Obama, Organizing for Action, and the Death Throes of the Democratic Party
By Scott S. Powell
March 3, 2017
If you think you’re going crazy from nonstop news coverage of unruly behavior and disruptive protests across the country since Donald Trump was elected president, rest assured there are veiled reasons for the current madness. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Goodwin asserts the ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ is no temporarily insane reaction, but rather “a calculated plan to wreck the presidency, whatever the cost to the country.”
The beginnings of this “rolling coup” happened in broad daylight in the taking down of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as Director of National Security by residual players within the Obama intelligence community -- including the CIA and the NSA.
Political correctness remains so dominant in language and culture in the U.S., that no one dares utter the word "sedition." Unbeknownst to most Americans, Barack Obama is the first ex-president in 228 years of U.S. history to structure and lead a political organization, a shadow government, for the explicit purpose of sabotaging his successor -- duly elected President Donald Trump. The primary vehicle of this campaign is Organizing for Action (OFA), legally founded in January 2013 by First Lady Michelle Obama and her husband’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, with input from David Axelrod.
Being respectful and accepting loss when your team doesn’t win -- essential for the functioning of any electoral representative democracy and a fundamental lesson every child used to learn through playing competitive sports -- has been destroyed by the left and appears no longer relevant for many in today’s millennial generation. It was telling that a majority of millennials embraced Bernie Sanders, not because his socialist policy platform was workable, but rather because their attitudes had been so conditioned by traditional and social media and educational institutions in the U.S. that embrace all things progressive while giving short shrift to the virtues of the American story and its animating ideas. Those ideas have always been workable because they revolve around freedom that ties rights to responsibilities, the creative power of free markets and the benefits of a Constitution that mitigates government abuse through separation of powers while also ensuring stability through the rule of law.
The modus operandi of OFA comes right out of Obama’s support and sympathy for Marxism and his background as a left-wing community organizer. It’s a combination of agitation and propaganda -- much like old-style Soviet agitprop, and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
For Alinsky, the rules start with an ends justifies the means quest for power, which can entail lawbreaking, deception, and concealing the true revolutionary agenda; militant obstructionism; and deflecting debate on substance while relentlessly attacking the character and legitimacy of the opponent.
Agitprop is synonymous with community organizing in that both focus on stirring up public grievance over an issue for the purpose of mobilizing that constituency to join like-minded people to protest and demonstrate, which provides made-for-TV drama scenes portraying “extemporaneous” mass protests that in turn get transmitted to millions through the media. This feedback loop is a key driver of fake news.
For instance, immediately following President Trump’s late January executive order temporarily banning refugees and visitors from seven lawless states that harbor terrorists, OFA kicked into action, mobilizing people to “spontaneously” demonstrate, causing utter chaos at nearly a dozen of the busiest airports across the country. Hardly spontaneous, it was in fact staged, courtesy of ex-president Barack Obama. Ditto for what happened in late February with members of Congress town hall meetings across the country. A week before the town halls started, OFA released its “Congressional Recess Toolkit,” a training manual for activists and demonstrators, invoking them to go in groups and get to meeting halls early and “spread out… throughout the front half of the room, [which] will make the perception of broad consensus a reality for your member of congress.” So perception drives fake news which is intended to drive reality.
Many have wondered why Obama didn’t follow the tradition of almost every other ex-president and depart Washington after his term was up. Instead he moved into a large home in Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, allegedly to provide continuity for his daughter’s education and to stay close to the shapers of his presidential legacy. Those reasons are likely secondary to his being an inbred leftist activist who lives for the “transformation” of America. Ramping up a hydra-headed organizational effort through OFA out of his 8,200 square-foot walled mansion in Washington to protect the Left’s gains and to sabotage the electoral victory of Donald Trump is simply a natural progression for Obama.
Obama is no fool and he understands -- having encouraged Black Lives Matter and the war on police and law enforcement, having facilitated ballooning welfare rolls and doubling student debt to $1.35 trillion, having presided over a flood of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, and having pushed unprecedented deficit spending that added nearly a trillion dollars annually to the federal debt and doubling that debt in eight years to $20 trillion -- that the U.S. is nearer collapse than at any previous time. And every Marxist knows that socialist transformation first requires collapse of the old order.
Obama has not only been trained in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, but he’s familiar with the “crisis strategy theory” of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two neo-Marxists who taught at Columbia University, where Obama later studied. For Cloward and Piven, the left’s easiest route to socialist transformation is to overload the welfare state, which will trigger an insolvency crisis and financial collapse. U.S. Congressmen Steven King (R-Iowa) and Steve Stockman (R-Texas) have both gone on record, saying Obama was “playing out of the Cloward-Piven theory” by “attempting to flood the border with illegals.”
As Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post, “Obama has an army of agitators -- numbering more than 30,000 -- who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.” Obama’s OFA Washington HQ is now the nerve center that coordinates 250 offices nationwide, which together with its Chicago-based sister organization, the Community Organizing Institute (COI), are planning to facilitate the “training [of] more than 2 million youths in Alinsky street tactics” and carry out plans “to stage 400 rallies across 42 states to attack Trump and Republicans over ObamaCare’s repeal.”
Recent funding records are not available, but in just its first two years, OFA took in over $40 million, according to IRS filings. Not surprisingly, OFA’s major donors are also members of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, which is a donors’ consortium of the left-wing super rich devoted to radical political change. Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.” Since OFA has all the contact information assets of Obama’s predecessor 2008 and 2012 campaign organization, Organizing for America, which include 30 million email addresses, three million donors and two million active participants there should be no underestimating OFA’s potential influence, especially with an uncritical media covering it up.
But in the end, the majority of Americans are not easily fooled. Their common sense was the key factor in electing Donald Trump, an unconventionally bold leader with the courage to take on corruption in the media and in the Washington establishment. Not only was Trump successful in peeling off many traditional Democrats affiliated with labor in the rust belt states, but now Trump and his movement can further drive wedges into an increasingly fractured Democratic Party.
Although Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as the worst Democratic president, Obama has singlehandedly done more to damage the Democratic Party in eight years than the GOP could have ever hoped or planned -- an unprecedented staggering net loss of 1,042 state and federal Democratic seats, among congressional and state legislatures, governorships and the presidency. Many state-level Democratic Party leaders are now in open revolt against Obama’s OFA, which they see operating as a shadow party without coordination or accountability, and funded from controversial “end of America” extremist sources like George Soros.
Contrary to the early vocal critics among the establishment elites, aka the “#NeverTrumpers,” it now looks like the Republican Party will not only survive, but prosper under Donald Trump, whose leadership was recently manifest in his first major speech to a joint session of congress, and is on display in his hand-picked A-team cabinet. It is the Democratic Party -- that is weak, divided, lacking in common sense and devoid of leadership and new ideas being under the grip of rigid left-wingers and ideology -- that is looking more like the endangered species, thanks in large part to Barack Obama and his Organizing for Action.
Next:
If the Obama presidency is winding down, why is his group Organizing for Action ramping up?
On June 30, Organizing for Action, a nonprofit group that grew out of Obama’s campaign machine, sent out a flurry of e-mails to potential donors announcing the impending conclusion of OFA’s fiscal quarter and requesting recipients chip in before midnight. These sorts of e-mails are standard little more than a year out from a general election, as we are now.
But Obama isn’t going to be on any ballots anytime soon. So each dollar that flows into OFA’s coffer is, presumably, a dollar not going to a candidate with battles yet to come. Why is there not more outcry against OFA from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), or congressional Democrats, or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? And why is OFA still pressing forward even as Obama’s presidency is winding down?
The answer says something about how Obama intends to influence the party in years to come. At a time when a good deal of partisan action takes place outside of regular party organizations, OFA works to mobilize support for progressive priorities in the face of continuing intense opposition. Beyond current struggles, the challenge for Organizing for Action will be to move beyond loyalty to Obama himself and find ways to deepen his political and policy legacies after he leaves the White House
Obama’s organization, 3.0
Organizing for Action is actually the third iteration of Obama’s grass-roots movement. First came Obama for America, the president’s vaunted information-age campaign organization. Next that was transformed into Organizing for America (OFA 2.0) which was inserted in the DNC, where it was tasked with several things: mobilizing support for Obama’s signature program, the Affordable Care Act; supporting Democratic midterm campaigns; and keeping alive — even strengthening— Obama’s grass-roots network and voter and contributor databases, to be ready for the president’s reelection campaign.
Some opponents of the merger had hoped to keep the organization separate so that it could remain an independent power base for the president. In a nod toward their concerns, OFA enjoyed “departmental” status within the DNC, retained control of its own e-mail list, and was managed by Obama campaign staffers rather than DNC personnel.
This third incarnation, Organizing for Action (or OFA 3.0), is especially pathbreaking. Although candidate-centered campaign organizations became a principal feature of the modern executive with John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for the White House, Organizing for Action was spun off as a 501(c)(4) group, and dedicated to championing the “agenda Americans voted for in 2012.”
OFA 2.0’s activities – especially its efforts to mobilize support for “Obamacare” – had gone beyond campaigning. But as former party chairman, Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) told us, OFA was primarily envisaged as “the grassroots arm of the DNC,” and it played an integral part in the national party’s expanded field operations in the states. Consequently, OFA’s objectives were closely tied to the 2010 midterms and, more emphatically, the president’s reelection.
In contrast, OFA 3.0, formed when the president was no longer going to be a candidate, has been explicitly dedicated to policy advocacy and implementation. Over the course of Obama’s second term, Organizing for Action has: played a critical part in enrolling the uninsured during the rollout of Obamacare; staged hundreds of rallies around the country in support of progressive causes; and continued to build and refine the gigantic e-mail lists and databases so essential to the president’s two electoral victories.
OFA’s ability to mobilize Obama’s supporters on behalf of policies has been one important reason that the president has been able to avoid lame duck status, and has instead continued to work on advancing substantive projects. OFA has helped to promote Obama’s policies, such as immigration reform, LGBT rights, and climate change policy through administrative action.
Taking up what the national parties can no longer do
If these tasks of mobilizing political support and advocating for policy sound like the DNC’s job, that’s because it is…or used to be. As Daniel Galvin has shown, since the consolidation of the modern executive office, presidents, especially Republicans, have relied on their party’s national committees to do much of the stage-setting needed to both win electoral battles and “win the peace” between contests.
But in 2002, the emergence of national committees as national political machines was short-circuited.
Although Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is best remembered for striking down some campaign finance restrictions, perhaps as important are the portions of 2002’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) that the Supreme Court let stand. While fundraising restrictions on Political Action Committees and other forms of “independent” groups were eliminated, the BCRA’s new regulations on contributions to party committees were upheld. The most significant remaining regulation was the so-called soft money ban, which proscribed the national party organizations from raising unregulated funds.
What does that mean? Prior to the BCRA’s passage, campaign finance law distinguished between money raised for the purposes of “electioneering” on behalf of candidates for office (what was then called “hard money”) and dollars earmarked for all other purposes (referred to as “soft money”). Individual donors were –as now – restricted in the amount of hard money they could donate, but there was no cap on soft money donations before 2002. Since then, however, no distinction has been enforced between hard money and soft; all donations to political parties have been subject to the same limits.
These esoteric but very significant changes in the campaign finance laws have had an important impact on the relative power of formal party organizations and “independent” groups. Parties once exploited the soft money loophole, using the more permissively regulated dollars to run issue ads that stopped just short of bestowing explicit endorsements or calling out opposing politicians by name.
Moreover, as Ray La Raja’s research has shown, national committees also used soft money to engage in party-building activities that strengthened the chances of candidates up and down the ticket. These were vital services politicians had come to rely on.
But with their war chests limited to campaign activity, both the DNC and RNC now focus almost exclusively on strategic contributions to candidates locked in competitive elections.
Using “soft money” to advocate for policies and train organizers
That’s where Organizing for Action comes in. Unlike parties, in the post-Citizen’s United era, 501(c)(4) groups like OFA can accept unlimited contributions. And they can advocate for policies in ways unregulated by campaign finance laws. Although such groups must spend more than half of their funds toward “social welfare” (read: not overtly political) purposes to be eligible for tax-exempt status, enforcing this provision is daunting.
Just as parties once exploited the soft money loophole, 501(c)(4) groups like OFA can now take advantage of ambiguity over exactly what counts as a campaign-related expenditure.
In addition to advocating on issues and policies, OFA has taken on some of the campaign-related roles traditionally played by national party committees. In addition to maintaining and updating the databases and other digital assets that have been so critical to Obama’s campaign and policy successes, OFA has held numerous “community organizer workshops” and an annual Spring Fellows Program. Through these efforts, OFA mints new community organizers and trains a workforce for Democratic candidates and other progressive nonprofits.
Organizing for Action trained more than 10,000 organizers during its first two years, many of whom worked on the 2014 midterm elections and have joined 2016 presidential campaigns. These campaign and advocacy laboratories suggest how OFA – a pioneering presidential organization – might endure beyond 2016, seeking, as a recent organization e-mail trumpeted, to secure the “future of the Progressive movement.”
That’s why there’s so little concern that OFA’s fundraising might suck the oxygen out of 2016 Democratic campaigns: It is, instead, preparing to support those campaigns. Obama’s grass-roots organization has only raised a bit over $5 million during the first two quarters of 2015. Instead of drawing from big donors and releasing TV ads, OFA invests in on-the-ground volunteers, more so than any previous presidential organization and almost all 501(c)(4) groups.
OFA
