Today 3,600 of those who applied in April and May, and were selected for the organizing fellowships, are setting out for six weeks of full-time campaign work in 17 states. The fellows, many, but not all, students or recent graduates, did not need political experience to apply or to be accepted. Buffy Wicks, the director of the Obama campaign's national volunteer program, said, "The best organizers are people who are passionate about what they're doing."

... Supporters were required to answer essay questions, supply references and go through a telephone interview with campaign staff members.

In return for a promise to give the campaign at least six weeks of their lives, they were promised training in community organizing techniques.

A cover letter from Obama, who spent three years in the 1980s working in impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, spoke of lessons in the "basic organizing principles that this campaign and our movement for change are built on."

In addition to community organizing and campaign basics, fellows were trained in field organizing, messaging and other campaign mechanics. Once in place, many will be housed as guests of local Obama volunteers; all will work with local grassroots activists and campaign staff.

Obama's program is one of several leadership training projects taking place this summer. Some others are: Bus Project's PolitiCorps Summer, Center for Progressive Leadership's New Leaders Fellowship, EMILY's List Campaign Corps, and GreenCorps.

Building the General Election campaign, building the party, building the grassroots activist base, yes, but most importantly, building a future of civic-minded citizens. Obama will always say, "I got my chance on the South Side of Chicago, as a community organizer, and it was the transformative experience of my career."

Some of these fellows will go into careers in politics or government, non-profit organizations or think tanks, for-profit businesses and professions. They will carry the Obama Fellowship experience with them wherever they go in life. And they will remember, just as Sen. Chris Dodd remembers the Peace Corps or Gen. Clark remembers "Ask not what your country can do for you," that they answered the call for change in their country's wrong direction.

On a more pragmatic level, Al Giordano said in May, when the application period had to be extended to accommodate the response:

A project like this is going to force GOP nominee McCain to spend the money he does not yet have in every state, diluting his ability to spend enough in any state. For every volunteer Obama fellow out there, he’ll have to pay a staffer just to keep up. Those funds will diminish his budget for media and other needs, or he’ll simply ... end up forfeiting entire states and their electoral votes to Obama.

The fellowship is a bigger version of Summer 2007's organization-building Camp Obama, a series of multiple-day training sessions for volunteer organizers, with a particular focus on states scheduled to vote on February 5.

We've seen how that turned out.

The 17 Fellowship states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin.