Posted on 05/26/2009 5:10:26 PM PDT by lewisglad
The president will reawaken his dormant grassroots network to push Sonia Sotomayor, The Daily Beast’s Richard Wolffe reports—a plan designed to divert attention away from his real summer agenda.
The White House is planning to revive President Obama’s 13 million-member grassroots campaign network, largely dormant since last year’s election, as it rolls out it first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, today.
Senior Obama aides tell The Daily Beast that the network, which revolutionized fundraising and online political networking during the 2008 campaign, will be an important factor in a series of high-profile struggles unfolding over the next two months. Besides the Supreme Court fight, the senior aides say they expect to bring universal health-care to the president’s desk, while simultaneously making significant progress on global-warming legislation, including a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases.
By drawing fire to its Supreme Court nominee, Obama’s aides believe that health-care and environmental politics may face less-intense opposition.
All three initiatives would move ahead before Congress disappears for its month-long August recess, and all three face intense opposition from a conservative movement desperately seeking to rally its own supporters.
The revival of Obama’s grassroots machine represents not only an effort to neutralize any Republican onslaught, but also something of a diversionary tactic. By drawing fire to its Supreme Court nominee, Obama’s aides believe that health-care and environmental politics may face less-intense opposition.
In any case, Obama’s online machine—now known as Organizing for America—has already started to re-energize its supporters for a June 6 launch of its health-care-overhaul campaign.
This is not the first time that Obama’s aides have hoped to restart their formidable online machine. At the start of his presidency, Obama said the group would play a critical role in his administration. But its first efforts—to support Obama’s budget—fizzled, with a petition amounting to 214,000 names.
Now the adversaries and the issues represent a far better opportunity to energize Obama’s supporters than the dry details of a federal budget. Conservative groups are planning to demonize the new Supreme Court nominee on a range of cultural issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage. While there is little chance for Republicans to defeat the nominee in a Senate firmly under Democratic control, movement conservatives believe they can rebuild their membership with extensive advertising and online activism.
Such counterefforts have proved in the past to be some of the most powerful catalysts for mobilizing Obama’s online supporters. When Sarah Palin was picked as John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee last September, Obama’s network responded with a higher level of activity than at any other time in the election up to that point.
The last time Obama proactively used his online support network for such a high-profile news event was his selection of Joe Biden as his vice-presidential pick in August. At the time, Obama announced Biden’s selection with a text message to supporters and an announcement on his campaign Web site.
Alongside the online activism, the White House is planning a traditional rollout of the nominee complete with a full schedule of one-on-one meetings with senators.
Richard Wolffe is an award-winning journalist, political analyst for MSNBC, and senior strategist at Public Strategies. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book, Renegade: The Making of a President, will be published by Crown in June
“which revolutionized fundraising and online political networking during the 2008 campaign”
I remember stealing from people’s bank accounts.
Watch out. The dims may use all of this to try to ramrod through draconian Brady Bunch Gun control bills and drastic defense cuts. This would happen while their SCOTUS pick takes the bulk of our forces out of combat, and Cap and Trade and Healthcare pin down the rest.
Here is what the Dims will try to ram through while we are distracted....
Obama will seek these 4 elements in a gun bill
1. An expanded HR 45, gun owner licensing. All gun owners will have to have these licenses, even owners of facilimie weapons (AKA Airsoft and BB). Licenses will only be granted if the records of the applicant are clean (This includes misdemeanors from decades ago). Licenses will have high renewal fees ($100-300/yr). Licensees will be required to hold $1 million in liability insurance. Possession of otherwise permitted weapons (See #3) without license is a felony.
2. Ammunition accountability... All ammo will be required to be microstamped and will be taxed $1/round. All non stamped ammo will be required to be turned in or thrown away. Possession of non-marked ammo is a felony. This part of the act also bans “Cop Killer” bullets. Furthermore, this will require the gun to leave a microstamp of its own on the ammo. (BTW, this will also affect law enforcement and military ammunition stocks, as they will be required to have stamps of their own)
3. Expanded “Assault Weapons” ban— This includes most all semiauto rifles, anything that can be “Bump Fired”, Semiauto handguns, and Semi-auto shotguns. It also includes pump-action shotguns and “Sniper Rifles” AKA your deer rifle. The AWB will also require people with “Prebans” to register their guns as Machine Guns, and that the tax stamp will go up to $10,000 per weapon. If you can’t afford this, you have to turn the weapon in without compensation...
4. Expansion of the Lautenberg amendment: Removes “Domestic Violence” as disqualifier to gun ownership, inserts any misdemeanor as disqualifer... Anyone with a misdemeanor on their record will be prohibited from owning a firearm. This includes DUI and traffic offenses, and offenses decades ago.
Finally, all CCW permits will be voided. Also, all gun and ammo imports will be banned.
They spawned. They will die.
The Dims can’t do anything until Franken is seated.
They will allow Franken to be seated on a provisional basis only to get Sotomayer through and to allow the rest of their agenda to pass.
And the Southern Democrats are defecting on the gun bills, others on cap and trade so it looks like health care may be the only issue for fall.
“Oama’s dormant 13 million grass roots Organization”
Why Obama may NOT still have 13 million.
1. If they’re collegeg Grads they may not have jobs or even Job Interviews.
2. They may now be Unemployed.
3. They may be pissed off about any number of Obama broken Campaign Promises. (lies)
4. They may be leaving California because the farmland cannot be Irrigated because of a Fish.
5. They may be Jewish and realized Obama loves Hamas.
6. They got tired of waiting for the tax break for 95 % of Americans, only to be told it was done, they just didn’t notice it.
7. Polls show a big drop in supporters.
8. (keep it going Freepers )
That group worked so well for the budget fight over Gitmo!
One, we have Supreme Court precedent on our side, including Heller, which clearly acknowledges the RKBA as an individual right, and immune from the kinds of sweeping national legislation you are suggesting.
Two, any such wide-ranging legislation can be challenged in federal courts as a usurpation of state authority, especially a Federal preemption of the rights of states to issue CCW licenses based upon their own standards.
Three, the majority of us - 80 million gun owners - will never comply and any attempt to enforce such regulations would lead to profound resistance, by which I mean significant conflict in an significantly organized manner.
How’s Kennedy health ?
How’s Byrd doing ?
God, sends us a Signal or Two.
It makes my heart sing to hear the lefties in my neighborhood going after him for being too far to the right. Soon he'll have no one but the semi-illiterates and the hopelessly in love.
This is what I was worried about. The stinking media is going to focus on what is a done deal and ignore what Obama wants to slide under the radar.
Face it, the day this faux POTUS was sworn in, we knew we were going to get 2, possibly 3 SCOTUS picks from the phony prez, we cannot stop it, we can only make sure that people are informed on the anti Constitutional picks Obama is making.
Our eye is off the looming dangers of the “kill US citizens” healthcare and Cap and Tax plans.
We just can’t let them play this game. So far, they are getting away with this scheme.
This is not all. As I have stated before, the Dims may also use the cover that this SCOTUS pick gives and the other issues to ram gun control legislation through
Yep, we might be surprised at all they are doing behind our backs with full cover of the perverted and corrupt media.
Don’t fool yourself, even Fox plays the game.
So it’s gonna be non-stop campaigning for at least the next four years? I have a feeling that folks are get tired of this.
It’s an interesting strategy, the libs think that the American people or the mainstream media can not focus on more than one issue at a time. I think they are wrong there!
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