It was on Facebook, after all, that the group had been born. Brandon Neil, a 21-year-old junior, had created it on Feb. 12, 2007, the day Obama announced that he was running for president.

It was through news clips posted on YouTube -- and through Obama's YouTube channel, which lists more than 1,800 videos -- that the group learned about the Illinois senator's policies and positions.

And it was mostly on the Internet, in one of those ubiquitous, inescapable Web ads -- the campaign spent $8 million on online advertising -- that they heard about Obama's text-messaging program. "I only get texts from my friends," Andy Green, a 20-year-old sophomore, told me. "Let me correct that: I only get texts from my friends and from Obama."

Looking back, I realize that it was on that Thursday night that a new political reality was cemented in my head. In the past, we've thought of politics as something over there -- isolated, separate from our daily lives, as if on a stage upon which journalists, consultants, pollsters and candidates spun and dictated and acted out the process. Now, because of technology in general and the Internet in particular, politics has become something tangible. Politics is right here. You touch it; it's in your laptop and on your cellphone. You control it, by forwarding an e-mail about a candidate, donating money or creating a group. Politics is personal. Politics is viral. Politics is individual.

And we're just getting started.

Obama's unprecedented online success guarantees that there's not a single campaign in 2012, Democratic or Republican, that won't place the Web at the core of its operation. The floodgates are open. This doesn't mean just hiring Web developers, bloggers, videographers -- the works. It also means using the Internet to invite people into the process, giving them something to work for, offering them a stake in victory or defeat. More than any other medium in our history, the Web is by the people, for the people. Starting with Howard Dean, continuing with Obama and stretching out into the future, this new dynamic will transform the way campaigns are run -- and, beyond that, the way the winning candidate governs. Fundamentally, all of this is redefining our relationship with our politics.


The numbers are quite staggering.  A million folks got Obama's text messages (which I learned, after the fact, were actually written by him and not a staffer), more than 13 million are on his e-mail list, and he raised half a billion dollars online from 3 million individual donors.

What this does--as Arianna Huffington totally GETS, as you can see by her goofy request that people everywhere, however they want to, take the oath of office and send her a video--what this does is give us all a shared stake in this presidency, something that goes way beyond sending $25, putting up a yard sign, making calls, or even voting.

Vargas writes:


"In this Internet era, it's not enough to run a campaign; you need to lead a movement," Mindy Finn, a Republican online political operative, told me less than three days after the election. "That's what Obama did." Finn, 27, worked on President Bush's eCampaign team in 2004 and supervised former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's Web strategy. She worries that, unlike its Democratic counterpart, the Republican establishment hasn't fully grasped the ways the Web is revolutionizing politics. "If you look at their site," she said of the Obama campaign, "their online videos, their online ads, everything they did, it wasn't about 'me, myself and I.' It was about 'we' and 'us.' "

It was, in essence, about you.


This is something that I noticed during the debates, both in the primaries and general election, as well as listening to campaign speeches from numerous candidates.  Every one of them spoke--some more eloquently than others--about what *I*--the candidate--was going to do for *you*--the voter.

Only Obama constantly referred to what *we* have done and what "we" hope to do, together.  It was a subtle linguistic difference, but a huge jump in meaning.

Vargas compares the standard model of top-down, message-control campaigning with the new Web-centered model:


But the Web is an uncontrollable, freewheeling medium. The Internet is not TV. You don't just sit back and yell at the screen; you sit up and write back at the screen. And you can also sit back -- click, click, click, scroll, scroll, scroll -- and think for yourself.

Indeed, what was so striking about the longest presidential campaign in history was the impact that everyday people had on setting its round-the-clock narrative.


Vargas refers to two or three books on the subject, but maintains that, hand's-down, the best one is Al Gore's The Assault on Reason.

In an interview, Gore tells him that the Internet is the greatest source there is for "reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish."

In another piece that ran in the Post two days later, "e-Hail to the Chief," Vargas reaches out to Obama supporters who are STILL "fired up and ready to go," and asks, "How will all that online energy be channeled from campaigning into governing?"

Claiming that the federal Washington bureaucracy is "stuck in the Encyclopedia Britannica era," Vargas contrasts that with the idea that "social networking is designed to foster a community."

He explains:


For that approach to be effective, WhiteHouse.gov can't just push information out -- it has to pull content in, too. And once it does so, the administration will have to decide whether, when and how to incorporate those voices into its decision-making process.


This is the unknowable part.

But the Obama team's workin' on it:


On Change.gov, a transition Web site launched two days after Obama won, a constant stream of information is doled out. You can watch YouTube videos of transition staffers. You can track meetings between the transition team and outside groups, which provide searchable documents online (and allow visitors to leave comments for the team). You can post questions in the "Open for Questions" feature, where submitted questions are voted to the top by other users. In its first week, the feature got 978,868 votes on 10,302 questions from 20,468 people.


Vargas details how Tom Daschle, Obama's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is trying to mobilize people in support of health care reform.  I will be getting into that in more detail in future posts, but already, there have been almost 5,000 house parties held, with administration support, that have submitted videotapes and ideas for dealing with this important issue.  Daschle has reported back via You Tube.

This is HUGE.  Unprecedented in our nation's history.

Certainly with the Bush administration, pharmaceutical company lobbyists wined and dined congresspeople and administration representatives alike, then literally wrote the legislation they favored, which was then rubber-stamped by the Republican congress and signed into law by a president who did not once use his veto, for six entire years.

(In the two years since the Democrats have had the majority in Congress, he has used the veto more than any other president.)

It's not just policy that is under discussion via the Internet.  Obama has also vowed to make government more transparent, through the Internet:


Aided by Karina Newton, her director of new media, Pelosi has been telling committee chairmen since the beginning of 2007 that they needed to webcast committee meetings. In the summer of 2007, 11 House committees did. A year later, nine more followed suit. The upgrade isn't limited to Democrats. Republicans such as Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina have been early Web adapters. Their aim is to talk directly with their constituents.

But Internet-centered groups such as the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation -- which includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia on its board -- say legislators can do much more to increase transparency, especially when it comes to disclosing online which lobbying groups they're meeting with and what earmarks they're requesting. At the height of the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system in late September, Sunlight started an online petition calling for all legislation to be posted online for a minimum of 72 hours before a vote. According to Sunlight, some 10,000 signed the petition within a few days.

"Every single day a member gets a printed-out version of his or her schedule. Why can't they put that up online? They know the list of earmarks they've submitted to their committee chairmen. Why can't they put that up online? The answer to 'Why can't they put that up?' is 'It's more information than they need to know.' I've had senior members of Congress use those exact words to me," says Ellen Miller, who co-founded Sunlight in 2006.

Adds Andrew Rasiej, an adviser to Sunlight and the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which chronicles the intersection of technology and politics: "Most members of Congress don't know the difference between a server and a waiter. But they're getting better. They have young staffers who live in the YouTube world. They've seen how Obama used the Web. They're waking up to this new reality."

For Rasiej, Obama can serve as a model in how to use technology for governing. A lot is riding on exactly what kind of power Obama's chief technology officer -- a newly created position -- will have. And where that position fits within the Obama administration. Julius Genachowski, a friend of Obama's since law school and the campaign's chief technology officer, is considered the front-runner for the job.


Consider it Government 2.0.


And all of this depends on us--the Obama Army, so to speak--to keep making our presence known.

In a piece in Time, "The Permanent Campaign," Michael Scherer-Owings, MD, explains how Obama supporters are staying involved:


They were white and black, old and young, middle-class professionals who shared a collective frustration with the state of their country. At least four of the founding 12 had once been registered Republicans. Most had stories of helping the Obama campaign; all had internalized Obama's message of bottom-up, people-powered political change. "For anything that is going on in southern Maryland, Barack Obama personally can have an impact — through us," explained Leandre. (See pictures of Obama on Flickr.)

This sort of thing has been happening quietly all over the country this winter. For the first time in decades, a President will enter office at the spearhead of a social movement he created.


The article goes on to point out what an unrealized potential this force really is, and how it has gathered together--both virtually and in reality--"with almost no publicity and barely a whisper of encouragement from Obama himself."

The key--the absolute bottom-line--is the usefulness of this "army" to get legislation passed:


Though few talk in public about it, a 13 million-man army, with foot soldiers ready to act in key congressional districts, could come in handy if the White House has trouble lining up votes for various bills and proposals that reach Capitol Hill. Obama's army can make a lot of phone calls and send a lot of e-mails — and it has proved it knows how to act fast.


True to everything else about Obama as a leader, the website has already clearly spelled out four reader-ranked objectives for the site, as catalogued by E.J. Dionne in a piece for the Post called, "What Next for Obama's Network?":


Offering a clue as to what Obama insiders are thinking, the survey asked supporters to rank four objectives: helping the new administration "pass legislation through grass-roots efforts"; helping elect state and local candidates "who share the same vision for our country"; training others in the organizing techniques perfected by the campaign; and "working on local issues that impact our communities."

After some internal consideration, Obama has decided to enfold this organization within the auspices of the Democratic Party.  There have been some protests to that, but the truth is that it is probably the most sensible solution, not just for legal reasons, but for organizational ones as well, especially when it comes time for him to run for reelection.

You can read much more about this in a piece by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe called, "Obama Brings Cyber Sensibility to Office."

Finally, websites are beginning to take shape beyond just change.gov, which was Obama's transition website.  Chris Cillizza writes in the Post that the new website that will be a part of the Democratic party is called Organizing for America.  You can read more about it here.

The article does not provide the Organizing for America website address, but I will

The Obama organization also has a new website up called USA Service, which is designed to help you find ways to volunteer in your community or in your area.

This is just the beginning, folks.

We don't know what the end result will be.  It could wind up being like herding cats.  As Will Rogers so famously said, "I don't belong to any organized party.  I'm a Democrat."

Already, Democrats have howled in protest when Obama displeases them, such as when he signed on to the warrentless wiretapping law, and when he invited minister Rick Warren to present the Inaugural invocation.

But both times, the howls of protest were aired extensively on Obama's websites; the negative comments were allowed to remain up for all to read, and when it got particularly heated, Obama himself blogged a response.

Eventually, everybody calmed down.

People just want to be heard.  And Obama and his administration--more than any other in our country's history--are listening.

But it's not enough just to speak out, or sign online petitions.  If we really want to participate in this exciting new democratic experiment, we must get involved.  That means paying attention to laws that are being discussed and working their way through congress.  It means making it clear that our elected representatives on the local, regional, and state level understand what we want to see in the new legislation.  It means continuing to work at the community level, not just to support candidates for school board or whatever, but volunteering and giving back what time or money we have in these difficult times.

(Charitable non-profits are the first to suffer in times of recession.  Food banks, in particular, have seen double the need and half the resources to meet it.)

In coming weeks, I'll follow along with what's going on in the new administration, and try to keep you guys posted as best I can.

In the end, it will be up to all of us to ensure that Barack Obama has a successful presidency, and the terrible problems of our time are dealt with in ways both comprehensive and fair.

The campaign might be over, but our work has only just begun.