Romanoff getting a hand from high places

Apparently 2010 Senate seat contender and former Colorado speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff is getting some help from some of President Obama’s campaign field directors:

New Partners specializes in grassroots outreach and is informally helping Romanoff get his campaign off the ground, said the former state House speaker, declining to give more detail.

Among the high-profile partners are Dave Hamrick, a former field strategist for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Paul Tewes, renowned for his primary work for Obama in Iowa.

On other fronts, Romanoff’s campaign has been less-than-traditional, most notably for lack of a designated campaign manager.

And while busy at house meetings and multiple local events, Romanoff’s relatively low profile has nonetheless led to speculation about the health of the 11-week-old campaign among the chattering class.

The introduction of New Partners should tamp down some of that, said Denver Democratic political consultant Steve Welchert. “That’s got a huge impact,” he said. “These are serious guys. Tewes ran Iowa for Obama; he’s an organizational magician.”

New Partners provides a range of services from recruiting a campaign team to motivating people to volunteer and vote. It also consults on fundraising and online outreach and provides research for polling, talking points and strategic planning, according to the firm’s website. Hamrick, the consultant working most closely with the campaign, declined to comment for this report.

This is somewhat odd because hasn’t Obama already backed Romanoff’s opponent, Sen. Michael Bennett, D-Colo.? Maybe in the Obama camp it doesn’t matter who wins the seat, so long as it’s a Democrat.

Does Wall Street own Obama?

President Obama made many campaign pledges and set out what many saw as progressive policy on the economy. So why is his economic policy appear so disastrous? It is so simply because of the people with whom Obama has lined his cabinet and administration.

You’ve got Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, who oversaw the New York Federal Reserve, whose job it was to prevent the sort of collapses that happened on Wall Street last year that played a major role in sparking our recession. Not to mention the fact the guy worked for the International Monetary Fund, a world bank responsible for giving debt-laden nations loans they will never be able to repay, and which could become even more powerful as more and more cash-strapped countries borrow from them.

There’s Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he oversees derivative deals. He worked by Goldman Sacchs, by the way, Obama’s largest corporate contributor to his campaign and who engineered not only the deregulation of derivatives that contributed to the economic meltdown but basically told the Bush White House how much it would be giving the firm in bailout money. Oh yeah, only about 30 percent of his contributions came from the people. So you can imagine where this president of the people’s priorities are.

Perhaps one of the most significant people in this mess is Michael Froman, deputy assistant to Obama, Harvard law school buddy and top fundraiser who helped pick Obama’s economic team when he was still working for Citigroup, that “too big to fail” bank that also helped collapse the economy.

What do these people all have in common? They all worked with Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the administration or on Wall Street when he was the head of Goldman Sachs, or with Citigroup where Rubin worked as senior counselor to “a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself.” In fact, Obama’s economic team is lined with people Rubin worked with, an incestuous stew of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup players who all had a hand in creating the banking mess of 2008.

What adds injury to insult is where he put all the hard-working people who worked tirelessly on his campaign: on the bottom rungs of the ladder. Karen Kornbluh, who served as Obama’s policy director on the campaign, was sent to Paris as ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of her. Austan Goolsbee, an economist who was one of Obama’s chief advisers on the campaign, was made staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, “a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel ‘Siberia.'”

This is all in a article by Matt Taibbi in the December 10 issue of Rolling Stone. To anyone who saw Michael Moore’s sensationalist, but well impassioned Captalism: A Love Story, this would not be news to some, but since most people seemed more fixated on health care, who Obama is or isn’t bowing to, who will or will not run in 2012 or some other cultural flashpoint, it’s probably fresh information. This is not a partisan concern. The economic policies these people have and will implement are sure to to leave Wall Street fat cats smiling and everyone else, right or left, shelling out more of their tax dollars to bail out their friends and pay for what will be disastrous inaction on regulating Wall Street. (Ironically, you never hear the Tea Party folks get in an uproar about this.)

But Obamamaniacs will say “yeah but at least they’re Democrats right?” Sure, but as David  Sirota, former Democratic strategist and current host of a morning show on Denver’s progressive 760 AM, they’re “limousine liberals.”

These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.

The whole situation is probably best summed up by Taibbi in the article:

There’s no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America’s racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Vocker, concerned about a “moral hazard” creeping over the administration.

If Obama keeps on this course, a Republican victory in 2012 will become more and more promising.