Democrat Jim Martin, who hopes to unseat incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss, is advertising his association with Obama and has asked for assistance from the Obama campaign network. Obama's top aides, now focused on remaking the federal government, have resisted jumping into the race. A spokesman said the president-elect had made no commitments yet to campaign in Georgia.
Still, illustrating the bottom-up nature of the Obama network, 100 of its organizers from neighboring states have already plunged into the race.
The debate underscores some of the larger challenges facing Obama, who must balance the idealism of his core supporters against the need to forge compromises within a Washington political environment that he criticized as a candidate but now leads.
The Obama network is far more expansive and sophisticated than the traditional list of e-mail addresses that are a common byproduct of modern campaigns.
Rooted in the street-level tactics learned by Obama when he worked in the 1980s as a community organizer in several Chicago housing projects, the network grew to include thousands of full-time organizers, many in their 20s and new to politics, who were trained to help create neighborhood teams led by volunteers.
In California, Obama's campaign developed an e-mail list with more than 790,000 names. That included 40,000 volunteers "who did real stuff like make over 10 million telephone calls," said Obama state campaign manager Mitchell Schwartz.
Top organizers such as Ganz, who created the training program called Camp Obama, view the network as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters.
Temo Figueroa, another top Obama campaign organizer who headed Latino voter outreach, said he was hearing from community activists across the country who wanted the network to remain intact -- but who were not necessarily party loyalists.
"A lot of these warriors on the ground are not Democrats, and that's by choice," Figueroa said.
"So creating a different organization might make them more apt to join it."
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peter.wallsten@latimes.com
tom.hamburger@latimes.com
