The party of Obama: what are the president's grass roots good for?

• Author: Homans, Charles
• Position: Barack Obama - Cover story

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In David Plouffe's campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, Barack Obama's victory happens the way explosions happen in the more lyrical action movies: there is a moment of silent suspended animation, and then the roar. Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, meets the new president in his suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago, just as Obama gets off the phone with President Bush, who has called to congratulate him. "I suddenly noticed how quiet the room seemed," Plouffe writes. "An outside observer might not have immediately known it we had won or lost the election." As Obama and his entourage pile into the motorcade to greet the crowds in Grant Park, Plouffe is still checking the western states' returns on his BlackBerry. It doesn't quite seem to have happened.

The principal architects of Obama's win were Plouffe and campaign adviser David Axelrod, and if Axelrod's handiwork--the shaping of the candidate and his message--was visible at the time, it took somewhat longer for outsiders to grasp the full scope of Plouffe's accomplishment, the technical workings of the campaign itself. Plouffe was press shy throughout the campaign, and came across in the few interviews be did give as almost studiously bland, like a particularly talented manager of a suburban Best Buy franchise. (He's even from Delaware.) But Plouffe's low-key act wasn't entirely incidental; the structure he built benefited from appearing not to have an architect.

The Obama campaign, Plouffe insists in nearly every chapter of his book, was built by, and for, the people. And to a real degree, it was. By November 4, Obama for America had a million active volunteers and nearly 4 million small donors, more than any previous Democratic campaign. With my.barackobama.com, the campaign's online hub, organizers could make more effective use of its grass roots than any candidate ever had. Local volunteers could organize and plan events without anyone in Chicago lifting a finger. By Election Day, the campaign's e-mail list of self-selected Obama supporters numbered 13 million addresses. With the click of a mouse, Plouffe could reach a group of true believers the size of the population of Illinois.

That list--by the time Obama took office in January, what was going to happen to it was the million-dollar question. It was a tool that no previous president had had--except that, legally, the White House couldn't have it. So after some deliberation, Obama and his organizers decided to move the whole shop into the Democratic National Committee, renaming it Organizing for America and tweaking its mission: the organization that helped Obama win as a candidate would now be tasked with helping him succeed as a president. The speculation commenced immediately. In a profile of Plouffe--the man who "Changed Politics Forever"--in Esquire, Lisa Taddeo wrote, "If Obama has a policy initiative he wants to push, or a message he needs to disseminate, or a gaffe he wants to bat down, he will call David Plouffe and Plouffe will unleash the many-million-mouthed dog, just as he did all across America for these past two years."

That was the idea, anyway. But then Plouffe, whose daughter was born two days after the election, went into private consulting. The rest of the campaign's inner circle mostly moved into administration jobs, leaving OFA in the hands of their thirtysomething proteges. And the organization that was supposed to change everything has--well, not changed much at all.

It isn't that OFA hasn't done anything--it's that it's hard to say whether what it's done has actually mattered. When Congress debated the stimulus package, OFA asked its members to host house parties and collect stories--ultimately some 31,000 of them--about how the economic crisis was affecting them. The bill passed, but you would've had to squint awfully hard to see OFA's fingerprints on the final product. As the climate and health care bills advanced through the House, OFA sent out informational e-mails to its members and ran a television commercial urging viewers to call their congressmen and ask them to support health care reform--until the congressmen (who weren't named in the ads) complained to the White House. OFA obliged, and the next round of ads praised lawmakers who were doing the right thing; "Even it they aren't 100 percent on board, we're asking our folks to thank our members," OFA Executive Director Mitch Stewart told the New York Times. In August, as conservative tea partiers descended on lawmakers' town halls, OFA belatedly mobilized members to provide moral support at Democrats' events, but shied away from Republicans'.

As summer faded into fall, OFA began to receive harsh reviews from progressives, who argued that an organization that could have redefined liberal activism for a new generation had instead been squandered on what was essentially a prolonged PR mission. In an August 30 Washington Post op-ed titled "We Have the Hope. Now Where's the Audacity?" veteran organizers Peter Dreier and Marshall Ganz contended that OFA had "failed to keep up" with Obama's legislative agenda, and chastised the group for spending time on community service projects rather than bare-knuckle pursuit of policy victories. That criticism, in particular, must have stung; Ganz, a onetime acolyte of Cesar Chavez and a legendary theorist of community organizing, had mentored members of OFA's brain trust, and conducted training workshops for Obama's volunteers during the campaign.

Finally, on October 20, OFA made its first big move: a national "day of action" on health care reform, on which the organization's...