(The Huffington Post) Shadow Elite: Has the Obama Organizing Machine Staged A Party Takeover?

By Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan
Do you know the President of the United States? No, we don't either, but you wouldn't know it from looking at our in-boxes, which have quite a few emails directly from, well, "Barack Obama," Vice President Biden, and a handful of deputies. Perhaps yours does too, if you're one of the 13 million people whose emails were collected during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The emails are the product of something quite novel in the annals of American politics, what Nation journalist Ari Melber calls "the largest governance organizing effort by a national party in history," an unprecedented attempt to convert "a winning campaign's volunteer network into an organization devoted to enacting a national agenda." They come from Organizing for America, the successor organization to the eminently-wired campaign organization Obama for America. O.F.A. is both novel and controversial, because some believe the organization has sidelined the broader Democratic party going into the crucial midterm elections, as well as the traditional media and even Congress.

Janine, a social anthropologist who explores emerging configurations of power and governance, sees O.F.A. as a sign of the times. In her book Shadow Elite, she charts a new system of influence that's emerged in recent decades, shaping decisions at the highest levels of government and business in ways that skirt checks and balances and defy accountability. Increasingly, top power brokers are bending traditional rules of both the state and the private sector; utilizing a rise in executive power; bypassing bureaucracies, personalizing and/or creating alternative structures; emphasizing loyalty to one's self, one's allies and one's cause rather than a broader organization; taking advantage of the very latest technology; and playing with the truth to brand and market their own agendas.
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