The Happening

Here they come. 3,600 volunteers fanned out to 17 states this weekend and will remain there all summer long, registering voters, organizing communities, and preparing the ground for November.

In return for a promise to give the campaign at least six weeks of their lives, they were promised training in community organizing techniques.

A cover letter from Obama, who spent three years in the 1980s working in impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, spoke of lessons in the "basic organizing principles that this campaign and our movement for change are built on."

Obama urged supporters to apply and to "put progressive values to work in the real world."

More than 10,000 people applied, said Obama strategist Jon Carson.

"They didn't have to have campaign experience before," said Buffy Wicks, the director of the campaign's national volunteer program. "The best organizers are people who are passionate about what they're doing. We were looking for folks who had really compelling stories."

A look at the states where these organizing fellows landed this week shows most of the usual suspects, but also Georgia, which clearly is an effort to see how many new voters they can get out of a registration drive. With the demographics in Georgia, you could make that state awful close despite the fact that it's one of the few trending Republican nationally.

We obsess over lines of attack, and mini-scandals, and gotcha moments, but this is where the campaign will be won. The campaign alerts that play out on cable TV are easily seen and easily identified, and it's simple to create a compelling narrative after the election results roll in pointing to one or two moments. But in what remains a closely divided country, if not an evenly divided one, the campaign that outworks the other on the ground is going to be very successful. And Obama's team is absolutely going about this the right way. The organizing fellowships are the greatest innovation he's brought forward so far.