By STEVE KRASKE

The Kansas City Star 

How much would Barack Obama love to win Missouri?

Let us count the staffers… 148, 149, yes, 150 …

The Democrat’s campaign said Tuesday it is tripling its paid staff — to an unprecedented 150 workers, who will fan out from 30 field offices across the state, from West Plains to Maryville.

“It’s unheard of,” veteran Democratic worker Woody Overton of Kansas City  said  of the effort and expenditure.

“It’s unbelievable.”

“Desperate” is the adjective John McCain’s camp uses.

“When you feel like you have to put that many people in the state to cover it, means you think you’re in trouble and you have to have a surge,” said Jack Jackson, McCain’s Missouri co-chairman.

Recent polls indicate the race in Missouri is close.

McCain’s operation expects to have 12 to 14 full-time workers and 10 offices. The Arizona Republican now has four people on the ground.

The Obama camp said it already has 50.

The Illinois senator’s deep pockets, resulting from millions of small contributors, gives him the chance to organize in ways and places that no Democrat has before, experts say.

Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 Missouri campaign had around 15 offices and 80 full-time workers, who ultimately were dispatched to other states deemed more competitive weeks before Election Day. President Bush had 50 staffers and about the same number of offices as Kerry.

Missouri, a key swing state for a half-century, is part of a strategy in which Obama wants to win all of the states Kerry did, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus bring back some Bush states, such as Missouri and Iowa, into the Democratic fold.

Obama’s recent advertising campaign included Missouri with 10 other swing states important to Obama’s Electoral College map, plus seven others reliably Republican in the past, such as Georgia and North Carolina. Refusing the limits of public financing has freed Obama to expand into Southern states where he is polling close and forcing Republicans to spend resources.

“I think we’ve got a good shot at winning and I want to be greedy,” Obama said last week. “I want to win as many states as possible.”

Pointing to his weaker poll numbers in former Democratic states, such as Michigan, New Jersey and New Hampshire, Republicans argue that Obama’s efforts are hollow.

Neither campaign has begun to organize in Kansas, won by Obama Feb. 5, but which has long backed GOP candidates.

Building grassroots, neighbor-to-neighbor networks can be the most powerful means of advertising, easily surpassing those ubiquitous 30-second TV ads, Obama’s aides say.

“That’s the best message we’re ever going to get,” said Buffy Wicks, Obama’s lead Missouri operative.

“At the end of the day, Missouri will be won or loss in the margins,” Wicks said. “Field is what gets you over the top. It’s these person-to-person contacts that really give you an edge.”

Wicks spent 17 months overseeing Obama operations in 14 Western states and serving as California field director in charge of making fast use of the thousands of volunteers who turned out.

The drawn-out primary struggle with Hillary Clinton is now paying a major dividend, said Missouri’s Sen. Claire McCaskill, an Obama confidante — legions of now-experienced hands.

 “Never before have we had a presidential nominee who’s organized and competed in nearly all 50 states prior to the general election,” she said.

Another potential dividend: Obama plans to keep the campaign infrastructure intact after the election to boost the future prospects of Democrats.

How much stems from Obama’s own past in grass-roots urban organizing?

“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Obama has said.

Today his camp has Facebook and MySpace networking sites. “There’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet,” he said.

“This is like back to the future,” McCaskill said. “This is like going back to the kinds of campaigns run a long time ago — neighbor to neighbor, only with high-tech help.”

Wicks said the fall strategy under way in Missouri was born in post-primary meetings that brought together the best of Obama’s organizers, focusing on what worked and what didn’t.

The dozens of field workers already in Missouri have held more than 130 house parties, registering voters and identifying supporters.

“You can have all the paid people in the world trying to sell a product, but if that product is not what people are looking for, they won’t buy it,” said Lloyd Smith, a longtime GOP campaign strategist in the state.

University of Iowa political scientist Tim Hagle also likened voters to consumers in making decisions — often by word of mouth.

“If your neighbor across street has an Obama sign, you’re more likely to trust that person than someone calling you from an automatic phone bank, a person you don’t know or where they’re from,” he said.