How the Obama team did it

Today's Washington Post takes a look at how the Obama team defeated the vaunted Clinton machine. It's fascinating. Obama's operatives played a different game than the usual path taken by presidential candidates -- and it worked. Worth a read for all the political junkies:

The insurgent strategy they devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured and causes that were often ignored.

The result may have lacked the glamour of a sweep, but tonight, with the delegates he picked up in Montana and South Dakota and a flood of superdelegate endorsements, Obama sealed one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to wrest his party's nomination from the candidate of the party establishment. The surprise was how well his strategy held up -- and how little resistance it met.
ad_icon

"We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states," marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama's top ground-game strategists.

"It's the big mystery of the campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe, "because every delegate counts."

And, the Obama campaign worked towards amassing delegates -- wherever those delegates could be found. It sounds so simple, but the brain trust at Clinton HQ overlooked it.