How the Community Organizer Won Florida

Some of us made fun of Barack Obama for being a community organizer - or rather, for having that on his resume for President. Truth be told, it may be that his community organizing skills were the PERFECT skills to run a successful campaign for the highest national office in the land.

The Miami Herald just published an inside story to how Obama won Florida. In the last four months of the general election campaign, Obama's campaign registered 200,000 new voters in Florida, opened 50 state field offices, recruited 600,000 volunteers and allocated $40 million to fight John McCain. WOW. Did they say 600,000 volunteers? Just in Florida?

Obama's Florida strategy was thorough and simple: ask every supporter to help, give every volunteer a job, register every eligible voter, get ''sporadic'' voters to the polls, and bring the campaign to every pocket of the state. Conservatives: this is what we must do beginning now.

Obama's campaign did it by dividing the state into five regions, or ''pods,'' each with its own staff and message geared to regional concerns. It harnessed social networking on the Internet and cell phones to allow grassroots organizers set up their own voter registration drives, home-grown phone banks and text messaging chains.

Florida represents a convergence of the national campaign's community-organizer approach and Steve Schale's (Obama's state director) view of the state, shaped by two years as political director for House Democrats in which he helped reverse the party's decline by wresting nine legislative seats from Republican control.

A lesson learned for conservatives here in Florida and across the nation. Acquire skills by getting yourself involved in and organizing in your own community. And then build relationships with those on the ground and invest technologies, skills, and creative freedom to each regional and community campaign organizer on the ground. The community organizer learned his skills long ago in the streets of Chicago. It ultimately helped him win a national campaign for the highest office in the land.