Obama made some sweeping claims during his “historic” campaign to buy get elected to the presidency of the United States. One of those broken record promises was that “Yes we can bring change to Washington”. Obama said the grassroots support that served as his army of dittoheads in the campaign would be a driving force in deciding what would take place at the highest echelons of power in Washington. No longer would special interests, lobbyists, or polling firms rule the day. The people would have a finger directly on the pulse of their government. Here is Oblahblah addressing the troops shortly before his inauguration:
On March 15 the Obamans sent out an email to their vast horde of zombies to get ready to mobilize in their first attempt to throw their collective muscle around since the November election. The media dutifully reported the Obamacrats’ sky high expectations for the effort. They also demonstrated how much they intended to rely on this strategy.
Several people closely involved in this campaign’s planning made it clear that they believe this is the moment Democrats have been waiting for since Obama’s election — the deployment of the volunteer army that helped catapult a freshman senator to the presidency…
Obama’s closest aides have been plotting for months when to make the move. Bringing Organizing for America under the umbrella of the DNC and installing a group of Obama loyalists — including Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine as chairman and Jen O’Malley Dillon, a highly regarded campaign operative, as executive director — were aimed at re-creating the disciplined organization of the campaign.
“This is exactly the scenario OFA was moved into the DNC for, to take on the toughest tasks, the most transformational moments,” said one party source.
So did everything go according to plan? Well, not exactly.
When his post-campaign organization was unveiled in January, Barack Obama vowed that the 13 million-strong grass-roots network built during his presidential campaign would play a “crucial role” in enacting his agenda from the White House.
“The change we’ve worked so hard for will not happen unless ordinary Americans get involved, and supporters like you must lead the way,” Obama told backers just before his inauguration.
But in its first big test, the group dubbed Organizing for America (OFA) had little obvious impact on the debate over President Obama’s budget, which passed Congress on Thursday with no Republican support and a splintering of votes among conservative Democrats. The capstone of the campaign was the delivery of 214,000 signatures to Capitol Hill, which swayed few, if any, members of Congress, according to legislative aides from both parties.
As we suspected, those “changers” who went door to door jehovah’s witness style to get signatures to “pledge” support for the budget were wasting their time. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were given nothing but empty slogans to sell it with. Here’s a training video that tells obots how to answer tough questions about why Obama’s budget should be passed. At one point he tells them to answer with this convincing comeback: “Because the American people demanded it!”
In case you didn’t make it to the end, you get an inkling of a distinct motive that OFA might have for this pledge drive; that of gathering the personal information of voters. In fact this kind of seems like a massive way to do some old fashioned polling. Plus you have the extra bonus of gathering even more contact information from people that you can later hit up for money. So what did the pundits think of the result?
Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, said the petition drive was “a pretty lame start to the effort, and largely inconsequential to the outcome,” adding: “The fact is that the sort of hard politics of policymaking are still driven by partisanship, by public opinion polls, by the roles of interest groups and all the other things that have always mattered in Washington.”
And what about those people that signed the pledge? Did they call their lawmakers? Well, if you’re talking about the ones that needed their minds changed in the first place, Republicans, it doesn’t look that way.
Republicans scoffed at the effort, arguing that it showed that even most diehard Obama supporters were uncertain about the wisdom of the president’s budget plan. Several GOP aides noted that the number of pledges gathered online amounted to fewer than 1 percent of the names on Obama’s vaunted e-mail list.
“The phones rang off the hook this week, but the overwhelming majority of calls came from Kentuckians who agreed that this budget spends, taxes and borrows way too much,” said John Ashbrook, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Even aides to Blue Dog Democrats who at first protested, but then later voted for the budget claimed that the effort had little impact.
But Kristen Hawn, a press aide to Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) who acts as a spokeswoman for the Blue Dogs, said the OFA campaign had little impact on lawmakers’ decisions on how to vote. Instead, she said, Obama’s promise to enact health-care reform on a deficit-neutral basis was the crucial factor in gaining support from 37 members of the fiscally conservative group.
“It was the policy issue, it was that specific commitment, that made a difference,” she said, adding: “I’m not sure how many members knew about the petitions.”
The real truth, obots, is that Obama was using you to do what Obama does best, collect money. Do you really think that you’re going to make any difference in what goes on in Washington? Yes you can? Don’t make me laugh.
But the Obamoonies will continue to blindly follow their leader, much like the loony 33%ers that stuck by GWB till the bitter end. I just hope that that happens after 4 years instead of 8 this time.
Posted by garychapelhill 
