The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone

To turn well-meaning students and nurses and social workers into self-sufficient organizers, the campaign has put nearly 7,000 supporters through an intensive, four-day seminar known as "Camp Obama." Starting last March, the campaign solicited applications from its most dedicated supporters and asked them to travel to Chicago on their own dime.

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Using the social-networking tools of MyBo, the volunteers began to create city- and statewide networks with names like IdahObama, groups that could be tapped later by the professional staff to organize down to the precinct level. In Maryland, the campaign was able to mobilize 3,000 volunteers in only three weeks, thanks to the months of groundwork by groups like Baltimore for Barack Obama.

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A strategy that leans so heavily on the grass roots is not without risk. In February, right-wing blogs had a field day when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag. But the unique structure of the Obama campaign blunts the PR fallout of such off-message moments because it offers plausible deniability: "This is a volunteer office," the campaign wrote in a press release that forced a clarification from Fox, "that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign."

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"There's no doubt that there's a downside to the Internet," Axelrod says. "Ugly, unfiltered things circulate virally, and we've had to deal with that. But it's a great democratizing force as well.

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Obama's army of organizers has enabled him to repeatedly outman and outwit his opponents — especially in states that vote by caucus. "The Clinton campaign is the last, antiquated vestige of the top-down model," says Trippi. "The top cannot organize caucus states; the bottom can."

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While Clinton was spending lavishly to win New Jersey with 600,000 votes, Obama more than offset his delegate loss there simply by mobilizing 17,000 Idahoans to caucus for him. "The Clinton campaign made a fundamental mistake by writing states off," says Hildebrand.

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Clinton, by contrast, had no plan, no money and no real grass-roots organization. Even worse for Clinton, the only state whose demographics truly favored her was Maine, a caucus. "Both campaigns thought it was better territory for her, and we were pretty nervous about it," admits Hildebrand. "She was spending a lot of time there, she had staff there." But demographics proved no match for Obama's field organization. Clinton lost Maine — by nineteen points.

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