Updated

"We're in it to win it," Herman Cain's chief of staff told the campaign's Iowa operation on Thursday.

Mark Block dropped by the Iowa headquarters around noon to talk strategy: getting events set up for the candidate in December, moving resources to keep the campaign going forward. Block chatted with the team of four paid staffers for around three hours.

Block's "unequivocal message," Iowa communications director Lisa Lockwood told Fox News, was that the Cain train is still moving "full steam ahead."

"We have a whole list of potential surrogates here on his behalf as well," said Lockwood, who said the campaign currently has 899 precinct captains.

"Hoping to hit 999 by end of week!" she said.

A new television ad will start airing in Iowa statewide Friday, entitled "Time to Put America Back to Work." In an email to supporters touting the ad, the campaign emphasized Cain's ability to create jobs and, in a cursory gesture towards Ginger White's allegations of infidelity, said "It's no secret that the Democrat Party and their surrogates in the mainstream media are out to derail Herman Cain's candidacy, and the only way for them to succeed is to destroy him personally."

And so, the Cain train isn't showing signs of derailing, at least not from the perspective of the staff. On Tuesday night, a shipment arrived at the Herman Cain headquarters in Des Moines, which prompted Michele Bachmann's campaign staff -- located across the parking lot -- to tweet that there were moving vans there.

When reporters arrived at the Cain office, Lockwood said, it was "poetic justice to say that it was a delivery of signs."

Three thousand signs, she added, and a whole bunch of volunteers to help assemble them. Bachmann's Iowa campaign chairman Kent Sorenson has since deleted the tweet.