There is a great article by Zack Exley from the Off the Bus column at The Huffington Post that describes in detail how the Obama campaign works both from the top down and the bottom up. And it's this article that justifies for me why I always favored Obama...
When my wife and I were making our primary voting decisions regarding Clinton and Obama, we split. She favored Clinton because of her broader experience in federal politics and, yes, her gender. (She felt pretty strongly it was just time for a woman president, case closed.) I, on the other hand, favored Obama not because of his politics per se--I didn't think in terms of substance he and Clinton were that far apart--but in what he would do for the Democratic ticket more generally. In brief, I liked how he had organized his campaign as an on-the-ground, 50-state strategy rather than the typical air war in swing states & swing districts, all TV advertising and nominal ground troops.
This approach paid off for Obama, especially with the retail politicking of the primaries for states that work by caucus. The expansion of that retail politicking to a fully nationalized approach is what I hoped we would see. And Exley's article makes apparent that this is exactly what Obama's campaign is doing.
This is all to the good because in the end what I wanted was not merely to see Obama as our president. What I wanted to see was something the Republicans sought and fundamentally blew: a "permanent" (but really long-term) Demcratic majority. I think we may, in fact, see that now at all governmental levels--municipal, state, and federal. It is something that I hope will move the country's "center" to a more rational place and eventually chip away the corporate mindset of the media once it realizes that it's fallen behind the cultural-social mores of the next generation of voters.
Exley's article also demonstrates something that I've been arguing with friends for a long time: that despite his MBA, as CEOs go, Bush sucked. He's the John Fuld (Lehman Brothers' former CEO) of American politics. Obama, on the other hand, may well be its Warren Buffett, a CEO who actually knows how to, well, manage!
Ironically, the Obama campaign, as described by Exley, also offers some interesting parallels to the revamping of the American military since its occupation of Iraq. Having learned the hard way what's involved in "running" rather than just conquering a country, the American military has adopted an eerily similar mindset of engaging and empowering the local population (its clan chiefs, local leaders, religious authorities) to make things work. OK, it's perhaps a stretch to compare, but there is something nonetheless.