Obama campaign operation sending emails to "bandage the wounds" with his base

There's an article in Roll Call (sub. req.) titled, White House Hopes to Soothe Liberals’ Angst, which begins:

President Barack Obama is confronting a threat to his re-election as members of his base increasingly voice concern about his policies.

Obama has faced a mini-rebellion from liberals after he went along with a decision to drop a public insurance option — and then its substitute, a “buy-in” expansion of Medicare — from the Senate health care bill. Liberals are also concerned about the climate change deal that he agreed to in Copenhagen and his decision to inject 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.

But the White House has been taking steps to bandage the wounds.

It is, however, unclear from this article what exactly those steps are, besides a couple of emails sent to the DNC's Organizing for America list:

The president and his aides are also moving to ensure that the activists who made up his own populist campaign organization — called Obama for America in 2008 and now housed in the DNC under the banner Organizing for America — do not stray from the fold.

Just two days after Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) sealed the Senate health care bill’s eventual passage by announcing on Dec. 19 that he would become the 60th Senator to back it, Obama fired off an e-mail to OFA members assuring them that this was the kind of legislation that they had worked hard to help him pass.

I don't think most of the OFA members expected Pharma and the insurance companies to be big winners.

To be clear, the President and his team are worried about the base for his reelection in 2012, not the congressional races in 2010. I think it's safe to say that it's going to take more than email messages from the President and David Plouffe to fire up the base. Words won't be enough. Actions are required. And, the best action the President could take would be to follow through on his campaign promises.

No one is expecting Obama to do more than he promised, but we are expecting him to do what he promised. At this point, it's clear Obama is not going to fight for a better health care bill, but he could actually put some presidential muscle behind repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell or passing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The base is watching and waiting -- and grumpy.