The Wall Street Journal-20080204-Campaign -08- Obama Campaigns for Delegates in Smaller States- Strategy Could Be Risky For National Contest- 13-000 Rally in Boise

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Campaign '08: Obama Campaigns for Delegates in Smaller States; Strategy Could Be Risky For National Contest; 13,000 Rally in Boise

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The campaign crazy quilt that makes up presidential candidate Barack Obama's 10-day sprint leading up to tomorrow's Super Tuesday contest includes some of the tiniest states at stake in the election. It is something the senator from Illinois acknowledges from time to time.

"So they told me there weren't any Democrats in Idaho," Mr. Obama said at a weekend rally in Boise, which drew about 13,000 people. "That's what they told me. But I didn't believe them."

Perhaps he should. Idaho offers up a paltry 23 delegates in tomorrow's nominating tilt, while four states -- California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey -- make up 60% of the nearly 1,700 delegates on offer. With time running short, why would Mr. Obama be campaigning in Idaho?

The answer is linked to the campaign's recurring strategy of combining intense ground organizing efforts with spirited rallies and pointed television advertising. While that gambit paid off in early states, it is a risky strategy for what will essentially be a national political contest.

To be sure, Mr. Obama and his opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, have overlapped a lot in the past week. Yesterday found them both in Missouri, whose 88 delegates are subject to fierce contention. But by tomorrow's voting, Mrs. Clinton will have staged several events in California, for example, where 441 delegates are on the line, and Mr. Obama has held only a single, relatively small event in the past 10 days.

Over that stretch, Mrs. Clinton will have visited 11 states to Mr. Obama's 15, but many of those 15 will offer Mr. Obama some of the lowest delegate counts in the union.

If he sticks to his schedule, by tomorrow Mr. Obama will have hit Delaware, which has 23 delegates, staged two rallies in 38-delegate New Mexico and spent a precious afternoon courting voters in Kansas, which will send 40 delegates to the nominating convention. Meantime, he will have made one stop in delegate-rich New Jersey and will have bypassed New York, Mrs. Clinton's home state, where 280 delegates are in play.

At the organizing level, Mr. Obama's ground game in many respects mirrors his hustings tour. He has a campaign office in Alaska, holder of 18 delegates. He has seven offices open in Colorado and five in the sparsely populated state of Idaho.

What the three states have in common: They are among the seven that will be holding caucus contests tomorrow, which are in general lightly attended by voters and often won by the best-organized campaigns. Officials with the Obama camp believe that the Boise rally, which drew about three times as many participants as took part in the 2004 caucus, could be enough to give the Illinois senator a landslide victory.

"When we put staff in six caucus states really early, a lot of people thought we were crazy to be organizing in places like Alaska and South Dakota and Idaho," said Steve Hildebrand, Mr. Obama's chief ground organizer and the man generally credited with engineering the campaign's most-stunning landslide victory to date, in South Carolina.

Though South Carolina wasn't a caucus state, it is a machine state where races are generally decided through endorsements -- most of which went to Mrs. Clinton. Instead, Mr. Hildebrand spearheaded an intense bottom-up campaign that relied heavily on volunteers and did an end run around the state's political establishment.

The no-delegate-left-behind strategy carries a more subtle advantage as well: Many of the smaller states Mr. Obama is concentrating on are also among the union's most conservative. Idaho, for instance, hasn't elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than a decade. And though tomorrow's nominating contest pits Democrat against Democrat, Mr. Hildebrand says local leaders "would rather see" Mr. Obama heading the ticket than the former first lady.

In a Super Tuesday contest where a simple TV blitz will cost tens of millions of dollars, such organizing techniques can tax any campaign. But Mr. Obama, who raised $32 million in unrestricted primary money from 177,000 mostly low-roller donors, may well be the most financially comfortable candidate in the field. He is lavishing money on the Super Tuesday contest, purchasing advertising time in every Super Tuesday state, his campaign said.

Getting a proportionally higher share of that advertising money are states where former third-running presidential candidate John Edwards was doing well. Mr. Edwards, whose national support hovered between 10% and 15% of the electorate, bowed out last week. "We were up with ads the next day in Oklahoma," Mr. Hildebrand said.

Oklahoma was the only state where polling put Mr. Edwards in solid second place. That polling gives Mrs. Clinton an intimidating edge but only if she manages to keep the Edwards vote from going to Mr. Obama.

Other states where Mr. Edwards had healthy pockets of support: Minnesota and Idaho -- and Mr. Obama gave speeches in both over the weekend, mentioning and paying homage to Mr. Edwards.

Mrs. Clinton retains a commanding, if somewhat diminished, poll lead in several states other than Oklahoma.

Despite its tremendous cash-raising ability and sprawling organization, the Obama campaign portrays itself as the underdog operation.

"She's much better known, and I'm still being introduced to a lot of casual voters in the other states," Mr. Obama said. "We're scrappy, though."