Fool Me Twice (25 page)

AUFC's acting executive director is Tom McMahon, formerly executive director of the DNC and deputy national campaign manager for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid. AUFC's deputy executive director is Caren Benjamin, an aide to then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
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and a senior media specialist with the AFL-CIO in the D.C. metro area.
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What might AUFC have in store for 2012?
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In a
Washington Post
account headlined “Obama offers 2012 election supporters change they can believe in—next term,” AUFC's senior strategist said,

A successful campaign will heavily focus on the radical, do-nothing Republican Congress. That will resonate with people. Most [Americans] believe Obama shares their values and their concerns, and where he has failed them is his effectiveness to improve the economy.

It seems to me the case the campaign needs to make is that that failure is a consequence of the damage created by Republicans and the refusal of Congress to take the necessary steps that he proposed for the economy.
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The assessment comes from Robert Creamer, who heads the Strategic Consulting Group and is married to progressive Illinois Rep. Jan
Schakowsky (D-IL). Creamer himself is no newcomer to progressive activism, and illustrates how progressive think tanks and their political cohorts both draft and promote radical legislation. According to his own company bio, Creamer worked with AUFC, “where he helped coordinate the campaign to pass President Obama's landmark jobs and economic recovery legislation.”
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Cut from the left-wing theorist Saul Alinsky's cloth, around 1970, Creamer worked with Heather and Paul Booth, of the radical incubator Midwest Academy, on a project called Campaign Against Pollution. By 1977, then executive director of the Illinois Public Action Council, Creamer was among those invited to attend VISTA roundtable discussions.
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He also served on Midwest's board of directors (1999–2000).
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In more modern times, during summer 2007, Creamer was one of the instructors for Camp Obama, a summer training program for campaign interns and volunteers.
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Creamer is a “political force in his own right,” political blogger John Ruberry wrote in September 2005. Creamer consulted for former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and since-convicted felon Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on prior political campaigns.
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In 2009, Creamer was the author of a blueprint for universal health care. Creamer wrote the document while incarcerated in federal prison for five months in 2006, after signing a plea bargain on bank fraud and tax evasion charges while heading Citizen Action of Illinois.
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Aside from LetHimDie.com, another joint PYC-AUFC operation—this one a progressive reincarnation of old Soviet-style agit-prop—was staged on October 21, 2011, at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. This incident illustrates two important dimensions of the “save ObamaCare” campaign—the use of 1960s-style radical direct action protests, and the videotaping of same for use as viral propaganda on the Internet.

First, protesters from groups including PYC, AUFC, Occupy Philly, Philadelphia AFL-CIO, Fight for Philly, SEIU PA State Council, Keystone Progress, Moveon.org, NCPSSM, Progress Now, and AFSCME demonstrated at the Philadelphia school following the cancellation of a speech
there by U.S. House majority leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA). According to Think Progress, a propaganda website of the Center for American Progress, Cantor was “apparently afraid of dissident audiences.”
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The
Los Angeles Times
and other news media confirmed that Cantor had cancelled a planned speech on income inequality because he feared protestors would “fill the seats,” as attendance was not limited to “students and others affiliated with the school.”
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The day before Cantor was to appear, the unofficial count of tents pitched at Occupy Philly opposite City Hall had reached 304. This did not include protesters simply “hanging out” there during the occupation's third week.
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By that night, the University of Pennsylvania's Capitol Police had informed Representative Cantor that it was “unable to ensure that the attendance policy [for students, faculty, alumni, and other members of the UPENN community] previously agreed to could be met.” So Cantor cancelled, but then approximately five hundred Occupy Philly protesters stormed the campus and, by force, entered Huntsman Hall, where Cantor was to have given his lecture. Protesters chanted “Eric Cantor, come out, come out wherever you are” and “We are the 99 percent.”
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Think Progress actually watered down its version of the event, reporting merely that “hundreds of protesters entered the Wharton School and chanted about economic justice.” A thirty-seven-second video on its website shows protesters shouting inside the hall while students on a balcony inside the building are “chanting in unison, ‘Get a job! Get a job!'”
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Recall here that the
Huffington Post
's Michael McAuliff and Sam Stein had written in April 2011 that CAP was going to send out “trackers to film various events” at town hall forums.
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Obviously, CAP's “film trackers” were not confining their activities to formal meetings between the citizenry and their elected representatives.

CAP is not the only group capturing GOP events on video and posting clips on YouTube, on behalf of the high-powered Protect Your Care campaign. The Ramirez Group, which describes itself as a “full-service public affairs, strategic communications and political consulting firm” located in Las Vegas, has also posted several.
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Group principals include Andres Ramirez, who began his career as a legislative aide to Senate majority Leader Harry Reid, followed by work for Nevada governor Bob Miller in the state's
Washington, D.C. office, Ramirez served most recently as senior vice president of the progressive think tank New Democrat Network. Ramirez also serves as vice chair of the DNC's Hispanic Caucus, “where he is tasked with helping the DNC develop and implement its Hispanic engagement strategy.”
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Andres' wife, Jacqueline (Jacki) Ramirez, who manages client relationships and internal operations for the Ramirez Group, served for nearly a decade as a regional representative to Senator Reid.
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Marco Rauda, prior to joining the Ramirez Group, served in 2010 as the deputy political director for the Rory Reid for Governor Campaign in Nevada. Rory is Harry's son. Rauda helped organize the 2008 Nevada Democratic Caucuses on behalf of the Nevada State Democratic Party and later “oversaw successful voter registration and mobilization programs targeting Hispanics.”
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Lastly, Warren Flood was hired by the Ramirez Group following the 2008 Nevada Democratic Caucuses, when he served as the Obama campaign's western region data director. He served also on the Obama-Biden transition team and, in January 2009, was appointed as director of information systems and technology for the Office of the Vice President. After two years, Flood left to join the DNC's National Targeting team for the 2010 election cycle. Besides his position with the Ramirezes, he is president of the political consulting firm Bright Blue Data.
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With regard to the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election, we must mention the role of the mega-ObamaCare coalition, the Herndon Alliance, which continues to be instrumental in shaping the ObamaCare message. In December 2011, PYC and the Herndon Alliance received the results of two polls conducted on their behalf. The research was done by Anzalone Liszt Research, a firm headed by KYC/PYC board member John Anzalone. ALR had also poll-tested messaging with “encouraging results” for advocates of ObamaCare in June 2011.
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One of the new polls showed that Hispanic voters had a “more positive impression” of ObamaCare “than the population as a whole—a fact that could help the president maintain his strong support among a voting block that backed him by a 36-point spread in 2008.”
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The second poll showed, in the research group's opinion, that “not only do Hispanic voters strongly support” ObamaCare, but they also “offer the law's allies a tremendous opportunity to increase support for the law.”
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With major legal challenges to ObamaCare before the Supreme Court scheduled for late-March 2012, the White House launched an “aggressive campaign” to “help shape public opinion” for the health care act, according to Robert Pear at the
New York Times
.
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The new campaign reportedly emerged after months of urging by progressives both inside and outside of Congress, to get the White House “to make a more forceful defense of the health care law.” According to the
Times
report:

White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.
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Pear's report also mentioned the names of some of the sixty groups represented at the meeting and working with the White House: PYC, SEIU, AFSCME, HCAN, CAP, Families USA (FUSA), and the National Council of La Raza. What followed was the mapping out of a strategy to “call attention to tangible benefits of the law, like increased insurance coverage for young adults.”

Five months after mid-September 2011, when the radical Occupy Wall Street movement had exploded into public consciousness and rapidly spread from New York to hundreds of other locations around the country—and with the endorsement and encouragement of the top Democrat leadership—the White House claimed with the proverbial straight face that it was “sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations.”
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A few days later, Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation exposed a four-page strategy memo—specifically mentioning Families USA, Know Your Care, and HCAN—that outlined day by day the game plan developed by the White House and progressive advocacy groups for manipulating public discussion during the Supreme Court's hearing of oral arguments on ObamaCare from March 26 to March 28. Advocacy groups were told to frame the debate over two issues:

• Remind people that the law is already benefiting millions of Americans by providing health care coverage, reducing costs and providing access to healthcare coverage. This message will include the ideas that these are benefits that politicans/the Court (are) trying to take away from average Americans.

• Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned. While lawyers will be talking about the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedents, organizations on the ground should continue to focus on these more tangible results of the law.
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With a straight face of its own, the
New York Times
reported the White House denials that it was “trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone's throw from Congress on Capitol Hill.”
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In truth, rallies and demonstrations were exactly what they planned—as evidenced by national media—and not only outside the Supreme Court.

“The process of finding out just what's in ObamaCare continues!” So wrote Jim Pethokoukis at the
American Enterprise
blog on March 15, 2012. Under one scenario, he wrote, “the gross costs through 2022 could be $2.1 trillion if even more businesses than expected decide not to offer health insurance and more people need government subsidized coverage.”
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Even a writer at the left-wing msnbc.com admitted:

Figuring out the ten-year cost of the Affordable Care Act is like trying to track a constantly moving target. That's partly because the ten-year forecasting window keeps advancing each year: the new forecasting window covers the years 2012 to 2022.
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Those comments were elicited by a stunning revision issued by the Congressional Budget Office two days earlier, to the effect that its cost estimate of $940 billion over ten years—made at the time President Obama
signed the bill in March 2010—would actually be nearly double, at $1.76 trillion.
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How could such a shocking underestimation have occurred? Let's call it Democrat sleight of hand. Philip Klein explained at the
Washington Examiner
:

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO's standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's pledge [in September 2009] that ObamaCare would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.”
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Rick Moran stated it more bluntly at the
American Thinker
:

Being wrong is not the same as lying. Obama wasn't wrong. He knew the funny numbers his administration was putting out. He knew the accounting tricks the Democrats were playing. He knew it all. And he looked the American people in the eye and lied to them.
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Klein reminded us that, prior to the bill's passage, critics of the CBO score
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had predicted “that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.”
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