Barack Obama

Catalist for Victory: How Nonprofits and Unions Have Struggled to Re-elect President Obama

By Neil Maghami, Organization Trends, November 2012 (PDF here)

Summary: Supposedly nonpartisan nonprofits on the Left and their union allies have exploited the latest “microtargeting” technology as they’ve worked feverishly to elect Democrats. The most powerful weapon in their arsenal is Catalist LLC, a state-of-the-art data firm that services both “nonpartisan” nonprofits and every would-be Democrat officeholder who can afford it. (Note: This study went to press shortly before the election.)

Winning in war, quipped a Southern leader in the Civil War, is all about getting to the battlefield “firstest with the mostest.” That’s a formula for victory in presidential politics, too. When it comes to mustering all possible support on Election Day 2012 for the Democratic Party, unions and tax-exempt left-wing groups have played a critical role in the party’s get-out-the-vote strategy. Since 2006 a high-tech operation called Catalist LLC has helped both unions and tax-exempt groups fine-tune their electoral influence to the point that they may well provide the Democrats the edge they need.

Catalist boasts it was vital to President Obama’s 2008 victory. By its own admission, “over 90 organizations, campaigns and committees” used the company’s services. “Based on data that was loaded into the Catalist databases and then standardized,” a Catalist analysis of the 2008 cycle says, “progressive organizations, the Obama campaign, and federal party committees attempted to contact more than 106 million people. This means that the progressive community attempted to contact over 46% of the U.S. adult population. Contacts were delivered in-person, over the phone, by mail and over the internet.”

Catalist says that “data stored by all progressive groups (over 90 organizations, campaigns and committees) working with [us] in the 2008 cycle shows that presidential [voter] ID activity alone reached 15,452,954 people—a difference of over 80% [compared to 2004]. Overall, Catalist customers were responsible for generating over 7 million voter registration applications. They completed over 127 million contacts to over 49 million unique individuals. Of these individuals, 28 million voted on Election Day, representing over 20% of all votes cast. Furthermore, 82% of progressive activities occurred in 16 highly contested states. Progressives contacted 37% of all the people who voted in the 16 battlegrounds.”

If this is what Catalist and its allies could achieve in 2008, imagine their goals for 2012, after four more years of refining their techniques. This edition of Organization Trends examines the who’s, why’s, and how’s of Catalist. We’ll also explore Catalist’s link to George Soros, the Left’s Daddy Warbucks. And we’ll look at some of Catalist’s known customers in the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt community and among labor unions.

Read all »

There’s no doubt that attacks on Mitt Romney by left-wing super PACs and nonprofit groups have been pushing Romney’s numbers down.

NerdWallet, which is a financial advice website, has a new study out saying Barack Obama has a –get this–  79.5 percent chance of winning reelection.

It has an 8.1 percent margin of error 70 days out from Election Day.

I don’t buy it but here’s the site’s reasoning.

Romney’s election odds: 19%
If current election polls are as accurate as historical polls, Mitt Romney has only a 19% chance of winning the presidential election.

Why are Romney’s chances so low?
Obama has 201 safe electoral votes. Romney has only 181. Only 12 states (156 electoral votes) could go to either candidate.
Therefore, Romney needs at least 89 of those 156 electoral votes to win (57%).
Given current polling in those states & historical polling accuracy, Romney’s statistical chance of getting those 89 votes is only 19%.

NerdWallet puts Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin in the Obama column. That may be a reasonable guess based on current poll numbers but I suspect those states  and several others will soon begin to move in the direction of Romney.

Predicting what millions of people are going to do in the privacy of a voting booth is a fool’s errand, of course, but from looking at current polls I suspect that  the Intrade forecast is more accurate. Intrade puts Obama’s chances at 55 percent versus Romney’s 44 percent.

But what do I know.

James Simpson has done a good write-up of “The Vetting: Obama, Radical Islam and the Soros Connection,” a daylong conference (conference website here) held July 19 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The event was put on by America’s Survival, a group headed by Cliff Kincaid.

I don’t have time right now to do justice to Simpson’s article or the conference itself so please pardon this short blog post. Suffice it to say that the political radicalism of Barack Obama was put under a powerful microscope. The mainstream media couldn’t care less about all of this, of course, so I’m glad that America’s Survival organized this informative event. The Left must have recognized that the conference had some value: it was attended by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post and Oliver Willis of the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America.

Capital Research Center contributor Trevor Loudon, who wrote our October 2010 profile of the Tides Foundation and Tides Center, spoke at the conference. Here’s the video of his presentation, titled ”The Pro-Soviet Agent of Influence Who Gave Barack Obama His First Job in Politics”:

A memorable quotation from the video: “I love the Tea Party … This is the start of the second American Revolution right now. This is 1773.” Loudon is also author of Barack Obama and the Enemies Within (a book I endorsed).

Other speakers at the conference included Kincaid; Joel Gilbert, director of “Dreams from My Real Father”; Weather Underground infiltrator Larry Grathwohl; Paul Kengor, author of The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor; and former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky (also spelled Preobrazhenskiy).

The Boston Globe‘s Leon Neyfakh quotes me in a feature article today, “Revealed: Obama’s secret agenda.”

In my view Obama’s agenda isn’t exactly secret but perhaps I’m quibbling.

Here’s the relevant passage:

Rebrand 9/11. One secret White House plot that has yet to be realized has to do with an attempt to change Sept. 11 from a day reserved for memorializing those who died in the terrorist attacks into a “celebration of ethanol, carbon emission controls, and radical community organizing.” This plan was first outlined in an August 2009 report published by The American Spectator under the headline “Obama’s Plan to Desecrate 9/11.” Written by Matthew Vadum, a conservative watchdog who investigates left-leaning advocacy groups, the article cited a source who had participated in a “White House-sponsored teleconference call” during which representatives of 60 “far-left, environmentalist, labor, and corporate shakedown groups” discussed the need to transform 9/11 from something that “helps Republicans” into something new. Vadum reported that the Obama administration was collaborating with a number of organizations, including the community activist group ACORN, on a “cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.”

Vadum described the plot last year in his book “Subversion, Inc.,” which outlined the numerous ways Obama was using ACORN as a secret army to enact his national goals. The group is now defunct, and in an interview last week, Vadum said he believes the 9/11 proposal has become less of a priority, as he has not come across any mention of it recently.

The bizarre plan to use 9/11 for left-wing purposes was indeed detailed in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Writer James Simpson has a wonderful new opus at the Accuracy In Media website.

Radical leftists are gearing up to try to steal the 2012 elections, he explains. In recent years Simpson, a frequent American Thinker contributor, has written extensively about the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis and of the devious tactics of Alinskyite community organizers.

The new piece begins:

This report reveals the Left’s vote fraud strategy for the 2012 elections. Like a KGB operation, it is thorough, multi-faceted and redundant. It has overt and covert, illegal and legal elements, the latter of which are designed, at least in part, to facilitate illegal activities later. It is a deliberate, premeditated, comprehensive plan to win the 2012 presidential election at all costs, and is in keeping with the organizational methods, associations and ethics of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

The Left seeks fundamental structural change to our entire form of government. In keeping with their amoral, means-justifies-ends philosophy, they will register any voters, dead or alive, legal or illegal, who will then vote as many times as possible, in order to establish a “permanent progressive majority.” As two New York Democrats recently caught in a vote fraud scandal told police, “voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections…”

Low income individuals are the perfect dupes for this strategy. An expanding welfare state makes them increasingly dependent on government benefits, a development that guarantees their vote for liberal-left candidates. At the same time, people with marginal attachment to society may be less inclined to report illegal activity at the polls—or actually participate. The “victim” narrative promoted in popular culture and press may even encourage such behavior. Meanwhile, a growing tax burden and public debt suck private enterprise dry—pushing ever more people onto the dole.

Politicians of both parties are not above engaging in vote fraud. But this kind of corruption is relegated to individual campaigns or areas where corrupt political establishments have been able to develop unchallenged. It is not a systematic component of overall national strategy, as it is with the Left.

This strategy has been under development for decades. They have constructed an entire industry devoted to this task and pursue a multifaceted strategy to accomplish it: [...]

A spinoff of Americans for Limited Government called Free Market America has created a wonderful new video that sums up all the ways that the Left is sabotaging America.

This powerful video is called “If I wanted America to fail.” It shows how the Left has been pushing an “economic suicide pact” for decades.

Click on this link to view the video on YouTube:  If I wanted America to fail

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

It begins

George Soros’ Democracy Alliance, an invitation-only club for billionaire leftist political donors, has decided to drown Democrats and President Obama’s re-election campaign in an ocean of cash this year. Democracy Alliance, founded in 2005, is a financial clearinghouse that recommends to its wealthy members projects and groups aimed at transforming America into a European-style socialist state. The secretive group has directed untold hundreds of millions of dollars to left-of-center causes.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Soros, he is the pre-eminent funder of the left in the United States. He openly favors American decline and has said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” The radical, anti-American philanthropist praises China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.” Mr. Soros already has begun doling out funds for Democrats. In the 2012 cycle, he has given a modest $203,500, but that number promises to rise exponentially.

Democracy Alliance’s original mission was to focus on building political infrastructure – think tanks, activist groups, leadership schools and media outlets – to help the left gain and keep power. The idea was to focus on long-term organizational issues as opposed to the more mundane task of helping Democrats get elected every election cycle.

But political expediency has forced a stunning course correction that is causing deep fissures in Democracy Alliance that ultimately may destroy it. On one side of an internal divide are Democracy Alliance members who believe in the original mission of the donors’ collaboration.

Soros doppelganger Peter B. Lewis, who helped found the group with Mr. Soros, thinks Democracy Alliance has become far too partisan. In a crushing blow to the club, the Progressive Insurance magnate, who spent $25 million in 2004 in a failed attempt to defeat President George W. Bush, reportedly resigned from Democracy Alliance in disgust weeks ago.

“Peter’s focus since 2004 has been on scaling up the progressive infrastructure, as opposed to election or political candidates,” a source told Politico last month.

To read the rest of it, click here.

President Obama has given ACORN $729,849 so far this year and billions more in federal cash may be in the pipeline.

The president’s new economic stimulus package, the so-called “jobs bill,” contains as much as $15 billion for radical left-wing groups such as ACORN (his former employer). Obama has been using his presidential bully pulpit to demand that Republicans in Congress “pass this bill,” even though there is no bill yet. Despite all the rhetoric, the proposed “American Jobs Act of 2011” apparently hasn’t even been introduced in Congress.

Meanwhile, longtime ACORN ally Shaun Donovan, who heads Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has been showering ACORN with your tax dollars. The money has gone to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA), which is the new name for ACORN Housing. Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name last year. Read all »

Summary: Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC drove the activist Left to madness. The decision affirmed a principle that corporations, like individuals, have free speech rights, which liberal doomsayers predict will lead to nothing less than the downfall of American democracy. To combat the ruling, the Obama White House has drafted an executive order that, if issued, will compel both for-profit and non-profit corporations (including  labor unions) to disclose their political contributions whenever they apply for federal grants and contracts. Read all »