Al Giordano has a brilliant analysis of the social movement that Obama has led to get us where we are today as a campaign. When others doubted this strategy, Obama and his team held firm, and discipline won out in the end.
He begins with a quote from Karen Tumulty in TIME:
Barack Obama was campaigning last October in South Carolina when he got an urgent call from Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who leads his campaign’s finance committee. About 200 of his biggest fund raisers were meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, and among them, near panic was setting in. Pritzker’s team had raised money faster than any other campaign ever had. Its candidate was drawing mega-crowds wherever he went. Yet he was still running at least 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls. His above-the-fray brand of politics just wasn’t getting the job done, and some of his top moneymen were urging him to rethink his strategy, shake up his staff, go negative. You’d better get here, Pritzker told Obama. And fast.
Obama made an unscheduled appearance that Sunday night and called for a show of hands from his finance committee. "Can I see how many people in this room I told that this was going to be easy?" he asked. "If anybody signed up thinking it was going to be easy, then I didn’t make myself clear." A win in Iowa, Obama promised, would give him the momentum he needed to win across the map — but his backers wouldn’t see much evidence of progress before then. "We’re up against the most formidable team in 25 years," he said. "But we’ve got a plan, and we’ve got to have faith in it."
I'm only going to include a few of Al's high-level points, because I think Al's writeup should be mandatory reading here at Daily Kos:
There are two other breakthroughs that have just come to maturity in the United States that were not inevitable, that required a perfect storm of factors - and the right catalyst or leader at the right time - in confluence.
The first is that the Obama campaign is the first mass multi-racial collaboration in the United States since the Southern Civil Rights movement.
For many of the millions that volunteered, donated and attended campaign events, this was the first time they worked hand in hand with people that did not look like them.
I experienced this firsthand many times while working on this campaign - from volunteer work I did in Iowa to work here in California. Not only did people look different, but they were ideologically different as well. (The Camp Obama I attended, by a rough hand count, 50% solid Democrats, 20% "independents", 15% Republicans, and 15% Greens. It's been a long time since we've seen a coalition like that.)
The second breakthrough is that a critical mass of progressive Americans are learning political discipline again: the disciplines that had been carried like rare seeds through a decades-long desert by the few and the proud that had continued the study and practice of community organizing.
We should see the results of passing the torch to a new generation of community organizers later this summer when the Obama fellows program comes to fruition.
The "no drama" point is paramount. The self-indulgence created in a society that has been market-niched into 280 million "countries of one" is perhaps the highest obstacle to change in the United States. Individuals have been taught that we are, each of us, nation-states that have territory, customs and immigration agents, and so much of life is wasted on stamping the visas or not of those that are seen as entering or infringing upon those micro-territories.
Enough from me: go read Al's writeup at The Field.