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Barack Obama has made it clear that he intends to bring with him to the White House the same online organizing and messaging tools he used so successfully during the campaign. That's made some in Washington nervous, and with good reason. No candidate had ever marshaled supporters as effectively, and no president has entered office with such a network so firmly intact. The following is one scenario of how the Obama White House could use these tools to set the agenda in Washington. Follow the links for more information about Obama's real-life Web operations.

In retrospect, the modesty of President Obama's agenda during his first 100 days should have foreshadowed the larger things to come.

It's no discredit to his achievements during those first months -- signing into law the economic stimulus package, establishing the National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank and squelching the efforts of a vocal faction of House Democrats to investigate former President Bush for war crimes -- to say that at the time they hardly seemed to augur the transformational presidency many of his supporters had hoped for.

But as Washington's summer heat approached, the White House began to lay the groundwork for what came to be known as the Obama Omnibus, the administration's "big bang" strategy of bundling together a series of sweeping bills on health care, energy, the environment and the economy. As it had done during the campaign, Obama's team used online organizing tools in new ways to take political opponents by surprise.

From the handful of former officials who have since opened up to the media, we now know that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel oversaw during this period a broad reorganization of the White House communications office, bringing in scores of former campaign staffers to help coordinate the administration's Web efforts with its even larger political operation, run through the Democratic National Committee, known to the public as Organizing for America and internally as Barack Obama 2.0.

In consultation with Emanuel's team in the White House, this office -- essentially an expansion of Obama's campaign apparatus -- soon set to work sifting the mountains of data gathered during the transition period and integrating it with the 13 million e-mail addresses on file from the White House race. In particular, they sought to match supporters to the issues that motivated them and identify voters living in the districts of Blue Dog and Republican congressmen whose votes might be in question.

At the same time, Obama's policy wonks began quietly reaching out to prominent bloggers and online commentators, soliciting their advice in much the same way that Obama had met with mainstream media pundits in the week before his inauguration. Where they corresponded with the administration's objectives, these recommendations were woven into the emerging bills and the bloggers given credit. But the strategic flattery would pay off down the line even with those whose opinions weren't used, and in the end the opinion leaders of the Web would line up more or less in favor of Obama's proposals.

By June, when Obama called on a joint session of Congress to enact his far-reaching agenda, the general outlines of the legislation had already been sketched out inside the various White House policy shops. The challenge now was to sell it.

In a series of appearances broadcast in prime time but circulated beforehand in high-definition video to online supporters, the president called on Americans to log in to my.WhiteHouse.gov, a social networking site built around the shell of his campaign's successful my.BarackObama.com, and submit their ideas on what measures the legislative package should include. Those signing in used an application much like the now-antiquated MixedInk, which combined the attributes of a wiki with ranking systems like Digg or Reddit, allowing visitors to recombine and rank other people's input.

Skeptics questioned how much of this citizen-generated advice was really making its way to the policy groups, raising many of the same questions that had come up about the more rudimentary feedback applications of Obama's transition Web site, change.gov. These questions, though, gained little traction as millions of people were at least made to feel like they were part of the process.

But while it wasn't immediately obvious at the time, the site was at least as much about shaping the administration's message as it was about giving a sense of ownership to average Americans. Previous administrations had used internal polling to craft their sales pitch, but Obama's team was able to analyze on an unprecedented scale which keywords and arguments reverberated most with opponents and advocates of each specific proposal. These keywords soon began appearing in Obama's online and television ad campaigns.

Since users of the site had to log in with their Social Security Numbers (an attempt to limit tampering as well as a nod to the complaints of anti-immigration groups) and were encouraged to give more demographic data about themselves, the site did double duty as a means to supplement the database kept by the Obama 2.0 team at DNC headquarters.

When, in August, rural congressmen and farm groups complained that their constituents were being disenfranchised due to lack of Web access, the Department of Homeland Security retrofitted hundreds of Hurricane Katrina-era trailers with Internet terminals and deployed them as "Democracy Stations" across the country. Allegations that these stations were more densely distributed in Democratic-leaning areas were largely overlooked amid the boomlet of positive press coverage that week.

Not surprisingly, the site did have some early bugs: Obama's Web team was accused of gaming the system to favor some proposals over others, and a withering denial-of-service attack believed to have originated overseas nearly brought the site down in its first week.

But despite these obstacles, the Obama White House was able to use its Web site, along with frequent e-mails and videos to supporters, to effectively dictate the terms of the national conversation throughout that summer. By the time Congress returned from its August recess, polling showed substantial public support behind the general themes of the first bill, this one on health care, put forward that week in the Senate by Obama's former home state colleague Richard Durbin.

Republicans, still smarting from two consecutive electoral disasters, had been hesitantly optimistic during the president's first months, mollified by his consensus-seeking and gestures of bipartisanship. But the impending legislative tsunami did more than any weekend retreat or statement of principles to overcome the party's disarray and galvanize it into opposition.

In order to counterbalance the reach of Obama's e-mail registry, a deal was struck among Republican lawmakers and sympathetic interest groups to pool their rolls of e-mail address and cell phone numbers under the aegis of the Republican National Committee. As a condition of combining their data, the RNC agreed to wipe clean its servers after the Obama bill had been defeated on the theory that saturating people's e-mail inboxes makes them less likely to read any particular message.

Using a low-cost text message and e-mail campaign, the newly expanded RNC Web operation was able to rally the party faithful into online opposition -- encouraging hesitant supporters to participate in my.WhiteHouse.gov, coordinating a national e-mail campaign to Obama and his congressional allies, and soliciting user-generated videos and running them as ads on nationwide cable.

When Republican attacks keyed in on a provision in the proposed bill they said would limit patients' ability to choose their own doctor, the White House promptly renamed that section the Susan Perkins Amendment, after a registered nurse from Pleasant Hill, Iowa, who had offered a similar recommendation on their Web site. The Obama team claimed the idea had in fact originated with Perkins -- a dubious claim given that most of the heavy lifting on policy was done in-house that summer.

Whatever the chronology, what is clear is that Perkins became one of the least likely stars of the ensuing legislative battle, much as "Joe the Plumber" had shot to prominence during the presidential campaign. Democrats recruited her for a series of Web and television ads and spotlighted her blog, which had been automatically created for her as a user of WhiteHouse.gov. (Allegations that it was ghostwritten by a senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle have never been proved.) Republican bloggers, for their part, took only days to dig up evidence of Perkins' criminal record and were soon savaging her on talk radio shows and in wildfire e-mail chains reminiscent of those that had incorrectly called Obama a Muslim.

As important as it was to court the public, the president's advisers knew from the battle over health care reform in the early '90s that congressional intransigence would likely be the bigger stumbling block. Over cries of outrage from lawmakers of both parties, the DNC's Web operation began mobilizing Obama supporters in the districts of wavering House members, threatening to turn their grassroots fundraising power against any congressman who held up the president's proposals.

Democrats in the Senate lined up grudgingly behind Obama, but the president's strong-arm tactics had brought about an unexpected unity in the opposition party. Knowing at least one GOP vote would be necessary to prevent a filibuster, Emanuel supervised an effort to bring intensive pressure on Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania along with Maine's two moderate Republicans. Texts, e-mails and Web videos from the president mobilized teams of Obama volunteers in both states. Those teams manned makeshift phone banks set up in candidate Obama's former offices and used a system similar to his campaign's "Neighbor to Neighbor" tool to crowdsource the political pressure effort cheaply and quickly.

At times, the fervor of Obama's supporters threatened to derail the best-laid plans of the White House. The president was finally forced to reign in the efforts of overeager activists who bused in thousands for demonstrations in the streets of Harrisburg and Philadelphia, Portland and Bangor that dragged on for days. The three Republican senators were overwhelmed with letters, e-mails and phone calls coordinated by online volunteers, and they suffered weeks of negative attention when pop musician will.i.am released his YouTube hits, "Triple Threat (To The American People)" and "Can't Stop Barack," both noticeably darker in tone than his previous efforts.

In the end, it was Specter -- the only one facing re-election this year -- who caved, giving Democrats the supermajority needed to send the health care bill through the House. The House, intimidated by the White House's hard-charging tactics and hoping for access to the President's e-mail list in the upcoming midterm election, voted 251-83 in favor of the bill (many Republicans withheld their votes in protest), and President Obama signed the bill into law in early October after having posted it online for five days "for review by the citizens."

Once the first bill was through, the subsequent waves of the Obama Omnibus were, for the most part, a foregone conclusion. The president's energy bill was held up for several weeks when a mysterious virus took down the Energy Working Group's computers, but with the enhancement of WhiteHouse.gov security measures, the project was soon back on track. It, too, was eventually passed into law.

The importance in 2009 of new media governance will no doubt earn the attention of scholars and political observers in the coming years. Some of these measures -- posting bills online, making sponsors of earmarks more easily searchable and instituting regular fireside chats -- have endeared the president to his fans and helped lower the wall between citizens and their government. Others, such as the immense stores of demographic data and standing army of grassroots supporters, have brought charges of bullying.

Strategists in both parties are hard at work reviewing the lessons of the past year, hoping to gain advantage in the second session of Congress and, beyond that, the upcoming midterm elections. Already, Republican leaders have launched a number of sites intended to watchdog and ultimately discredit the new government programs set up by President Obama's legislation. And both sides have dug deep their netroots in preparation for November. The clock won't be turned back now.

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