Mitch Stewart, of the group I like to call Organizing Against America, checked in the other day with his 2009 assessment. Aside from my leaving out their overt begging for funds, this is how Stewart saw their year:
Looking back at 2009, it turns out you were right.
Early this year, millions of you chose to keep working together and create Organizing for Against America, to build on the momentum of the Obama campaign, take on the defenders of the status quo, and make change happen.
Special interests thought they could steamroll you with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and attack ads. Meanwhile, you built a massive organization, driven by local leadership, that reached out to millions of fellow Americans and made your voices heard to Congress in record numbers.
In the coming year, our opponents will make a final stand to block health reform and seek to defeat many of the President’s other crucial initiatives. And they’re already targeting those in Congress who are championing change.
So I wanted to take a moment at year’s end to reflect on everything you’ve built, and to ask for your help one last time this year to hit the ground running in 2010…
…This has been a remarkable year for the movement you’ve built from the ground up.
Beth Kimbriel, a mother of four from Richmond, Virginia, has no formal political experience. But every week, as an OFA “Community Organizer,” she trains and manages other volunteer leaders to organize effectively around the President’s agenda. Hundreds of her fellow OFA Community Organizers around the country have already volunteered more than 200,000 hours doing similar work. Thousands more have taken on other leadership positions in every single state. And we’re still growing — nearly a million people who had never volunteered for the presidential campaign have signed up with OFA this year.
Supporters spread the word throughout our communities, with more than a million conversations with neighbors on the phone and at the doorstep, and 250,000 letters to the editor about how President Obama’s policies would help ordinary Americans.
And when Congress was making crucial decisions, you spoke out more powerfully than the special interests ever could. In the last few months, you’ve made more than 1 million calls to Congress — including more than 300,000 on one amazing day in October that created huge momentum for health reform. Thousands of supporters attended town halls to counter the shouting mobs and speak out in person. And you even held 37,107 events in every congressional district — bus tour rallies, phonebanks and forums to inform your neighbors.
These incredible efforts have powered victories on a wide range of issues. OFA volunteers provided a huge boost to help pass the Recovery Act, President Obama’s historic budget, an expansion of children’s health care, credit card and student loan reform. Your voices helped pass a historic green jobs and energy bill in the House, and the confirmation of the nation’s first Latina Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, in the Senate. And of course, you were instrumental in passing comprehensive health reform through both houses of Congress for the first time in American history.
With every phone call to a member of Congress, every door knocked on a rainy day, every event held in a town center, you’ve helped to push this country forward.
But with the special interests and their allies in Congress fighting us for every inch, we need your help again to keep our organizing strong in 2010. (Emphasis in original, strikethrough obviously mine!)
Well, Mitch, looking back at 2009, I know I was right – correct in fighting your idiocy and ignorance of Constitutional government practically every step of the way. Hate to break it to you folks, but the Constitution IS the “special interest” of the American people.
As a member of one of those “shouting mobs” I’d also like to point out that you have a LONG way to go still to secure so-called “health care reform,” and I haven’t received one dime from Big Insurance to say this. That’s because I don’t need to be paid to be right. (It would be nice, though.) On the other hand, Beth Kimbriel, the Virginia volunteer who Stewart cites in his e-mail, conceded “‘it’s difficult to be believed’ when she lays out the president’s position” in a Los Angeles Times article back in August. Beth, the President has no position because we’ve never seen “his” bill and he won’t claim ownership of one until he signs whatever is passed.
And the only push forward we’ve gotten from Obama’s allies is one closer to an economic precipice. Without new private-sector job growth, the economy will sputter and if this is considered a recovery I’d hate to see their version of prosperity and growth.
The idea behind putting this up, though, is to show my side what we’re up against. We need to work twice as hard as they do because the job of slowing down government is much more difficult than the default position of growing it. (Reversing the tide may be ten times more difficult still.)
But Mitch made an interesting choice of words in that boldly emphasized sentence – “the movement you’ve built from the ground up.” That’s exactly how Astrotrurf is installed – you tear out the sod in place, bury the barren soil in a layer of pea gravel, and roll the Astroturf out on top. The grassroots have no chance as they’re smothered away from light and most of the water.
That seems to be the goal of this administration – snuffing out the political grassroots represented by thoughtful Americans and instead placing an impermeable layer of bland sameness atop them.