It has been a busy news week which saw President Obama unveil a sweeping proposal for gun control and the Republicans completely and utterly caving (and I hate that word) on the debt ceiling, but this may have been the biggest news of the week considering its future implications.
via TPM
President Barack Obama on Friday announced that the remnants of his campaign organization will be reborn as a new political group called Organizing for Action, which will be able to accept unlimited donations.
“Together, we’ve made our communities stronger, we’ve fought for historic legislation, and we’ve brought more people than ever before into the political process,” Obama wrote in an email to supporters. “Organizing for Action will be a permanent commitment to this mission.”
News of the move was broken by The Los Angeles Times on Thursday, which reported that Organizing for Action would be set up as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit organization, and that an official launch was set for Sunday, when thousands of former campaign staff and volunteers are expected to attend a daylong “Obama Campaign Legacy Conference” in Washington D.C. Obama will take the oath of office for his second term the same day.
It may be too early to speculate, but the implication, at least from my perspective, is that the president will be a significant proponent of progress far beyond the end of his second term in office.
Democratic presidents typically are, but this suggests a far larger role than any previous president has assumed because OFA will have far more power than any other Democratic PAC. And that is comforting to me because it reassures us that it will remain in the right hands.
It's ironic to think that Organizing for Action, a hulking monstrosity by any conservative operative's reckoning, will be an inadvertent creation of Citizens United. And in hindsight, those on the Left who called for unilateral disarmament in the face of unlimited corporate cash look even more foolish now than they already did.
The Right gained very little in 2012 by opening up the financial floodgates to Karl Rove following the Citizens United ruling, but the Left has gained a permanent, reliable ally.