Robert Knoll.

The great teacher in my life.

His classroom was part theater, with Knoll roaming the stage and every eye following. He engaged students directly and by name, invited individual exchanges, conducted a symphony.

College classes aren’t often described as exhilarating, but his were. He excited interest in writing, brought Shakespeare to life, challenged students to search, grow and excel.

He set the bar high.

In his classroom, you could sense, feel, almost hear or touch the magic of learning.

With a broad smile and a gleam in his eye, Knoll probed and pushed and encouraged.

“The trick is to prime the pump,” he once told me.

As a newspaper writer, I returned to his classroom during the final week of his Shakespeare course before he retired and was dazzled again by the teacher who challenged me in my undergraduate days.

“Power is the dirty little secret in each of us….in each of us,” he said as they discussed “The Tempest.”

Walking directly up to individual students, he pulled them into the conversation.

“You don’t mind being picked on, do you?” he asked one.

“Mr. Oliver,” he asked another with that gleam in his eye. “Why do you smile?”

Robert Knoll died last week.

But the great teacher in your life will never be gone.

Eight days before the inauguration, let’s wrap up the story of how Barack Obama put a crack in Nebraska’s Republican stronghold.

When John Berge was chosen to lead the effort, he was tasked with a single goal: Compete solely for the 2nd Congressional District electoral vote.

That would be the battlefield.

Douglas County and portions of Sarpy County.

“Very small geographically,” Berge says on his cell phone from Scottsbluff.

“Diverse not only ethnically, but in terms of party registration and economically.”

This was primarily a battle for Omaha.

And this would be a ground game.

“The magic of the campaign was we had the ability because of the smallness of the district to divide out portions into regions for field organizers and organize by legislative districts,” Berge says.

Seven of the 10 field organizers were Nebraskans.

And they recruited a volunteer infantry.

That army “put a neighborhood face on the campaign,” Berge says.

The order went out: “Do not be afraid to, and in fact you should, approach people outside their comfort zone. Reach out to a wide swath of individuals on their turf.”

The Obama campaign recognized it would need “a pretty significant percentage of Republicans and a majority of independents” to win the district, Berge says.

The intensive ground game was powered by “a very, very sophisticated use of technology and data,” Berge says.

“In my first campaign with Bob Kerrey in 1994, we used index cards,” he says. “Now, we were able to target voters in a way I didn’t even know was possible.”

It’s the new world of electronic wizardry that now is employed by both political parties in Nebraska. It was perfected in the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary campaign mounted for Dave Heineman by Carlos Castillo and again by last year’s Obama campaign.

The data, including neighborhood characteristics, jobs, memberships and other information, created a huge “persuadable voter pile,” Berge says.

The campaign reached out to those people “early and often,” he says.

Suddenly, he says, “people were talking to people on their doorsteps about a presidential campaign for the first time in 40 years” in Nebraska.

On the first weekend Berge was in Omaha, a volunteer brigade knocked on 300 doors.

Before it was over, 15,000 people were being contacted either by phone or at their doorstep every couple of days, he says.

“We did it pretty much on the cheap,” Berge says. There was no budget for direct mail or paid calls.

Chicago handled the expensive TV ad buys.

“But by the time we were on the ground, I don’t know that the ad buys did either candidate a great service,” Berge says.

In the end, he says, the campaign probably made between 300,000 and 400,000 contacts, many of them multiple visits with individual voters.

The volunteer army grew to 2,300 or more.

Obama won the district by 3,370 votes, overwhelming the dependably Republican vote in Sarpy County by building an insurmountable 10,519-vote margin doorstep by doorstep in Douglas County.

And through unprecedented early voting.

Estimates indicate Obama won more than 60 percent of the independent voters and about 6 or 7 percent of the Republican vote, Berge says.

And a little state history was made.

Hey, Republicans say, we won the 2008 election in Nebraska, but the media spotlight keeps shining on that Obama electoral vote.

The GOP captured an open Senate seat.

Lee Terry withstood the Obama surge in Omaha and was re-elected to the House.

Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith were re-elected.

John McCain won the state.

Good point.

Lots of media attention has focused on the Obama vote because of its historic significance in a state where Republicans dominate, but the GOP had another big year.

Here’s some detail about the Nebraska Republican Party’s role:

* 100,000 mailings supporting Terry as the party stepped in to help make up for the lack of an active McCain campaign in Nebraska.

* 60 mailings in legislative district races.

* $400,000 in direct expenditures on behalf of Republican candidates, resulting in a $70,000 debt at the end of the election cycle.

Colby Coash’s legislative victory over Dan Marvin by a whisker in Lincoln probably ranks as the biggest upset.

Republican polling showed Coash down by 5.8 points a month before the election and still down 3.9 points on Oct. 29, just six days before the election.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or at dwalton@journalstar.com.