My new report on the first year of Organizing for America is yielding some interesting responses, including notes from politicos who want to remain anonymous. Here is an email from a seasoned Democrat that suggests a broader context for Internet politics, and argues Obama's political operation has undercut its own ability to innovate:

Since OFA is a coherent organization, one can point to it and say 'this is unprecedented, and they are doing a great/good/bad job', but a post-Presidential period has happened before, forty something times.

It would be interesting to informally benchmark what's happening now against previous Presidential campaigns and what came out of them. There were a lot of important spinoffs of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns on the right, not just generations of talent but new organization models like corporate PACs, direct mail, and New Right structures. In 2004, a lot of progressive activists on the various Dean, Clark, and Kerry bandwagons came into politics with a very specific set of initial searing experiences. And the people who ran the Obama campaign at the top came out of various campaigns from the 1980s and onward. Some campaigns held onto talent long-term, some didn't. Some had highly charged electoral energy, some didn't. Some were centralized, some weren't.