Whatever happened to the left-wing Secretary of State Project
liberals promised would save our elections from the dirty tricks of
those dang lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered Republicans?
The evidence now suggests that the election-stealing, George
Soros-funded so-called “527” political committee is dead, or
perhaps just deeply sedated. This group that section 527 of the
U.S. Internal Revenue Code allows to accept unlimited financial
contributions was created solely to rig elections for
Democrats.
It accomplishes this by electing permissive liberal Democrats as
secretaries of state. In most states the secretary of state is the
chief elections officer, so putting left-wingers in the
often-overlooked but critically important office allows these
political radicals to manipulate the electoral process. This is
what liberals call “election protection.”
Billionaire donor Soros, whom Saturday Night
Live has mocked as the “owner” of the Democratic
Party, underwrote the Secretary of State Project in order to help
Democrats gain an unfair advantage on Election Day. Soros and
progressives all across the fruited plain believe with a religious
fervor that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal
the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris)
and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).
For years Soros’s ultra-wealthy colleagues in the Democracy
Alliance, a billionaires’ club that funds left-wing political
infrastructure, opened their wallets to help secretary of state
candidates endorsed by the SoS Project. They helped to elect Saul
Alinsky-inspired community organizer Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving
Minnesota secretary of state who presided over Al Franken’s theft
of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008
election cycle.
Until a year and a half ago the Secretary of State Project was
doing well. Before the 2010 cycle it took credit for electing 11 of
the 18 left-wingers it endorsed since it began funding candidates
in 2006.
Then in 2010 disaster struck for Democrats at both the national
and state levels. Five out of the SoS Project’s seven official
candidates
went down to defeat. Only Ritchie and another progressive
incumbent, California’s Debra Bowen, stayed afloat in the
Republican electoral tsunami. As the Secretary of State Project
lost its luster and its funding dried up, the writing was on the
wall.
Despite the SoS Project’s ultimately limited shelf life, the
idea behind the group was clever in a Robert Mugabe kind of way. A
relative pittance can help swing these little-watched state
contests, allowing even small donors to play a big role in making
all of America Vermont.
Once a secretary of state who doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss
about electoral integrity is in power, the undemocratic
installation of Democrats in public office may follow.
(See Franken, Al.)
The secretary of state candidates the SoS Project endorses sing
the same familiar song about election-related issues that we now
hear from Eric Holder’s lawless Justice Department.
The left-of-center candidates bearing the Secretary of State
Project’s seal of approval typically say that: a) voter fraud is as
real as the Loch Ness monster; b) Republicans routinely practice
vote suppression; c) voter rolls should never be cleansed of the
dead and fictional characters; and d) anyone who demands that a
voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a
racist.
With that said, how do we actually know that the fetid Secretary
of State Project is likely a-mouldering in the ground?
Rumors of the organization’s death have been circulating for
months.
The Secretary of State Project’s website, secstateproject.org,
is currently offline after
vanishing from the Internet in July of last year. At press time
its Facebook
page, YouTube channel,
and Twitter account hadn’t
been updated since 2010. The group hasn’t endorsed any candidates
for the 2012 election cycle and its most recent IRS filings show
almost no financial activity since the 2010 election cycle.
Progressive activists involved with the group refused to
comment. Contacted by telephone, co-founder Rebecca Bond,
who goes by “Becky,” politely refused to comment for this would-be
obituary after this writer pointed out that the political
committee’s once-impressive website had gone dark.
Bond wasn’t the only one with zipped lips. Wayne State law
professor and community organizer Jocelyn Benson, who was beaten
decisively in blue state Michigan by Republican Ruth Johnson in
2010, failed to return telephone calls. Benson, who lost by five
percentage points despite running in a blue state, being endorsed
by the Secretary of State Project, and outspending her opponent by
a quarter of a million dollars, failed to return telephone
calls.
Longtime Democratic operative Alexandra Visher, who is vice
president in charge of partner engagement and communications at the
Soros-backed Democracy Alliance, and who has generally been willing
to comment on other matters, also honored the Left’s code of
silence, failing to respond to emails seeking comment. The
Democracy Alliance has steered its members’ sizeable donations to
the Secretary of State Project and dozens of other progressive
pressure groups with close ties to the Obama White House such as
Media Matters for America and John Podesta’s Center for American
Progress.
Incidentally, the SoS Project’s friends in leftist groups such
as the ACORN-affiliated Project Vote have launched a massive
assault on electoral integrity through the courts. Project Vote,
which used to employ Barack Obama, and other radical organizations
are
pressuring state officials across America to drop voter fraud
investigations.
Meanwhile, it is telling that at the time the Secretary of State
Project was created Bond paraphrased an aphorism attributed to
Joseph Stalin. The brutal Communist dictator reportedly said, “The
people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the
votes decide everything.”
Bond told the San Francisco Chronicle bluntly that,
“Any serious commitment to wrestling control of the country from
the Republican Party must include removing their political
operatives from deciding who can vote and whose votes will
count.”
Bond and co-founder James Rucker, formerly director of
grassroots mobilization for MoveOn, used the Secretary of State
Project to perpetuate perennially popular progressive platitudes
about the Grand Old Party’s supposed track record for electoral
malfeasance.
Rucker is better known for co-founding Color of Change, an
Afro-centrist attack group, with former Obama green jobs czar and
self-described “communist” Van Jones. Color of Change takes credit
for getting Glenn Beck off the Fox News Channel. The group also
takes credit for getting major corporations to stop funding the
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and getting the highly
effective conservative public policy group to abandon its
common-sense push for voter ID laws.
Now that the Secretary of State Project is either pushing up the
daisies or writhing in the agony of death throes how will its
originators pass the days?
While Rucker spends his time organizing boycotts and smearing
conservatives as racist, San Francisco-based Bond’s day job
consists of targeting Tea Party-friendly lawmakers such as Reps.
Allen West (R-Fla.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) for defeat.
Bond is political director for CREDO Mobile, the wireless
reseller that donates part of its profits to leftist groups such as
Media Matters for America, Project Vote, Color of Change, Food
Democracy Now!, and the Sierra Club Foundation. CREDO Mobile
president Michael Kieschnick boasts that CREDO Action, a network he
claims has 2.5 million activists, has given upwards of $70 million
to left-wing groups since 1985.
Bond has another role within the for-profit company. Although
CREDO opposes the Supreme Court decision that allowed independent
political action committees, known as super PACs, to accept
unlimited corporate funding, the cognitively dissonant company went
ahead and created the CREDO Super PAC anyway.
CREDO felt it shouldn’t “unilaterally disarm,” Bond, who is the
new committee’s president, reportedly said. “If we decided to sit
this out and be purists on this thing, it wouldn’t change a thing
other than help the other side.”
“This allows us to directly advocate for defeat of these [Tea
Party] candidates, instead of talking about defeat of issues. This
is something we could not have done before” the Supreme Court’s
decision in the Citizens United case, she said. Bond
claims that only MoveOn has a larger list of left-wing voters’
email addresses than CREDO.
CREDO Super PAC has taken in almost $1.2 million so far,
according to the Federal Election Commission database.
Real estate investor Patricia Bauman, a Democracy Alliance
member, has given $13,000 to CREDO Super PAC so far this year.
Kieschnick, another Democracy Alliance member, has given $30,000 to
the political committee since last year. Hollywood actresses and
longtime Democratic donors Stockard Channing and Patricia
Richardson (from TV’s “Home Improvement”) have each given $500 to
the committee so far this year.
The super PAC has also retained a sleazy Marxist in Chicago as a
consultant. The committee paid $50,417 to Strategic Consulting
Group, the firm of convicted swindler and tax cheat
Robert Creamer. An admitted fan of Saul Alinsky, Creamer has
reportedly visited the Obama White House close to 60 times since he
got out of the hoosegow. In prison he wrote a book widely hailed by
leftists that later served as a blueprint for Obamacare. Creamer,
who is married to socialist congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.),
also used to be a lobbyist for Soros’s Open Society Institute.
The busy Ms. Bond is also on the board of the Alinsky-inspired
New Organizing Institute (NOI), a Soros-funded school for community
organizers. The nonprofit created something called the Candidate
Project to recruit candidates for city councils, school boards,
state legislatures, and local commissions.
These are “the battlefields where life-changing issues are
constantly being tested and decided under our noses,” according to
NOI. “There are more than half a million local elected offices
outside of the Washington gridlock — that’s more than 500,000 ways
to influence whether government serves the 99% or just the 1%.”
Maybe Bond has embraced new political vehicles because those who
tilt to port no longer need the Secretary of State Project. After
all, the dirty work of the Left is already being done on the
taxpayer dime.
Attorney General Holder’s minions are doing everything in their
power to ignore wrongdoing on the Left. Their failure to pursue
truncheon-wielding New Black Panther Party members who tried to
intimidate Philadelphia voters in 2008 is just one example. They
are also opening elections to massive voter fraud. Even after the
U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law the Department of
Justice has blocked eminently reasonable voter ID laws in Texas and
South Carolina.
Those statutes are racist and discriminatory, according to the
Obama administration.
But in reality they are something quite different. Such laws
might be the only things that prevent Democrats from stealing the
election this November.
