Obama's Ground Game

When Obama wins the nomination sometime in the next couple of months it'll be because of stories like this.

Obama's Texas Two-Step
In the same cluster of messages came one from the Obama campaign. It was notifying me that they were setting up "Precinct Captain" meetings in locations all over the state and asked if I'd be willing to attend one and volunteer for the campaign. …

I visited the Precinct Captain website and to my great surprise, I found 25 meetings scheduled all over the state, including such remote locations as Matamoros way down on the border with Mexico. There were, in fact, meetings scheduled in two border communities as well as FIVE locations in San Antonio, and one all the way out in El Paso, which told me right away that the campaign was not conceding a single Hispanic vote to Hillary.

West Texas, which is almost always forgotten in national political campaigns, had meetings scheduled in Lubbock, Abilene, Midland-Odessa, and of course, El Paso.

"So this is the much-vaunted Obama ground operation," I mused.
…
Abilene, Texas is, literally, one of the most conservative cities in the country. Back last summer, when the Obama campaign staged its "Walk for Change," I was able to find only two people signed up for the walk in Abilene--so few that the campaign didn't send any materials.

So I was more than curious to see how many people might attend an organizational meeting for the Obama campaign in Abilene.

The meeting was held in a nice hotel, in a room that seated about 25 people, but by the time I got there, all the seats were full. They sent out for more chairs, but by the time they got back, there were too many people for the extra chairs they'd brought. Finally, a small crowd stood at the rear of the room and the overflow spilled out into the corridor.
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Having read Mayhill Fowler's excellent post, "Clinton's Texas Ground Game Plunges Into Chaos," I can say that, contrasted with what I've observed on the ground with the Obama campaign--there's a whole helluva lot of difference between conducting a campaign from the top-down, and doing one from the ground-up.