Obama's got ground game

Part of Obama's advantage, of course, also comes from how readily voters appear to be flocking his way -- the momentum has been feeding on itself. Now that he's on a winning streak the campaign doesn't have to seek out supporters so much as it needs to figure out what to do with them when they show up. "I wanted to be a part of it," said Mark Barker, 27, an advertising copywriter in Austin, who came to the precinct captain training and signed up to make 200 calls to strangers in his neighborhood even though he'd never been active in politics before. "I didn't want to look back and leave anything on the table" in this election, he said.

This field campaign has seized opportunity in the groundswell. Around the country, Obama staffers have linked up with networks that supporters built up themselves long before paid field organizers even arrived. "It was a seamless thing, where the campaign kind of came here, kind of stood outside the doors, and said, 'Knock knock, tell us what you need,'" said Mark Keam, a lobbyist for Verizon who, on his own time, organized Fairfax County, Va., for Obama three months before a campaign worker showed up there.

The campaign kept working with the lists of voters and volunteers that Keam's group had put together on its own. The volunteers had already set up their own field structure in each of the county's nine smaller jurisdictions, so the official Obama organizers rolled with it. "You normally see this omnipresence of the heavy hand of the national campaign, all the way down to much more local organizational efforts, but that is not the case here," said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a national chairman of the campaign who barnstormed small Midwestern states including Kansas and North Dakota before Super Tuesday. (Obama deputy campaign manager Hildebrand ran Daschle's losing 2004 campaign for reelection in South Dakota.)

Obama aides suggest their field plan illustrates a broader point about leadership. "We netted more delegates out of Kansas than [the Clinton campaign] did out of New Jersey," said Obama strategist Robert Gibbs. "For the candidate or the campaign that seems to discuss that they're ready from Day One, they didn't seem to have a plan from Day One for this campaign."

Clinton, meanwhile, is finally now putting serious muscle into organizing -- but it may be too late. The one-time front-runner, who by most accounts must win Texas to stay alive in the race, said last week of the state's complicated setup, "I had no idea how bizarre it is. We have grown men crying over it." (Besides the two-part voting, Texas Democrats award a greater number of delegates for winning precincts where the party did well in the last two elections -- many of which are currently Obama strongholds.) But any joking aside, her campaign says it'll be ready for the Tuesday vote; it has since deployed Ace Smith, who ran her victorious California operation, to handle Texas. (Likewise, Robby Mook, who ran her Nevada caucus organization, is in charge in the other crucial state Tuesday, Ohio.)

But it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Clinton campaign stumbled badly by failing to organize and compete more forcefully in a number of states. Her campaign's spin now, after the fact, also suggests that caucuses inherently favor Obama's wealthier, better-educated base, because caucuses are harder for night-shift workers or single parents to attend. "I don't know that we could have overcome the challenges in the caucus states," one Clinton strategist said. But that assessment fails to acknowledge that Obama has shattered demographic barriers throughout the race, including building support among working-class voters in states such as Wisconsin.

An inferior ground game could make it hard for Clinton to emerge with the most delegates in Texas, even if she wins the statewide popular vote (which recent polls show she might not do, anyway). "We're not going to give up on the process, we're not going to bend to the process, we're not going to whine about the process," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Clinton-supporting Democrat from Houston. But then she proceeded to ask whether caucuses should be eliminated in future nomination fights. "From my perspective, it is not the fully democratic process." It is, however, the Democratic process -- and the one by which the well-organized Obama campaign appears to be closing in on the nomination.

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