Obama backers look for ways to carry out the call for change

Anne Savage showed off a poster she made at a meeting of Obama supporters in Dexter, Mich. Many grass-roots meetings are considering a role for his backers. (Rob Widdis for The Boston Globe)

The movement that elected Barack Obama president, looking beyond last month's hard-earned victory, has begun to chew on a central question:

What now?

"It's like, damn, that was amazing," said Chris Savage, a 44-year-old chemist and Obama activist who lives near Ann Arbor, Mich. "The question is, what happens to all this energy?"

Obama supporters nationwide are busy trying to come up with answers, meeting in homes, bars, coffee shops, and at holiday parties to devise plans for building on the enthusiasm generated by his presidential bid.

If Obama's campaign was about bringing change to the country, the post-election period is about defining what that change means and how to achieve it.

His backers are already using networks developed during the campaign to rally support for causes including building local neighborhood organizations and eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

In Florida, they plan to apply Obama's organizing methods to local races, including the 2010 contest to succeed retiring Republican US Senator Mel Martinez. They showed up in droves at the Foggy Bottom Coffee House in Dexter, Mich., for a postelection meet-and-greet with a newly elected Democratic representative, Mark Schauer, partly to show they would be paying attention to what he does in Congress.

"I was overwhelmed," Schauer said of the Nov. 15 event, which drew some 120 people. "I would have thought it was a rally two days before the election."

Obama aides say they are still figuring out how best to use their e-mail list of some 13 million names. The campaign says it received more than 500,000 responses to an online survey. Over the weekend, it hosted an Organizing for Change Legacy Conference outside Chicago, an invitation-only event at which a few hundred field staff members and volunteer leaders met to "look forward to the future of what our volunteer organization can become."

"Since the election, the challenges we face - and our responsibility to take action - have only gotten more urgent," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote to supporters Thursday to promote "Change is Coming" house meetings this coming weekend. Coordinated by the campaign, more than 1,500 gatherings of supporters are being held around the country to harness the campaign energy for governing.

There are already a few hints of how Obama and his administration might do that. Former US senator Tom Daschle, expected to be named as Obama's health and human services secretary, said at a healthcare summit Friday in Colorado that Americans should attend the house meetings and brainstorm on how to overhaul healthcare and that he planned to attend one himself.

"If I'm trying to move health-care reform through Washington, then the fact that we have 10 million people on an e-mail list who are ready and willing to get activated and to help educate their friends and neighbors and co-workers about the issue - that's incredibly powerful," Obama says in the January edition of Ebony magazine.

But many in the Obama movement are not waiting for a cue. Indeed, one lesson they learned from his bottom-up campaign is that they can act without directives from the top, and they have been exploring various means of bringing order and purpose to the still-amorphous desire among many Obama supporters to stay connected and involved.

Last Thursday evening, for example, Savage and nearly 30 other Obama supporters from the Ann Arbor area hashed out ideas at a pub in Dexter, Mich. Savage said he hopes to see the creation of a local network that could organize around anything from watershed issues to taxes.

"During the general election, there was one giant goal, so it was easier to focus on," said Scott Stoddard, a 34-year-old graphic designer and Obama activist in Aurora, Colo. "What's happening now and what's going to continue to happen, you obviously have people who are partial to certain issues. I think you're going to have small groups sprouting from that."

Some former Obama volunteers have already launched specific projects. Rita Rogers, a fifth-grade teacher in Akron, Ohio, used the campaign website's social networking technology to develop a new group called Ohio Teachers for Obama, which she hopes will grow to influence national education policy.

Rogers, 55, said she is particularly concerned that the increased focus on standardized testing is hurting students.

"I knew what we did during the election was too important to drop," said Rogers, who led a bank of Obama volunteers during the campaign. "And I thought, while this energy is still buzzing around, we need to mobilize."

Others are relative newcomers to political activism. Mary Coe Corroo, a 70-year-old from Cape Coral, Fla., who works part-time behind the counter at a Bob Evans restaurant, had never been active in a political campaign before Obama's. She just gave $5 to Obama's transition effort, and she wants to participate in reforming healthcare and Social Security, both of which she relies on and worries about.

"Those are the close-to-home things that we have to work on," she said.

Supporters and activists are also pondering exactly what their relationship with Obama's administration will be, knowing their job will entail both supporting initiatives they like and challenging ones they don't.

"What's the dance?" Jim Wallis, a prominent liberal evangelical pastor and activist, asked at a gathering of civic leaders at the Kennedy Library in Boston last week. "What's the choreography?"

Those are the same questions supporters of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts were asking after he won office in 2006 and promised to maintain ties with his own grass-roots network, a relationship that may hold lessons for Obama.

Over the past two years, Patrick has regularly met with and solicited input from those supporters, and some - including a group of Massachusetts dairy farmers, who successfully pressed for more state financial assistance - used their organizing skills and access for concrete ends.

But Patrick also found that campaign supporters will not necessarily march in lockstep behind him as governor. Many, for example, opposed his push for casinos and let him know.

"Listening to grass-roots supporters is easy," said Liz Morningstar, who runs Patrick's political committee. "Making them feel heard is the challenge."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.