Progress Illinois

Over at The New Republic, Noam Scheiber's piece on Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is worth a read.

In the stretch of primaries following (the first) Super Tuesday, it was clear that the Obama camp was way ahead of the game. As many on-the-ground observers noted, they were simply more prepared than the Clinton folks to organize in a group of states that few thought would come into play.

Apparently, it was all part of Plouffe's plan:

As the primary calendar fell into place, it became clear that February 5 wouldn't much resemble the Super Tuesdays of old. Instead, it would be a de facto national primary that sprawled across two dozen states. The conventional wisdom was that mechanical strength would get you nowhere in such a contest, since you couldn't organize half the country. What would be decisive was local establishment support and name recognition, which Hillary Clinton had in droves.

Plouffe disagreed. Back in April 2007, he'd hired a former Gephardt strategist named Jeff Berman, probably the party's most respected authority on the dark art of delegate math. When Plouffe and Berman sized up the states in play on February 5, they realized they could at least secure a draw, sending the race into a two-week period that strongly favored Obama. The idea was to build a sturdy base by targeting key primaries and relentlessly organizing the caucus states. By fall, Plouffe and his field staff, led by a lieutenant named Jon Carson, were already setting up ground operations in places like Idaho, Kansas, and Colorado. Carson's teams had cased these states for months when the Clintonites finally arrived. In effect, Plouffe wanted to turn the entire campaign into Iowa.