Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han analyze how Obama for America transformed political organizing by applying principles of community organizing to electoral campaigns at unprecedented scale. The 2008 campaign recruited, trained, and managed over two million volunteers through methods that differed fundamentally from traditional field operations. Rather than treating volunteers as interchangeable labor for predetermined tasks, the campaign invested in developing their capacities as leaders who could make independent decisions and build their own teams. McKenna and Han, political scientists who study civic engagement, show how this approach generated both electoral success and genuine democratic participation. They trace the campaign's organizational structure, its training programs, and the culture it created among staff and volunteers. The book examines what happened to these innovations after the election, when attempts to translate campaign organizing into governing faced institutional resistance. It analyzes how the approach influenced subsequent campaigns and what it reveals about possibilities for engaging citizens in democracy beyond voting. The authors draw on extensive interviews and observations to reconstruct how the campaign actually worked, distinguishing between its rhetoric and its reality. The book provides a model for understanding how organizations can develop the distributed leadership necessary for sustained civic engagement.