"President-elect Obama was clear throughout the campaign that elected officials alone aren't going to bring change to Washington and that it would take a broad coalition of Americans organizing their own communities to build support for the change we need," said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama for America, the campaign organization. "There's no question that we will continue to leverage the work our supporters are doing locally to support the policy agenda they rallied around during the campaign."
Voter information gathered by Obama's campaign has gone into the DNC's databank, which will be under Obama's control but remains the property of the national party. His most valuable assets - a full list of donors, including some 3 million who gave online, and an e-mail list of 13 million names - are Obama's alone and likely to stay tightly held outside the party structure.
The runoff election for a Senate seat in Georgia provides an early indication of this two-track approach. Obama has directed volunteers and campaign workers to Georgia, kept Democratic field offices open in the state and recorded a radio commercial on behalf of the Democratic candidate, Jim Martin. He may even make an in-person campaign appearance before the Dec. 2 vote. But he hasn't let Martin use his database, according to a Democratic official.
The other day, Obama took steps to begin re-organizing his grass-roots network of campaign volunteers.
A mass e-mail, sent out over the signature of campaign manager David Plouffe, asked Obama supporters to "help shape the future of this movement" by submitting a four-page online questionnaire.
The Obama organization "will continue to work for change," Plouffe wrote, "whether it's by building grassroots support for legislation, backing state and local candidates," or working at the neighborhood level.
Obama's information request also appears on his campaign Web site, which remains active. It will deepen his databank by adding fresh demographic details about supporters - including age, ethnic background and religious affiliation - along with specific issue concerns, level of political experience and whether they'd like to remain "part of an Obama organization."
Don Devine, a Republican strategist from Maryland who worked in Ronald Reagan's campaigns and in his administration, said that most presidents haven't had a separate organization or haven't tended it very well.
"It's a smart thing to do," he said. "And if some of Obama's supporters don't identify with the Democratic Party, that would be doubly smart."
But a former Obama campaign adviser called it needlessly expensive to maintain a separate political arm outside the DNC and warned that the new president's strategists may overreach if they try to keep their campaign apparatus running at a cost of tens of millions of dollars a year.
"You don't have the glue any more," said this Democrat, who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy. "Obama's election was the cause," he added, not individual items on his agenda as president.
