight future battles? Did the activists who swarmed to swing states this year do it only out of a quick, one-shot hatred of George W. Bush, or were they expressing deeper convictions, passions that will motivate them for the long haul?

For the third-party groups, this is the most difficult question to answer. It’s hard to tell what peculiar cocktail of hatred for Bush, love for Kerry, and genuine fear for the national condition sparked the grand activist effort we saw this year; consequently, it’s hard to tell whether many of the activists will remain active, or whether many will take Kerry’s defeat as too much to bear and lose their willingness to fight.

“There’s an absolute 100 percent risk of that,” says Allan Oliver, who headed the League of Conservation Voters efforts in Florida. “That’s a risk that we’re trying to fight, and the way we’re trying to fight is by saying: Let’s sit down and do some smart analysis and figure out what went right, what went wrong. Let’s figure out a future plan. What do we do from here?” In time, those answers will come. “And perhaps all those volunteers who traveled across the country for us — they’ve taken some days off, they’ve sat down, we’ve all kind of moped around at one point or another. But soon they’ll come back saying, We need to get into the fight.”

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

“What? Are you sure? Where did you hear this?”

“It’s online.”

The texts and calls and tweets and Facebook posts and cable news ticker feeds piled up from there, morphing into that familiar buzzing audiovisual din. Our other atmosphere.

At first there was no actual news, just rumor and speculation. Finally the Sunday night shows were interrupted by reports that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida mastermind and America’s most wanted criminal, might finally be dead, nine-and-a-half years after the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil.

On NBC’s East Coast affiliates, the announcement of an impending presidential address cut into the final moments of “Celebrity Apprentice,” starring would-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Take that, you combed-over bigot.) Obama did not appear for another hour. After he spoke — confirming that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Joint Special Operation Command forces working with the CIA — NBC and CBS returned to previously scheduled programming. ABC and the cable news channels stuck with the story. “The minute I heard that the president was doing an announcement at 10:30 and breaking into TV, I sort of guessed, I thought, ‘They got bin Laden,’” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told New York’s WABC. “They wouldn’t break into TV for any other reason.”

Fox News Channel somehow managed to deliver comprehensible audio over the collective, bloody grinding of teeth, even when relaying a statement from ex-President George W. Bush congratulating Obama: “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”

“This will probably prove to be one of the most significant, if not the most significant accomplishments of the president,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told anchor Brian Williams, in a bloc of live MSNBC coverage that displaced a taped program titled “Sex Slaves UK.”

On ABC, Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of the hijacked flight that struck the Pentagon, told anchor George Stephanopoulos, “This has been a long time coming. It’s been rough because it pretty much dominated my life, all of these national security issues. And we’re not out of the woods yet, George, but this is really big.”

Yes.

So big that after a certain point, a New York-based TV columnist can no longer sit in his living room, typing on a laptop while stealing glances at a TV. Next stop, ground zero.

2.

The Cortlandt Street R train stop deposits riders on the perimeter of ground zero, in front of the Century 21 department store on Church Street, meters away from a chain link fence festooned with banners detailing the splendors that will appear on the former World Trade Center site: Freedom Tower. Reflecting pool. High-end retail shops.

At first the street seemed unnervingly quiet. Yes, it was 1:30 Monday morning at the the start of a work week, but this was supposed to be V-E Day all over again, at least in theory. Where were all the people?

Two blocks away, as it turned out: Klieg lights. Waving flags. The distant roar of a crowd’s cheer building and cresting:

“HhhhhhhhhhRRaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

How many people were there? Thousands, I’m told. 

They’d stuck bunches of red and white roses into the fence and taped up signs: “Thanks, Barack!” “USA WINNING.” There was a scrawny young man in a red, white and blue top hat, and a tearful man with a hand-lettered sign that read, “He’s dead,” and a man holding an iPhone with a viewscreen spelling out, in huge letters, “OBAMA 1 OSAMA 0.” One woman came dressed in an Old Glory jumpsuit complete with hoodie.

“It feels like the world’s guiltiest criminal is now gone from this earth,” said Eric Brehm of Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting New York with his girlfriend, Megan Sander. “I’m happy for the people of New York and happy for the world.” Sander recalled watching the second plane hit on TV almost a decade ago. “My boss’ sister was a flight attendant on that plane,” she said.

A number of celebrants wore American flags as capes. “It’s an amazing night,” said one flag-caped celebrant, Juan Rodriguez of Cliffside Park, N.J. “I feel like I can breathe again.” He said the flag around his shoulders once belonged to his grandfather, who served in the Pacific during WWII.

Archie Archipolo, who grew up on the Lower East Side and has lived in lower Manhattan for over a decade, recalled the madness in this neighborhood nine-and-a-half years ago. “The Red Cross set up a station with bottles of water. There were tanks in the streets.”

Archipolo was wearing a VFW cap that belonged to his grandfather, who served in the 1st Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was there with his girlfriend, Danielle Cristiani, and her godson Max Sperling, a teenager who was 5 when the towers fell. “It was like a war zone down here,” Sperling recalled. “But it was so quiet that first night.”

“We lost friends, cousins that day,” Archipolo said. “Everyone did. Now I think we’re on the way back. But we have to be careful. It could happen again any time. It might not be as big as it was before. It could be some guys strapped with C-4.”

A young Navy officer in dress blues and a sailor in white joined a drunken civilian teenager atop a lamppost at the corner of Church and Vesey and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. 

3.

What didn’t come through in the TV feeds and newspaper stories was the peculiar character of the crowd: half in-the-moment, half outside of it.

There were engaged, ecstatic — and over time, increasingly tipsy — revelers. There were news vans and trucks with broadcast-quality cameras and bright lights and rumbling generators. There were roving reporters with notepads and hand-held digital tape recorders. I saw people collecting video and audio with their iPhones. One woman circled the outer edge of the crowd, holding her iPad slightly above her head, getting a smooth tracking shot around the edges of the gathering and double-checking her framing by glancing up at the screen.

In some sectors of the designated celebration zone — a two-block area ringed by cops and barricades — witnesses to history appeared to outnumber participants.

Then again, the distinction between participants might be a false one. Nowadays just about everybody has the ability to record his or her life at any time, for any reason, via digital stills, video, audio. And there was a whole lot of recording going on last night. Three young men in kilts climbed on top of a bank of pay phones and gave an impromptu bagpipe concert; the strobe-flash illumination of shutterbugs was so intense that they might as well have been performing on the floor of a disco. There were people taking video and still photos of cops, construction workers, Marines, sailors and civilians wrapped in American flags or carrying signs. There were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures. And there were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures.

Clouds of pot smoke occasionally wafted through the scene, and as the celebration wore on, it became harder to move through the throng without accidentally kicking an empty beer bottle and sending it clattering down the street.

If you stood back and squinted at the crowd, hundreds of rectangles of electronic light seemed to bob like embers on a dark wave. People were showing each other their iPhones, sharing Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, uploaded and downloaded photos, YouTube clips, streaming video from CNN. They were discussing the coverage, repeating what they’d heard, saying what they did or didn’t believe.

“They should show pictures of the raid, pictures of the body, a picture, something,” a man holding a bottle of water told a man holding a tall can of Budweiser. “They have to show proof that he’s dead, that it’s him they shot, otherwise the tinfoil hats come out.”

And yet despite the anxiety and intense self-consciousness, there was a bustling energy to the gathering, with undertones of joy, relief and hope — plus a brute satisfaction than somebody finally tracked the son of a bitch down and put one in his brain. Songs and chants erupted and faded, some merely patriotic, others belligerent: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America the Beautiful.” “You ess AY! You ess AY” “Nah nah NAH nah!/Nah nah NAH nah!/Hey HEY-YYYYY/Good BYE!” One especially wasted young man lunged at a TV camera and yelled, “Iran is next! I don’t care what anybody says! Iran is next!”

Jonathan Jirack, formerly of Pittsburgh, left his apartment near ground zero around 2 a.m. bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, “We cheer for [PEACE SYMBOL], not death.” He walked through the crowd for hours holding it over his head. “I saw the gathering on TV and I thought, ‘I need to go down there and try to put an asterisk on the event,’” he said. “I understand the jubilation. I can feel it. But a lot of people are watching this thing on TV, and I’m afraid what we’re putting out there can be manipulated or misinterpreted.”

“That’s noble,” said Kevin Caslava, a San Diego-born writer who has lived in New York off and on for a decade, indicating Jirack’s sign. “But you’ve also got people here chanting, ‘Fuck Osama,’ so it’s not like what you’re describing is the only subtext out here.”

They argued politely about the sign — Jirack insisting that most of the people here were more relieved and happy than bloodthirsty, even though it might not come across that way on TV, and Caslava was taking a more skeptical view.

“Look, I get it,” Caslava said. “I feel a deep-rooted satisfaction, but also a sense of, ‘Should I be cheering because a man got shot?’ I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve met people who argued for bin Laden as a freedom fighter, as somebody who had reasons for what he did. When you hear them talk, intellectually you understand the reasons, even though you have a visceral hatred of what happened in this country, right here on our own soil. Deep inside us, there’s a very strong voice for war. You try to be rational, but there’s that voice inside that says, ‘Fuck this.’ That’s the voice I’m hearing here, mostly.”

“And,” he added, “when you’re watching news from Middle Eastern countries and you see people holding up signs in Arabic, how do you know what they’re saying? If you can’t read Arabic, you can’t know. You might think what’s on that Arabic sign was a message of peace when it’s actually something like, ‘Fuck all y’all!’ How do you know that somebody in another country where they don’t speak English won’t look at your sign and just not understand it at all? Or misinterpret it?”

“That’s why I put the peace symbol on there,” Jirack said.

4.

Back in Brooklyn again after a brief subway ride in an R train car filled with mostly sleeping people and other awake persons — fellow pilgrims to ground zero who thought the timing of Obama’s announcement was a bit too convenient, that maybe the president delayed the raid, or delayed announcing the news, until tonight because it would put a lid on the celebrations.

“They were building up to this raid for weeks,” a man said. “He didn’t give the go-ahead last night. Why? Because if he’d done it last night, Saturday night, around the same time as tonight, the word would have gone out when half the people in America were already half-drunk, and then what would the TV have shown? It would have been insanity. So he waits until late Sunday night. Everybody’s happy, but they’re tired. They want to celebrate, but they also gotta go to work in the morning.”

“Not everything is a conspiracy,” another rider said.

“They’re very precise in how they manage the country,” the first rider said. “They got shaping P.R. down to an exact science.”

Home at last.  The kids were zonked out. On CNN, Steve Bernstein, whose brother Billy died on 9/11 when Cantor-Fitzgerald’s World Trade Center offices went up in smoke, said that when he heard about bin Laden, “I felt like my brother could finally rest in peace. I felt the same way.”

Then the newscast cut to correspondent Ted Rowlands reporting live from “a hookah lounge in Anaheim, California” at 2 a.m. Pacific. His topic: the reaction of Muslim-Americans. He sidled over to one side of the club and approached a couple of attractive young women. “Leila,” he said, extending his microphone to one of them, “as a Persian-American, give it to me: What is your reaction to Osama bin Laden being killed?”

“We’re elated that someone who is the biggest symbol of terrorism is finally gone now,” Leila said. “And I can’t wait to see his picture now, to be honest with you.”

Rowlands led the camera crew toward the back of the club, where the owner was waiting for him. Ninety minutes earlier, Rowlands explained, the owner — a U.S. armed forces veteran — had been the victim of a drive-by egging. There was still a splotch of yolk on his shirt.

“This is Mohammed, the establishment’s owner,” Rowlands explained. “He was actually hit in the neck by an egg.”

“Good job, U.S. Army, and Marines, everybody, Obama, we’re glad that’s over with,” Mohammed said. 

Rowlands followed up: ”Does it help? Do you think this is the beginning of the end of discrimination here in America, or no, is it an ongoing thing?”

“It’s gonna be an ongoing thing as long as we have a lot of the biased media and ignorant people out here,” Mohammed said. “Hopefully, this brings a little closure … We’re happy that he’s dead, we’re happy that he’s gone.”

I glanced down at my laptop. In my Twitter feed was a link to a wire story saying that Osama bin Laden’s corpse had already been buried at sea.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman tells Ambinder. Plus he recently moved:

Mehlman said that his formal coming-out process began earlier this year. Over the past several weeks, he has notified former colleagues, including former President Bush. Once he realized that the news would probably leak, he assembled a team of former advisers to help him figure out the best way to harness the publicity generated by the disclosure for the cause of marriage rights. He is worried that some will see his decision to go public as opportunistic. Mehlman recently moved to Chelsea, a gay mecca in New York City.

Hm.

Well, welcome to being on the right side of one issue, Ken. (And this marks another one that Mike Rogers was right about.)

The Obamas’ answer is usually some variation of: “Work really fucking hard for it.” Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the couple is that while their marriage is most often held up by others as an ideal to aspire to — or flat-out envy — the two people in it, when asked, spend much of their time dissecting the ways in which they have failed each other. “The image of a flawless relationship,” writes Jodi Kantor, is, according to Michelle, “the last thing we want to project. It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair to young couples trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”

Although it seems paradoxical that one of the most envied couples in the nation is also one of the most vocal about the hardships of marriage, it makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly, the Obamas wouldn’t have the luxury of nitpicking at the flaws, major and minor, of their relationship if others made a habit of doing so, too. But they have quite a bit of distance to fall before they would succeed in knocking themselves off their own pedestal. And in many ways, it’s entirely consistent with the rest of their philosophy: Just as one’s accomplishments shouldn’t be limited by birth, marriage isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you do. And just as you’d expect, the Obamas see yet another “teachable moment” in describing the mechanics of their marriage.

The first couple recognizes that their personal life is political; Kantor even describes it as central to Barack’s overall “political brand.” But politics itself is the thing that, for a time, made their personal life nearly untenable. She writes: “Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.”

In fact, when you read the Obamas’ account of their marriage, the shocking thing is that any family manages to combine the stress of marriage and politics, much less endure the unfortunate side effect of having their marriages scrutinized by an unforgiving public. Let’s just start here: Until moving into the White House, the family had not lived full-time under the same roof since 1996, two years before Malia was born. To repeat: Barack has been at least a part-time absent father and husband for nearly 13 years.

This left Michelle, obviously, to care for their two children largely on her own. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” says Susan Sher, her former boss and current chief of staff, who remembers that Michelle showed up for her interview at University of Chicago Medical Center carrying newborn Sasha, because her sitter had canceled. Not only was she left with the bulk of the childcare, but Barack’s political career wasn’t enough to pay the bills, leaving her to earn the income as well. As Barack recalls, “She said, ‘Well, you’re gone all the time and we’re broke. How is that a good deal?’” (Note that the guy who put her in the situation is also the guy who remembers just exactly what he did.)

How indeed? The answer, it seemed to be, was that Michelle just happened to find herself married to a Great Man, though neither of them knew it yet. “Barack doesn’t belong to you,” Michelle’s friend Yvonne Davilia recalls telling her back in the mid-’90s, when Barack was finishing up his memoir and considering getting into politics. But at first, Michelle “just wasn’t ready to share” her husband. Which begs the question: With what? His future destiny as leader of the free world? And would that destiny have been possible had a Great Woman, who also happened to be his intellectual and professional equal, not stepped in to look after the more prosaic concerns of raising the children and collecting a paycheck? “That was sort of an eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard,” says Michelle. “But going into it, no one tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love him? What does the dress look like?’”

At this point it might be worth noting that in seeing a temporary absence from his family as a fair price to pay for greater goals, Barack was not simply following the model of his father (who had “fleeting” relationships with his wives and children), but also the model of his mother, who spent long periods of time away from her children while working as an anthropologist in Indonesia. Michelle had to point out to him, according to Sher, that a lot of parenting is about “sheer physical presence, which wasn’t something he was used to.”

The very essence of marriage is finding ways to calibrate individual aspirations with the cumbersome, day-to-day workings of a larger family unit. And it’s beyond ludicrous that those people whose individual achievements make their family lives most visible — politicians, actors, writers, musicians — are often those whose family lives are most compromised by the costs of individual achievement. But in asking us to take a good long look behind the curtain of their marriage, the Obamas have given us a better lesson in the real costs and benefits of family values than any fairy tale could.

Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean’s successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee’s national field effort that helped produce Al Gore’s national popular vote victory.

Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I’d like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.

Kenneth Baer: I think right now it’s not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can’t get people saying, “My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don’t need to go out and vote. It’s cold out, it’s rainy.” [You can't have] staff people who are like, “I don’t need to work that hard, we’re going to win this anyway.” Just really keeping motivated, that’s the big challenge.

Steve McMahon: Obama’s got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it’s dangerous. The best thing to do when you’re winning is to keep doing what you’re doing because that’s the reason you’re winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he’s done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they’ve got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it’s important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.

Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that’s definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They’re just going into high gear, right?

Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that’s what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.

Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn’t tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS — jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?

Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we’re in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s about, it’s about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it’s basically been the same thing. And it’s working. It’s a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you’re doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.

McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn’t really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn’t really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they’ve set a frame for Barack Obama’s campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it’s very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it’s very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it’s also pretty clear because they’ve set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they’ve stuck to very, very religiously and that is he’s John McSame. He’s going to just give us four more years of George Bush.

If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That’s really what he’s struggling with and the fact that he’s now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They’re now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.

Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?

Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they’re voting for. They know what they’re going out and casting their ballot for and that’s a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they’re so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, “Oh well, it just won’t matter if I get to the polls that day.” You have to convince them that’s not the case, that it actually does matter.

Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don’t know if it’s the night before or Sunday night, but he’s going to have this 30-minute segment. We’ve seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It’s usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?

McMahon: I actually think it’s the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address — which, by the way, I don’t think there are at this point — it gives him an opportunity to address those. It’s a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it’s something that’s going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.

Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it’s feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it’s a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven’t seen.

Baer: It’s interesting listening to you two guys because I’ve actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don’t?

Moskowitz: There won’t be any Greek columns.

McMahon: No, I’m just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we’re fixing to find out.

Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we’ve seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you’re Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you’re ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?

McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn’t. I don’t think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it’s smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who’s not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it’s going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain’s name.

Baer: I think that you can’t look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they’re throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don’t mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can’t let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It’s not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it’s going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.

Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it’s just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?

Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny’s right in the sense that the campaign can’t let up. We don’t want them to and we can’t afford to. This isn’t going to be a landslide. We’ll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they’re throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.

Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it’s already performing.

Moskowitz: It’s definitely real. It’s phenomenal. And I think, whether it’s a buzzword or not, it’s organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that’s having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it’s definitely a new operation the likes of which we’ve not seen before.

Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it’s more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?

Moskowitz: No, it’s not more command and control. Again, there’s framework, there’s structure, there’s goals. But again, they’ve really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They’ve provided them with a slate of tools to use. They’ve really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They’ve definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who’s running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn’t matter; as long they’re willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they’re included in the operation.

Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign’s use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?

Baer: Well, maybe. There’s something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he’s breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that’s exhilarating, is that you just don’t know if it’s going to work or not. This is the field program that you’ve dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like “The West Wing.” We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it’s exhilarating partly because we don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a huge gamble.

We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That’s how you win. Registering a million new voters like they’ve done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that’s a high-risk strategy, and it’s exhilarating. Because if it works, we’ve just done something great. It’s great for democracy. I hope it works. And there’s every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it’s a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn’t been successful because it’s done the tried and true. It’s been successful because it has done things differently.

Moskowitz: I think what’s also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that’s not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I’m even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don’t necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They’re going door to door, they’re getting people to vote early, they’re making phone calls from their homes, they’re doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.

Schaller: It’s been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?

McMahon: I don’t think it’s a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama’s staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it’s just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He’s organized; even in places where he’s not necessarily competitive, they’ve got campaigns. They’re going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.

Moskowitz: Steve’s absolutely right. They’re not going to go do this where it doesn’t help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they’re not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.

Schaller: Ken, you’ve written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?

Baer: That’s a good question. It’s a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you’re not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it’s a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we’ve got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era — or it’s an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it’s screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.

Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he’s already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don’t count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It’s definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?

McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.

Baer: Hire Steve.

McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you’ve got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I’m sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I’m sure he’d be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that’s what I’d encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.

Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That’s a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.

Baer: I look at it differently. I’m sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it’s a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That’s expanding the map. It’s a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let’s just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let’s not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that’s sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?

Schaller: We’ve reached the final question. We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.

Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They’re already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Hold your breath for the last day.

McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don’t go to church at Rev. Wright’s church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.

Baer: Yeah, that’s very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that’s a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don’t talk to your transition team. Don’t even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.

Schaller: That’s some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.