enjoy it while it lasts

In about 2 weeks you're likely to see the HRC train begin to head back to New York, resigned to the life of a U.S. Senator. Not a bad place to be, but not Pennsylvania Avenue. The Clintons will still be a major force to be reckoned with, and they'll have considerable leverage in the party convention and platform, but the days of Clinton(s) being the dominant, Democrat party, force are nearing an end.

I base this on a couple of things. Foremost are the percentages by which she's been losing in the last 11 primaries. The numbers are rising and of late, they have running close to 60 percent Obama versus 40 percent HRC. The party insiders, read super-delegates, take these numbers to heart and the only thing that really matters to them is getting a Dem in the Big House painted White come November.

Secondly, the blogosphere has seen a noticeable shift away from HRC in the last few weeks as more and more folks resign themselves that we will wait again before a woman becomes President in this country. Check out the comments section in any political blog and you can see how the respondents in her favor have been tracking down. Every since the campaigns realized that the blogosphere is just another way to hijack public opinion, candidate trolls have been hammering constantly for word up. McCain supporters launched a SURGE against the NYTimes expose about McCain's cronyism, pounding the paper with over 2400 comments, about 10 times the normal. Conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh, hate the NYTimes even more, and they were quickly able to get the retirees to do some besides listen to vitriolic screeds and play cribbage on-line.

All of this brings us to Obama and why his campaign has done so well. Howard Dean, who may have been the first candidate to effectively use the internet, has nothing on the Obama organization. They have been masterful in a number of different ways.

First to get into an Obama concert, people are meet with volunteers telling them that they need to fill out this form in order to get into the hall. They don't really, but the crush of the crowds tends to make people mad to fill in the forms. And on the form is a request for an email address. They probably get a lot of bogus emails, but they also get a lot of live ones and through those they been able to get about 1 million people to donate to their campaign. Of those, the majority have been small contributions of $100 or less. And that's been adding up as Obama continues to break funding raising numbers every quarter.

Unlike the HRC machine, the Obama campaign has not set on its laurels. It's used those campaign contributions to drive new ways to get the word out, and to use a no-cost grassroots organization to do the work that used to be done by staffers in offices. Examples, setting up the ability of people to make calls from their own home to anyone in the country on behalf of the candidate. Benefits are many. People respond best to phone calls from other folks, not from robo-machines. The callers are busy people, they have lives, they have family, but now they can work for the campaign from home and feel as though they are part of the populism.

Other examples. Why spend a lot of money printing campaign materials that are mostly wasted when you can get volunteers to print them on demand? Then they can hand them to their friends and neighbors and this is how opinions are really changed. The television spots just affirm what you've already heard from someone else.

The campaign has put out approximately 500 YouTube videos and these get spread around at essentially no cost to the candidate. Many young voters don't watch debates, or if they do, not for long, but they will watch a vid. And sometimes those vids go viral, like the will i am piece. This was was done unsolicited by the campaign. Will saw a speech and decided to make a video. A million hits later, you've got landslides in key states. Young folks - and people have been saying this to them for years - can make a difference in an election. Seems like the message is finally getting out.

It remains to be seen if the Obama campaign can carry forth this kind of energy for the many, many more months left in this election cycle. But if they can continue to spread out the work between many people, they'll stand a fighting chance.

Image from The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.