Organizing for America has been the Wehrmacht of American politics. Using new tactics and technology, they have blitzkrieg Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney the Republican Party, Conservatives and the Tea Party over the last 6 years. OFA is an electoral Juggernaut not seen in American politics but just like the German Wehrmacht they have finally met their match.

Taking advantage of the Newtown massacres, Obama and OFA thought they could push gun control. What they did not realize was that the National Rifle Association is a formidable foe. Just as the Wehrmacht underestimated the Red Army, OFA did not realize what it was up against. The NRA had a social media team and had data-miners of their own. They answered every OFA charge and won the Twitter and Facebook wars. Then yesterday the Toomey-Manchin Amendment, alongside Feinstein’s assault weapons ban failed, handing Obama his biggest loss.

Never before had President Barack Obama put the moral force and political muscle of his presidency behind an issue quite this big — and lost quite this badly.

The president, shaken to the core by the massacre of 26 innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School, broke his own informal “Obama Rule” — of never leaning into an issue without a clear path to victory — first by pushing for a massive gun control package no one expected to pass, and then sticking through it even as he retrenched to a relatively modest bipartisan bill mandating national background checks on gun purchases.

It was a bitter defeat for a president accustomed to winning, a second-term downer that may — or may not — foreshadow the slow decline suffered by so many of his predecessors. Obama seems to have the public behind him, but it illustrated his less-than-Johnsonian powers of personal persuasion, the possible shortcomings of his decision to wait a month after the killings to present a plan and above all the limits of his go-to “outside” strategy of taking his case directly to the American people.