WARNING: The Far Left will be with Obama by Election Day 2012, so even “a strong, courageous, America- focused alternative” may not beat Obama if the canard that Obama is a man of good character is not exploded.
Laura Ingraham on Facebook: “So much for the vaunted ‘triangulation’ strategy! A new Gallup poll shows that Washington and the Dems are ending the year with their lowest marks. The GOP better settle on a leader who can articulate a clear path out of America’s decline, with resolve and substance. We cannot afford another Republican nominee who answers tough questions with bromides and generic catch phrases. We must press every potential candidate to be specific–what will you do for a permanent tax solution? How will you begin to tackle the deficit? Will you ever give illegal aliens a path to citizenship and voting? You get the point. Obama is not going to roll over in the 2012 campaign, and the country needs a strong, courageous, America-focused alternative in order to beat him.”
Ingraham’s right…that “Obama is not going to roll over in the 2012 campaign, and the country needs a strong, courageous, America- focused alternative in order to beat him.”
BUT… “the vaunted ‘triangulation’ strategy” is Obama’s best shot at re-election and not to be dismissed easily.
The liberal media establishment that put Obama in the White House by promoting him, not scrutinizing him and even covering up for him and targeting the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, is loathe to repent.
How was Obama elected President in what was then (and still is) a center-right country after beating out the late Senator Ted Kennedy and avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders for independent National Journal‘s designation as the most liberal of the 100 United States senators?
Obama spoke eloquently, generally and passionately (but in a non-threatening manner) of “hope” and “change,” excused his lack of experience with his “fierce urgency of now” slogan and was packaged as a post-racial candidate whose election would bring Americans together (and give white voters who supported him a plausible response to the playing of the race card again them).
America was tired of the war in Iraq and not looking for a war hero, especially a septuagenarian. A 47-year old former president of the Harvard Law Review (and rookie United States Senator with no military or executive experience) easily beat a veteran United States Senator (who had graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy) old enough to be his father.
The financial crisis broke during the presidential campaign at a perfect time for Obama…and was blamed by most voters on Wall Street and Republicans instead of the likes of ACORN and the Democrats who forced lending to uncreditworthy persons and then blocked supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the United States (as the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans led by McCain had urged).
Most importantly, most voters did not know enough about Obama, gave him the benefit of any doubt and believed McCain’s assurance that Obama’s “a fine young man” and Obama’s lie about the extent of his relationship with ACORN.
Long before Election Day 2008 Stanley Kurtz traced Obama’s ties to ACORN and the financial crisis:
“I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance ‘counseling’ operations…. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.
“In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as ‘oppositional outlaws.’ Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as ‘militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.’ ‘This identity as a uniquely militant organization,’ says Swarts, ‘is reinforced by contentious action.’ ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers ‘tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists…the only truly radical community organization.’”
Ironically, Obama. “the Senator from ACORN,” benefited hugely from the financial crisis that his kind of thinking created with his personal help as organizer, trainer. lawyer, funder and political supporter and won the Presidency.
Fox News and talk radio notwithstanding, Obama was not generally perceived as a radical and a stealth socialist.
And critically important Obama lies went unexposed.
“’Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work,” Mr. Obama said.
That was the truth.
But in the last presidential debate Obama blatantly lied.
Obama in the last presidential debate: “My only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.”
That’s a lie, not a fact. Obama represented ACORN in that lawsuit and the Clinton Justice Department predictably sided with ACORN, but that was the public tip of the iceberg, NOT Obama’s only involvement with ACORN. Obama looked into the camera during the last presidential debate and flat out lied to the American people about it (in his calm, seemingly non-threatening manner).
ACORN is the organization with which Obama has been associated throughout his adult life, as organizer, trainer, lawyer, funder and political beneficiary…and Obama’s Achilles heel.
ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief revealed connections between ACORN and the Obama campaign based on personal knowledge that all Americans should know, but most do not know.
In late 2007, MonCrief related, she received a call from the Obama campaign asking if this was the same Project Vote that Obama worked for in the 90′s. With a staff retreat fresh in mind, she answered yes and sent an email to Zach Polett, Karyn Gillette, Nathan Henderson James, and Kevin Whelan stating that the campaign wanted someone to call them back regarding some media questions that were being asked at the time.
In late 2007, MonCrief related, Gillette told her that she had direct contact with the Obama campaign and had obtained an Obama donor list. MonCrief was given an excel spreadsheet to work with for cultivation of new donors. When she had trouble because of the duplicates, Gillette stated that she would contact her person at the Obama campaign to get another one.
(MonCrief explained that Gillette also provided lists obtained from the Kerry and Clinton campaigns, as well as the 2004 DNC donor lists, and that these lists were shared with the Political directors of roughly 12 ACORN battleground states in order to raise money for a $28 million dollar (number as of 11/2007) voter registration drive.
Bottom line: ACORN improperly coordinated with and operating as an arm of the Obama campaign, and “the Senator from ACORN”‘s involvement with ACORN was much more than his representation of ACORN in the motor voter case years ago.
As Ingraham posted on her Facebook page: “Obama is not going to roll over in the 2012 campaign, and the country needs a strong, courageous, America- focused alternative in order to beat him.”
Right! But with triangulation Obama may win back many independents if his personal integrity is not challenged and the recent criticism from the Far Left is exactly what Obama needs after being “shellacked” on Election Day 2010.
WARNING: The Far Left will be with Obama by Election Day 2012, so even “a strong, courageous, America- focused alternative” may not beat Obama if the canard that Obama is a man of good character is not exploded.
Michael J. Gaynor
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About Michael Gaynor
Hi, this is Madeline Talbott. I am mentioned in this posting, so I thought I would respond. I am a Chicago community organizer who worked for Acorn for many years. Both Acorn and I opposed predatory lending, the high risk subprime lending that “teased” borrowers in with a medium interest rate and then started hitting them with big increases every six months, quickly making the loans unaffordable. This kind of lending was very profitable until the price of homes started dropping; at that point, borrowers could no longer refinance their way out of the loan as it became unaffordable, because by then their mortgages were underwater.
The kind of lending that Acorn and I pressured the banks to engage in was conventional lending through the Community Reinvestment Act, some of the safest and securest lending, with low fixed rate mortgages that borrowers could afford to pay. Unfortunately, most mortgage companies and Wall Street investment banks did not fall under bank regulations, so they were free to provide and back predatory loans. They did target these high interest mortgages to minority communities, who often had no alternative credit source because we were not successful enough in getting conventional lenders to offer credit to them, but the house of cards started to fall when they offered option ARMs and no doc loans to speculators in high end communities of California, Florida and Nevada, to name a few. Even that would not have brought down the entire economy if Wall Street had not been trading heavily in derivatives, making every failed loan an exponentially larger failure. “The Big Short” is a good book for seeing how all this worked.
Anyway, I know I won’t change your mind right now, but over time, I believe you will discover that Acorn was a good organization with a very few bad apples, that Barack never worked for Acorn (I would know, as I ran the Chicago and Ilinois Acorn offices) and was at most someone we liked and admired as the good man he was. Thanks for the opportunity to weigh in with my side.
I remember middle of last year Anita Moncrief was filing FEC charges against the Obama administration. Is she still going forward with that? Please keep me posted. cheers.