Independent Backlash Building Over Perceived "Loyalty Oath"

During 2009, Obama operatives made off-year "block walks"
throughout the urban Northeast "Bos-Wash corridor" to
maximize support for the President's policies and
objectives. Named "Organizing for America," the program
includes a "pledge of support" for prospective contributors.

Here is the way it reads.

"President Obama's plan will rebuild and renew America by
creating jobs and investing in the three areas most critical
to our future:

"Energy - Transforming America's economy to run on clean and
renewable energy in order to create new American jobs and
industries;

"Health care - Comprehensively reforming health care so that
families, businesses, and government are relieved from the
crushing costs that impede economic growth and prosperity;

"Education - Reforming and investing in America's education
system so that citizens are prepared to compete in a global
economy.

"I support President Obama's bold approach for renewing
America's economy. I will ask friends, family, and
neighbors to pledge their support for this plan."

Underneath that language is a block for a signature and an
optional pledge of donations.

Some former Obama supporters who have become disenchanted
with administration policies object to what amounts to a typical
straw poll indicating a measure of the support for Obama.

They are are seizing on this pledge and calling it a "loyalty oath"
that calls for prospects to pledge their fealty to Obama the
man and not the office of President or the Constitution.

They do not, however, quote the exact language of the
"loyalty oath" to which they refer. If pressed, they claim
it's on the internet or that they have mislaid the offending
document proffered at their door by a volunteer and cannot
locate the website references to the same thing.

This theme is growing in volume and intensity on poltical
blogs and websites across the nation.

A key component of a growing rallying cry for an independent
party to run a Presidential candidate in 2012, a precursor
signal of a voters' revolt that seeks to reject both
mainstream parties in favor of a vote-splitting movement
similar to the George Wallace phenomenon of 1968 or the Ross
Perot initiative that blocked out key elements of the
conservative vote and denied a second term to President
George H.W. Bush, it's one of many signs of the beginnings
of the 2012 Presidential campaigns.

Naturally, these campaigns began on election night,
November, 2008, as usual.

A streaming video on an Organizing For America website shows
volunteers visiting northern Virginia homes in an ultra-
green and upscale red-brick and picket fence neighborhood
that looks a lot like Fairfax or Falls Church while a
bespectacled young man in shirtsleeves explains to
volunteers how the organization would like to do business
door-to-door to gain contributions and make new friends in
the effort to re-elect President Obama.

One is hard-pressed to see any substance to the complaint
ventured by hard core conservative independents.

After all, a "pledge of support" is hardly the same as an
oath of loyalty to a certain political personality that will
be placed ahead of any other political consideration,
national, constitutional or political. A Nazi oath of blind
obedience to a Hitler this is not. It's about as innocuous
as a tithe pledge one may find proffered in any suburban
Protestant church, be it mega-media or mainstream.

jim@downdirtyword.com