Tonight I attended one of the "house parties for change" organized by the Obama campaign.  The house parties are meant to contribute to an ongoing conversation about what to do with the energy and structure that was the Obama volunteer organization.

If you think you've heard this song before, you're probably right - this was the question faced by Dean volunteers in the aftermath of his 2004 defeat, and there are similar, smaller-scale challenges faced by other candidates at the local level all the time.  Dean's campaign operation ultimately became Democracy for America (DFA), and it and its far-flung network of chapters are still kicking.  Given the founding conviction s of DFA - that progressives need to show up everywhere, and that voting is just the beginning of civic involvement - it wouldn't be too unreasonable to say that DFA was a prototype for the DNC's 50 State Strategy in spirit, although the mechanics of DFA and the 50 State Strategy are very different.

The problem of what to do with Obama's campaign structure is very different, for a number of reasons.  One, Obama's campaign was much, much larger than Dean's.  Two, in early 2004 there was a huge overlap between the netroots progressive movement and the Dean campaign, whereas the Obama campaign of necessity includes plenty of moderate and establishment Democrats, and no small number of Obama volunteers were Republicans.  Three, and perhaps most importantly, Obama was in fact successful, he now has to govern, and his supporters have reason to expect that their priorities will be represented in the White House.

There are a few basic ideas running around for what to do with the Obama campaign, and they seem to include the following basic options:

• Supporting Obama.  The Obama volunteers will become a support network for Obama's legislative priorities in Congress, and will presumably become a group dedicated to pressuring Congress and the media.


• Being active and possibly critical.  The Obama volunteers will be called upon to stay active in, and to continue to sound off on, national politics.  That could include commentary on change.gov or a successor website, conference calls with a randomly selected subset of Obama volunteers, MoveOn-style house parties, and other activities.


• Becoming active in local politics. Essentially following the DFA model, Obama volunteers will be encouraged to support other politicians in Obama's mold at the local level, thereby keeping the campaign going and turning volunteers attention towards a more local level.


• Service projects.  Somewhat like the early version of the Edwards campaign (OneCorps), volunteers will be asked to take on local, mostly apolitical service projects - helping out in food pantries, conservation projects, etc.

There are strengths and weaknesses for each of these options, but I think the main complication is the fact that Obama will soon be president, and there is a limit to the amount of political campaigning he can do.  At the same time, the email list is intensely Obama-focused; if it were to grow into an organization that became a hotbed of criticism of the administration, Obama could simply shut down the email list.  Contra-wise, Obama can't just hand off the email list to a third party; or rather, he could, but a lot of list subscribers would unsubscribe, or stop paying attention.

This is a serious conundrum, but I think one idea which emerged from our house party tonight was quite interesting, and that was to use the house parties simply as a springboard for further policy-oriented conversations - or salons, if you like.

Here's one way this might play out.  Every month, the members of the Obama email list are charged with holding house party conversations about some broad topic.  Hosts could receive some basic informational materials about the issue, but attendees would be free to discuss other sources of ideas on the topic as well - articles, movies, books, whatever.  Each house party could be charged with answering a set of questions, and the administration could commit to taking that aggregate response into account when crafting and directing policy.  What's more, the topics could go on a six-month rotation cycle so that if an issue was discussed in February, it would come up again in August, and house party attendees would have a chance to give feedback on the government's performance on that issue.  There could even be a chance for issue task forces to develop, in order to give more focused and frequent feedback on an issue in between the "spotlight" months.

This approach would, I think, neatly sidestep many of the thornier issues involved in keeping the Obama organization alive.  It is political without being essentially campaign-oriented.  It allows Obama to gather support and feedback, but it is appropriately open to everyone.  Most importantly, it gives the Obama volunteer network something to do, and an ongoing set of opportunities for involvement and action.

There is still the not-insignificant problem of how this operation would be managed.  Would it be run from within the government, as an essentially non-campaign operation with the White House's official support - and would that mean that emails gathered through the operation could not be used for campaign purposes?  Or would it be essentially a shell for the 2012 campaign, and therefore a non-governmental entity which requires its own fundraising arm?   This question is a bit thorny, but I actually think either answer would work out fine in practice.

I'm curious to see what becomes of these house parties, although I'm a bit dismayed that the campaign's progress on this question has been so slow, and that the communication about this problem appears to be very top-down.  Unfortunately, I've also heard this song before in Massachusetts, when Deval Patrick promised to keep his campaign organization involved in governing post-election.  Although there was a lot of hay made about the idea early on, and a few citizen task forces convened, the effort eventually fizzled.  Here's hoping that Obama is more successful in this part of the transition.