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Toward the end of 2015, Organizing for Action (OFA), a nonprofit group that grew out of Barack Obama's formidable campaign organization, sent out a flurry of emails to its members urging recipients to chip in before midnight, December 31. These sorts of appeals are standard less than a year before a general election. But Obama was facing the twilight of his presidency--in all likelihood, he had run his last political campaign. So each dollar that flew into OFA's coffer was, presumably, a dollar not going to a candidate with battles yet to come. Yet there was no outcry against OFA from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or congressional Democrats or the party's frontrunner's--Hillary Clinton's--campaign. Why was OFA pushing forward as Obama's presidency was winding down?
The answer says something about how Obama intended to defy lame-duck status and influence his party for years to come. At a time when a good deal of partisanship takes place outside of regular party organizations, OFA works to mobilize support for progressive priorities in the face of continuing fierce opposition. Beyond the struggles of the moment, OFA was seeking, as it had since its creation in 2013, to move beyond loyalty to Obama himself and find ways to deepen his political and policy legacies after his presidency.
Organizing for Action was actually the third iteration of Obama's grassroots movement. He and his allies built a digital-age grassroots organization that proved central to the success of his two presidential campaigns. Born during the 2008 campaign as "Obama for America," this mass mobilization effort, unlike other presidential campaign organizations, was not dismantled once the 2008 campaign ended. Envisaging a postelection role for OFA, the president-elect; the newly appointed chair of the DNC, Tim Kaine; staffers; and volunteers engaged in extensive discussions, finally resolving that it should be absorbed as a significant part of the national party's expanded field operations in the states.1Reconstituted as the "grassroots arm of the party," OFA was inserted into the DNC as "Organizing for America" during the president's first term, where it was tasked with mustering support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the ACA), the president's signature program; working for Democratic candidates in the 2010 off-year election; and developing a ground game...