Obama Team Preps for Online Campaign

Politico reports:

President Obama’s aides have quietly turned the key in the engine of the massive campaign-in-waiting that’s been operating under the name Organizing for America for the past two years, and will begin his reelection with the sort of online and field organizations most presidential campaigns would be glad to have 16 months from now.

The leadership of the field organization — with hundreds of employees, tens of thousands of volunteers and massive online assets (primarily, a giant email list) — is shifting from the Democratic National Committee to the new campaign in Chicago. And in mass emails and in a quiet series of one-on-one meetings with volunteer leaders, the group is resetting its relationship with its supporters.

And while many Democrats have complained that Organizing for America’s vaunted abilities began to sputter once Obama became president, people watching the organization closely say it has succeeded in what may have been its central mission all along: building an unparalleled reelection organization while staying under the political world’s radar.

“Nothing like this has ever happened this early or this big,” said Natalie Foster, a former DNC new media director.

Obama’s reelection campaign may lack the novelty, and the purity, of his first campaign. Aides hope, though, that any enthusiasm gap — which they believe will close as the race begins to take shape — will be made up for by the sheer scale and capacity of the newly re-tuned organization.

Obama’s campaign will “give a little on the enthusiasm, but they gain a lot on the fact that they’re starting with this huge set of resources they didn’t have in 2008 ,” said a Democrat closely watching the ramp-up.

That Organizing for America remains very much a political powerhouse to be feared may come as a surprise to some who have bought into the popular narrative that group has floundered since the 2008 campaign. And early in Obama’s presidency, OFA did suffer from being wildly over-hyped: it was to be a juggernaut that would transform legislative politics, sending members of Congress of both parties running headlong in fear.

The group, to the dismay of some of Obama’s key supporters, never attempted to bring the “movement” feel of the campaign to a truly independent new organization. Its website remained BarackObama.com, and – after an early foray drew complaints from Capitol Hill – it shied away from doing anything that could get the president in trouble with his less trail-blazing allies in Congress.

But despite the fact that OFA did not live up to admittedly unrealistic expectations, it did play a role in keeping Democrats on board during the protracted health care fight, mobilizing on a large scale despite a sour national mood and skepticism of the bill, even among Democrats. The group’s 2008 breakthrough had been linking the online organization with offline action, and the organization’s leaders last month detailed some of their results strong>in a Huffington Post article<, writing that in August of 2009, more than 34,000 OFA members attended 410 town hall events to back the bill, and that 65,000 supporters paid in-person visits to members of Congress.