A great read by Andrew Gumbel at Huffington Post who has a very interesting look into how the Obama campaign has been working against convention wisdom to employ canvassing and Internet campaigning in the nations most populous state.

Obama’s grassroots campaigning model, depending heavily on a pumped-up army of passionate volunteer field workers using the Internet both to connect and to organize, has been adopted before - notably, in the recent past, by Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign - but has never paid real dividends, certainly not in a presidential nominating race.

Conventional wisdom has it that even the most energetic field operation can’t net a candidate more than one or two percentage points. Conventional wisdom suggests, too, that the only really meaningful way to campaign in a state as vast and varied as California is to rally the party establishment, as Senator Clinton has done, gun for as many endorsements as possible from public figures and unions, raise money like there’s no tomorrow and bombard the airwaves with paid advertising.

Essentially, the Obama people are waging the battle as though the Golden State were holding 53 separate caucuses, one for each congressional district. “What they are doing is concentrating on the delegate hunt,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the University of Southern California’s School of Planning, Policy and Development. “Sure, it has a chance of succeeding, particularly in rural areas. It worked in Nevada and Iowa. It’s not so much a new model as grabbing the caucus model and grafting it on to not only a primary state, but the biggest primary state there is.”