Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson did a bang-up job in the new issue dissecting what happened to Obama's campaign apparatus -- and why. Lots of meaty stuff. For one thing, there were a lot of unintended consequences to rolling Obama For America's volunteer organization into the DNC.
It may interest you to know that the same president who can't seem pull it together on healthcare -- the same one who both Obama and David Axelrod insist isn't even thinking about re-election -- already has his reelection infrastructure in place:
OFA has quietly deployed paid staff to all 50 states, building a network from state directors all the way down to a corps of supervolunteers, trained in organizing, who recruit an army of neighborhood team leaders. "There's a skeleton of a re-election campaign already set up -- beyond a skeleton," says Figueroa, the campaign's former field director. "There's already meat to the bone in every state in the union. Three years away from the next election, that army is already being continuously fed. If you're Barack Obama and his political operation, revving the engine, how is that not a good thing?"
For the rest of us? Perhaps not so much. If Obama's putting this kind of effort into his re-election, and not into passing healthcare reform, well, it seems he's getting ahead of himself.
