Thanks to DU, I've just sent a motivational email to my local Obama supporter network.

I sent it to them to share with them all of the good information and perspective I get from DU and to get ourselves pumped up for action. Our primary isn't until May 6. The Obama campaign is expecting to win Indiana and so we have work to do!

Monroe County Indiana Obama supporters arise! We've got work to do!

If you've only heard the corporate media spin on the results of the March 4 races you might feel discouraged. Here are the Top 5 reasons why you should not feel discouraged:

1. Senator Obama won more delegates from Texas than Senator Clinton: Obama =100 & Clinton = 93

2. Senator Obama successfully defended the delegate lead he had before the March 4 races: Today Obama has 156 more pledged delegates than Clinton. On March 3 he had 160 more; so Clinton reduced his lead by only 4 delegates on March 4.

3. The Obama campaign expected to lose Ohio and Texas - they've taken that into account in their long-term strategy. Learn more about this from Tim Russert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAPkoqW-yWo

4. We don't have long to wait until the next primaries -- Wyoming is Saturday and Mississippi is next Tuesday. Senator Obama is heavily favored to win both races. After he wins those states, then he will have won 29 states to Clinton's 14 -- nearly a 2:1 winning margin.

5. We have to get moving in earnest now -- Indiana really matters for the first time in a long, long, long time. The Obama campaign is expecting to win Indiana and we've got to make sure that happens! Again, the video of Tim Russert on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAPkoqW-yWo


Please keep an eye on your email for a message from Pam about the next meeting of Bloomington/Monroe County for Obama

-and-

Enjoy the following article about how the Obama campaign depends on us:


The Machinery of Hope: Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are run.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/19106326

The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo" — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be micromanaged by Ukman or anyone else from the campaign. They'll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. <snip>

This scene in the rec center is being repeated in neighborhood coffee shops, high school cafeterias and public libraries across Texas. Over the course of the three-day weekend, the Obama campaign trained 4,000 precinct captains in more than twenty communities, from El Paso to Corpus Christi. This is the same grass-roots effort that has trounced the Clinton campaign — a classic top-down operation run by high-paid consultants — in ten straight contests by an average of more than thirty points. It has evolved into the mother of all get-out-the-vote campaigns, one that has enabled Obama to collect more votes in Virginia and Wisconsin than all of the GOP candidates combined. <snip>

The Obama campaign has actually worked to tamp down media coverage of its technological advances in organizing, avoiding anything that would cast the candidate as "the next Howard Dean." In Democratic political circles, Dean's short-lived campaign still carries heavy baggage: Howard Dean was the Internet. Howard Dean lost.

"They've been guarded," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank that promotes technology in politics. "It's been beautiful to watch them blending these new tools into the old-fashioned shoe-leather, door-knocking politics. But they don't talk about it. People like myself have to piece it together from its outer effects."

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/19106326