President Barack Obama waves as he boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland,... 
(Gerald Herbert/AP Photo)
For some of President Obama's most loyal supporters, the campaign never ended.
In northeastern Ohio, Amy Diamond is back organizing the same counties for the president that she did for candidate Obama. In Texas, more paid staffers work for the president now than before the election, says Luke Hayes, the state director of Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America.
It's all part of a systematic effort to maintain the loyalty of Obama's vast network of volunteers and to leverage the enthusiasm his campaign generated into support for his agenda.
Nearly a year after the election, Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird, two veterans of Obama's 2008 grass-roots organizing effort, have almost completed their effort to reconstitute the national network that fueled the president's historic win.
Once Organizing for America directors are hired for Oklahoma and Wyoming, "we'll be in all 50 states," Bird says. "We are really committed to being everywhere."
Since June, the group has focused on drumming up support for the president's health care plan. Stewart said volunteers on Tuesday placed or pledged to make more than 300,000 calls to Congress on the topic.
"It takes hard work," says Zack Davis, an Organizing for America regional director in Sioux City, Iowa. "Without it," he says, "the change we fought for will just be this great dream."
Obama isn't the first winning candidate to try to turn his campaign workers' enthusiasm into an engine for his legislative agenda. Former president George W. Bush shared campaign mailing lists with the Republican National Committee and tried to activate those supporters to push for his pet programs, says Ben Ginsberg, a GOP election law expert.
The difference, Ginsberg says, is that Obama's effort "has been much more direct and organized."
Immediately after the election, while most of Obama's staff was planning for the inauguration, a small team of field organizers began debriefing campaign volunteers. Bird, who helped to spearhead that effort, says it included a nationwide survey, a two-day conference in Chicago for about 400 campaign activists, conference calls and house parties to solicit more views from the grass roots.
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