Obama’s advisers have spoken of his brand, which is a stand-in for the party identity that defined other presidencies. Obama’s brand is about inclusivity, transcendence, a generational break from stale dogmas. Inevitably, Obama’s brand management runs up against the culture of his party. State activists are sometimes told their requests for the president to appear at a typical political event, in some ballroom with room dividers or at the local labor hall, aren’t going to fly. Aides know that if they bring that kind of thing to Obama, he’ll ask, “Can’t we do any better than that?” As a rule, Obama no longer speaks at the traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners where state Democratic parties gather to raise money from the faithful. “For what?” a senior aide responded when I asked why. “To talk to the same people he already has?” Obama prefers venues, preferably outdoors or in large theaters, where he can reach voters who aren’t party regulars. He generally refuses to do “robo-calls,” those ubiquitous, recorded messages in which a politician asks you to go out and vote for the party. “He’s got a practical objection to them, which is that they’re irritating,” Axelrod explained to me…

If the president isn’t going to be his party’s chief strategist or its most prolific fund-raiser, then aides say there are two things he will do for his party that are, ultimately, more important — and that are, not coincidentally, in keeping with the brand. The first is to remind voters that Democrats didn’t create the current economic morass. As Rahm Emanuel told me when we sat down in April, “The American people know overwhelmingly that he inherited a” — and here Emanuel used a word I can’t repeat — “sandwich.” (Suffice it to say the sandwich wasn’t pastrami.) “They know that. They don’t need to be educated. I believe it’s worth reminding them of the scale, size and scope of the” — that word again — “sandwich we got…

The second thing Obama can do for Democrats, in the view of the White House, is to change the way they run their campaigns. Democrats running for the House and the Senate, like the party’s presidential candidates, have generally relied almost exclusively on the unions and other constituency groups to get out the vote, using paid phone banks and door-knockers. Starting out, Obama didn’t have that option. His party’s existing organizational structure was largely beholden to Hillary Clinton through the 2008 primaries, so Obama recruited an army of volunteers, many of them previously uninvolved in any kind of party politics, who ended up organizing blocks and precincts in their towns, lobbying neighbors door to door on Obama’s behalf and squeezing out the vote on Election Day. It was, in effect, much like the volunteer-driven network employed by Bush’s campaign in 2004, although less centralized and more Internet-focused.