Obama’s base bailing on gutted healthcare bill
See my previous posts about unions and prominent liberals bailing on Obamacare after key components were dropped to lure Senate votes.
Now Politico is reporting a rank-and-file revolt…
The foot soldiers of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, organized to go into action when key elements of his agenda are at stake, aren’t universally enthusiastic about fighting for the health care compromise now before the Senate.
On Wednesday morning, Organizing for America, as Obama’s reconstituted campaign organization is now known, emailed its list of 13 million Obama supporters asking them to “call your senators now and help us ‘ring in reform.'”
The campaign yielded 150k calls – less than half the number of a similar effort in October – and it prompted a backlash among online and local activists who had logged countless volunteer supporting Obama’s campaign and legislative agenda, but who felt betrayed by recent Democratic concessions in the healthcare reform fight….
One leading OFA volunteer in FL blasted an email to a statewide listserv urging activists to “just say no” to the phone-banking effort – uncorking a torrent of frustration from FL Democrats – while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action email with angry messages [see message at top of this post] and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.
Still others said they would indeed call their senators – but would urge them to oppose the bill. And the liberal blogosphere registered its dissatisfaction with the call to action, with one prominent blogger on MyDD predicting that “OFA will get a rude awakening when they try to round up canvassers and phone bankers.”…
Dave Hearn, a Ft. Dodge, IA optician who helped organize Obama’s campaign in Webster County and has volunteered for OFA by sending emails and organizing a local healthcare “vigil,” said Obama “is taking for granted that the volunteers who worked so hard for him were going to buy in to whatever strategy he chose to pass his major legislative initiative.”…
Tanya Keith, a small business owner from Des Moines who was a precinct captain for Obama’s IA campaign, replied to the OFA email, writing “Why should I devote my valuable time to volunteer for a bill that has no teeth left in it? We’ve sold our souls to 4 Senators instead of sitting down and convincing them that a public option or at the very LEAST medicare is included in the bill.”
Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who ran former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, said OFA didn’t effectively “do the groundwork to get their on-ground supporters to buy in” to the reform plan before asking them to advocate for it….
That kind of disappointment has already diminished the power of OFA, asserted Adam Green, a former official with the liberal online juggernaut MoveOn.org, who now helps run the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports the public option.
In September, the group collected signatures from more than 100k former Obama campaign staffers, volunteers and donors on a letter urging him to support the public option.
“We heard story after story from current Organizing for America volunteers about how they were getting disillusioned with Obama because he wasn’t fighting for the public option,” Green said. “Obama’s email list may soon become a hallow shell if he does not fight Joe Lieberman and insist that there be a public option.”
[Photo via the Associated Press]

This has got to be one of the more encouraging developments I can think of. Seems like many people, including those who do not yet agree with me on the right to life, have at least woken up and seen what sort of man Pres. Obama really is. This will rightfully help stop the fake health care “reform” bill and other frauds perpetrated by this regime.
I really am certain the Republicans will take over the House and maybe even the Senate next year. Then Barry will be the lamest of lame ducks.
I don’t know what kind of health care reform will come out of this session, but I strongly suspect it won’t be much. There is, however a silver lining behind this very dark cloud. I am reminded of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Don’t be embarrassed if you’ve never heard of it, there really isn’t a hell of a lot to remember about it; a mere pittance, really – a scrap of leftovers tossed out to “American Negros” (in the parlance of the age) in order to appease them. But it made the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – the one we remember – all-the-more easier seven years later.
We’ll live to fight another day.
http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com
Tom Degan
This may be a stupid question, but why doesn’t Congress just make insurance companies not immune to anti-trust laws? Then they’d have to do all that stuff like provide quality service to their customers at affordable prices and all that jazz. It seems much simpler than all this nonsense.
Organizing for America sent out an email on Wednesday? Wow. They must have taken me off the list after I sent them very clear notes about lying regarding fed money for abortions, and our “democratic” party not looking out for the little guy, the voiceless, and helping people brighten their economic forecast by killing another person who poses an encumbrance.
Hmmm..sounds like the effects of the Obama Kool-Aid is wearing off…
..time to whip a new batch..maybe a different flavor this time?
Hell has no fury like a liberal/progressive/humanist feminista or girlyman scorned and ignored by his/her/it’s reliably non-responsive whore.
These blind idealists were so deluded they foolishley believed B.O. actually cared about not not their causes, but about them personally.
B.O. is Tiger Wodds and these gullible gumbahs are his sex toys of the moment.
These people remind me of the unfaithful spouse who leaves his/her wife/husband for another married person who has betrayed rejected and abandoned their former spouse for them.
Now that is relationship that has absolutely no foundation except for the sexual gratification of the moment.
All the fidelity of a pack of dogs in heat.
yor bro ken
Tom Degan,
Please don’t forget to mention that we have Republicans to thank for passing both Civil Rights bills. Democrats filibustered both.