Obama’s ground game strategy in Texas leans heavily upon upon ultra-engaged and quasi-independent volunteers like Ian Davis:

The 29-year-old Austin community organizer has been laboring for months with no guidance at all from Obama headquarters. When Sen. Obama’s team finally arrived, Mr. Davis handed over laundry baskets stuffed with 20,000 handwritten names of potential volunteers, which Mr. Davis had gathered on his own… As the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire approached, Mr. Davis and thousands of other Texans took advantage of a powerful tool available on the Obama campaign’s national Web site, MyBarackObama.com…The idea is to create a virtual national phone bank. Volunteers pick states they want to call. They can place calls from home, from a cellphone in a coffee shop, from anywhere they want. The campaign provides phone scripts tailored for particular states. The Texas script, for example, explains the intricacies of the state’s Byzantine nominating process, which begins with an open primary, followed by an evening caucus. Mr. Davis called it “the Texas two-step,” and now, so does the campaign.

Feb. 29, '08