The best, most thorough, and most straightforward account of how Obama did it appears, aptly enough, on the website of Reader's Digest, written by my friend and former colleague Carl Cannon.
For a supplementary reading on how my profession disgraced itself this year see Harold Evans (no knee-jerk conservative) in The Guardian.
If the administration would like a blueprint for screwing up the next four years, John Judis has written it for them at the New Republic. The Republican party is destroyed, the Democratic party now owns the country outright, the post-industrial United States is a center-left country. (Can membership of the European Union be far behind?) To remain in power for decades, all liberals need is the nerve to be bold. Judis makes some excellent points. He is right that the Republicans are in even worse trouble than you might think--but I suspect that the surest way to help them out of their hole would be to follow his advice.
"how my profession disgraced itself this year"
how about the past seven to ten years? or is media bias only an evil when it glosses over the faults of a candidate opposite you on the ideological divide? media deficiencies in this time period have been well documented, and mccain himself has benefited for quite some time.
your contempt and bias with regards to people to the left of you (e.g. your "liberals are snooty and think they're better than everyone else" article) undermines your intellectual credibility. i'm not sure you have behaved much better than the fellow journalists you deride with your linkage.