January 8, 2010
Obama and the White House Chicago Boys
Ed Linsky – American Thinker
Signs are emerging that the Chicago Boys — the triumvirate of Obama, Emanuel, and Axlerod — are up to their old tricks, as I touched upon in a previous American Thinker column. My recent interest was piqued by two news items that floated across my screen in the last week.
One was the release of the White House visitor logs that showed visits by Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and named by Fortune Magazine as “the most powerful woman in the labor movement. ” We know Andy Stern, head of the SEIU, routinely visits the White House and has boasted of the tens of millions of dollars and man-hours the union spent in electing Barack Obama to the presidency. We can expect a repeat performance come 2012.
But Anna Burger is far more than an SEIU honcho; she also is the vice-chairman of a shadowy group called the ” Democracy Alliance,” composed of billionaire funders and savvy political operatives who set out a few years ago to change politics as we know it in America. Among their projects was something called the Secretary of States Project that set about electing secretaries of state in key battleground states.
These are the very officials who are charged with maintaining the integrity of the voting process. Recall the controversies in Ohio and Minnesota — including ACORN problems — regarding the accuracy of the votes in those states last year? The secretaries of state who gave a stamp of approval to these elections (where Democrats won) were Democrats supported by the Democracy Alliance. Various state chapters of the Democracy Alliance have formed to use a range of controversial methods to ensure Democratic victories. (See “The Colorado Model” by Fred Barnes for a display of the type of tactics that can be used to manipulate elections. These include creating faux controversies, spreading them through supposedly non-partisan groups created by Democrat activists, and relying on an echo chamber effect until the mainstream media picks up the “story” and broadcasts it far and wide. Other groups are formed to harass journalists and editorial writers who don’t push the liberal line.)
The Democracy Alliance has helped form front groups to get Democrats elected. David Axelrod is a master at this type of tactic.
The Alliance’s handiwork played a role in the victory of Al Franken over Norm Coleman, which helped secure a sixty-seat majority in the Senate. There was a group — Alliance for a Better Minnesota — that posed as a group of concerned citizens. The Alliance was funded by outsiders, namely the wealthy, hyper-partisan Democrats behind the Democracy Alliance. This was a so-called astrotruf group: it falsely appeared to be a true grassroots effort.
Tellingly, the Obama team has killed off disclosure rules mandating that unions reveal how they spend the billions of their members’ union dues. These, in turn, are often poured into “front groups” and other “funds” each year. Anyone care to wager whether these funds will flow to help Democrats? Thanks to Obama, we will never know. So much for transparency. But we do have change.
The second item that sparked my interest was Obama’s move to ditch the superdelegates’ role in nominating Democratic candidates for the presidency.
These superdelegates include Democratic members of Congress, national party figures, and established leaders of the Democratic Party. They vote at the nominating convention. The system was established in the wake of the 1972 Democratic Party nominating process, when anti-war radicals seized control of the party and ended up nominating George McGovern. The superdelegates were supposed to ensure that radicals did not take over the party’s nominating process. Well, apparently that sort of restraint does not appeal to Obama, who now has taken steps to shape the nominating process to play to his preferred territory: the caucuses, where his brand of populism holds sway. The Wall Street Journal noted the trick:
One reason for the superdelegates in the first place is the disproportionate role of activists in states like Iowa, which rely on caucuses rather than primaries. Mrs. Clinton held in her own in the primary states but Mr. Obama crushed her in the caucus states where his supporters found it easy to dominate proceedings where older and frequently busier people weren’t able to invest the time to counter them. Take the case of Texas, which has both a caucus and a primary: Mrs. Clinton won the state’s primary in which 2.8 million people voted, but Mr. Obama so controlled the caucuses where far fewer people (some 800,000) participated that he ended up with more delegates overall. The new rules, if approved, would likely mean even more of the same.
Since Obama’s policies are sacrificing the careers of Democratic congressmen to fulfill his agenda, these politicians may withhold their support at a future nominating convention. What is the solution? Remove them from the equation by stripping their vote. Out they go, joining the ever-increasing number of bodies under the bus.
Of course, the boys who earned their stripes in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago 
politics (where the phrase “vote early and vote often” should be the city’s motto) will not stop there in their drive to win.
Why should they? Customs, rules, ethics, and traditions were thrown under the bus to get ObamaCare bills passed by the House and the Senate. Why stop there when there are so many ways to skin Americans? Skullduggery comes naturally.
There are other cards to play (and Obama is an avid poker player).
How else will the Chicago Boys game the system and gin up victories?
While that [ACORN census] seems to be off the plate for now, there is still the prospect that sampling may be used to collect census figures. That is a statistical method that has been denounced by, among others, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal as a formula that could be abused to exaggerate the number of residents of certain states and municipalities. This would affect the number of House seats awarded to each state. Those figures also play a role in the amount of federal funding flowing to those areas. Those are also the very figures used to determine electoral votes.
Will census figures compiled by community groups chosen by this administration be reliable? Remember that this team earned their stripes in Chicago and has ties to ACORN, which is embroiled in voter registration and other scandals across our nation.
There will be a strong desire to boost numbers in blue states, especially since red states seem poised to pick up seats and electoral votes, as people vote with their feet and move to red states. This won’t do for the Obama team — not at all.
So what to do? Fool ‘em with some other numbers, this time the ones with dollar signs in front of them. But the Chicago Boys may have tipped their hands by revealing one of their cards:
The government, reports The Hill newspaper, will target $80 million of those dollars to racial and ethnic minorities and non-English speakers — groups that vote disproportionately Democratic. Nor will Democrats permit efforts to limit the count to those here legally. An effort by Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) to exclude illegal aliens from the count went nowhere.
Illegal aliens don’t (usually) vote of course. But when they are counted in the Census they do affect representation in Congress. So some of the money you pay in taxes will go toward increasing the legislative clout of one party.
And those illegal aliens will also boost electoral votes of those blue states. We can also expect a campaign to allow felons to regain their right to vote. Anything to boost those numbers and rack up some wins.
But wait, there’s more.
The push to “Rahm” through universal voter registration is a ploy ripe for voter fraud, as noted so well by my American Thinker colleague James Simpson in his recent column. This is a proposal to impose a federal mandate regarding voter registration. State laws will be overridden by federal law drafted and passed by Democrats. As John Fund notes:
The feds will tell the states: ‘take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be …’
What is the problem? Many of these lists include vast numbers of illegal immigrants, there will be felons, there will be duplicates, and there will be a lot of people who never cared enough about the country or democracy to take the simple steps to register under state laws. What will be the end result? A huge pool of likely Democratic voters will be created out of thin air — and then Obama’s army of volunteers and Democratic Party activists and paid contractors (think ACORN) will shepherd them to the voting booths. Between the pickup at home and the pulling of the lever, a lot of steps can be taken to ensure they vote the left way.
Are there any more ways for Obama and the boys to stack the deck?
Our Crook-in-Chief means to keep his power. Unless we man the fair election life-guard towers and
clean up his dirty work, Obama’s sludge of cheating, lying, and diabolical tricks will continue to pollute the waves of REAL change.
