One problem is that the Democrats/Obama campaign team no longer have a huge advantage technologically. Their opponents have caught on and are using it for all it's worth. They are ardent, not to say intensely gauche, tweetie pies.
Even if Democrats lose ground in a lot of states where [Obama's] network is less formidable than it was two years ago, however, Mr. Obama still stands to reap a significant benefit: he will need a strong volunteer network when he pursues a second term in 2012.
Coming out of the last election, with a four-year term still ahead, Mr. Plouffe and his team faced two principal dangers. The first was that, having achieved their main goal of getting Mr. Obama elected, many of the volunteers on O.F.A.’s lists might drift away and become inactive.
The second was that technological innovation might outpace the Obama team. Just as Facebook and text-messaging had popped up between the 2004 and 2008 campaigns, supplanting blogs and list-serves as the leading tools for organizing online, so might some fresh invention come along that O.F.A. would not be prepared to exploit as adeptly as the opposition does.
Win or lose, the midterm elections have provided an opportunity to tweak the operation in both respects. Organizers in the states are keeping their most ardent volunteers involved and pounding on the doors of first-time voters. And O.F.A. is getting a chance to evaluate its tactics on Twitter and on the iPad, capabilities that are likely to be important in waging the next campaign, as opposed to re-fighting the last one.
Mr. Obama’s advisors insist that their sole objective right now is to hold the House and Senate. But 2010 is also a practice run for Mr. Obama’s legendary field operation, and he will probably emerge stronger for having gone through the midterm campaign — even if his party does not. ...NYT
What could be a useful game-changer, though, is a well-organized effort on the part of progressives as a practical, hard-headed political force which offers its volunteers and leaders to the Obama effort in 2012 in return for policy guarantees. No tickee, no laundry.
