In the wake of Senator Obama's historic victory it may well be worth noting the single deciding factor in the widely acknowledged skill with which his campaign was conducted:

...a critical mass of progressive Americans are learning political discipline again: the disciplines that had been carried like rare seeds through a decades-long desert by the few and the proud that had continued the study and practice of community organizing.

We are today reading a plethora of columns by pundits and reporters marveling at the discipline of the Obama campaign and its successes. Every single one of those successes can be traced to a single core factor: Barack Obama was one of the few, even in politics, that had carried the community organizer torch all these years. Those principles were infused into every aspect of the campaign. The community had simply become an entire country.

Al Giordano - No More Drama The Field 5 Jun 08

As Al further notes in a link to Karen Tumulty in Time:

When Betsy Myers first met with Obama in his Senate office on Jan. 3, 2007, about two weeks before he announced he was forming an exploratory committee to run for President, Obama laid down three ruling principles for his future chief operating officer: Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama.

Karen Tumulty - How Obama Did It Time 5 Jun 08

This is the legacy of Saul Alinsky and his legendary Rules for Radicals on a national scale.  The patient transmission of these hard-learned lessons in the labour movement and community activist groups for a generation has finally borne fruit in national politics, bursting on the scene with unanticipated success.

And the breakthrough is not just one of national politics, but has already had an unprecedented impact on our national culture of 'individuality' which sadly has largely compartmentalised us into isolated consumers of information, ideology and entertainment, often co-mingled into a pastiche with little usefulness in changing our physical reality.  The result has crippled our solidarity as willing movement-oriented participants in the political process and led to an unwittingly selfish and fractious attitude toward collective action:

The presumption by so many Americans (the international leader in these indulgent personality traits, and this, one of its last export products to the rest of the world) that their precious sense of "individuality" gives them the 24 hour right to use all public forums as personal therapy sessions to vent and inflict their every perceived psychological misery upon others is a big part of what has made serious political movements in the US impossible for so long. Anybody that has attended a political "meeting" at which there was a "decision making process" has seen the tyranny of the individual crash down upon the collective imperative again and again. "Acting out" - without discipline nor regard for the hijacking nature of such behavior - had become considered a sacrament, rather than the sabotage that it was and is.

Al Giordano - No More Drama The Field 5 Jun 08

Well, we have now been given a dramatic lesson in how powerful we can be when these 'bad habits' are unlearned, even for a few short months.  Senator Obama's policies, taken one at a time, are no more radical in detail than those of any of his opponents, some of them even less than theirs, but his over-arching strategy of applying the simple, basic precepts of community organizing in electoral politics has defied the conventional wisdom of the punditry, the political establishment and, yes, the citizenry themselves.  Hang on to your hats, folks, we could end up miles from here.