This week, Barack Obama lost a big advantage. No one, ever again, is likely to underestimate him. For a long time, he could rest secure in the knowledge that most of his opponents - inside and outside the Democratic Party - had no idea what they were up against.
He could craft a winning strategy right in plain sight. Forget that - he could share his voter file and major aspects of his entire campaign plan with millions of total strangers, secure in the knowledge that the people who should have been paying attention would dismiss his path to victory as improbable at best.
Most of all, he could enjoy watching his opponents get really excited about his supposed "mistakes" and "weaknesses," knowing all the while they were truly assets. And knowing as well that he was far more ready than anyone understood to deal with his true mistakes and weaknesses.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Surely the McCain campaign won't make that mistake, right?
I know something about the benefits of being underestimated. I've used that to my advantage earlier in my career, when I was young enough to pull it off. And so when I saw that Barack Obama was considering a Presidential run, I didn't underestimate him. I decided in January of 2007 to support him. And I believed at the time he could win. I didn't know if he would, mind you. But I knew he could.
MIne was probably at that point a minority opinion. Plenty of folks thought he was too young, too inexperienced and too conciliatory to succeed in a crowded field of highly talented candidates. One had already made a serious run at the party nomination and been a Vice Presidential candidate. A second had a prominent place in national politics, the loyalty of many key members of the party and the widely admired last Democratic President by her side. Others were successful Senators and Governors with more years of Washington service. Finally there was the frequently-mentioned candidate who used to be The Next President of the United States, but who never formally entered the race as he was too busy winning the Nobel Peace Prize and such.
Then Obama started campaigning. What a disaster he seemed to be! That talented rising star languished in the polls all summer and fall. His campaign seemed to make so many mistakes. Obama let all the great endorsements slip through his fingers. He was messing around with all this touchy-feely volunteer social networking instead of courting the establishment constituencies. He wasn't giving us any "substance." The judgment was harsh:
"Obama Is Done" said one prominent blogger, while another promised "I'll eat my shoe" if Obama's message is successful in winning him the nomination. And as Jon Stewart reminded us last night, for a long time the conventional media was even more sure Obama could not win. (I will however, give happily give credit to Markos for hisforesight in the matter).
Obama seemingly kept making "mistakes" and "gaffes" - like saying he would meet with leaders of rogue nations. Surely his supposed "weaknesses" of name, race, inexperience would hold him back.
Yet there were early indications that Obama might surprise everyone. Quarter after quarter he announced record breaking numbers, not just of dollars, but of donors. Yet even this gave rise to what I called the "Obama Paradox" - the apparent disconnect between this fundraising prowess and the low poll numbers. If you looked closely, though, you could see the potential for things to change quite dramatically.
Here's what I wrote about the "Obama Paradox" on October 1, 2007, after the campaign announced it had accumulated an unprecedented 500,000 donations and 350,000 unique donors:
In fact, I truly think the Obama Unknown is a legitimate unknown. Because we've never seen this before. Dean? He created the model, but he never hit donor numbers on this scale. He collected a lot of e-mail addresses, but got fewer people to take the tangible step of participating in some way. And Obama has improved on the model. He is, after all, a former community organizer. So he indeed has a plan to tap into this support, by training volunteers at Camp Obama, and by establishing a formal campaign structure designed to plug volunteers in to specific roles at the neighborhood and precinct level.
So what we have is an unprecedented number of people who "own" the campaign. An unprecedented number of small dollar donors, who can be tapped again. And who, having taken the tangible step of making a donation, are that much more likely to encourage their friends and neighbors to vote Obama, to sign up for a phonebank or canvass, or simply to hold onto Obama as their first choice through the inevitable ups and downs of a primary campaign.
I can speculate that this huge return on his current poll numbers yields a long-term strategic advantage to Obama over the other candidates. (This recent Jennifer Clare diary makes a similar point). That we are several months away from voting in the early states and the blockbuster Feb. 5 voting. That having a huge network of committed supporters can make the difference in caucus states, where organization matters most. And that caucus success in turn, combined with the bodies on the ground to do GOTV, will make the difference in the primary states early in the calendar. So I don't spend time worrying about whether the polls are catching young people with cell phones. That isn't going to be enough to make up 20 points. 350,000 people who are already voting with their dollars? That might.
At the time you could see a path to victory. But it was far from a sure thing.
As we got closer to the Iowa caucuses, there were more indications Obama was the candidate to watch. He gave an incredible performance at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Iowa in November, although the content of his speech was perhaps less important than the display of field organization:
The Obama campaign has been relentless about two things: (1) raising enough money to be competitive with Clinton and (2) building field structure. The first has been fairly visible, with the quarterly reports providing a clear progress indicator. The second has been happening largely below the radar screen. We tend to focus here on what we can see - who has made an endorsement, what has a candidate said about a particular issue. Knowing who is "winning" the field structure war is tough, because we can't really see what the campaigns are doing. We largely rely on impressions or anecdotes, or gut feelings about who is more organized.
On Saturday, we got to really see relative levels of campaign organization. Here's the most important fact about the JJ dinner - 99. That's how many counties are in Iowa, and every single one of them sent volunteers to the dinner. Rather than just concentrate on getting as many bodies there as possible, the Obama campaign used the JJ dinner as a "dry run" of their field structure. It's a test to see how the field responds - you ask every team across the state to do the same thing at the same time on a single day. Because that's what you need to do come primary/caucus day.
They have their volunteers organized in every Iowa county. And when they needed to turn out every county for the campaign on a single day, they did it. And they flooded the event with their people, dominating the turnout. Will they be able to do the same thing on January 3? No one can know for certain. Yes, the usual caveats apply. But this was an incredible show of organizing strength, breadth, and depth.
*****
There's a growing sense we just might pull this off, that we might really own the ground game. That could turn Iowa. That could start turning polls everywhere else. And that in turn could make the difference on February 5.
Obama spent the fall and winter building Obama for America into a prodigious 50-state organizing strategy:
State by state, precinct by precinct - that describes Obama For America right now, before a single primary vote has been cast. Barack Obama is not running an Iowa strategy, or even an Early States strategy. He is running a broad campaign in multiple states simultaneously, building field offices and infrastructure and training a huge cadre of volunteers. And in doing this he is going deep into red state country. If he wins the nomination, the next day he will have a national campaign, ready to go, and people fired up in a lot of places Democrats don't usually even bother campaigning.
Go to Barack Obama's campaign website, and click on "states." Notice that he has pages for, and field office open in, places like Idaho, Kansas, Arizona and Georgia. Yesterday, GoldinI told us how The Obama Campaign Comes to Nashville. They are running caucus trainings in North Dakota(!) These are states that vote on February 5. The other campaigns are not moving to build field outside the four Early States. They aren't even paying much attention to many of these February 5 states, where frequently Obama For America is the only campaign to actually have a formal presence. When Obama says that we live not in red states and blue states but in the United States, he literally puts his money where his mouth is, pouring resources into red state primaries at an unprecedented level.
And then Barack Obama won Iowa. Decisively. He was an instant media darling, shot up in the polls. He would sweep to victory after that . . .
And then he lost New Hampshire, after being predicted to win. Suddenly the race was on. Perhaps that was the best thing that could have happened. At the time, I was of course extremely disappointed. I consoled myself with the thought that we might be better off having to win it the old-fashioned way rather than by a pre-emptive media coronation. Looking back, this is surely true.
Barack Obama used this loss as an opportunity - he showed again, and more powerfully, how he could handle adversity - how he could use real mistakes or weaknesses as an opportunity to show strength. He gave what may be the finest speech of his campaign, one that lives on as a beautiful video and a key slogan: Yes. We. Can.
Out of this loss he held his campaign together, and began his critical drive to the nomination. He won South Carolina, big, and fought Super Tuesday to a draw. Then he dominated the February contests, building what would become an insurmountable lead.
Along the way he began to pick up critical support from prominent Democratic Party leaders, including the dramatic endorsement statements by Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy. (Here is an interesting argument about why the media underestimated the value of the Kennedy endorsement and its role in Super Tuesday.)
I have to mention California, where I put most of my energy ended up a somewhat disappointing loss -- made more disappointing by the tantalizing suggestions in the week leading up to the vote that we could pull off an upset. Even here, Barack Obama showed he was stronger than one might expect. For his campaign kept it close in California, and in most states where he lost, on the metric that mattered - the delegate count. That effort to get almost as many delegates in defeat as in victory in many states would turn out to be critical.
Indeed, perhaps the clearest example of underestimating Barack Obama was the Clinton campaign's erroneous assumption they understood the nomination process enough to win. The Obama campaign didn't make any assumptions - they simply sat down and learned the process inside and out, then crafted a strategy to win. Indeed, given the competition, the Obama campaign simply had to be incredibly effective, thoughtful and disciplined. That was the only way it could be done.
But even as he went on a roll in February, it still would not be easy. Facing criticism over statements by the departing minister of his church in Chicago, Barack Obama needed to show he was tough enough to withstand the kind of nasty personalized, unfair attacks we can expect from the Republicans. I think Senator Clinton believed that Obama's apparent weaknesses or vulnerabilities would eventually bring him down. That was the source of her case to the superdelegates that she was more "electable." Hillary Clinton underestimated Barack Obama.
Rather than derail his candidacy, the Rev. Wright situation allowed Barack Obama to show he could handle attacks - I described his incredible speech on race in Philadelphia as a necessary proving ground: Crossing the Swiftboat Threshold. And I believe that the fact that he handled it as he did, and continued campaigning and fighting, meant that superdelegates and the party would continue to move toward him.
As we entered early May, Obama held a decisive delegate lead. He began to draw close in superdelegates. But after losing Ohio and Pennsylvania and the split decision in Texas, he needed to again show his strength. He did that with his resounding victory in North Carolina and his near-upset in Indiana. I was working on the ground in Indiana, and I again saw hints that Obama's strength might have been underestimated. Comparing the field operation I saw in early February with that of early May showed that the long fight for the nomination had sharpened and deepened the campaign in ways that will be invaluable against McCain.
(Having started this diary and theme yesterday, I saw Mark Halperin this morning suggest McCain may already be underestimating Barack Obama. He probably isn't - but I can hope.)
Tuesday night, it finally ended. And oddly enough, even though it had been clear for a long time that Barack Obama would be the nominee, it was still an historic moment when he clinched the nomination. One shouldn't underestimate how difficult it is to overcome the barrier of race, not to mention the special challenges for a campaign that ran against Washington money, influence and power, that built a new alternative power structure, that actually delivered on a promise to bring new people into politics.
Then again, one shouldn't underestimate Barack Obama.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer with Obama for America in California. When I write here I speak for myself, and not for the campaign in any way. The campaign has no input on my diaries - the ideas and all the words in them are my own.