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.

Today, President Obama is doing something no sitting U.S. President has done before. He is using his massive network of grass-roots supporters, which has been undergoing a reboot since Election Day, to go between the legs of Members of Congress and generate pressure from below on them to pass health care reform. Today is a big test of Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's political arm at the Democratic National Committee. OFA's leaders are calling on its supporters to generate a massive wave of phone calls to Congressional offices and district offices--100,000 or more in one day. They've got a barometer up showing more than 1,100 2,468 28,000 calls so far. (It jumped 1,300 in the 15 minutes since I started writing this post. And about 25,000 more in the last hour.) Will they succeed? And will the calls sway any wavering Members?

Jeremy Bird, the deputy director of Organizing for America, was back in South Carolina for the Democratic party state convention. In this video, shot by a local activist, he talks about the intensive community organizing model that was "in many ways started here in South Carolina" during the campaign, and promises that OFA is going to staff up across the state and cover "every county, every precinct, every block, every neighborhood." That's an audacious goal, reflective more of the Obama campaign at its height than anything the Democratic party has had in the state (or in just about any state) in the past.

Organizing for America brings out the big gun: the President, who is featured in this morning's email blast to his campaign list and via YouTube video. "Passing this budget won't be easy," he says, as the video closes with a big ask. "That's where you come in. That's why I'm asking you to head outside this Saturday to knock on some doors. Talk to some neighbors and let people know how important this budget is to our future. And that's why I'm asking you to stay involved in the days ahead. By writing letters and making phone calls and summoning the spirit that first gave us this chance for change. Now is our moment to seize that chance."

We will soon know just how big the sleeping giant of American politics, now known as Organizing for America (OFA, for short) actually is.

That's because earlier today, David Plouffe, the group's de-facto boss, sent out an email asking Obama supporters to watch a video of the President defending his economic stimulus plan and urging them to share the video with others. At the same time, OFA has put out a call to its most active volunteers to organize "Economic Recovery House Meetings" for this weekend, and you can search for specifics on nearby meetings on the OFA website.

More details on OFA after the jump...

Andrew Rasiej and I are in Cambridge, MA today and tomorrow at the Berkman Center's "Internet Politics 2008" conference. Several techPresident contributors are here, including Gene K., Ari M., Garrett G., Chris R, and David A. and tons of friends and colleagues. The conference is semi-open in the sense that we are allowed to blog about it under the "Chatham House rule," which means that we're not supposed to name people (hence my semi-cryptic references), but that we're free to use the information shared, unless someone says something is completely off the record. Some of the conversations are being recorded and will be eventually posted to the Berkman website, however. So, consider yourself forewarned, I'm somewhat handcuffed here...