One question that a number of people have raised in response to my post on The Obama Disconnect is essentially, "What's your alternative? What should the Obama team have done to keep the new political movement it had spawned going as a force for change? And how could they have better reconciled Obama's role as president of the whole country with his role as leader of a political organization beholden to him?" That's absolutely a fair question. Here's what I think could have been done...

"Thank you for prying yourselves away from Going Rouge." That was David Plouffe's way of welcoming us to a conference call to discuss his own version of a campaign memoir, the newly released The Audacity to Win. (Check out Colin Delaney's helpful short guide to reading the book for the chewy digital bits.) The point of these "blogger calls" gets fuzzy as the months go by, where it's never quite clear to either principle or participant if the bloggers on the call are press, activists, some hybrid of the two, or something else entirely. Plouffe got a mix of questions from angry advocates, progressive press, interested technology writers, and more.

Including a hard ball from me. Or, at least, a question meant to dig out Plouffe's thinking on whether strategy behind the methodical plod to the White House he details so carefully in the book has an resonance now that we've a President Obama, big problems to solve, and no metrics so gloriously measurable as winning Iowa, raising half a billion dollars online, or knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors. The Obama campaign was soaring, no doubt. But a presidential election has a structure to it that government can't match. You know long in advance when each primary state will vote (well, there was the Florida/Michigan dustup of this past election season -- which Plouffe calls "Florigan" -- but that was a fairly unusual case.) You know where and when your parties nominating election is going to be held many months ahead. There are delegates to be racked up, electoral college votes to secure. There are things to measure, milestones to achieve. Campaigns are a bit like baseball that way.

And governing, it might be fair to say, is somewhat more like soccer. Nothing happens for a long time. People mill about. And then, wham! Something changes the game entirely. You put your best players on the field, but strategy is generally something reserved for set plays and making the coach feel like he or she is actually playing a role in the match. There's a reason we don't keep real stats. So I asked, Plouffe, is it possible that what he cooked up for Organizing for America, a strategy of checking boxes and amassing wins, simply doesn't translate to changing the country to the legislative process without a huge amount of misplaced energy, at least in the near term?

"You're right," said Plouffe...

As others have noted, David Plouffe's book on his time as campaign manager of Obama for America is surprisingly open and candid, more Dreams from my Father than the anodyne Audacity of Hope. Even only a few dozen pages in, there are revealing glimpses of the role that technology, the Internet, and the Obama '08 new media team played billion-dollar organization that Plouffe engineered. From the outside, the machine seemed well-oiled. Inside, things were not always so smooth. There are tantalizing glimpses of how new media interacted, sometimes not without friction, with the more traditional elements of a presidential campaign, particularly fundraising and field. Plouffe on building a new media team:

The new media group (online communications, Web-page development and maintenance, texting) in most campaigns reports to the communications department, and its department head is not considered an equal of other senior staff. But I saw how important the burgeoning online world was to our overall success; new media would touch just about every aspect of our campaign. So I had that department report directly to me. To find us new talent we enlisted one of Barack's law school classmates, Julius Genachowski, who was steeped in the technology world. He identified our director of new media, Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's revolutionary new media effort in 2004. Joe seemed to relish the challenge of marrying digital technology and strategy with a strong grassroots campaign.

And here he is on the early tensions between the new media team and those ultimately responsible for raising the tremendous amounts of money to mount a credible primary challenge against Hillary Clinton:

We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.

Here's hoping that sort of transparency holds up past page 54.

There's a fantastic post about the OFA Massachussetts meeting on Bottom up Change yesterday.

I recommend reading the entire post--its rich and thoughtful, and gives me some real hope for creating power out of the network of people who initially came together for the Obama campaign. Massachussetts supporters, without DNC staff, created a 400+ person organizing event last weekend.