The Obama experiment

By Jeff Zeleny - New York Times News Service

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — Lukas McGowan was sitting in an old barber's chair, a cell phone pressed to his ear, as he contemplated a critical assignment for the closing chapter of the presidential campaign: the ground game.

The most pressing matter inside this field office for Sen. Barack Obama was not the next debate, but getting every possible voter to the polls. As McGowan surveyed an assembly line of activity, he wondered: Have all the spots been filled in the 6 to 8 p.m. shift for walking neighborhood precincts?

"When we identify sporadic voters, we want to go back to their house until they can't stand us anymore," said McGowan, 23, who oversees Virginia's largest Obama operation, in Fairfax County. With a smile, he added, "As long as we're kind and respectful."

If the primary race was an experiment in building the capacity of the Obama organization, the general election will show whether a political campaign has the ability to change the electoral map.

In half a dozen states where polling suggests a toss up, Obama seeks to capitalize on devoted grass-roots enthusiasm and an unprecedented investment of money to push the get-out-the-vote effort to a new level. The Obama campaign hopes to gain that edge in perennial battlegrounds Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The campaign also seeks to use its army of employees and volunteers to shift the electoral map by putting in play Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, where changing demographics and the challenging political environment for Republicans nationwide have given Democrats hope.

The outcome of the next three weeks will help answer whether the organizing principles, backed by Obama's fund-raising advantage over McCain, are made of myth or muscle.

"Are they a mile wide and an inch deep?" asked Trey Walker, the McCain campaign's Mid-Atlantic campaign manager, whose territory includes Virginia. "We'll find out on Election Day."

Obama, whose career in public service began in community organizing in Chicago, dropped in on a training session Friday in Ohio, and even through his encouraging words, he sounded a note of wonder about whether the system will work.

"We've been designing, and we've been engineering, and we've been at the drawing board, and we've been tinkering," Obama said. "Now, it's time to just take it for a drive. Let's see how this baby runs."

The Obama campaign has broken the country into a collection of battleground states, which are dissected into precincts, then into neighborhood teams. (Ohio is divided into 1,231 neighborhoods.) Ideally, each team leader lives just down the block from the doors that need to be knocked on.

In Virginia saw a net gain of more than 300,000 voters from January through Oct. 1, and more are thought to have registered by the deadline last Monday. Voters in Virginia are not allowed to identify their political party, but 76 percent of the new voters are 44 or younger, a figure that even Republicans concede favors Obama.

In Virginia and in other electoral battlegrounds, the McCain campaign and the Republican Party opened more offices than initially planned. But party strategists said elections are not won by the number of office locations, but by a core of voters who cast ballots like clockwork every four years.

"Because the Obama campaign gets college kids to go and stand outside a grocery store and gets anyone who comes up to them registered to vote does not mean they have a good voter-registration program," said Trey Walker, a McCain campaign official. "We go fishing where the fish are."