I just got off a conference call with Obama for America campaign manager David Plouffe, who talked with bloggers about his upcoming book, The Audacity to Win.

I had a chance to ask Plouffe about a comment Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, made last week. Mark said, in response to a question about whether "social media" won Obama the election:

It’s interesting because he obviously had a great, what do they call it, online media operations. Some of it social media, some of it just standard techniques. The tremendous benefit particularly early on was through fund-raising.

But it’s very interesting, if you think about it, every one of his major social media successes was proceeded with a major television or media event. His announcement, how it was covered, his 60 Minutes interview, his speeches. And it typically, those big media events, then as I said before, drove people, I think, to an online operation there. It’s like having a million operators waiting.

And I think that this is the one-two punch. And I think people very much forget the one part of the one-two punch, which is why traditional media actually played such a big role in these social media success. And then you know when you hear 500,000 people did something, then the traditional media says ‘hey, 500,000 people did this.’ Then everybody says ‘well, 500,000 people did it, I ought to get in on it.’ The kind of network effect of this echo chamber, and I think he had a very successful online operation but don’t forget how tied to traditional media that I think those successes were.

Plouffe disagrees. He told me that he doesn’t consider Mark Penn "to be an expert in technology or organizing," and that the benefit of technology and organizing early in the campaign was movement building, not fundraising.

We faced huge challenges at the beginning of the campaign. We had virtually no assets, and we were running against the strongest front-runner a party has seen in modern times. The only way we could scale up was online.

Online is how voters came into the campaign initially. They raised money and they did their own initial organizing. For example, in states besides the early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, folks were organizing themselves online while we were focused on winning the first primaries.

Traditional media certainly played a role, Plouffe said, but the Obama campaign made an end-run around the media establishment – even "building our own television station," a reference to Obama’s popularity in the online video medium – all to great effect:

Sure, some people saw Obama’s announcement speech and that made them go to the website. But word of mouth, people emailing speech clips to each other, articles, that’s how the campaign got built. We did lots of rallies in places like Austin and San Diego, and people scratched their heads, because those weren’t the big primary states, but we did it to build our campaign.

The way this got built is our supporters would ask neighbors, friends, colleagues to sign up on our website. The easiest thing we could tell people who didn’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire to do for us was, "Can you find 10 more people to sign up?" And because the primaries eventually went all the way through the country, we needed organizations everywhere. That’s how it got built up.

This is consistent with my personal interpretation of the campaign as well. Organizing effort was spread broadly, not just in places where the tradition media was concentrating, making it impossible for tradition media to have "driven" the campaign, as Penn infers, and also leaving the Obama apparatus in a great position to take advantage of a long primary season and a general election that played out in many battleground states.

Plouffe was very clear: The time and effort spent on organizing, both online and offline, was well spent. It allowed the campaign to build a winning organization that didn’t need outside groups and efforts to put them over the top, something the campaign preferred so they could maintain control. And, Plouffe argues, it has laid the groundwork for the activities Organizing for America is doing.

If traditional media had ruled the 2008 campaign, Clinton may very well have won the election. And health reform would be dead. And we’d never be even contemplating putting some timetables on Afghanistan. But the traditional media doesn’t rule the political landscape anymore.

Obama won through organizing relentlessly in every corner of the country. He built a base, a base he now must be responsive to in order to pass his agenda, govern effectively, and win re-election. And he did it often in spite of, not because of, the tradition media. It is this mindset that holds the key to moving the country forward, if and only if Barack Obama as President, not candidate, buys into it once again, as he did when he was running against the "strongest front-runner in modern times."