As a reminder: I voted for Obama and volunteered time to help his campaign, making calls to and knocking on the doors of undecided voters. Net: I was a willing and enthusiastic member of what Campaign Manager David Plouffe — in a Dec. 19 email to Obama supporters — characterized as “the most powerful and effective grassroots movement in America.”

Acknowledging those past realities, I still experience a recoil reaction when I read lines like this one from Plouffe’s email:

… you’re helping to define how this movement will support President-elect Obama’s agenda and continue to bring the change we need.

Or this one:

86 percent of respondents feel it’s important to help Barack’s administration pass legislation through grassroots support

I can cite a list of reasons why those lines should not trouble me. Among other things, I’ve long believed in the power of grassroots organizing behind worthwhile causes, of aggregating the voices of everyday Americans so they break through and are heard inside Washington’s thickly insulated echo-chamber. I also respect the fact that Obama’s post-campaign movement continues, as its in-campaign counterpart did, to ask diverse people what they think, inviting them to share their ideas in an open, ongoing, evolving exchange.

That’s all good. But as much as I applaud these aspects of the effort, I’m equally inclined to (a) question and resist potential cults of personality, and (b) favor “Congressional centrality,” i.e., if there is a greatest-among-equals branch of government, it should be the branch with the most diversity/least concentration of individual power.

In raising my concern about cults of personality, I recognize and regret how much this sentiment might be compared to certain charges levied against Obama by the Far Right, a drumbeat of opposition they started long before the Senator became President elect. In turn, this regret compels me to clarify that I believe Obama is as non-arrogant and unassuming a man as we’ve had on the doorstep of the Presidency in some time. Though he has certain innate gifts which might too-easily lend themselves to feeding a potential cult of personality, he (thanks in part to his upbringing, his spouse, etc.) will not be easily consumed by the superhero-ness that others try to project on to him. Even then, even if Obama resists said cult, there remains a danger — a predisposition to creeping blindness among his supporters — that’s rooted in the proliferation of too much rhetoric about this singular man and his singular agenda.

In raising my second concern, I draw once again on the counsel of individuals like George Will and Mickey Edwards, who will not let us forget that our founding fathers crafted a constitution in which Article I, Section 1 opens thus: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States … ”

That construction was not accidental. As Edwards argues in Reclaiming Conservatism (page 11) Congress, not the President, was established as “the institution through which the people exercise a collective control over public policy and national priorities.”

Obviously, a President can, per the Constitution, approve or veto legislation, or “recommend [for Congress’s] consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” But I find nothing in the Constitution that would suggest the President is allowed to organize and apply grassroots pressure on Congress to pass legislation authorizing the measures he recommends for their consideration.

To be fair: I have observed and acknowledged signs that Obama/Biden will be more respectful of Congressional turf than Bush/Cheney ever were (and that the 111th Congress will more diligently protect its turf than the four preceding Congresses did).

Even so, I think Obama would demonstrate even greater respect for the Constitution if he were to reign in the grassroots movement bearing his name, and make it perfectly clear that, while this movement might do many things, it will not directly or indirectly encourage grassroots interface with Congress on behalf of Obama’s “agenda.”

Call me crazy — and yes, I may be splitting hairs. But after witnessing the current Administration vow to uphold the Constitution and then proceed to systematically ignore and violate it for eight years, I think a touch of paranoia is warranted, no matter how different the incoming Administration might be from the one soon to depart.