House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has charged President Obama with siding with poor and middle class workers in using Organizing for America, Obama’s political campaign organization to “demagogue” the efforts of Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who has threatened martial law to bust unions and the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
“President Obama has acknowledged the challenges we face, but – thus far – he has done nothing to offer solutions,” Boehner said in a statement. “Now, worse, his political organization is colluding with special-interest allies across the country to demagogue reform-minded governors who are making the tough choices that the President is avoiding.”
While Republicans have fallen back on their pledge to create jobs and have limited their focus to waging war on government spending in so far as it involves assisting the poor and needy, Boehner invoked the recent civic protests in Greece over that country’s austerity measures to criticize Americans’ exercising their right to gather publicly and protest government overreaching, deflecting attention from conservatives’ abandoning the American people.
“When the American people watched the people of Greece take to the streets to protest cuts to unsustainable government programs, they worried it might foreshadow events in our nation’s distant future – but today, we see the same sort of protests on the streets of Madison, fueled by President Obama’s own political machine,” he said.
Indeed Organizing for America has provided limited assistance to Obama’s base, but has done so rather late in the “first act” of the game, after brave workers and their supporters had already flooded Wisconsin’s state capital some three days in a row, without any local or national political assistance, except for the brave state Deocrats that refused to participate in the vote on Walker’s bill. It seemed as if the protesters were on their own, as if “leaders” of the left, were waiting to see what others thought about the poor and needy standing up for themselves. But then President Obama commented that it seemed Walker was attacking unions.
“He is very understanding of the need for state governments, governors, state legislatures to reduce spending, to make tough choices, to be fiscally responsible,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Portland, Ore.
“But he also feels very strongly that we need not to make this an assault on the collective bargaining rights of workers in a given state. Public service workers need to make sacrifices just like everyone else, but there’s a distinction here that he sees. And I just want to make sure that people see that he was very clear about his recognition that states need to deal with their budgets just like the federal government needs to deal with its budget.”
Thereafter, the dam of liberal public assistance broke. Organizing for America began working in close coordination with state and national union officials to offer bus rides and make phone calls to help what eventually amounted to some forty (40) thousand protesters rally in Madison Friday.
Protests are expected to continue throughout the weekend, with Republicans planning counter-protests as well.