Promoted by Steven D (edited to shorten title)

As the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Senator Obama spoke to his campaign staff in Chicago on Friday and …he has put it on the net.

Obama told his HQ staff:

“It wasn’t because of the candidate, it was because of you…a great gift you’ve given to me.”

Watch it:

Ben Smith, Politico observes Why he won and she lost

Mark Penn takes the blame-laying to the op-ed page of the Times, saying that the real problem was the money — that is to say, its management. Though it’s not mentioned in the piece, Penn has told people that he blames his internal rival, Harold Ickes, and Patti Solis Doyle and Mike Henry for that spending, which left the campaign broke after Iowa.

Meanwhile, Harris and Halperin make a key point we all probably should have spent more time thinking about last year: The big shift here was the black vote moving from the Clintons to the insurgent.

But while there are both organizational and demographic explanations — there’s never one cause — for Hillary’s defeat, as the story gets retold over the months and years I suspect it’ll begin to fit bigger narratives: Race and gender, generations, and change. Few are going to remember that Hillary should have contested the caucus states.

Over at JJP I found this post instructive

By the way, take some time to read the TNR piece The Agitator link provided

How Obama Won: That $10,000/year job pays dividends.

I have listened to the likes of Pat Buchanan sneer as they call Barack Obama a ‘ Community Organizer’.

Well, that ‘Community Organizer’ just used his skills learned there, and in the trenches of Chicago Politics to defeat the most powerful Democratic Party Political Machine in 25 years.

As a reader at JJP stated:

Barack Obama did what the ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ couldn’t do: He beat the Clintons.

And, he learned the foundation of how to do it in the Projects on the South Side of Chicago. Obama learned, through that job, the skill of community organizing. How, when faced with an entity more powerful, that one small voice maybe can’t make a difference, but joining together hundreds , then thousands of small voices brings a loud chorus that can’t be ignored.

When I went to Camp Obama, we were instructed by one of the men who had taught Obama all those years ago, and this guy was a pistol. He was so on point, and made me sit back and think about what Obama was really trying to do. He was training Community Organizers to go back to their homes and find others to come to the Obama Campaign.

It was definitely bottom-up organizing,, and this is how Obama was able to win. One of the articles that we were requested to read at Camp Obama was The New Republic one on Obama being influenced by Saul Alinsky. If you’ve not read the article, you should, because I thought it was very instructive, but also plays into the foundation of what Obama did.

In order to beat those who have ‘The Establishment’ on their side, you have to create your own ‘Establishment’. Barack Obama had to create his own ‘ Organization’ in every state throughout the country. And, he did, just that.

Obama also learned from his time in Chicago, that you can win in two ways

  1. Get those who have always voted to come over to your side
  2. Get those who don’t vote to come and vote and make sure you have enough of them to overwhelm Group #1. If you bring a voter to the dance, sure it’s possible they might switch partners later on in the dance, but not before you get the dances out of them that you need.

Where did Obama learn this from? Chicago. Basically, this is the story of how Harold Washington won. There were a group of activists who thought it was time for a Black Mayor of Chicago, and they went to Harold. Harold told them: raise me this amount of money, and register this amount of voters, and then come back to talk to me. When they did, Harold kept his word, ran, and the rest is history.

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On to the Fifty State Strategy -Obama taking campaign to Republican turf –NYTimes/IHT

Obama has moved in recent days to transform his primary organization into a general election machine, hiring staff members, sending organizers into important states and preparing a television advertisement campaign to present his views and his biography to millions of Americans who followed the primaries from a distance.

In one telling example, he is moving to hire Aaron Pickrell, the chief political strategist for Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, who helped steer Clinton to victory in that state’s primary, to run his effort against McCain there.

In another, aides said, Obama has tapped Dan Carroll, an opposition researcher who gained fame digging up information on opponents’ records for Bill Clinton in 1992, to help gather information about McCain. That is the latest evidence that, for all the talk on both sides about a new kind of politics, the general election campaign is likely to be bloody.

Obama’s campaign is considering hiring Patti Solis Doyle, who was Clinton’s campaign manager until a shake-up in February, the first of what Obama’s aides said would be a number of hires from the Clinton campaign.

To counter persistent rumors and mischaracterizations about his background, Obama’s advisers said they would begin using television advertising and speeches in a biographical campaign to present his story on his terms. But they suggested that their research had found that voters were not that well acquainted with McCain, either, signaling that the next few months would see the two campaigns scrambling to define the rival candidate.

[.]Obama’s 17-day economic tour, which starts Monday, comes as polls suggest acute public anxiety about the economy, fueled by a new wave of bad news, including a surge in the unemployment rate and a record rise in the cost of oil.

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As Obama said in his speech to his staff, they’ll be coming at him. He has to get ready.

But already the GOP is denigrating Obama’s achievement.   They’ve made up Obama’s Resume; portraying him, not as a “Community organizer” but, a “street organizer”

What the GOP overlooks is that in politics, being a “street organizer” stands you tall in the winning column.

They’re running scared; the GOP is running away from Bush. Nothing good to show for eight long, long years.

We have a choice:

Change we’ll help create or as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) noted: McCain’s policies would ‘absolutely’ be an extension and enhancement of Bush.