Melding Obama’s web to a YouTube,Facebook presidency

“It’s almost like a football season or a basketball season — you go as hard as you can,and then you’ve got to take a breather between the seasons,” he said. McIntosh’s uncertainty suggests just one of the many obstacles the White House faces as it tries to accomplish what aides say is one of their most important goals: transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-Texting-Twittering grassroots organisation that helped put Obama in the White House into an instrument of Government. That was something that Obama,who began his career as a community organiser,told aides was a top priority,even before he was elected.

His aides have created a new group,Organising for America,to redirect the campaign machinery in the service of broad changes in healthcare,environmental and fiscal policy. They envision an army of supporters talking,sending e-mail messages and texting to friends and neighbours as they try to mould public opinion.

The organisation will be housed in the Democratic National Committee,rather than at the White House. But the idea behind it is also very evident in the White House’s media strategy. Obama is attempting to bypass the mainstream news media and take messages straight to the public.

The most prominent example of the new strategy is his weekly address to the nation — what under previous presidents was a speech recorded for and released to radio stations on Saturday mornings. Obama instead records a video,which on Saturday he posted on the White House website and on YouTube. By late Sunday afternoon,it had been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube.

White House cannot use the 13-million-person e-mail list because Obama’s team developed it for political purposes. That is an important reason Obama has decided to build a new organisation within the Democratic Party,which does not have similar restrictions.

Still,after months of discussion,aides said the whole approach remained a work in progress.

“This has obviously never been undertaken before,” David Plouffe,Obama’s campaign manager and one of the organisers of this effort,said in the video sent to supporters. “So it’s going to be a little trial-and-error.”