Daily Digest: Obama Organizes While Republicans Regroup

• Can Obama Organize the Stimulus? Should He?: You'll remember that we've been exploring just how the Organizing for American outfit that evolved out of the Obama campaign is actually going to engage with the nuts-and-bolts of passing the President's legislative agenda. Well, now, a clue on how it might happen. The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that OFA will be hitting some part of its multi-million-member email list today to ask supporters to organize host parties around the $800 billion-plus stimulus package. But this nugget of news raises more questions than it provides answers. The House has already passed its version of the stimulus package, and the Senate is molding the plan into what it wants as we speak. So what, exactly, is the intended outcome of gathering some friends and neighbors together to rally around the stimulus now? Is it to lean on senators to quickly back the other chamber's version of the bill? That sort of public pressuring isn't something senators might take kindly to -- as their former colleague, the president, well knows. This just in! As we go to press, Zephyr Teachout predicts that Organizing for America is going to fail in this and other efforts. And, the Dean for America veteran writes, "I think this is a very good thing."

• Young Turks Hope for a New Face of the Republican Party: Yesterday saw a seven-minute video called "We Are Republican" making its way around the Intertubes. The YouTube piece is a product of Rebuild the Party, a tech-driven effort to reposition the GOP as a modern and networked beast. In a way, it fits very cleanly into a stream of conservative story-telling that goes back decades. There's no escaping the obligatory Ronald Reagan voiceover. But the party's young (and young-thinking) guns clearly want to market the reconstructed Republican Party as super-duper inclusive. Witness the African-American veteran proudly displaying what appears to be giant National Rifle Association belt buckle. But compare the faces you see in the video to this inside look at who is, this very day, picking the next RNC chairperson. You can follow today's RNC vote action on Twitter.

• Twitter Earned Media: We've profiled in the past Tweet for Chuck. That's the campaign by Republican California state legislator Chuck DeVore, hoping to topple Senator Barbara Boxer, to generate cash and buzz through Twitter. A quixotic quest? Perhaps. But his newfangled new media campaigning just earned DeVore his own dot portrait on the front cover of the print edition of today's Wall Street Journal.

• Law & Order: Regulatory Reform Unit: There's a new episode out in our favorite series: "Elizabeth Warren Talks TARP Oversight." The Congressional Oversight Panel on the $700 billion financial industry bailout, of which Warren is chair, has just released its congressionally-mandated study of the regulatory tweaks could have prevented the current economic crisis. At just over 100 pages of PDF, it's zzzzzzzzzz.... Seriously, the report is important stuff. But Warren knows that no one outside of DC's acronym soup or beyond a (very) few dedicated reporters are going to read the thing, so she's put together a more palatable seven-minute YouTubed overview. For another look at where bailout monies are being spent, check out the New York Times' TARP tracker. Want more of that sort of good reporting on tax-dollar spending? Then might we suggest you get behind the push to make the stimulus bill's transparency as structured, timely, and transparent as possible.

• Wait, I've Got the Job, Right?: Politico's Ben Smith finds that Timothy Geithner is not yet Treasury Secretary nor is Hillary Clinton the current Secretary of State -- at least according to the White House website.

• Telephone Town Hall Gone National: If you're familiar with Shaun Dakin, then he's probably the last person in the universe you'd expect to be advocating for a nationwide robocall. But that's exactly what the head of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry is doing. Dakin is making the case that, while the Internet is, you know, great, just about everybody in America has a telephone, and Obama should give them all a ring. Telephone town halls are, writes Dakin, one low-tech but effective technique that Republicans are using to better effect than Democrats.

• The InaugurationReport Takeaway: "[W]hile I view the project as a success," Andy Carvin tells Journalism.co.uk's Laura Oliver about NPR's InaugurationReport social media project, "we're also a victim of that success, because we're simply overflowing with user content." Carvin and others worked to use Twitter, texting, cell phones and more to citizen-report the presidential inaugural. "I think that will be one of the biggest takeaways for me," says Carvin. "[W]e need to have better structures in place for reviewing and curating the best content." Carvin offers more insight on lessons learned in the piece.

• Jefferson Probably Saw This Coming. Dude Was Insightful.: The Library of Congress has taken to Twitter, tweeting now from @librarycongress. (Via Ellen Miller) The LOC has also done some interesting participatory work with Flickr, asking for help sorting through their vast photo archives. Whomever's heading up their Twitter account thus far has been very engaged -- responding to followers left and right -- but we look forward to seeing what the unique institution can do with the tool.

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola profiles the new Director of Citizen Participation at the White House, a Google vet with a history of using tech to include more people in closed-off political processes. And Nancy also covers "topprog." No, that's not the third party candidate in that Kodos and Kang election episode of The Simpsons. Rather, it's a Twitter hashtag making traction on the left.

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