For once I agree with Harold Ickes. Do not underestimate Obama's ground game. [View All]

[madfloridian]

From a three-page article today in Time Magazine, one paragraph jumped out at me. The article is about the on the ground organization of Barack Obama in this campaign.

Obama Banks on the Ground Game

This paragraph quoting Harold Ickes is most interesting.

Underestimating a surge of new voters was, in some ways, Hillary Clinton's downfall in the primaries. In Iowa, the Clinton campaign expected 150,000 people to caucus, but they came in third place when more than 230,000 people ultimately participated. The Obama campaign "has enthusiasm, they have a lot of people, they have money to finance in a serious way ground operations and they have the resources in terms of good lists at their disposal," says Harold Ickes, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Hillary Clinton. "If the McCain people think that that's not serious, they're in for a big surprise. They should not pooh-pooh the ground game that Obama is mounting, it's a formidable one. I don't think in my experience in Democratic politics there's ever been anything like it."

The article compares the methods being used by the two parties. First the Republican's tried and true one.

The Grand Ole Party tradition has become a familiar ritual for this Old Dominion group, some of whom have been volunteering since before the Starbucks took up residence in the upscale Fairfax, Virginia, strip mall, not 10 miles from Washington. They spent the morning retracing familiar paths, calling on homes they most likely have visited before and, as always, completing SAT-style fill-in-the-bubble spreadsheets that are fed in to the GOP's massive voter files.

"I sure have knocked on these doors, countless times," former State Senator Jay O'Brien says of the once-a-month-or-so gathering, "I've been out here since 1991." (O'Brien knows the importance of new voters firsthand; he lost his State Senate seat last year when a surge of new voters came out of nowhere in his Fairfax district. "Frankly, I got as many votes as I used to get, but there was a bigger turnout by new voters who wanted to make a statement about other things and they were more energized by a Democrat," O'Brien says.)

And then there is the way the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party with Dean as chairman are doing the voter registration and outreach.

About 30 miles south in Woodbridge, Virginia, Angel Thomas was canvassing for Obama. Thomas, 26, who has never before volunteered for a campaign, spent the last month downloading lists of neighbors from her mybarackobama.com website and, in her free time knocks on as many doors as she can. She asks her neighbors whom they support, tries to educate and convince those who are on the fence and logs all the information into Obama's website before downloading another list. While the GOP is still meeting in group once a month, Thomas and her eight million allies are canvassing 24/7.....Over Labor Day weekend, while waiting for Obama to finish an event, David Axelrod, the nominee's top strategist, noted that their strategy is broader than McCain's and therefore requires a lot more leg work, but that it has more of a potential payoff. "We're going into Nov. 4 with many different scenarios to get to 270 electoral votes," he says, squinting at airplanes buzzing overhead, part of Cleveland's annual air show. "I think their path is very, very narrow, as is their thinking

I felt rather negative about Harold Ickes at many points during the primaries this cycle. I was not pleased at his behavior toward my state at all.

I was not happy at his manipulation of a state when he was in on the ground floor making the rules the state was breaking.


Harold Ickes must win over party officials to keep Clinton in the race. Michael Edwards for TIME

In 1988 Ickes was at it again, negotiating a change in party rules that would not be tested until 2008. In return for Jackson's support at the convention that summer, Michael Dukakis endorsed a complex plan that awarded delegates based on a candidate's proportion of the vote in every state. By doing away with winner-take-all primaries, the new rules prevented a front runner from wrapping up the nomination with a handful of wins in big, delegate-rich states. Underdog candidates could stay alive through the primaries, and perhaps even win the nomination, by collecting delegates in every contest, whether they won it or not. It would be two decades before an underdog turned front runner named Barack Obama would take full advantage of those rules. If Clinton's victories in big states like New York, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio had been winner-take-all, she would be the nominee today. Of course, if superdelegates didn't exist, Obama's delegate lead would be foolproof. Such are the ironic consequences of the rules Ickes helped write.

I agree with him now, though. No one should discount Obama's ground game.

We can never be nastier and meaner than the Rove types who have been in charge of McCain's campaign since July. Obama sounded feistier today, and I think he will fight back...but it is not our nature in this party to just lie and sink to such low depths.

The ground game often seems not to be even noticed by the media at all. Our party is combining the DNC 50 state staffers and the Obama campaign staffers. Add to that the awesome number of trained volunteers no one ever talks about because they are so busy hyperventilating over lipstick and pigs.

I think it might catch some by surprise.