Robert Creamer
Not that you will be reading abut this in the mainstream media but Robert Creamer (pictured above) attended President Obama’s Health Care Reform Bill signing ceremony at the White House last week.
If you are really happy with Obama's health care legislation, you should think about sending Robert Creamer a "thank you" note. Despite the fact that Creamer is an ex-convict, having served time in a federal lock up for bank fraud and tax evasion, I guess Obama felt it was only right for Creamer to be present at the bill signing since Creamer is the author of the progressive liberal blueprint that led Obama and company to their health care victory. You see, he wrote it while he was in prison.
Creamer, the husband of Illinois Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, used to be the leader of the Chicago based community group, Citizen Action/Illinois. He also founded its predecessor, Illinois Public Action, in which Ms. Schakowsky served as Program Director. He runs a political consulting firm, the Strategic Consulting Group, which lists ACORN and the SEIU among its clients and which made $541,000 working for disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.
Creamer resigned from Citizen Action/Illinois after the FBI began investigating him for bank fraud and tax evasion at Illinois Public Action. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to five months in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, plus eleven months of house arrest. While in prison—or “forced sabbatical,” he called it—Creamer wrote a lengthy political manual,
Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win.
The book was endorsed by leading Democrats and their allies, including SEIU boss Andy Stern—the most frequent visitor thus far to the Obama White House—and chief Obama strategist David Axelrod, who noted that Creamer’s tome “
provides a blueprint for future victories.”
In the book, Creamer draws lessons from decades of experience on the radical left, including the teachings of arch-radical Saul Alinsky, and several episodes from Rep. Schakowsky’s political career.
He also lays out a “
Progressive Agenda for Structural Change,” which includes a ten-point plan for foisting universal health care on the American people.
"We must create a national consensus that health care is a right, not a commodity; and that government must guarantee that right.”
“We must create a national consensus that the health care system is in crisis.”
“Our messaging program over the next two years should focus heavily on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health insurance.”
“We need to systematically forge relationships with large sectors of the business/employer community.”
“We need to convince political leaders that they owe their elections, at least in part, to the groundswell of support of universal health care, and that they face political peril if they fail to deliver on universal health care.”
“We need not agree in advance on the components of a plan, but we must foster a process that can ultimately yield consensus.”
“Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program.”
“We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement and the faith community.”
“We must systematically leverage the connections and resources of a massive array of institutions and organizations of all types.”
“To be successful, we must put in place commitments for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used to finance paid communications and mobilization once the battle is joined.”
Creamer adds: “
To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.”
Democrats have followed Creamer’s plan to the letter. They have claimed our health care system is in crisis despite polls showing the overwhelming majority of Americans are happy with the care they receive. They have—with the help of President Obama—circulated false horror stories about Americans dying for lack of health care and health insurance.
They have targeted the health insurance industry, with Rep. Schakowsky herself promising to “
put the private insurance industry out of business,” though it is a top employer in Illinois.
Democrats cut deals with the pharmaceutical industry and the American Medical Association, among others. They have brought in the President himself to tell wavering “Blue Dog” Democrats that their re-election chances depend on passing health care reform. They have bused in SEIU members to town hall meetings, and used rabbis and pastors to back health care reform from the pulpit. They have bribed and paid off their own fellow democrat members of congress.
They have used a complex, interconnected web of organizations—including Organizing For America, the former Obama campaign arm—to whip up support and silence opposition. And they have benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to convince the public to support bills that their representatives have never read themselves.
Creamer wrote his plan in 2006, explicitly proposing that it be carried out once a “progressive Democrat is elected President” and once Democrats could count on 60 votes in the Senate. It is curious that Creamer, sitting in prison, could have predicted the details and the timing of President Obama’s legislative agenda so precisely. The likeliest explanation is that Creamer helped design the Democrats’ health care strategy. That would explain why President Obama made health care an obsession in 2009, when it was only one among many issues he raised on the campaign trail in 2008. It would explain the role of several overlapping left-wing groups, including Creamer’s own Citizen Action/Illinois.
It would also explain Creamer's high profile after being released from prison when he immediately went to work for the Obama campaign, training volunteers at “
Camp Obama.”
He has continued his work at the Strategic Consulting Group, leading “
many of the country’s most significant issue campaigns,” he claims.
This isn't the first time Creamer has been to the White Huse. He was also at a White House state dinner this past November—together with Stern, Axelrod, and other cronies—despite the fact that ex-convicts are usually barred from such events.
Creamer’s broader aim, as laid out in his book, is the “
democratization of wealth” in America and “
progressive control of governments around the world.” He recently wrote, “
If we succeed in winning health insurance reform we will have breached the gates of the status quo. We will demonstrate that fundamental change is possible. Into that breach will flow a wave of progressive change.”
It is a radical agenda, making use of Rep. Schakowsky’s public profile as a liberal democrat representative from (where else?) Chicago, a network of far-left organizations, and Creamer’s old friends in the White House.
It can be said that Obama's health care reform was conceived in federal prison, nurtured amidst the corrupt political system of Chicago and ultimately born in the Congress of the United States assisted by midwives Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over the protests of thousands of ordinary Americans across the nation. It will not end with health care. It will continue until Mr. Creamer’s Alinskyite dream of radical change is realized—or until voters stand up and put a stop to it in 2010.
Peter J. Mahon
