• The New Yorker , Monday, November 17, 2008 10:45 AM

The morning after the election, I compiled a bunch of stories that analyzed the marketing of Brand Obama and asked readers to submit good ones that I'd missed. Here's a recommendation for a story that that didn't appear until last week, but, overall, it's the best reporting and analysis of Obama's victory that I've seen.

Ryan Lizza shows how the delicate balance between the field operatives led by campaign manager David Plouffe and the marketing operation led by chief strategist David Axelrod was maintained by the candidate's own equilibrium throughout the campaign.

Early in the process, Obama told aides: "I'm in this to win, I want to win, and I think we will win. But I'm also going to emerge intact. I'm going to be Barack Obama and not some parody." We learn this in the last paragraph, but the preceding 7,000 words or so are illustrative of exactly how he managed to stay true to Brand Barack amid tactical twists and turns and internal (as well as external) debate about whether the message of change could carry the day. As we now know, it did.

"Not only was it the answer for an electorate exhausted with Bush," Lizza writes, "it turned Obama's vulnerabilities into assets."

Read the whole story at The New Yorker »