US:Barack's grassroots campaign helped to wrest power from the party's old guard, writes Denis Staunton
LAST NOVEMBER, when Barack Obama was trailing Hillary Clinton by 23 points in national polls, he visited Fairfield, a town of 5,000 people in southwest Iowa. Neither Clinton nor most of the other Democratic candidates had visited Fairfield, but Obama was already a familiar figure with an established organisation in the town.
"It's great to be back," he said, as he told supporters how they could get involved in his campaign and prepare for the caucuses two months later.
Obama's extraordinary political appeal had been evident throughout 2007 as he attracted vast crowds throughout the country, but it was in Iowa that he first showed the organisational muscle that played an equally important role in securing the nomination.
He had more offices and more paid staff in the state than any other candidate and volunteers not only recruited supporters, they held regular caucus rehearsals to make sure that everyone knew how to participate. Potential supporters received regular e-mail updates and on caucus day, they got a personalised text message telling them where and when to caucus.
All this was possible because of Obama's prodigious fundraising, most of it on the internet from small donors who could be tapped again and again for further contributions. By contrast, Clinton relied heavily on a relatively small number of big donors, many of whom had already given the permitted maximum of $2,300 within the first few months of 2007.
Clinton was alarmed by Obama's fundraising success, but her campaign downplayed the threat he posed to what they saw as her inevitable nomination, persuading themselves that his young supporters would fail to turn out to vote.
On the night before the Iowa caucuses, I stood with a group of Clinton's most senior supporters as they discussed the jobs they were looking forward to in the next Clinton White House. One was interested in a foreign policy role - "I don't want an embassy," she said - and another was expecting a cabinet post.
When Obama swept to victory in Iowa, leaving Clinton in third place behind John Edwards, it was clear that she had made a serious strategic mistake in running as the candidate of experience in a year when two out of three Democrats wanted change. Clinton rushed to retool her message, shuffling staff and showing a softer side of her personality in time to clinch an upset victory in New Hampshire.
The shock of defeat in Iowa had unsettled Clinton's campaign, however, and triggered a series of red-faced outbursts from her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who angered many African-Americans with dismissive comments about Obama.
Obama's victory in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, persuaded black voters, half of whom had until then supported Clinton, that the Illinois senator had a real chance of winning the nomination and they gave him a massive victory in South Carolina later in January.
Clinton, who had planned for a short campaign that would end on Super Tuesday in early February, ran out of money in January and had to give her campaign a personal loan to remain competitive.
With limited resources, she effectively abandoned the states that held caucuses rather than primaries, a decision that almost certainly cost her the nomination.
Although Clinton did better than expected in big primary states like California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, Obama won caucus states by big margins, allowing him to build a delegate lead that Clinton was unable to erode in the final months of the campaign.
Before Tuesday's primaries and the last-minute flood of superdelegate endorsements that clinched the nomination for Obama, he had a 157 delegate vote lead over Clinton. In the 14 states that picked some or all of their delegates through caucus systems this year, Obama won 400 delegates to Clinton's 193, a 207 delegate advantage.
After 11 successive victories in February, Obama's team believed that the nominating contest had been decided, but Clinton was not ready to give up and she roared back into contention in March with a win in Ohio and a split decision in Texas.
Outspent by Obama and written off by many commentators, Clinton won another big victory in Pennsylvania as her rival offended some small-town voters by saying that they were bitter about economic adversity and clung to guns and religion. Obama faced further controversy over his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose old statements about race and US foreign policy were replayed repeatedly on cable news.
Throughout the ups and downs of the campaign, Obama's message remained unchanged and his team of trusted advisers exuded calm, in sharp contrast to Clinton's fractious kitchen cabinet, whose antagonisms frequently became public.
A bigger than expected win in North Carolina returned the momentum to Obama and big wins for Clinton in West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico and South Dakota were not enough to change the game.
Obama's losses in Appalachian and rust-belt states exposed weaknesses in his candidacy, notably among white voters without a college degree.
In West Virginia and Kentucky, one out of five voters admitted that race was a factor in their decision, but others complained that Obama was out of touch with their concerns.
Clinton fought hard in recent weeks to persuade superdelegates that she would be the strongest candidate to face Republican John McCain in November, but it was too late. Perhaps the clearest sign of the shift in power within the party came last Saturday when a committee of Democratic bigwigs, many of whom had long been her close allies, rejected Clinton's demands over the seating of delegates from disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan.
As one former loyalist after another spoke out against her proposal, the public saw a party that had been in the grip of the Clintons since 1992 slipping irretrievably into the hands of a young, black, first-term senator from Illinois.