Reported in the Daily Caller:
ACORN’s man takes over the Democratic Party’s war machine
A longtime ACORN operative is about to take over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director – just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
The activist in question is Patrick Gaspard. He currently holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush’s administration.
Gaspard comes from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that shaped Barack Obama. Gaspard is well schooled in the brutal, street-smart organizing tactics taught by the late Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles. (Former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine will remain as general chairman of the DNC.)
OOPS!
Reported in Politico:
White House aide failed to disclose $40K payout
President Barack Obama’s political director failed to disclose that he was slated to receive a nearly $40,000 payout from a large labor union while he was working in the White House.
Patrick Gaspard, who served as the political director for the Service Employees International Union local 1199, received $37,071.46 in “carried over leave and vacation” from the union in 2009, but he did not disclose the agreement to receive the payment on his financial disclosure forms filed with the White House.
In a section on his financial disclosure where agreements or arrangements for payment by a former employer must be disclosed, Gaspard checked a box indicating that he had nothing to report.
Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, told POLITICO Monday that Gaspard was in the process of correcting his disclosure form to reflect that he did in fact have an agreement for severance.
Who is Patrick Gaspard? What has he done in the past to merit this position?
The New York Observer gives us a little background:
Mr. Gaspard’s political sensibilities were formed in part by his cosmopolitan (almost Obama-esque) personal background.
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haitian parents, Gaspard moved with his parents to the United States when he was three years old.[1] He is married and has two children.
He was born in present-day Democratic Republican of the Congo to Haitian parents, but raised in America, in Manhattan and Queens.
He writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon. He also likes Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet of the Acmeist school.
He has acted in plays and performed spoken word, holds strongly positive opinions about Otis Redding and collects Marvel comics. (His prize possession is the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.) He is a big Mets fan. He was married on the grass of Prospect Park; his wife and two children are about to join him in Washington after living for years in Park Slope.
Prior to working on Obama’s campaign team, Gaspard worked nine years as the executive vice president for politics and legislation for the 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East labor union, the largest local union in America.[3][4] He helped coordinate political activity and government relations on behalf of 300,000 members. In 2006, Gaspard served as the acting political director for SEIU International during the national union’s successful effort to help Democrats capture majorities in the House and Senate. In 2004, Gaspard was the National Field Director for America Coming Together. Gaspard worked for Governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, the 1988 Jesse Jackson presidential bid and numerous congressional candidates and campaigns. In 1989, he worked on the successful and historic David Dinkins mayoral campaign.[5] Gaspard is a former community organizer around school reform issues.
In the election of 2004 Gaspard was National Field Director of America Coming Together. Wikipedia provides a definition:
America Coming Together (ACT) was a liberal, political action, 527 group dedicated to get-out-the-vote activities. ACT did not specifically endorse any political party, but mostly worked on behalf of Democratic candidates. It was the largest 527 group in 2004 and was planning to be involved in future races. The group was primarily funded by Peter Lewis, George Soros, and labor unions, especially the Service Employees International Union, and was led by Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the AFL-CIO.
In the last three weeks before the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, ACT planned on funding over 12 million phone calls to targeted voters and having canvassers hand-deliver 11 million pieces of literature at targeted doorsteps. On Election Day, ACT had projected to have 45,000 paid canvassers in the battleground states and spent over $10 million on Election Day. It had 86 offices open every day, a staff of 4000 and a goal of reinforcing the army of 45,000 paid canvassers with 25,000 volunteers.
In the fall of 2004, ACT was featured in the Frontline Documentary, The Persuaders, which described ACT’s use of narrowcasting.
In 2005 ACT was in the process of being wound down.[1] Its website was not renewed and is no longer operational.
The Federal Election Commission announced on August 29, 2007, that it had reached a settlement agreement with ACT for violations of various federal campaign finance laws during the 2004 US presidential campaign. ACT has agreed to pay $775,000 in fines. [2]
Hmmm.
Back, back, back to 2009 from The National Review:
Patrick Gaspard, ACORN, and Obama
By Stanley Kurtz
With the revelation that White House Director of Political Affairs, Patrick Gaspard, has close ties to Bertha Lewis and to ACORN, Matthew Vadum and Erick Erickson appear to be onto something significant. While the Gaspard matter needs further investigation before we form any hard conclusions, it certainly seems to confirm that President Obama’s ties to a whole series of ACORN-controlled organizations are neither minor nor by any means long-past. In fact, making use of what Erickson and Vadum have discovered about Gaspard, we can trace these links still further.
There’s been a good deal of attention to ACORN of late, and deservedly so. Yet for all the fuss, what is arguably the most important Obama-ACORN tie of all has gotten short shrift. During the 2008 election, Obama’s close links to the far-left New Party were revealed and explored (although not by the mainstream press). Yet many seem to have forgotten that the New Party, particularly in Chicago, was dominated by ACORN (and by an ACORN-controlled SEIU union local). During the campaign, I detailed Obama’s New Party ties in two pieces, “Something New Here,” and “Life of the New Party.” Important evidence of Obama’s pursuit of the New Party endorsement can also be found in the September-October 1995 issue of “New Ground,” newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Obama’s New Party ties matter because they show that his links to ACORN went far beyond shared on-the-ground organizing, legal representation, training, or even funding (although all of those ties existed and were important). By running for office with the New Party, Obama was effectively indicating that he shared ACORN’s radical political goals.
So it’s of interest that in late 1995, just as Obama was seeking New Party endorsement in Chicago, Patrick Gaspard was working as a New Party organizer in New Jersey. (This was reported in “Jersey Man Hopes to Create Third Political Party,” NPR, “Morning Edition, ” September 28, 1995). Then, in the July 2, 2001 issue of “The Nation,” Gaspard and Bertha Lewis jointly published a reply to a June 4 Nation article by Doug Ireland which had been critical of the New York’s Working Families Party (a successor to the New Party, led by New Party co-founder Dan Cantor, and largely controlled by ACORN and the SEIU). In the course of their letter, Gaspard and Lewis describe their extensive joint involvement in Working Families Party activities. The letter is signed: “Bertha Lewis, ACORN, WFP; Patrick Gaspard, SEIU State Council, WFP.” This does seem to confirm and extend the new evidence of a close political tie between Patrick Gaspard and ACORN’s Bertha Lewis.
Reported in the American Spectator:
ACORN’s Big Spender
By Matthew Vadum on 11.6.09
More proof has emerged of White House political director Patrick Gaspard’s ties to the radical advocacy group ACORN.
Gaspard, a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its partisan arms, New York’s Working Families Party, currently holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.
Internal ACORN documents show that Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years. Specifically, while Gaspard worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York he gave ACORN $15,000 in 2007 and $25,000 in 2008.
That’s an awfully large tithe for someone who made $111,894 in 2007 and who has a wife and two children. The $111,894 figure comes from SEIU 1199’s most recent publicly available tax return. (If salary and deferred benefits are combined the total is $151,869.)
Moreover, Gaspard hails from New York which has a crushing tax burden, especially for individuals earning six-figure salaries — and he lived in the upscale neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was unclear at press time if Gaspard’s wife contributes to the family fisc.
It is also entirely possible that the $40,000 Gaspard handed over to ACORN was SEIU money.
And in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter whether the lefty lucre belonged to Gaspard or SEIU. What matters is the fact that Gaspard handed over the money to ACORN. This is yet more proof of his closeness to the radical group.
So, for those of you who are eternal optimists and are willing to believe that Obama has “seen the light” and is now veering to the center; think again. if you excuse the Scripture “a dog returns to his vomit” and “even a youth is known by his companions.” The tigers are not changing their stripes.
Obama has put a neo-Marxist “progressive,” Union backed, Socialist Democrat with an Alinskyite “community organizer” entry on his resume, a George Soros funded organization directorship in his experience column, and all the connections a political operative could wish for — and he’s rearing to get the “Democratic War Room” operating to get the putative president re-elected.
The ACORN tree has not been chopped down, the left-wing nuts are a gathering.
More on the audacity of Gaspard, in Gulag Bound, from Trevor Loudon.
One of them is using conference bags.