Obama Prepares to Community-Organize America
By Matthew Vadum
In his latest unprecedented move in American history, President Obama announced he is converting his campaign apparatus into a permanent in-your-face campaign aimed at furthering Obama’s divisive, radical politics.
The new tax-exempt advocacy group, Organizing for Action, will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said last week.
In the same vein, in his second inaugural address yesterday, Obama bullied the opposition. Reinforcing his long-running “spread the wealth” theme, the president hectored successful people, declaring that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”
Obama also seemed to signal in his mercifully brief oration that he’s going to go all-out to make government bigger.
Americans, he said, “reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”
Now, like a Third World caudillo, Obama will be able to pursue his policies from inside government and from outside through his OfA thug army.
OfA is a less violent version of Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers use to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents. OfA units brought muscle to the recent fight in Wisconsin over that state’s out-of-control government labor unions. OfA has bludgeoned Democrats that Obama deemed insufficiently left-wing, especially red-state congressional Democrats who had been wavering on the issue of Obamacare.
OfA also dabbles in state politics. In 2009 it meddled in a congressional race in New York’s 23rd district, backing winner Democrat Scott Murphy over Republican Dede Scozzafava. It also involved itself in the Virginia gubernatorial contest, championing eventual loser Democrat Creigh Deeds over Republican Bob McDonnell.
OfA will carry on Obama-style community organizing. This anti-capitalist agitation revolves around the nebulous Marxist concept of “social justice.” It’s about making people angry so they push for change. It artificially creates pressure for government spending on whatever happens to be fashionable in leftist circles that day.
Giving OfA nonprofit status institutionalizes the brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques of Saul Alinsky within America’s partisan political infrastructure.
This has long been Obama’s goal.
“We may have started this as a long-shot presidential primary campaign in 2007, but it’s always been about more than just winning an election,” Obama wrote in an email to his fans last week.
“Together, we’ve made our communities stronger, we’ve fought for historic legislation, and we’ve brought more people than ever before into the political process,” he wrote. “Organizing for Action will be a permanent commitment to this mission.”
OfA aims to make community organizing hip and mainstream. The group is an outgrowth of the president’s 2008 presidential campaign, and its name is adapted from Obama for America, the name of the Obama campaign organization.
OfA isn’t, strictly speaking, a new group. After the 2008 election, the group, then known as Organizing for America, was a phony grassroots campaign run by the Democratic National Committee that sought to replicate the community organizing techniques Obama learned from the teachings of his fellow Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky. OfA was created because the White House could not legally use the 13 million e-mail addresses that the campaign compiled in 2008.
Organizing for America is not subject to IRS nonprofit regulations because it has no independent legal status outside the Democratic National Committee. DNC financial filings disclose little about the group’s structure and day-to-day operations. The party’s spending on the project is not separately accounted for in public disclosures, so its actual scope has been difficult to determine.
The incorporation of OfA won’t lead to information about the group’s donors, which OfA still will not have to disclose, but the group will have to disclose basic information about its budget and operations. When it lacked corporate personality, public disclosure requirements did not apply to it, making it easy for the DNC to conceal its activities and how much money was being spent on projects.
Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, will become Organizing for Action’s national chairman.
“The formation of the group will make Messina the de facto political director for Obama, and is an implicit rejection of DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an Obama outsider not close to the president, as the [Democratic] party’s operational leader,” according to Politico newspaper.
OfA’s board of directors will include Obama adviser David Plouffe, along with spin doctors Stephanie Cutter and Robert Gibbs.
Running OfA’s day to day affairs will be executive director Jon Carson.
Carson, a Wisconsin native, is not afraid of getting his hands dirty.
While he served as director of the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement, Carson was involved in a concerted effort to game the electoral system to help Democrats. At the White House he met with former ACORN attorney Estelle H. Rogers, now director of advocacy at Project Vote, to make it easier for illegal aliens to vote. Project Vote is the unit of the ACORN network that President Obama worked for in 1992 when he ran a successful get-out-the-vote drive in Illinois that helped to solidify his reputation as an effective leader and organizer. The group vilifies as a racist anyone who thinks voter ID requirements are a good idea and constantly presses to make voting requirements even more lax than they now are.
Carson was previously chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality serving under Van Jones. Jones, a self-described “communist,” was forced out in 2009 as Obama’s green jobs czar after he was revealed to have signed a 9/11 “truther” petition accusing President Bush of complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Before joining the administration, Carson was National Field Director for Obama’s 2008 campaign. He also worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and served in the Peace Corps in Honduras for two years, building water systems for rural villages.
OfA will be “the largest grassroots network in the history of politics,” Carson says. It will be involved in “organizing locally and nationally to put pressure on Washington to act in the interests of ordinary Americans” and will “train the next generation of grassroots organizer to do this work so that they’ll be ready to take on the fights of the future.”
Carson urges supporters to get in others’ faces and enlist them in the fight for OfA’s most important immediate priorities which he listed as, “immigration reform, reducing gun violence, and tackling the budget in a balanced way.”
In its earlier incarnation, Organizing for Action never shied away from confrontation.
As outraged voters packed town hall meetings during the nationwide battle over changes to health care law, Organizing for America sent out a mass email attacking the good faith of opponents, by now a standard Obama White House tactic. Those who questioned the wisdom of Obamacare weren’t Americans who sincerely disagreed with the president, but “Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.”
The institutionalization of Organizing for Action is more bad news for conservatives who in many respects seem outgunned by the activist Left.
As David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin note in The New Leviathan (Random House, 2012), “[a]s of 2009, the financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt foundations of the Left identified by our researchers added up to $104.56 billion,” or 10 times greater than the financial assets of the 75 major foundations of the Right.
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