Obama's risky strategy to fire up fans -- Jan. 24, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama is converting his campaign apparatus to a tax-exempt organization aimed at pushing his agenda.  It’s a bold but risky move.

The newly created Organizing for Action will accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations.

The strategy could be a way for Obama to assure his legacy through legislative accomplishments and beat the second-term curse, a supposed phenomenon of the modern era that says most re-elected presidents have less –than-successful second terms.     

Or the strategy could backfire and bring disillusionment to the idealistic young people Obama hopes to motivate. That would be more than a setback to his progressive agenda. That would be a curse that could damn Democrats in future elections.   

Fred Wertheimer, a leading campaign finance reformer, was among the first to sound an alarm.

 “It opens the door to opportunities for government corruption by allowing corporations and individuals to provide unlimited amounts of money to directly benefit the president’s interest and potentially to receive government benefits and favors in return,” Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, said in a statement. His group describes itself as working to eliminate the undue influence of big money in American politics.

“This would take President Obama about as far away as he could possibly get from the goal he set in 2008 to ‘change the way business is done in Washington,’” said Wertheimer.

The last thing Democrats need is to alienate the fans Obama brought out in droves in 2008 and 2012. Organizing for Action does plan to disclose names of donors, even though the law doesn’t require it. Aides told the New York Times they were unsure whether individual amounts would also be released.  It would help if they just said yes to full transparency.

The new group is the successor to Organizing for America, the Obama campaign arm that operated as part of the Democratic National Committee. Organizing for Action is separate from the national party and is being chartered as a  501(c)(4) organization, which must operate exclusively for the promotion of social welfare. These groups may lobby. Donations are generally not tax deductible as charitable contributions.

Obama’s position on corporate contributions evolved as he faced competition from well-funded Republicans. Wertheimer noted that Obama had refused corporate contributions for his 2009 inauguration. Planners of the 2012 Democratic National Convention initially refused corporate cash but later reversed themselves and accepted $20 million from banks and other sponsors. Obama accepted corporate contributions for his 2013 inauguration, including $250,000 from ExxonMobil.

The Organizing for Action is being run by some of Obama’s closest political advisers. Michelle Obama announced the new grassroots effort in a video three days before the inauguration. Typical of their firm grasp of the obvious, news outlets mostly focused on her new hairstyle.

It’s “the next step in our grassroots movement and will be crucial to finishing what we started,” the president wrote in a note on the Organizing for Action website.

Organizing for Action plans a grassroots structure with local control while running expensive, campaign-style TV ads.

Let’s assume that supporters are not turned off by the potential fat cat influence on the second term. Does that mean it’s smooth sailing for Organizing for Action? Not exactly. Some Democrats worry that the group will drain energy and support from the party.

“We need a unified organization that will bring about victories in 2013 and 2014, and we don’t need to be splitting our efforts,” Fred Hudson, vice chairman of the Virginia Democratic  party, told Beth Reinhard of the National Journal.

 “It’s a recipe for how to lose an election. We’ve been told there will be no competition for fundraising, but that’s difficult for me to accept, and there will certainly be competition for staff and volunteers,” Hudson said.

Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager and Organizing for Action’s chairman, said before the inauguration the group will focus on gun control, immigration and climate change.

Traditionally, a second-term president has a short time to accomplish anything. By the second year, attention shifts to the midterm congressional elections, and by the third, the next presidential campaign is underway. The lame duck president may find himself not only fighting irrelevancy but scandal, as Nixon and Clinton did.   

In his inaugural address, Obama emphasized “collective action.” He used the word “together” seven times and “we” five dozen times in 15 minutes.  You might say he was organizing for action or for a strategy that holds both promise and peril for his second term.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Family values, fundraising, fairness -- and Obama's stance on same-sex marriage -- May 10, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

To those who were shocked, shocked to hear that campaign politics might have figured into President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, I have bad news. It was ever thus.

Obama fired off a fundraising email the day after he said he personally supports same-sex marriage. Unseemly, yes, but hardly surprising. Political strategizing has been at the heart of the war over marriage equality since the Defense of Marriage Act was a glimmer in Bob Dole’s eye 16 years ago.

As President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, co-sponsored the Senate bill that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Dole wanted to stir the “family values” pot, but Clinton grabbed the spoon.

As Dole shepherded the bill banning same-sex marriage through Congress, with the help of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the White House announced that yes, indeed, Clinton would sign it. And in September he did so, ignoring the outrage of gay supporters. The re-election campaign soon ran ads on Christian radio stations, lauding the president for fighting for “our values.”

Clinton sanded the edges off what Dole had hoped would be a wedge issue in that campaign. But the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, lives as the law of the land. Obama disavowed DOMA and has refused to defend it in court – but the law still blocks thousands of lawfully wedded same-sex couples from receiving benefits available to heterosexual couples. We’ve yet to hear how Obama proposes to change that.

In 1996, no state had legalized same-sex marriage. Today, six states and the District of Columbia permit it, but under DOMA no state must recognize same-sex marriages that are performed in another state.

Section 3 of the law specifies that for federal purposes ``the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.”

The law effectively cuts out same-sex married couples from more than 1,100 federal benefits, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

Married same-sex couples cannot file joint tax returns, take unpaid family leave, receive surviving spouse benefits under Social Security or receive family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees.

Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News Wednesday that, “For me, personally, it is important…to go ahead and affirm that I think that same-sex couples should be able to get married.” But he dodged questions about what he will actually do, saying the issue should be left to the states.

A day earlier, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage, reinforcing current law with a constitutional amendment.

It’s difficult to imagine how Obama can stick to the stance that his views are merely personal when he says fairness and justice are at stake. He stood for fairness when he backed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that prevented gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

The main rationale for not defending DOMA in the courts was Obama’s determination that the law was unconstitutional, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote House Speaker John A. Boehner in February 2011. Nevertheless, law is law, and the president ordered his attorney general to continue enforcing it.

House Republicans hired a lawyer to defend the law in the courts.

The Supreme Court likely will decide the issues at some point. For now, Obama has a campaign to run and pay for. One in six of his top bundlers, who have brought in $500,000 or more, have publicly identified themselves as gay, The Washington Post reported.

Obama is trying to walk a line between voters with strong feelings. He stressed in the ABC interview that he deeply respects pastors and others who believe in traditional marriage, and he indicated that same-sex marriage isn’t a current priority.

“I’m not gonna be spending most of my time talking about this, because, frankly, my job as president right now, my biggest priority, is to make sure that we’re growing the economy, that we’re putting people back to work, that we’re managing the draw-down in Afghanistan effectively,” he said.

But he’s not shy about using the issue to bring in campaign cash. For now, Obama’s strategy is to describe himself as a practicing Christian who believes in the Golden Rule.

“Treat others the way you’d want to be treated,” he said before boarding Air Force One for a trip to the West Coast for fundraisers, where his support of same-sex marriage could boost his haul.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.