The Winning Combination: Passion Plus Efficiency

Barack Obama triumphed because he managed to infuse his campaign with that rarest of combinations, writes Karen Tumulty in Time—"the energy of an insurgency and the efficiency of a corporation." His camp also has been remarkably free of drama and unshakable from its core message of change. And it didn't hurt that it rewrote the book on how to use the Internet as a campaign tool.

"What I'd felt was that we could try some things in a different way and build an organization that reflected my personality and what I thought the country was looking for. We didn't have to unlearn a bunch of bad habits," Obama says in an interview. “Because I was not favored,” he adds, “that meant that the people who signed up for this campaign really believed in what the campaign was about.” (More Barack Obama stories.)