At TIME magazine, Karen Tumulty has a piece titled “How Obama Did It,” which adds a few nuggets to the tale of the Obama organization (which the Washington Post this week suggested was untold, though pw regulars know better).

The first nugget is one of Obama’s seemingly unlikely inspirations:

When Betsy Myers first met with Obama in his Senate office on Jan. 3, 2007, about two weeks before he announced he was forming an exploratory committee to run for President, Obama laid down three ruling principles for his future chief operating officer: Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama. Myers was struck by how closely Obama had studied the two campaigns of George W. Bush. “He said he wanted to run our campaign like a business,” says Myers. And in a good business, the customer is king. Early on, before it had the resources to do much else, the campaign outsourced a “customer-service center” so that anyone who called, at any hour of the day or night, would find a human voice on the other end of the line.

The second nugget is that even the Obama campaign was surprised at the degree to which the Internet aided their organizational efforts.

The third nugget explains what I got wrong in one of my very first posts on organization as it related to the Iowa caucuses.  I wrote:

Organization can be decisive in Iowa.  Fund’s own passing comments about tiny turnout in rural precincts demonstrate the power of — as Woody Allen would say — just showing up.

This is true in both parties, so people seeking to make sense of the Iowa caucuses would do better to focus less on polls and more on stories about organization.

For example, the Boston Globe covers the competing union efforts for Clinton and Edwards (and the latter’s  “99-county strategy”).  Also note that story claims that Obama’s campaign is considered the best-organized, especially at the ground level.  But it does so while talking about thousands of Iowa college and high school students.  I suppose that might be true, but recall that Howard Dean relied on zealous students in 2004 to ill effect.  Unions on the other hand, know a bit more than high school and college students about organization.

Tumulty reveals that the Obama campaign had learned from the Dean example, but struggled to execute on that lesson:

“Mission No. 1 was finishing ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa,” recalls Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. “If we hadn’t done that, it would have been hard to stop her.”

But counting on new voters had proved disastrous for Dean in 2004. The Obama campaign knew that it would have to build a network of Iowans rather than supporters brought in from other parts of the country, says Plouffe, but “we didn’t have to accept the electorate as it is.” At bottom, Obama built a new party in 2008. It was difficult. Not until the morning of the caucuses did the campaign reach its goal of 97,000 Iowans pledged to support Obama that it thought it would need to win. Then came the real question: Would these people show up?

Show up they did, shattering turnout records. Obama prevailed with a surprising eight-point margin over Edwards, who came in second. Obama counts Iowa as his biggest victory, the one that foreshadowed the rest.

The thread connecting these nuggets is the importance of personal peer contact in GOTV efforts — a focus of Obama’s social networking efforts, picked up from the GOP’s earlier “72-hour projects.”

Tumulty also covers how  used community organizers to assemble volunteers, particularly in caucus states, with an eye to winning cheap delegates.  That may be news to TIME readers, but not to pw readers visiting on January 10 and 23.

There are some parts of the Tumulty piece that suggest potential areas of weakness for Obama in a general election campaign, particularly his reliance on the not-always-reliable youth vote.  But reading post-victory pieces like this, I am always struck by the degree to which they tend to not reveal any secrets.  Put another way, my guest-posts here on organization have been the product of keeping an eye open for the relatively small universe of traditional media stories run about Obama’s organizational efforts — and organizational efforts more generally (e.g., a January 23 post on cheap delegates for the GOP) — that ran at the time (sometimes in local media available via the Internet).  The story of the Obama organization could have been told more widely in real-time, but the establishment media remains locked in the same herd mentality it complains about after each election.