The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Building Abandoned. Will the last person leaving Organizing for America Hdqtrs please lock the doors.

    By jollyroger on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 7:18pm |

     At his inauguration, Barack Obama was the owner of a chestful of political capital and the world's most valuable rolodex.

    We know the tragic way he wasted the capital, leaving him impotent to be a player in the midterm elections.

    The rolodex, the email addresses of 13 million grassroots supporters should have turned, in any intelligent machine, into the block captains of a concerted pressure group to support the administration's legislative agenda.

    The contests of the first two years should have been calibrated to produce issues for the midterm elections.

    Instead, a conscious decision was made to shut down the operation.  The same operation that Prez is currently trying to resurrect, with indifferent success.

    Meanwhile, we suffer at every governmental level, from local to state, from the pounding that capital is delivering to labor.

    We seriously are feeling the lack of that grass roots pressure group. Our Genial Host himself, has referenced the necessity to build such a constituency, now that the first one has been fecklessly pissed away. (And of course, in this, as in all things, Genghis is correct..which I have learned the hard way)

    At the time the decision was made to shut the operation down, I got an email from Organizing for America which provoked a somewhat quizzical post that still had the reek of deluded optimism that was rapidly fading during the spring of 2009.

    Now it seems ironic.

    Obama's decision to turn his back on community organizing bit us all in the ass. What a putz!

    Comments

    The single stupidest act of his Presidency, IMHO. Or the act most revelatory of a deeply arrogant man. Or perhaps, for those most cynical, the sign of a sell-out, sent up early, for anyone willing to pay attention. 

    He should have been flogged for this disaster from the day it happened, and ceaselessly. Because he destroyed something which was, oddly enough, much bigger than him. 

    It has been disastrous for the entire center and progressive left, not just in the US but worldwide, ever since it got pulled off. 

    What a blisteringly pompous, selfish, myopic and short-sighted move this was.

    Accccccch. Spit.


    by quinn esq on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 9:05pm

    You fail to realize, quinn, that in three-dimensional chess, 27 moves later -- checkmate!

    You'll be sorry you doubted. You too, roger.


    by acanuck on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 12:15am

    I've been waiting for that jaw  dropper of a slick move, to show that he was just letting the  pugnants get jiggy....still waiting...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 12:35am

    Dude, he totally pwned Trump with that birth certificate thing ... weren't you paying attention?


    by kgb999 on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 8:33pm

    Theres rumors the document was forged, using the same paper the yellow cake memo was written on.

    Others suggest the name  Jason Bourne appears lightened out.

    Rumor = Untrue 


    by Resistance on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 9:23pm

     weren't you paying attention?

    I thought that was nicely played...that's why I keep waiting for the sparkle pony to rise up out of the horseshit.  But, alas, no  pony for Rogie.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 12:10am

    I remember feeling a shadow on my grave when they let all the paid staff go about a week after election day.

    A purge of the entire cadre, and to save trivial amounts of money.  A bad sign,.


    by jollyroger on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 12:21am

    Had he not shut it down, what missions would activists have been tasked with?  Would they have gone along, or begun to twig that all wasn't right with the plans, the policies?  Some pretty smart people were involved...

    In a way, you'd have to think that given the early moves to float so many deals with big Pharma and the hospital associations, that he really didn't require an organization that would drive Congress toward the best deals; same along the way.  Is is crap to think that OFA would have been an encumbrance on the deals he wanted and got? 

    What a tragedy though, for so many new and young voters who seem now to be so disenchanted with the political world.  I suppose some will get involved if the Republican nominee is a wingnut freak...(yeah, Michelle; I'm talking to you.  Hearing you enunciate tonight 'When I'm your Commander0in-Chief' made me guffaw at what a thought that is...)

    But for tonight again, JR, it's all so sad when it's not just infuriating.  G' night.


    by we are stardust on Sun, 06/19/2011 - 11:52pm

    OFA would have been an encumbrance

    for a certainty


    by jollyroger on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 12:23am

    that he really didn't require an organization that would drive Congress toward the best deals

    Maybe that’s the problem; what good would an organization be, if from day one Nancy Pelosi; the first woman to take the reigns, went to Obama and set him straight.

    "I'M THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE. I CONTROL THE MONEY, REMEMBER AND DONT FORGET IT.

     It will be our job to craft a health care bill, and frankly Mr. President; I would prefer you and your Army stay out of it. Deals need to be made and I need to make them and I don’t need you or your army screwing this up.

    Go back into the oval office and be a good House servant, when we call you" 

       


    by Resistance on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 5:54am

    I have to oonfess to some confusion.  I thought Nancy was the bad cop and Prez was the good cop.

    Are you saying I had it backwards?


    by jollyroger on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 12:08am

     "but I remain cynical enough to believe that, of all possible truths, what we will get cannot be what we see"

    Care to elaborate?


    by Resistance on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 3:59am

    Sure.

    I figured (at the time) that in reality Nancy Prez and Reid had to actually all be on the same page, and that the visible tensions were no more real than when Jimmy  Smits tells Sipowicz to quit slamming the perp against the wall, and offers him a soda and sympathy.

    That analysys, however, turned upon the fallacy that Prez was actually the secret socialist that Limbaugh et al revile.

    That said, and conceding that he's so far from a secret socialist that I'd rather have Eisenhower, I believe that Nancy was always the left hand of the operation, and had she had her druthers, we'd have single payer, or at least a public option competing with the bloodsuckers.

    So I was surprised that you seemed to be saying that Nancy fucked things up.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 4:36pm