"These dudes are old school communications people. They're playing the game the way they know how because it's been lucrative for them. And they're destroying the whole promise of the Obama Administration in the process."

David Plouffe is out with an email to Organizing for America's massive list, calling on Obama supporters to "regroup, refocus, and re-engage on the vital work ahead." The focal point of his missive: to attend State of the Union "watch parties" organized by OFA members around the country.

It's been a whirlwind couple of days for Ari Melber since we released his report on Organizing for America's first year of action. As folks start to really get into the meat of Melber's research, here's a list of places where we've seen him — or his report:

Marta Evry is a 45-year-old film editor who works on television shows and movies in Hollywood. She took off six months in 2008 to volunteer full time on the Obama campaign, ultimately working as a Regional Field Organizer for CA-36. Along with her co-RFO, she ran many dozens of phone banks for Obama from August 2008 to election day, managing some 1,500 volunteers who made over 500,000 phone calls to swing states all over the country. Since then she has remained active as a community organizer, running the blog Venice for Change, and working on everything from health care reform, to marriage equality to California budget issues. She is also a delegate to the CA State Democratic party and a life-long Democrat. Until this summer, she was working with Organizing for America. No longer.

A few days ago, she read my Obama Disconnect essay and wrote me to say: "The thing I find completely heartbreaking about is to watch such an opportunity squandered right before our eyes. I literally watched it happen. When I look back to how eager our vol[unteer]s were this time last year, those sea of faces in both Denver in 2008 and the Inauguration in January and know that whatever movement there was is gone, gone, gone."

This afternoon, she read OFA deputy director Jeremy Bird's encomium to OFA's first year, which he posted on Huffington Post, and noticed that he had included a link to it on his Facebook page. Since she and he were friends on Facebook, she posted a comment, venting her frustration. It read, in part, "OFA as an organization has been a profound disappointment, but the volunteers are not, and the contacts and relationships that came out of the campaign have been amazing." Not long after, Bird unfriended her, disappearing her comment. [UPDATE: See below; Bird has refriended Evry.] (The full text is on her blog, which also inspired the title to this post.)

This is her story.

I hate to break it to my friend Mark Tapscott, who I have made common cause with (and broken bread with) over the issues of government transparency and accountability, but my end-of-the-year post on the Obama Disconnect should not be read as saying, "the truth about the Obama campaign in 2008 was almost exactly the opposite" of the mainstream media's description of him as bottom-up and people-driven. I know this is as hard for folks on some parts of the Right, so wound up in their intense dislike of Obama, to understand, as hard as it seems to be for folks on some parts of the Left, so passionate in their support for him, but the picture I tried to describe--obviously not as successfully as I would like--is more nuanced than that.

Dear Karoli:

Obviously, we don't know each other. I didn't know if Karoli was your real name or your nom-de-blog; thanks for clearing up that confusion with your latest post. You clearly don't know me or my work, or you wouldn't be accusing me of "criticizing from afar." I forgive you.

I'm sorry if you think I'm being disrespectful of your passion. Actually, I really like it. People who are passionate about something are the ones who drive change. I just want passion married to facts, rather than illusions. And here's the facts about Obama, campaign finance, and his grassroots base:

A blogger who goes by the name named Karoli has posted a long critique of my Obama Disconnect post entitled "The Sifry Disconnect: When cynicism kills hope." It's fundamentally a sentimental post, arguing that it makes more sense to be a "positive catalyst for change," to take responsibility for making change into our own hands, and to "quit taking potshots at the President." Why the latter is in

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...

As 2009 comes to a close, and with it, the first year of the Obama administration, one big question seems to be hanging over the man who said he had "The Audacity to Hope," and promised his supporters "Change We Can Believe In." That question can be summed up with two simple pictures.

How did this...

produce this?

There was a time when Barack Obama was the number one most followed personage on Twitter, back during the campaign season, but after getting elected his staff seemingly let the account go fallow, to be overtaken by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres.