From The Washington Post
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

While the nation’s capital obsesses over Barack Obama’s next Cabinet pick, the president-elect’s lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama’s vast grass-roots network?

Electoral campaigns, like circus tents, quickly disappear after the show is over. But Obama is our first community-organizer president, and he sees the way he got elected as being almost as crucial as the fact that he won. Because of the emphasis he put on organizing, barackobama.com might fairly be seen as the most successful high-tech startup of the past two years.

Over and over, Obama has spoken of change coming from “the bottom up,” and the organization he built down to the precinct and neighborhood level could be an agent of that change. But how?

The discussion among Obama’s lieutenants focuses on several alternatives. In one view, the Obama apparatus could be integrated into the Democratic Party and be run through the Democratic National Committee. Many of Obama’s top aides, including campaign manager David Plouffe, are veterans of traditional Democratic politics.

Turning the Obama network into a vast national party organization could give Democrats durable advantages that the party has not enjoyed since the New Deal era, when Franklin Roosevelt built an alliance between local political machines and a growing labor movement.

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