I think the conventional grassroots mobilization methods, even upgraded and intensified as they were by Karl Rove in 2004, have become as outmoded as a cavalry charge in 1939. They did not work in 2006 or in 2008. I do not think that we even know how the new Blitzkrieg version of electoral warfare actually will be conducted. I think were moving into a new method of conducting elections as radical as Blitzkrieg in 1939 and the Gulf war. I am convinced that no one in the Republican party establishment has read Rommel's book.
That is not to say that just because conventional grassroots organizations are outclassed by the new cyber/Alinsky methods they should be abandoned. To the contrary, we have got to go with what we have if only to mitigate the disparity. But in doing so must not deceive ourselves that we are accomplishing very much. Those of us who predicted the electoral disasters 2006 and 2008 have become extremely wary of mindless optimism which is so often seen, for example, on these threads which has the fatal effect of masking mortal peril.
That is not to say that just because conventional grassroots organizations are outclassed by the new cyber/Alinsky methods they should be abandoned. To the contrary, we have got to go with what we have if only to mitigate the disparity. But in doing so must not deceive ourselves that we are accomplishing very much. As far as organizing on the ground is concerned (which is the the foundation of politics) the sad truth and yet the opportunity that still lays before us is this: we have never come close to approaching the kind of organizing we can and probably must do.
We do not need tricks. We have the basic resources we need. We have the plans that have worked* and will continue to work. We just need modest money, focus, determination, and the commitment to utter camaraderie and utterly no division.
I could go on and on (and have, including training materials and a fund raising prospectus).
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*plans that very effectively recruit a big "sleeping giant" of very available people direcly into bottom-up electoral activities, not the top-down, crippled 501(c)4's of the 1980's and 90's.