CAMPAIGN STARTS FROM THE GROUND UP CALIFORNIA: STRATEGY IN STATE USUALLY SEEN ONLY IN LOCAL POLITICS.

Byline: Tony Castro

Staff Writer

With a share of the Democratic presidential front-runner spot and a growing list of key endorsements, the Barack Obama campaign is hitting California hard for its Feb. 5 primary -- throwing hundreds of staffers, thousands of volunteers and millions of dollars at the Golden State to get out the vote.

In the days since Obama's surprise coup in the Iowa caucuses, his California leaders have recruited some 3,000 precinct captains as part of an unprecedented effort to run a statewide campaign with ward-style organizing usually seen only in local politics.

"We're challenging the status quo not only on politics but on how you campaign," said Buffy Wicks, Obama's California field director. "It's not only about challenging the message and the messenger, but on how that message is delivered.

"It's all part of empowering people to the process of taking back their communities."

Experts believe California still will be an uphill struggle for Obama, with Sen. Hillary Clinton keeping a strong hold on the Latino and African- American vote.

But in the San Fernando Valley alone, Obama is running four separate campaigns, each focusing on its congressional district with designated captains in charge of block-walking and phone-banking in individual precincts.

These congressional district leaders and precinct captains include a broad spectrum of volunteers who have been drawn to Obama -- from 63- year-old video producer Peter Rothenberg of Northridge to his 26-year-old daughter, Valerie Rothenberg of Burbank, a costume designer.

"I don't think we really came to appreciate what we've been doing until we saw how the campaign was working in Iowa," said Rothenberg, one of three leaders assigned to oversee the Obama campaign in Congressional District 27.

Setting up shop

The district is represented by Democrat Rep. Brad Sherman and sprawls over almost half the San Fernando Valley.

Additionally, the Obama campaign has assigned five to eight others in each district to separate tasks -- from phone bank coordination to volunteer training -- as well as being captains in dozens of precincts organized for phone calls and door-to-door contacts.

The campaign has even set up a Web site specifically to help precinct captains and coordinate what it calls a "virtual phone bank" -- www.obamaprecinctcaptains.com.

"That's historic, if that's what they're doing," said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles.

"The thinking has always been that California is too big of a state to run a statewide campaign that way."

Wicks said Obama's San Fernando Valley campaign -- divided into separate campaigns in the 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th congressional districts -- is a microcosm of what backers are doing statewide.

"This is a very ambitious field operation, and we're starting to see the fruits of our labor," said Wicks.

"There are tens of thousands of people involved in the Obama campaign, and the precinct-captain program will translate this energy into real organization on the ground."

Wicks is in charge of some 250 statewide organizing teams responsible for reaching into each of California's 53 congressional districts and into thousands of precincts.

All those teams are made up of volunteers and unpaid staff members. According to Wicks, the campaign has only 18 paid staffers in California and only 10 working in field operations -- freeing the Obama campaign to spend its dollars on television commercials and in the other 21 states holding primaries Feb. 5.

According to the campaign, some 120,000 supporters have already signed up for duty -- to log on to the state's voter database and make targeted calls from their homes or cell phones through election day.

No other campaign, Democrat or Republican, is organized at the congressional district and precinct levels to this degree, according to a sampling of other campaigns and political professionals.

And some political veterans even scoff as to whether a California statewide campaign can be successfully run in such a way.

"You have to put a lot of money into professional phone-bank operations," said veteran Republican strategist Allan Hoffenblum.

"Having thousands of volunteers do it sounds good, but unless you have a highly trained army, all you have is a mob."

But Wicks appears to have organized highly disciplined groups of volunteers, training them at intensive, three-day Obama Camps beginning late last summer and continuing with weekend training sessions.

Godfather of organizing

The effort employs organizing tactics developed by the late Saul Alinsky -- and in doing so, borrows a page from Hillary Clinton's longtime hero who was the subject of her honors thesis at Wellesley College.

Alinsky is generally regarded as the godfather of community organizing who developed a new approach to politics, using tactics that allowed ordinary people -- the poor and disenfranchised -- to effectively fight City Hall in his native Chicago and to empower others with a cause, including Cesar Chavez's successful organizing of farmworkers in California.

Obama himself traces his own organizing roots to Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained him in Chicago, where he also spent years teaching workshops on the Alinsky method.

Another reason why the Obama campaign chose this organizing tactic is the Democratic primary vote will be divided up by candidates according to how well they do in each of the 53 congressional districts.

Breakdown of delegates

Up to three to seven delegate votes are up for grabs in each district, for a total of 241 delegate votes directly elected.

An additional 129 statewide at-large delegates will be selected later at a meeting of the 241 congressional district delegates. These delegates are selected based on the statewide vote.

The balance of the state's 440 convention delegates are the so-called "super delegates" -- members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee and a few others specified in the party's rules -- who will represent California as a result of their elected or official party status and are not elected in the primary.

"Super delegates" will officially be "unpledged" to any presidential candidate.

"Our campaign has been designed to create community organizers," said Wicks. "There is a similar campaign infrastructure in other states, but there are two elements in California that have led us here.

"One is the absolutely incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm because of the intense demand of people to get involved. The other is, how do you run a field operation without hiring 300 organizers?"

tony.castro(at)dailynews.com

818-713-3761

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Peter Rothenberg and his daughter Valerie, seen with his wife, Marcy, are among a large cadre of state volunteers working on the Obama campaign.

(2) Barack Obama's supporters gather around a computer to watch New Hampshire primary results Jan. 8 in North Hollywood. His California leaders have recruited some 3,000 precinct captains for his campaign here.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer