WASHINGTON — Lyle McIntosh gave everything he could to Barack Obama’s Iowa campaign. He helped oversee an army that knocked on doors, distributed fliers and held neighborhood meetings to rally support for Mr. Obama, all the while juggling the demands of his soybean and corn farm.
Asked last week if he and others like him were ready to go all-out again, this time to help President Obama push his White House agenda, Mr. McIntosh paused.
“It’s almost like a football season or a basketball season — you go as hard as you can and then you’ve got to take a breather between the seasons,” he said, noting he found it hard to go full-bore during the general election.
Mr. McIntosh’s uncertainty suggests just one of the many obstacles the White House faces as it tries to accomplish what aides say is one of their most important goals: transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government. That is something that Mr. Obama, who began his career as a community organizer, told aides was a top priority, even before he was elected.
His aides — including his campaign manager — have created a group, Organizing for America, to redirect the campaign machinery in the service of broad changes in health care and environmental and fiscal policy. They envision an army of supporters talking, sending e-mail and texting to friends and neighbors as they try to mold public opinion.
The organization will be housed in the Democratic National Committee, rather than at the White House. But the idea behind it — that the traditional ways of communicating with and motivating voters are giving way to new channels built around social networking — is also very evident in the White House’s media strategy.
Like George W. Bush before him, Mr. Obama is trying to bypass the mainstream news media and take messages straight to the public.
The most prominent example of the new strategy is his weekly address to the nation — what under previous presidents was a speech recorded for and released to radio stations on Saturday mornings. Mr. Obama instead records a video, which on Saturday he posted on the White House Web site and on YouTube; in it, he explained what he wanted to accomplish with the $825 billion economic stimulus plan working its way through Congress. By late Sunday afternoon, it had been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube.
The White House also faces legal limitations in terms of what it can do. Perhaps most notably, it cannot use a 13-million-person e-mail list that Mr. Obama’s team developed because it was compiled for political purposes. That is an important reason Mr. Obama has decided to build a new organization within the Democratic Party, which does not have similar restrictions.
Still, after months of discussion, aides said the whole approach remained a work in progress, even after Friday, when the organizers e-mailed a link to a video to those 13 million people announcing the creation of Organizing for America. Mr. Obama’s aides know they have a huge resource to harness, but fundamental questions remain about how it will run and precisely what organizers are hoping to accomplish.
“This has obviously never been undertaken before,” David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager and one of the organizers of this effort, said in the video sent to supporters. “So it’s going to be a little trial and error.”
Even with that video, in addition to one sent earlier in the president’s name, the organization does not have a fully developed Web site, evidence, some of Mr. Obama’s advisers said, of just how murky the mission is.
Mr. Plouffe said the group had not settled on a budget or begun serious fund-raising. The goal is to have a relatively small staff, with representatives in most, if not every, state, and to make up any shortfall in personnel with the use of technology.
There is a clear interest in keeping the Internet-based political machinery that made Mr. Obama’s brand so iconic and that helped him raise record amounts. The new group’s initials, O.F.A., conveniently also apply to his Obama for America campaign. And the desire for the Obama organization to live on was voiced in a meeting of organizers in Chicago after Election Day, and echoed at 4,800 house meetings in December and in a survey completed by 500,000 Obama supporters.
Still, sensitive to ruffling feathers even among fellow Democrats wary of Mr. Obama’s huge political support, Mr. Obama’s aides emphasized that the effort was not created to lobby directly or pressure members of Congress to support Mr. Obama’s programs.
“This is not a political campaign,” Mr. Plouffe said. “This is not a ‘call or e-mail your member of Congress’ organization.”
Instead, Mr. Plouffe said the aim was to work through influential people in various communities as a way of building public opinion.
“So it’s: ‘Here’s the president’s speech today on the economy. Here are some talking points,’ ” he said. “This was a very under-appreciated part of our campaign. If someone who has never been involved in politics before — or is an independent or a Republican — makes this case with their circle of people, that has more impact.”
The operation is being run from borrowed desks on the third floor of the D.N.C. headquarters on Capitol Hill, led by organizers chosen, Mr. Plouffe said, because of skills they demonstrated during the campaign. The head of the group is Mitch Stewart, a low-key operative who helped run Mr. Obama’s effort in three critical states — Iowa and Indiana in the primary season and Virginia in the general election. Another important person in the operation is Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the new executive director of the Democratic National Committee, who was the battleground states director for Mr. Obama in his campaign.
And there will be clear coordination between this independent operation at the Democratic National Committee and a communications arm being set up at the White House, under Macon Phillips, the “new media” director for Mr. Obama’s administration.
Mr. Phillips was an Internet strategist with Blue State Digital, a private firm closely tied to Mr. Obama’s campaign. His team signaled the new direction Mr. Obama is bringing with a redesigned White House Web site that was introduced shortly after Mr. Obama was sworn in and is modeled after his campaign site. It will be continually updated to add presidential orders and blog postings that make the case for administration policy, often echoed by talking points that Organizing for America is sending to supporters.
In an interview, Mr. Phillips, 30, said the site would give the White House another way to reach the public without having to rely on the mainstream news media.
“Historically the media has been able to draw out a lot of information and characterize it for people,” he said. “And there’s a growing appetite from people to do it themselves.”
The approach is causing some concern among news media advocates, who express discomfort with what effectively could become an informational network reaching 13 million people, or more, with an unchallenged, governmental point of view.
“They’re beginning to create their own journalism, their own description of events of the day, but it’s not an independent voice making that description,” said Bill Kovach, the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. “It’s troublesome until we know how it’s going to be used and the degree to which it can be used on behalf of the people, and not on behalf of only one point of view.”
The undertaking will require Mr. Obama’s aides to wedge technology that worked for them in the campaign into the infrastructure of the White House, with its relatively older technology and security restrictions. Where Mr. Obama’s campaign was free to use Facebook, instant messaging and Twitter, among other forms of communication, the White House faces more constraints. With every note part of the historical record, and new scrutiny on every communication, staff members are unable to access public instant messaging accounts and social networking sites from their desks.
The administration’s Web team has a YouTube channel, but it is already exhibiting the dangers for a White House in the Wild West of the Internet: a page showing Mr. Obama’s inauguration address is littered with offensive commentary from users.
In campaigns, candidates control multimillion-dollar advertising budgets and organizations in 50 states. When they take office, they have had to put their own stamp on existing party organizations, and to rely largely on the news media to communicate with the public. Though he comes to the task with the advantage of a team that proved innovative in using technology and communications advances to reshape electoral politics, Mr. Obama’s challenge is not totally different from the one that faced his predecessors.
“The problem that you have is, you come off a campaign — where there is an infrastructure and a director in every state — and then you have nothing,” said Sara Taylor, a White House political director for Mr. Bush. “You have allied organizations, but they don’t report to you, so you’re relying on allies to be supportive when you don’t have control of those organizations.”
Mr. Obama’s aides acknowledged that after two long years there were also some concerns about “list fatigue.” Mr. Obama, the party and the inaugural committee have reached out to his supporters on the e-mail list so frequently — for money, for input, for help in persuading their neighbors to vote — that some want to give it a rest before cranking it up again.
Even some of Mr. Obama’s most enthusiastic foot soldiers understand the sentiment.
“It’s kind of like we’re spent right now,” said Dr. Robert Gitchell, who campaigned for Mr. Obama in Ames, Iowa. But, “once that fire is lit” in supporters, he said, “it’s easy to trigger them all again.”http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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