My new report on the first year of Organizing for America is yielding some interesting responses, including notes from politicos who want to remain anonymous. Here is an email from a seasoned Democrat that suggests a broader context for Internet politics, and argues Obama's political operation has undercut its own ability to innovate:

Since OFA is a coherent organization, one can point to it and say 'this is unprecedented, and they are doing a great/good/bad job', but a post-Presidential period has happened before, forty something times.

It would be interesting to informally benchmark what's happening now against previous Presidential campaigns and what came out of them. There were a lot of important spinoffs of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns on the right, not just generations of talent but new organization models like corporate PACs, direct mail, and New Right structures. In 2004, a lot of progressive activists on the various Dean, Clark, and Kerry bandwagons came into politics with a very specific set of initial searing experiences. And the people who ran the Obama campaign at the top came out of various campaigns from the 1980s and onward. Some campaigns held onto talent long-term, some didn't. Some had highly charged electoral energy, some didn't. Some were centralized, some weren't.

The New York Times convened several tech experts this weekend to debate online privacy and the "overuse of social networking tools." Professor Clay Shirky stole the show, recounting a college tequila run that ended with his hair on fire. That youthful indiscretion was a harmless secret for Shirky, back in the days went you had to be physically present to witness a private event:

Society has always carved out space for young people to misbehave. We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn’t see, because it was hidden, and behavior we could see, because it was public. That bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption.

So nowadays, a tequila flaming head incident cries out for instant memorialization via cell phone, Facebook and YouTube. That may ding some millennial reputations, Shirky contends, but eventually it will recalibrate societal norms to tolerate a greater range of benign misconduct – as long as adults “cut young people some slack.” So if President Clinton dabbled in pot and President Obama once tried some blow, the argument goes, then surely we can chill out on today’s kids:

Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

The arc of social networking does bend towards reality; a society that sees more of itself should eventually discard some delusions about its own behavior and propriety. The examples of Clinton and Obama, however, actually cut in the opposite direction.

Hillary Clinton has been talking up online diplomacy, as Micah Sifry and Nancy Scola reported in this space, and her husband is getting in on the act, too.

OFA launched a new email and petition drive on Tuesday afternoon, ratcheting up pressure on Congress to pass the President's health care plan. Huffington Post's Nico Pitney reports on the move's political significance:

A first shot, of sorts, is being fired in the Obama-era battle for health care reform. Organizing for America, President Obama's political arm, is blasting out an email to its massive list of supporters urging them to join an "Organizing for Health Care" campaign.

A DNC official says the message is significant because it is "the first email" that is "going out from the OFA and DNC lists organizing for health care." The declaration drive will culminate, the official added, in a supporter list that organizers "can deliver to members of Congress." But there are some problems here.

It is early, but so far, these OFA legislative "organizing" efforts run the risk of being boring, vague and redundant.

"I don't want to be an apologist, especially not for this zip code," said Joshua L. Steiner, co-president of the Quadrangle investment firm, as he scanned the well-heeled crowd gathered in lower Manhattan for The New Yorker Summit. Steiner, a former U.S. Treasury official during the Clinton administration, cautioned against the "temptation" to inflict pain for its own sake, or chase "speedy" fixes. Yet at this salon on Obama's agenda, Steiner is -- as conference keynoter Malcom Gladwell might say -- an outlier.

Most of the economic heavyweights here indicted Wall Street and Washington, without falling into any discernible partisan patterns.

Political blog readers know that Condi Rice recently lost it.

Asked about her role advancing torture during the Bush administration in a meeting with college students, Rice claimed that no torture occurred in Guantanamo (false); Al Qaeda poses a greater threat than the axis in World War II (dubious); and -- this was big -- the President can make an act legal by authorizing it (official Frost/Nixon alert). Along the way, Rice also berated one college student, chiding him to "do your homework first" and read a report supporting her views -- an exchange that was unbecoming and uncomfortable to watch.

Harpers' Scott Horton already demolished Rice's arguments, so I won't repeat his points here. But this incident also shows the prospects for what we might call a substantive Macaca Moment - using YouTube and citizen media to scrutinize our leaders on the issues, not gaffes.

For Internet politics, the controversial becomes conventional very quickly.

Until recently, there were heated disputes over whether political blogs had any impact on American government. While academics still debate the contours of that impact, much of the media and political establishment now seem to accept that blogs and online activism have an impact on politics. Credit the wired Obama campaign, or the media learning curve, or liberal bloggers' knack for being right and early on Iraq, financial regulation, economic populism and the Democrats' 50-State Strategy.

Whatever the overlapping factors, this Sunday's New York Times Book Review has a salient example of blogs' ascension within the conventional wisdom.

Maybe there weren't that many "P.U.M.A.s" after all. A new Harvard study -- from some PDF friends at Berkman -- reports that male voters displayed "in-group" bias for people who shared their candidate preference in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, while women voters did not.

The tendency to favor fellow Obama or Clinton supporters was measured through a generosity exercise, the "dictator game," which found that male voters chose to be more generous to others who supported their preferred candidate, be it Clinton or Obama. Women voters did not exhibit that tendency. "In-group favoritism existed in male Democrats after Clinton's concession in June," reports the study, and "persisted into August."

What about all those unity gestures during the Democratic Convention?

The White House released a new video on Friday, tackling another question from last week's virtual town hall with President Obama. White House aides had indicated they would continue to engage citizen questions, as I reported for PDF this week, and the new video features an official for disability policy, Kareem Dale, responding to a video submission about health care for people with disabilities.

Just about everyone has weighed in on the President's first virtual town hall, and my report from a day at the White House is here. Looking forward, here are three thoughts on the next Open for Questions, and picking up on related PDF posts:

1. Don't weed out the weed
Mathew Burton defends the pot questions, explaining how their open, spirited participation does not constitute "gaming" the system - that is the system. "Lack of participation from a broad base of the populace" was the problem, he argues, and next time the White House should avoid the temptation of using tactics "to--ahem--weed out questions." (Somewhere, Joseph Tartakovsky smiled.) If anything, Obama hit the wrong tone by not giving the pot question a serious answer on par with other citizen queries. That tack upset even ardent Obama supporters. It also left Robert Gibbs hitting clean up, as several thoughtful drug policy questions bubbled up in the press briefing that same afternoon.