May 26, 2011 11:03 PM UTC

"Obamaworld 2012"--Coming to Arvada, Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

Add this to the list of reasons why Republicans can’t seem to attract the presidential candidate they need to win–while a lackluster field slowly takes shape on the right and underwhelming candidates grope for half-hearted support, 2008’s juggernaut is warming up unencumbered in the places where it will count. Like the suburbs of Denver, writes Michael Scherer for Time:

Obama’s senior staff has hatched a plan to start anew, urging the President’s supporters to look beyond the grind of the past two years and toward the simpler choice of the next election. Obama strategists want to force the question early. When the Obama 2012 website went live on April 4, it asked a simple question: “Are you in?” The accompanying YouTube video, which was e-mailed to supporters, focused on field volunteers knocking on doors and working phones, just like in the old days. “You can’t be half in,” explains one Obama team member…

The Chicago plan will play out in places like the Denver suburb of Arvada with volunteers like Suzan Rickert, a recently retired health care worker. For more than 25 years, Rickert, 60, has been active with her local Democratic Party, and she has long been accustomed to caucus meetings with just four or five people in attendance, including her husband and her. But for a fleeting time, she says, something happened when Obama burst onto the scene. “In 2008 we had 80 people,” she remembers. “I want them to come back.”

A few weeks ago, she answered an online appeal for volunteers to donate 40 hours a week all summer working the phones and pavement for the President. She decided to put off her plan of starting a small business, after being assured that she would not be the only person over the age of 25 on the job. Her training has yet to begin, but she has already started meeting with former volunteers, including a gay couple and a pastor, at the local Starbucks or Panera Bread. “Once you get people talking, they go and go,” she says. Her sessions tend to last an hour, and the results of the conversation are entered into the Democratic National Committee’s VoteBuilder master database.

The new volunteers will be matched up with the existing network of Organizing for America volunteers and staff that the DNC has nurtured for the past three years. “No other President going into a re-election effort has ever had a grass-roots network that we have in these states,” says Stewart, 35, now battleground-states director. [Pols emphasis]

Sherer is quite candid about the nuanced message President Barack Obama must employ for re-election, as opposed to his more idealistic message as a presidential candidate in 2008. Not even the president’s most ardent supporters can deny that some of his sensation has faded among base Democrats since he took office, and that his campaign will need to work hard to rekindle the enthusiasm that got him elected. But that’s why they are ramping up 18 months out.

And as a pivotal battleground state, we’re going to get lots of attention from the president’s campaign. Judging how the coordinated federal/local campaign succeeded for Democrats in 2008, that should make Colorado Democrats up and down the ticket very excited.