A Okie look at all thing Politics, eCampaign, New Media and Warfare - - - I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. - John Adams
A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress. Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.
The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.
The group is still in its early stages, and its organizers have adopted a secretive posture: Several of the people involved did not respond to emails over the last two days, even though one of them, former MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser, has programmed his MoveOn email account to assure correspondents that he is using the account for messages "including Unity '09 work."
People familiar with the planning said that the White House is not directly involved in the group's formation, though Unity '09's main day-to-day staffer, Aaron Pickrell, was a senior aide on Obama's presidential campaign. Aides to Obama and to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel didn't respond to inquiries about whether they were familiar with the group.
Unity '09 comes at a time of increasing coordination on the left, including an effort this week by the Democratic National Committee, Obama's grassroots network and other groups to defend Obama's budget and attack the GOP as obstructionists.
But Unity '09 is setting a broader, and longer-term agenda, aiming to exert grassroots pressure on lawmakers in their home states over the next several years on the entire spectrum of political issues.
"When progressive activists are working in concert and the right is forming a circular firing squad, you know it's a new day," said consultant Paul Begala, who said he's not involved in the new organization.
Unity '09 is, informally, the field organizing compliment to another new organization, Progressive Media , which launched a month ago to coordinate the liberal groups' messages and their attacks on Republicans and on critics of Obama's policies. That group's 8:45 a.m. daily conference call has helped bring such unlikely groups as the League of Conservation Voters into an effort to castRush Limbaughas the leader of the Republican Party, and has coordinated attacks on two leading critics of Obama's health care plans.
But while Progressive Media is an in-house project of two existing organizations, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters.
Unity '09 requires more commitment from its members in the form of a $25,000 contribution to the group's future organizing campaigns, a source said.
Unity '09 is conceived as ultimately including 20 to 30 organizations, people familiar with the planning said.
The groups have overlapping, but different, groups of members and financial resources at their disposal, and the idea behind the organization is that they can share resources to fill in geographical and organizational gaps. Labor unions could, for instance, put their weight behind environmental campaigns in regions where environmental groups are relatively weak, and vice versa.
Along with the groups previously mentioned, others involved in planning discussions include the Sierra Club, Media Matters for America, and Health Care for America Now.
Unity '09 is not to be confused with Unity '08, a bipartisan group of political operatives that sought to nominate New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg as the top of an independent presidential ticket last year.
The new organization is likely to stir fears among conservatives already feeling organizationally outgunned and flatly alarmed by the new progressive infrastructure.
"This, ladies and gentlemen is, a threat to America," Fox News's Bill O'Reilly said, responding Saturday night to POLITICO's report on the birth of Progressive Media and its morning conference call. "The Obama administration would be wise to avoid this crew. If the new administration gets involved in this, it would be like the Nixon dirty tricks squad."
This is September the 10th. This is the eve of the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, and you know what congressional Democrats have done? They have released a report attacking the Bush administration. This report, issued by the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committees, claims that the Bush administration has failed to provide the American people the security they expect and deserve. They charge that there's been a failure to provide rail and bus security, cargo screening, failure to promote democracies abroad, failure to capture weapons of mass destruction. This is unbelievable. We have not had a single attack on our soil since 9/11, 2001.
There has been no bus blown up. There has been no train blown up. There has been no cargo that allowed a bomb to get into the country and go off. Failure to promote democracies abroad? What the hell is Iraq about, in part? Anybody who has paid attention since 9/11, you want to talk issues, Barry, we're talking issues here. Anybody who's paid any attention at all since 9/11 knows that this report is a joke. For the last seven years, Democrats have engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine our national security for political gain, including Obama, who still, as recently as this weekend made the case that terrorists caught on the battlefield need to be read their rights. Every step of the way for the last seven years Democrats have obstructed our mission aimed at national security. They have fought against surveillance of terror targets. They have fought against funding the military while it's destroying Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their Senate leader, Harry Reid, called the war a failure. He said, "This war is lost."
Their presidential candidate still will not admit the troop surge in Iraq worked, and he will not say that he would support it again if he had the chance. They have gone to court to give terrorists at Club Gitmo constitutional rights, while at the same time smearing our troops, comparing them to Nazi thugs. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has acted, and the results are not one major terror attack on our soil, not a bus, not a train, not a port, for seven years, thanks in part to the Bush administration breaking up terror plots, thwarted by methods Democrats still to this day protest using. Instead of action to secure America, Democrats write reports which are nothing more than election-year political propaganda. They have failed atrociously. They have abused the power that has been vested in them. We cannot trust this Democrat Party to protect this country, to lead this country; we cannot afford to take the chance because these people have not shown they have one iota's worth of competence or even interest in protecting this country. They want to blame this country. You want issues, Obama, take those.
We begin, as one always must now, again, with Bill Clinton. The past week he has traveled South Carolina, leaving discord in his wake. Barack Obama, that "fairytale," is low, sneaky. "He put out a hit job on me." The press is cruelly carrying Mr. Obama's counter-jabs. "You live for it."
In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton "predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties" and suggested his wife may lose Saturday's primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It's the press, and Mr. Obama. "Shame on you," Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the backdoor of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: "Sticky Fingers Obama."
Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.
There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."
That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.
Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It's all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.
But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we've done for you?
Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.
As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They're throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.
The rage is due to many things. A world is ending, the old world of conservative meaning, and ascendancy. Loss leads to resentment. Different pundits back different candidates. Some opportunistically discover new virtues in candidates who appear at the moment to be winning. Some feel they cannot be fully frank about causes and effects.
More on that in a moment.
I saw Mr. McCain this Tuesday in New York, at a fund-raiser at which a breathless aide shared, "We just made a million dollars." What a difference a few wins makes. There were a hundred people outside chanting, "Mac is back!" and perhaps a thousand people inside, crammed into a three-chandelier ballroom at the St. Regis. When I attended a fund-raiser in October there was none of this; perhaps 200 came, and people were directed to crowd around the candidate as if to show he had support. Now you had to fight your way through a three-ring cluster. (When I attended a Giuliani fund-raiser this summer I saw something I wish I'd noted: The audience was big but wasn't listening. They were all on their BlackBerrys. That should have told me something about his support.)
Mr. McCain is in the middle of a shift. Previous strategy: I'm John McCain and you know me, we've traveled through history together. New strategy: I'm the old vet who fought on the front lines of the Reagan-era front, and I am about to take on the mantle of the essentials of conservatism—lower spending, smaller government, strong in the world. He is going to strike the great Reagan gong, not in a way that is new but in a way that is new for him.
In this he is repositioning himself back to where he started 30 years ago: as a Southwestern American conservative veteran of the armed forces. That is, inherently if not showily, anti-establishment. That is, I am the best of the past.
Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is running as I Am Today. I am new and fresh, in fact I'm tomorrow, I know all about the international flow of money and the flatness of the world, I know what China is, I can see you through the turbulence just as I saw Bain to success.
It will all come down to: Whom do Republicans believe? Mr. Romney in spite of his past and now-disavowed liberal positions? Or Mr. McCain in spite of his forays, the past 10 years, into a kind of establishment mindset that has suggested that The Establishment Knows Best?
Do conservatives take inspiration from Mr. Romney's newness? Or do they take comfort and security from Mr. McCain's rugged ability to endure, and to remind?
It is along those lines the big decision will be made.
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It's not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn't work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That's the way to help.
By BEN SMITH
