Credit: Organizing for America

Organizing for America is focusing energy on what it's calling its "Final March for Reform," a week-long health-care push that gives volunteers discrete, structured tasks for each particular day. It's like the Jenny Craig meal plan of political advocacy. OFA has gotten knocked for giving its grassroots allies unstrategic* work to do that doesn't have much of a direct impact on what's happening in Washington (though that's the work's stated aim). It's a criticism that can probably be leveled at the opening stages of the Final March program too (see below). But the program probably deserves extra points for making non-campaign advocacy manageable. Like Jenny Craig.

Day one's task is to "spread the facts":

If you haven't already, please download the fliers and posters below, and make sure everyone in your community sees the facts about reform.

The mission for day two (a.k.a. today) is to call Congress:

Everything we've worked for depends on winning this upcoming vote in the House of Representatives, and it's going to be very, very close. There's no time to spare. Call today and make it clear that Americans support reform

What's up for days three through seven? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the White House is keeping up its dead-simple approach to giving health care traction, a media push it's calling "By the Numbers." Each day brings a new figure, disseminate through blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Today's number? 625, as in the number of people, according to ThinkProgress, who lost their health insurance each and every day of 2009.

*Unstrategic isn't actually a word, it seems. But it works there, no?

Credit: The White House

The theme of last night's event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture's elegant building just west of Manhattan's Central Park was, officially, the somewhat objective question, "Obama: Change We Can Still Believe In?" But the vibe of the evening turned out to be more about relationships than distanced assessments. Whether by providence or a bit of good stage setting, the song that was playing when panelists Katrina vanden Heuvel and Ari Melber of the Nation, the New York Times Gretchen Morgenson, Politico's Ben Smith, and Demos' Ben Barber took to the stage actually seemed more on point. "You've got a friend..." sang James Taylor. On this night, to consider the future of the Obama years, the question was, well, does he?

He does, was the consensus of the evening. And Barack Obama has the poll numbers to prove it. But the sentiment on stage and in the crowd was still that Obama hasn't been much of a pal to the progressive movement in his first 13 months in office. Of course, we've talked here about this question of whether and why all the considerable momentum of the Obama campaign, ginned up and harnessed by the Internet in large part, was allowed to float off into the ether after Election Day. There was a rehashing of that last night, for sure. (13 million names! And for what!)

But Demos' Barber offered a newish take on the question of just where the grassroots aspect of the Obama enterprise went off course. "Narrative is a way of explaining to ourselves the nature of the world that we live in," he suggested, and argued that Obama has failed to provide one that would give his progressive allies a story book to go by. And the web, in particular, loves a good story...

Credit: Organizing for America

Conservative dominance of the airwaves is taken as an article of faith, but Organizing for America is rolling out a new project that intends to equip progressives with the tools to get their voices heard on talk radio. They're calling it "On the Air."

The way is works is that supporters are prompted with the call-in number for a talk radio show that discusses political topics and the option to to listen to the show live. When the timing's right, the volunteer can call the number provided. Importantly, OFA's troops are asked to report back on whether they got on air, and how the call went.

Credit:Organizing for America

On the Air is a shiny new tool, no doubt. But what might be more important for the long-term prospects of Organizing for America -- and its ability to provide back-up to Obama's agenda -- is how On the Air was engineered in the first place.

Organizers say that when they began the radio project, they found that there was no one good database of call-in numbers for the many talk radio shows that dot the United States.

So OFA built a program, called Groundswell, that slices up certain organizational tasks into discrete bits that can be accomplished by individuals but add up to a substantial effort, a la the crowdsourcing efforts of Pro Publica's distributed Reporting Network.

The benefit for volunteers is that it gives them achievable, tangible tasks to do that fit into the nooks and crannies of their day to day lives. The benefit for OFA is that they get buy in to the organization's missing that also has the effect of multiplying the organizing efforts that those on the Democratic National Committee's payroll might hope to achieve.

Organizing for America's new media director Natalie Foster says that both On the Air and Groundswell are part of a drive within Organizing for America to encourage experimentation and creativity amongst staff, particularly those staff with the programming chops to pull something like this off.

The projects, says Foster, "demonstrate what’s great about the 'labs' concept, and having software engineers embedded with our New Media team. Building out the DNC/OFA Innovation Labs was an early decision last year, and Nathan Woodhull does a great job leading that team."

Credit: Organizing for America

We noted yesterday that there's an on-going push by Democrats to make that job chart from Nancy Pelosi's office -- the one showing the decrease in non-farm lob loss in the United States over the first year of the Obama Administration -- nearly unavoidable when you're on the web. The spread continues. Organizing for America has put together a web page where, with a couple quick clicks to shake hands with the Twitter API, you can make the "Road to Recovery Avatar" your Twitter icon.

One pedestrian yet powerful thing the Obama campaign's new media team was fairly masterful at was repurposing visuals. A "Farmers for Obama" logo whipped up for one event in Iowa would, for example, be housed on the campaign website so that any agrarian interest could make use of it. That's not something OFA has been particularly adept at -- until now, at least.

A good chart is a terrible thing to waste, it seems. About a week and a half ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office posted a simple bar graph on her blog, called "The Gavel," showing the progressive decrease in job losses in the United States over the course of the Bush and Obama presidencies. The chart riffed off the January jobs report issued by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

Credit: Speaker Pelosi's Office

If you follow online discussions of the economic policy, Pelosi's chart became difficult to avoid. Progressive bloggers used the powerfully simple chart to give weight to arguments that the Recovery Act had, in the year of its existence, had begun to reverse the employment decline of the previous eight years under George W. Bush. One posting by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, for example, was "Dugg" more than 2,300 times.

As it turns out, David Plouffe seems to count himself among the chart's many fans. Obama's campaign manager emailed a note last night to the Organizing for America list with the subject, "Have you seen this?" The "this" was the Pelosi chart, polished a bit and, naturally, switched over the Gotham font. Here's Plouffe:

Wondering what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- President Obama's stimulus bill -- has accomplished? Look at this...

One year ago tomorrow, after tens of thousands of you shared stories and called your representatives, the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And while this anniversary isn't a cause for celebration, there is reason to be optimistic. This chart makes it clear: We're on the road to recovery.

The Pelosi chart's world tour isn't over, not if Plouffe has anything to do with it. Not content with allowing only the online world to enjoy the graph, Organizing for America is offering up a PDF flyer version of the chart that you can print and take with you.

Update: The march of the chart continues. DNC press secretary Hari Sevugan makes it his Twitter icon.

Organizing for America is hiring a "Social Networks Manager":

Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering communities across the country to organize around the issues they care most about. The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America is hiring a Social Networks Manager The Social Networks Manager is responsible for maintaining the Democratic Party and Organizing for America accounts on all social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts, etc.) The Social Networks Manager works closely with the rest of the New Media department to execute grassroots campaigns to advance the President’s agenda for change.

The Obama campaign had someone similarly tasked with reaching out to the grassroots via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and several dozen other small social networks. The campaign position was called the "External Online Director," was filled by Scott Goodstein, and made the Obama campaign somewhat unique amongst high-level political campaigns in the importance they placed on making the most of the online tools that people already like and use. Call it the "Mohammed to the mountain" approach. For those folks eager for signs that OFA is attempting to recapture some of the online, people-centric magic of the Obama campaign, this probably looks like a positive development.

Credit: BarackObama.com

At a fundraiser for low-dollar donors to the Democratic National Committee held in a DC hotel last night, President Obama fielded just four questions sent in by supporters through cell phone text messages or email, delivering policy-thick answers on his perspective of what needs to be done to pass health care reform (the gist: more vetting needs to be done), how government can help to grow small business (more lending), how we can keep America competitive in the future (more clean energy), and how the costs of higher education can be made more manageable (more loans and grants), in an event that had been billed by Organizing for America, in what was perhaps a bit of overpromise, as a "Conversation with the President." OFA Executive Director Mitch Stewart posed the questions to Obama at the tail end of an event that started about 20 past its scheduled 5:45pm EST start time, just after Obama wrapped up a speech to the crowd.

Leaving substance aside, performance-wise, aside from the event's Q&A-by-SMS twist what was perhaps most notable about the evening was just how fired up Obama seemed while delivering that speech. This Obama resembled more the candidate from the '08 campaign trail's most energetic days than the somewhat more staid president we've regularly seen over this past year. At one point, Obama just about yelled when admonishing the assembled crowd and those watching online to keep find, trumpeting, "Don't give up!" (Yes we can!, yelled someone in the crowd.) A passionate Obama continued. "The forces of the status quo might not give an inch," he said, "but we won't give an inch." Video of the full event is here.

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe emerges as the main villain in Tim Dickinson's examination of how Organizing for America lost its magic in the early days of the Obama Administration. Some of Dickinson's criticisms would resonate more strongly were the national Democratic party not organized as a loose-knit collection of interests and was instead, say, the Mafia. Plouffe was at a DC book party while Massachusetts was burning! "Plouffe and OFA," the latter of which gets treated as the former's alter ego, "permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy's seat." Martha Coakley and the people of Massachusetts might have had a thing or two to do with that.

The decision made by Plouffe and others to attempt to install Organizing for America into the Democratic National Committee comes into focus in Dickinson's piece. Dickinson calls it "a truly bizarre call." And here, Dickinson switches from a personality-driven narrative to what seems to be, boringly enough, central to the OFA story. Institutional structure -- and the choices made around it -- seems to underlay so much of what went down with OFA in the early going, including the Coakley affair. At the end of the two-year-plus campaign, Obama, Plouffe, David Axlerod and others had just poured their hearts and souls into getting a seat at the table; Plouffe was, by all accounts including his own The Audacity to Win, exhausted. The less likely choice would have been to go back outside to rallying in the streets. Organizing a version of Organizing for America as a grassroots organization rather than as an extension of the DNC would have meant that the Obama operation would have translated into the Obama operation taking on two jobs rather than the one (very big) one they'd just been given by the American people. (A reasonable question alluded to in Dickinson's piece is how would a free-floating OFA would have funded itself.)

Reading Dickinson, it seems like Organizing for America's future as a grassroots organization would probably have been better served had Obama actually lost. Once the win was won, all the considerable momentum from the campaign flowed into the presidency. No one with the authority or power to do so had was willing to pour the necessary time and resources into simultaneously converting Obama for America into a sustainable Organizing for America organization. Maybe it was a calculation. Or maybe it was a tremendous mistake. Organizing for America's executive director Mitch Stewart admits to Dickinson that the organization has make a few of those in its first year. "Organizing for America did not properly plan for that first week of August," Stewart told Dickinson, referring to the townhall protests of this summer where tea partier objections to health care reform were allowed to echo without much organized pushback.

You can read Dickinson's full piece here.

Pity be upon you should you be the sort of person who has had a question for Barack Obama gnawing at your brain over the last several months, and yet you happened to be out traveling remote corners of the globe, underwater, or otherwise occupied for the last seven days. Following close on the heels of yesterday's chance to query the president through YouTube is a program from Organizing for America, the outgrowth of the Obama campaign, to text message in questions for the President. This "Conversation with the President" was itself announced through a text message from OFA that went out to at least part of the list last night. According to Organizing for America, Obama will answer some of the questions during a live session on BarackObama.com at 5:45pm EST this Thursday.

Obama is getting more practice this week in gazing into a live-streaming camera and responding to disembodied questions direct from the Internet than he's otherwise had over the first twelve months of his presidency.

Doing question-collection through text messages is pretty novel, but it does lack the transparency of doing it through something like Google Moderator. We won't know what questions people on the Organizing for America mobile list are putting to Obama unless they choose to make it public. It's an open-ended ask, so I'll be curious to see whether folks on the list ask general policy/political questions of the sort we saw during the YouTube session, or whether they instead home in on how the Obama grassroots operation has operated over its fairly embattled first year and where it might go from here.

The argument has been made here and elsewhere that the twists and turns of the Obama Administration's year one was just a poor match for the skill set of Organizing for America, the field wing of the DNC that grew out of the Obama campaign. From bailout legislation to health care negotiations to the fact that there were only a handful of meaningful elections, the thinking goes that there just wasn't much for Organizing for America to sink its organizers' teeth into in 2009. 2010, though, is starting out differently. OFA has already inserted itself into the Scott Brown vs. Martha Coakley special election race in Massachusetts, particularly in its closing days, and they're following that up with an email campaign pushing back against the Supreme Court's decision yesterday in the Citizens United case. Here's OFA's Mitch Stewart (via a few correspondents), in an email titled "A stampede":

Friend --

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend freely in federal elections.

It's a green light for a new stampede of special interest money in our politics, giving their lobbyists even more power in Washington. Now, every candidate who fights for change could face limitless attacks from corporate special interests like health insurance companies and Wall Street banks.

While the GOP is celebrating a victory for its special interest allies, President Obama is working with leaders in Congress to craft a forceful response that protects the voices of ordinary citizens.

Please add your name right away to help show that the American people support strong, urgent action to prevent a corporate takeover of our democracy.

Congress: I support bold action to ensure fair elections.

Worth noting that here, as with the Coakley race, Organizing for America's focus is on changing the political system, rather than shaping the products of that system (i.e. health care). That's arguably a more natural fit for the organization that grew out of the Obama campaign's call to "change," not to mention an echoing of a core and enduring issue ("fair elections") in progressive/liberal politics. That said, the call to action here is the same one that OFA has gone to again and again: call your congressperson to support reform legislation. That seems to leave on the table a range of possibilities of what a grassroots organization might do to organize around the issue, such as working to educate themselves and others about what the Court's decision yesterday means for American politics.

For whatever it's worth, there also seems to be some degree of message coherence afoot between OFA and the White House. "A stampede" was the same phrasing Obama used yesterday to discuss what the Supreme Court's decision would do. ("With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.")