Obama is winning because he read the rules.

And Hillary is losing because she didn't.

Where the media is making its mistake in this election is thinking that the Obama campaign is about Obama. They keep trying to focus the coverage on what he says and how that might affect the election.

But the campaign is not about Obama. Ultimately, what we have here is a community organizer running for president. And his campaign is designed to be a grassroots campaign that excites and energizes the electorate and gets them involved in the political process.

The million or so voters who have given $25, $50 donations are stockholders in the "Obama" brand, and since we have invested our hard-earned money, we want to see our investment become successful.

That's why Obama will win in the general. It feels good to be involved in the Obama campaign, and people then take the skills they learn as Obama organizers and use them in their own communities.

From Yahoo News:

Last Thursday, about a year too late, I read the "2008 Delegate Selection Rules for the Democratic National Convention." Not a fun read, I must add, which may be the reason Sen. Hillary Clinton, or her people, and most of the press, did not read or understand its 25 dense pages.

Sen. Barack Obama, or his people, obviously studied the thing, and that is the reason he will probably be his party's nominee for president of the United States.

... Understanding the rule, the Obama campaign campaigned everywhere, in primary elections and caucuses in even the smallest states. Two weeks before the Delaware election, polls showed Clinton ahead by 10 percent or more. Obama campaigned there, Clinton did not, and he won the state by 2 percentage points. More important, he won nine delegates to her six.

The same thing happened in small state after state, which is why Obama is ahead in the delegate count. If states still had winner-take-all primaries, Clinton, who won more votes in California, New York and Texas, would have easily won the nomination. But again, she had not read the rules and Obama had.

There was a myth at the center of the Clinton campaign, the idea that she and her husband, the former president, had a nationwide organization ready to knock on every door in America. Not so. The Clintons had many friends, but no organization. Bill and Hillary were always top-down, media candidates. Obama's manager, David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, did build a national knock-on-any-door campaign, an old-fashioned Chicago-style campaign -- and it worked.