On one side were the first names of five voters and their phone numbers. The other side had a script to read.
Before Obama set foot on the stage, his staffer emceeing the event asked for help from the audience. Would everyone with a cell phone please call the five numbers on their list now and read the script urging people to vote for Obama? Many people dutifully fished out their cell phones from their pockets and purses and started dialing.
Long lines formed in Bozeman late the previous week to get free tickets to hear Obama. But a shorter separate line was available to people who registered to vote at the nearby courthouse, cast their ballots and sported “I voted” stickers.
A Great Falls lawyer made the maximum primary election donation of $2,300 to Obama. Later, an Indiana lawyer he didn't know called to urge him to up the ante for the general election.
He told of a Missoula lawyer and major Democratic donor volunteering to host a fundraising party for Obama and invite major contributors. No, the Missoula attorney was told, that's not how we raise money. The Obama campaign raises the money on the Internet, from donors small and large.
A Helena woman received a call recently from a bone-marrow transplant doctor in Arizona she didn't know on Obama's behalf. She told him she backs Clinton, in part because she prefers her health-care proposal to Obama's. They talked national health-care policy for 15 minutes.
Around the state, people talk, or in some cases, groan about receiving call after call from Obama volunteers urging them to vote for the Illinois senator. There's nothing new about these calls, except perhaps the sheer volume.
Stories like these are reverberating around Montana and the nation.
Rolling Stone magazine, in a March 20 article called “The Machinery of Hope,” described how Obama's campaign had transformed grass-roots activism. The article quoted Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN.
“They've married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations,” Rosenberg was quoted as saying. “We've never seen anything like this before in American political history.”
In Montana, Obama's opponent, Hillary Clinton, has been running a more conventional, traditional campaign. She has racked up the endorsements of some leading Montana Democrats, including former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams and his wife, state Senate Majority Leader Carol Williams, of Missoula.
Clinton has spoken in multiple Montana cities, just as Obama has.
Her husband, former President Clinton, will have spoken in Montana more than a dozen times by the time the Montana primary concludes. Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, appeared in Billings.
Yet if a recent poll is any indication, Obama appears to have a leg up here. The Lee Newspapers poll, taken May 19-21, showed him leading Clinton 52 percent to
35 percent, with 13 percent undecided. Even the pollster said he expected the race to tighten.
Obama's big national advantage in fundraising has enabled him to run television ads in Montana throughout most of May. Clinton's first TV ad went up last week.
Obama has opened 14 offices across the state and has more than 50 paid campaign workers here.
The Obama campaign is counting on thousands of supporters to make get-out-the-vote phone calls and door-to-door canvasses to Montanans this weekend.
“We're concentrating on waging an aggressive grass-roots campaign here and winning June 5,” said Matt Chandler, Obama's spokesman in Montana. “Senator Clinton has been working hard here. We frankly expect this to be a close race.”
Over on the Clinton side, the Montana campaign also has thousands of volunteers and an ever-increasing number of paid staff, with some moving here as soon as another state's primary is over, spokeswoman Kate Downen said.
With offices in the major cities, the campaign is spending the final few days with staff and volunteers knocking on doors, working at phone banks to tell undecided voters why Clinton is the best choice and arranging for rides to take Clinton supporters to the polls.
Former President Clinton is returning to Montana for speeches Sunday in Stevensville, Anaconda, Great Falls and Helena. He always draws big crowds and “really has always been a good boost” for his wife's campaign, she said.
“I think we're feeling really good,” Downen said. “Our field staff is working very hard. We've got a lot of people really excited and pumped up.”
Tuesday's election will be a good test of the new versus the old campaign methods.
Charles S. Johnson is chief of the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in Helena. He can be reached at (800) 525-4920, (406) 443-4920 or chuck.johnson@lee.net.
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