“When Obama came with his message of change,” says Lyn Haiken, “he certainly ignited my imagination.”

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE — It was anger and hope that drove Lyn Haiken to this place, Rhode Island’s carpeted epicenter of a campaign that changed history.

The Warwick woman, a decade past retirement, is not someone you’d expect to be here. Until a few months ago, she had never attended a political rally. She had never held a campaign sign. And she had certainly never volunteered to call strangers in Montana.

But this fall, Haiken found a second home inside the first-floor offices of 321 South Main St., the Rhode Island headquarters of the Barack Obama campaign.

“If you firmly believed that the country needed a change, you would do it. That’s what everybody who came here believed,” she said late last week, standing in an office that produced 56,000 phone calls on Election Day alone.

The story of Lyn Haiken, a political novice who was both inspired by Obama and frustrated by President Bush, helps explain the success of a first-term senator from Illinois who will be sworn in Jan. 20 as the 44th president of the United States.

She joined an army of between 1,500 and 1,700 volunteers — many of them newcomers to political campaigns — who worked for Obama in a state that was never at risk of moving into the Republican column. The downtown Providence offices became the staging ground for a coordinated campaign led by just three paid employees and 20 interns who touched hundreds of thousands of voters in places such as Iowa, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Hordes of volunteers spent weekends knocking on doors in New Hampshire towns they had never heard of. And they spent hours spreading Obama’s message on personal cell phones when the phone bank ran out of lines.

“It’s typical for volunteers, activists, and enthusiasts to travel from Rhode Island to New Hampshire, and to make calls to voters in states in which the outcome of the election is not a foregone conclusion. We saw Rhode Islanders engage in similar activities in both 2000 and 2004,” said Brown University political science Prof. Jennifer Lawless. “What was unique about 2008 was the volume of these volunteers.”

Haiken cannot say exactly why she devoted two months of her life to a politician she had never met.

The former small business owner had spent the last 10 years enjoying a peaceful retirement in Warwick, having moved to Rhode Island from New Jersey with her husband in the 1990s.

“I’m a thinker. I read a lot... I do things that retired people do: go to the gym; go to lunch; go to museums,” she said. “But when Obama came with his message of change, he certainly ignited my imagination.”

Haiken walked into the Obama headquarters unannounced one day in late August. She asked if they needed help.

They asked if she knew anything about data entry.

“I had never heard those words before,” Haiken recalls with a smile, noting that her computer skills had been limited to the search engine Google.

But she was willing to work. And they put her to work that day.

Haiken started logging information about potential voters collected during the nightly phone bank operation. Her work would be shipped to Obama’s Chicago headquarters to help shape detailed GOTV (get out the vote) strategy.

Almost immediately, she started showing up every day.

Haiken was usually the first volunteer in every morning. She worked through lunch. And she stayed well into the night.

“I was busy. I was energized. I ate when I went home,” she said.

Some days, there wasn’t enough data entry work. She started making phone calls.

Haiken recalled an interesting discussion with a Montana man who said he was in love with Sarah Palin. “There was nothing I could do about that,” she said.

She wasn’t alone on the phones. Dozens of others joined in.

The phone bank regularly ran out of campaign phones (they had more than 60 in the final weeks). That simply meant that people — sprawled across the office floor and on folding plastic chairs — used personal cell phones.

“All walks of life were represented. There were a lot of young people, but a group of plumbers came in. A lot of blue-collar workers came in after work,” said Obama’s Rhode Island director Ray Sullivan, a local legislator and former campaign staffer for U.S. Rep. James Langevin and gubernatorial candidate Myrth York. “You could feel the energy and excitement. It was real. It was a palpable thing in this place.”

Haiken worked weekends as well.

She and her husband regularly started Saturday and Sunday mornings at Hope High School, where volunteers would gather to carpool to New Hampshire. There were on average 150 volunteers each day in the campaign’s final weekends, according to Sullivan.

“I’ve never seen people so motivated, so willing to do anything,” he said. “Our job was to make sure they were used efficiently.”

Indeed, it was the campaign’s ability to put everyone to work that impressed political observers.

“The willingness of volunteers to engage cannot be separated from the Obama campaign’s organization and efficiency,” said Lawless. “If a volunteer could only commit 15 minutes…, for example, then the Obama campaign graciously put that person to work. They’d send phone numbers and ask the person to make calls from home. They’d arrange transportation if a person wanted to help, but couldn’t get to an office. There was no commitment too small and no volunteer to take for granted. This type of operation allowed people to become invested one baby step at a time, which is an excellent way to cultivate a reliable volunteer corps.”

Of course, the Obama campaign enjoyed a major advantage over his opponent: money. Over the course of the Obama campaign, $639 million was raised; McCain raised $360 million.

The advantage allowed Obama to establish an office in an uncontested state such as Rhode Island; McCain’s nearest office was in New Hampshire.

“Obama had a lot more money than McCain in this campaign so he had many more field offices in key battleground states,” said Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

And Obama also used technology to maximize volunteer efforts. The campaign last year hired Chris Hughes, one of the founders of the social networking site Facebook, to help revolutionize the use of Web sites in political campaigns.

The result was a Web site, dubbed “MyBo,” that allowed the campaign to further empower volunteers, according to Sullivan.

MyBo allowed people to recruit other volunteers, print personalized call lists, download talking points, create personal blogs and run their own fundraising operations.

“Obama changed the way volunteers are used in elections. The 2008 campaign will go down in history as our first digital election in the same way 1960 represented the first television election,” West said.

While the Web site allowed Haiken to work from home, she preferred to spend her time in the hectic and excited offices of 321 South Main St. She liked being part of the team.

“I’m the most insignificant person in here,” she said. “There were hundreds of people every day. Different people, all kinds of people, young and old. It’s like the whole world comes in here.”

Haiken spent Thursday afternoon helping a handful of interns clean up. There were documents to be shredded. Dozens of phones were packed into boxes.

She said she enjoyed her first presidential campaign, but that it’s time to turn her attention elsewhere.

“Tomorrow, I’ll start my life again.”

speoples@projo.com