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Anyone except the ant, that is.

Anyone, as Frank Sinatra sang, knows an ant can't move a rubber tree plant. The ant, however, had "high hopes."

One can't help but get a similar impression from Ari Melber, a writer for The Nation magazine. Melber recently published his report on the first year of Organizing for America (OFA), the name of the political organizing arm of the Obama campaign. OFA was extremely successful in mobilizing support and fundraising at the grassroots level, but, as Melber notes, feels like it is being left out of the process of governing now that its candidate is in the White House.

Melber concludes that if OFA can sustain a large, permanent corps of volunteers and can successfully impact legislation on the federal level, "the organization could raise the stakes of modern policymaking, establishing a new template for political parties' efforts to organize mandates and enact their legislative agendas."

Those are some pretty high hopes. But then again, apparently ants can carry 10 times their weight; perhaps OFA believed it carried Obama from Chicago to Iowa and finally to the White House, and now believes it can carry Congress' legislative agenda as well.

It brings to mind the question of just how much influence the populace has on its leader(s), and vice versa. In the Jewish community, the relationship between the leaders and those they lead has been, after thousands of years of basically following the same formula, turned on its head.

Who leads the Syrian Diaspora now, and how much deference will its nominal leadership have after the community watched its leaders handcuffed and booked for corruption and money laundering in July?

Who leads the effort to help converts to Judaism, after the Orthodox community finally split over the RCA's decision to effectively outsource the criteria for American conversions into the hands of the Israeli rabbinate?

Who leads our prayer services, now that "indie" minyanim are proliferating?

And who leads the American Jewish community's efforts at doing what OFA is trying to do and effect policy change at the federal level? The question was raised with regard to immigration after the recent publication of an in-depth poll on public attitudes toward immigration.

The poll, carried out by Zogby and commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based immigration think tank Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), compared attitudes on the issue between members of American religious groups and their leadership. Though Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement have been advocating for increased immigration to the United States, Jewish respondents to the poll leaned heavily toward less immigration and more enforcement of current immigration laws.

Obviously, there are good arguments for both opinions, but the gap between the leadership and the people on the issue is starting to look more like a canyon. In response, the leaders of these Jewish organizations explained that, well, they know better than the people.

"To the extent that it's a fair representation, there's a lot of education that needs to be done in the community," Richard Foltin, the American Jewish Committee's legislative director and counsel, told JTA.

"It's not unusual for leadership to take a more assertive position on the issues than the amcha (community)," added Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center.

There is often a backlash at such attitudes. On the issue of conversion (and others, such as ordaining women) the Orthodox community showed its first true such revolt when Rabbi Avraham Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx officially formed the International Rabbinic Fellowship with Rabbi Marc Angel, rabbi emeritus of New York's Shearith Israel.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Shapiro of Congregation Beth Shalom in Red Bank said that one of the main reasons for the IRF was that "more and more decisions that affect the world of orthodoxy were being made by a smaller and smaller group of people, by gedolim (institutional leaders), people within yeshivas, and not by congregational rabbis who were out in the field."

In America more broadly, the issue is bipartisan; while the Left has OFA, the Right has been dealing with the emergence of the Tea Party folks -- conservative-minded Americans who oppose steep deficit spending and the current health care reform bill.

As Americans, we choose our leaders, and OFA and the Tea Partiers are both learning that choosing the candidate isn't the same as choosing the policies that follow.

As Jews, we choose our leaders to a certain extent as well. And while we must place our faith in the scholarship by which our rabbis adjudicate, Jewish organizations like AJC and HIAS must now adapt to the rising tide of public opinion.

As such -- and as the immigration poll demonstrated -- a more public discussion of all the issues is warranted. As both sides will tell you -- the Tea Partiers being proponents of independence-era conservatism and ordered liberty, while Obama supporters have compared him to Edmund Burke -- commitment to reason born of open debate is a fundamental principle of American public policymaking.

Unsurprisingly, this idea was best expressed by Burke himself, in his 1791 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs: "For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state [except] when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates."

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.