According to Woodrow Wilson, what he called the “preface” of the Declaration of Independence—the part about “self-evident truths,” “unalienable rights” given to human beings by the Creator, and the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—was not the “real Declaration of Independence.”  If you want to understand that, Wilson said, “do not repeat the preface.”  For Wilson, the point of the Declaration—and the Constitution, too—was not the permanence of any principles.  “No doubt,” he wrote, “we are meant to have liberty, but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is.”  The Founders, early progressives held, wrote for their own time in our first documents, but not for future generations. For Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, Frank Goodnow and other founding fathers of progressivism, the Constitution of the American Founding was an obstacle to be overcome.  Insisting that the Constitution must be interpreted in view of the new but increasingly dominant Darwinian model of constant change, progressives pronounced our Constitution a “living” document.  The Constitution, they believed, is as malleable as human nature itself.  The Founders’ old ideas about separation of powers could be discarded in favor of new and improved notions of “enlightened administration.”

Podesta and Halpin allege that conservatives “often mask social Darwinism . . . in a cloak of liberty,” but in fact it is progressivism whose roots run deepest in the political ideology of Darwinism.  The fittest among us, it turns out, are the bureaucrats, empowered by a Constitution whose original restraints, like federalism and the limitations imposed by enumerated powers, have been stripped by progressives in favor of a more “dynamic” model.

In rendering the Declaration a dead letter, and the Constitution a “living” document, early progressives saw the Founding as something to be surmounted, not celebrated.  Citing with approval Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union, in which he proposed a “new economic Bill of Rights,” Podesta and Halpin neglect to mention that in his speech, FDR used the past tense when he referred to the original rights of “life and liberty.”  Wishing to add material “security” guaranteed by the federal government to the list of rights all Americans should enjoy, FDR might have revealed something significant in his use of the past tense:  when the federal government oversteps its original, limited aims, it will end up undermining the natural rights it was originally charged to protect.  Happiness is much more difficult to guarantee than a right to the “pursuit of happiness.”  A government responsible for a people’s every material need can more easily end up not being responsible to the people themselves.

Constitutional conservatives reject the New Deal and Great Society as “aberrations from American norms” not because conservatives are for unsafe food, corporate exploitation of children, and the perpetuation of poverty.  Rather, conservatives reject the New Deal and Great Society—and their progressive underpinnings—because they are incompatible with the bedrock principle of constitutionally limited government. Contemporary progressives glide over that part of their own history and tradition that disdains the Founders, and in a slick sleight of hand try to convince us today that the real progressive forefathers are Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.  However, according to the late 19th and early 20th century intellectual progenitors of progressivism, the core ideas of the American Founding were not just inadequate, but bankrupt.  Progressives today cannot both revile those foundational ideas and revere their promise.

The Constitution did not set out on a “never-ending search for ‘a more perfect union’” because its framers knew that perfection would always elude politics.  This does not mean that the Founders did not aim high. On the contrary, their “more perfect union” marked a dramatic improvement over the old Articles of Confederation, and over every other previous political regime in history.  In establishing a Constitution firmly rooted in the enduring principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Founders gave us a gift whose real staying power is lost when it becomes a “living” document as dictated by progressivism.

John Podesta will step down as president of the Center for American Progress, an official at the organization said today.

Podesta, who served as Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, founded the center in 2003 with a core of wealthy liberal supporters and transformed it into the Democratic Party’s key policy and politics shop.

Podesta, 62, will remain the center’s chairman, and will also serve Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a day-a-week volunteer, the CAP official said, but is not immediately expected to take on any other public role.

“He will continue to provide long-term strategic advice,” said his successor, former Clinton and Obama policy aide Neera Tanden.

Podesta chaired President Barack Obama’s transition, and about a third of the staff of the Center for American Progress went into the Obama administration. Since then, CAP has been a key ally of the Obama White House, developing policy plans that included an outline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and defending the administration from Republican attacks on its media outlet, ThinkProgress.

Read the rest of the story here.

The very premise of the Republican presidential debate, hosted by NBC/Politico and broadcast by corporate welfare queen MSNBC proves that conservatives don’t understand the power the media is trying to exert over the next election.

It is an insult to the house of Reagan that MSNBC would try to pass itself off as a fair news organization with the eight Republican candidates giving the sneering, snobby and snide enemy a certain imprimatur of legitimacy.

The only reason the GOP is in a fighting stance in the 2012 presidential election is the Tea Party. The alternative narrative-drivers at MSNBC have spent much of the last two-plus years trying to frame millions and millions of patriotic and concerned Americans as violent, racist knuckle-draggers.

To dignify those habitual and unaccountable slanderers by appearing on that stage shows that apparently these Republicans and daily MSNBC punching bags don’t comprehend the scope of the media problem.

Barack Obama was elected due to the work of the media in 2008. Barack Obama will not cross the finish line in 2012 without the help of that same media–with MSNBC leaning forward as it pushes their wildly unpopular President from behind.

For instance, the moderators dared Mitt Romney to distance himself from the Tea Party–after MSNBC and Politico spent years painting the Tea Party as toxic.

Yet MSNBC and Politico conspicuously refused to bring up the massive deficits that gave rise to the Tea Party in the first place, and which the majority of Americans rightfully fear.

(Ironically, given MSNBC’s repeated meme that the Tea Party is racist, the moderators patronizingly trotted out an Hispanic anchor to ask the candidates about immigration, then dismissed him when they moved on to other issues. This was classic MSNBC race-baiting against the GOP. Why didn’t they bring up a twelve-year old girl to ask the HPV question? Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.)

MSNBC: "Gracias. Ahora sal del escenario, por favor."

Wednesday night’s moderators also treated Michele Bachmann as a second-tier candidate, despite her win in the Iowa straw poll, and tried to frame the debate as Romney v. Perry, before any GOP voters have even had a say. They are using the absolute power of media manipulation to tell GOP voters who their candidates are.

Afterwards, MSNBC’s exclusively leaning-forward “progressive” panel-Sharpton, Maddow, O’Donnell, Shultz, et. al.–a sluggers’ row of free-market media losers–sneeringly, snobbily and snidely framed the debate they’d just witnessed as a freak circus of unintelligible and retrograde imbeciles.  All while the smartest man in the room, Al Sharpton, called Galileo, “Galeo.” It is amazing how these irony obsessed leftists can’t see how foolish they look.

Why would those candidates who seek to govern the free world put themselves in this utterly absurd position, entering an arena that is so unfairly structured to make them look extreme, ugly, stupid and crazy?

I give Newt Gingrich a “C” for pointing out the obvious when he chided the moderators over the rigged line of questioning. But we knew he was going to go after the media bias on display, because that’s his new line of attack, and a sign of life in his formerly moribund campaign.

2012 will be won or lost in the media trenches. General Electric (still partial owners of MSNBC, and its crony capitalist architect) has become the poster child for rent-seeking corporate welfare and tax dodging. Do Republicans not know that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is Obama’s close friend and corporate fig leaf as chair of the administration’s jobs panel? Why did none of the eight candidates shove this back in the aggressive moderators’ faces: that they are as complicit in the debt crisis–that they refused to bring up in the debate–as Obama himself?

MSNBC is the administration’s government-supported public relations operation, continually featuring news segments framed by the George Soros-funded and John Podesta-led Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America. The latter is partially funded by a labor movement that considers those that appeared on the Reagan stage “sons of bitches” and has declared “war” on them. MSNBC even injected an SEIU hit job ad during a debate break.

My message to these GOP candidates, while they’re licking their wounds this weekend, is this: you only have yourselves to blame.

When the New York Times and other media outlets push false “anti-science” and “racist” memes, intentionally distracting from Obama’s debt disaster and the jobs crisis mega-disaster–subjects that MSNBC did everything it could to steer clear of at the Reagan library–remember this: you willingly walked into this trap set by those willfully seeking your destruction.

Worse yet, MSNBC’s ratings would constitute a national disaster worthy of FEMA intervention. On Wednesday night, the Republican party invited millions of unsuspecting independent and Republican viewers into a venue that holds a majority of them in contempt.

Am I calling for a boycott? No. I’m not boycotting dog-fighting rings–I just wouldn’t ever entertain the thought of going to one. So the question is: Why would you? With all due respect, I have no choice but to question the judgment of those who would willingly subject themselves to a forum that puts them at the mercy of political opponents in the media who wield “objectivity” as a weapon–opponents who unsurprisingly used last night’s opportunity to craft narratives designed to help reelect Barack Obama.

In 2008, we watched John McCain’s campaign repeatedly play the role of Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy. Last night was a demoralizing reminder that the next GOP standard-bearer will find him or herself on their back after the media has pulled away the ball.

Those in the Tea Party, who in 2010 made the conservative resurrection possible, have learned everything they need to know about the mainstream media, and will be less than enthusiastic about a candidate who hopes to achieve positive results by chumming up with those who actively seek their destruction.

Amazingly, ACORN’s 40 years of lawlessness have been heavily subsidized by taxpayers. From the federal government alone, the ACORN network has received at least $79 million in federal taxpayer funding. No one knows how many millions of dollars ACORN has taken in from states and localities. Yet as of November 2009, ACORN was a tax deadbeat, owing more than $2.3 million in back taxes to all levels of government.

Bertha Lewis

You don’t have to take my word that ACORN will soon arise from the ashes. Nathan Henderson-James, longtime director of the group’s online campaigns, confirmed in a leaked February 2010 e-mail that ACORN plans to come back. America’s most notorious nonprofit felt it needed to perform this trick because its employees were caught red-handed repeatedly counseling a fake pimp and prostitute on the finer points of establishing a brothel for pedophiles. ACORN calculated that people would forget the transgressions of the taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit best known for its voter fraud efforts.

In the e-mail that came five months after conservative activist-journalists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles punked ACORN with their “pimp and pro” routine, Henderson-James explained the group’s ongoing hoax that consists of its state chapters separately incorporating under new, innocuous-sounding names. “It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members,” he wrote. “These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize” low and moderate income constituencies “without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.” Stepping out of the spotlight for a while is a “tactically smart … reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” he wrote.

The secret operation was already underway when Henderson-James bragged about the effort to his radical and liberal friends on Townhouse, an invitation only left-wingers’ online discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, who was senior policy adviser to colorful former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla. In late 2009 and early 2010, ACORN staffers across America created a plethora of separate organizations aimed at carrying on ACORN’s corrupt affairs.

Among them were Arkansas Community Organizations, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New England United for Justice, Missourians Organizing for Reform & Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, Pennsylvania Neighborhoods for Social Justice, and Pennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change. Almost all of the “new” groups operate out of old ACORN offices and are run by old ACORN hands. ACORN’s housing bubble generator, ACORN Housing, changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America after the undercover video saga. The organization has long served as the ACORN network’s cash cow, funneling millions of dollars to other affiliates in ACORN’s far-flung empire of activism.

ACORN’s court historian John Atlas also confirmed that the undead group plans to resurface under a new name after the 2010 elections. A new entity tentatively called the Community Action Support Center (CASC) will be created “to provide a range of training, technical assistance, and oversight services to the new community organizations,” he wrote last year in his institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change. ACORN’s Brian Kettenring will be interim executive director. ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis plans to create a Black Leadership Institute. Executive Director Steve Kest quit ACORN “but will work with the new community groups in a consulting and voluntary capacity.” Kest later became a “senior fellow” at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which is run by Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta.

“The emerging community organizations will retain ACORN’s commitment to building national power, and are beginning discussions toward a process to federate at some later date, presumably after the 2010 elections or in 2011,” Atlas writes.

The new groups’ focus will be on localities and states. CASC “will support the continuation of organizing around jobs and low-wage work, bank lending and foreclosures, immigration, state fiscal crises, civic engagement, and green jobs and environmental justice.” ACORN leaders are working on “voter engagement activities.” They intend “to engage the surge voters of 2008 and turn them into permanent voters in 2010 and beyond.” ACORN’s fraud-prone Project Vote affiliate continues to operate. It ran a nationwide voter registration and get-out-the-vote drive during the 2010 election cycle.

Despite its history of election fraud, it continues to operate undisturbed, doing business as usual. Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even let disgraced ACORN executive Amy Adele Busefink run its 2010 voter drive. Charges were pending against her the whole time she ran the 2010 voter registration and get-out-the-vote effort. Talk about an understanding employer!

Busefink’s job performance in the 2008 election cycle didn’t seem to bother Project Vote. The New York Times reported that Project Vote was forced to admit that 850,000 of the 1.3 million registrations from allegedly new voters were not from new voters at all. About 400,000 of the registrations “were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers.” ACORN acknowledged it fired “829 of the 10,000 canvassers it hired during the election for job-related problems, including falsifying registration forms.”

Busefink and her subordinate were implicated in a massive conspiracy to commit voter registration fraud in Nevada. Her underling took a plea bargain, and Busefink cut her own deal with prosecutors in hopes of avoiding prison time. She entered an “Alford plea,” which is similar to a “no contest” plea. In January 2011, she received a two-year suspended sentence.

(Look on Big Government tomorrow for Part 3. This article is excerpted from “Subversion Inc.: A new book reveals how Obama’s ACORN friends are still ripping off American taxpayers,” by Matthew Vadum which was published in the May 2011 issue of Townhall magazine and is republished here with permission. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum.)

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Vadum is author of the new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books), from which this piece is adapted. Of the book Andrew Breitbart says, “For too long the institutional left has been allowed to operate under cover of darkness because the Democrat-media complex refuses to hold them accountable. But these radicals who have been sticking it to Americans for decades scatter like cockroaches under the harsh spotlight of Matthew Vadum’s great new book, Subversion Inc.”

There were a few, on both sides, who indulged the urge to turn America’s victory into an occasion for smug partisanship.

And I’ll admit that I enjoyed the opportunity to mock the extremists at MoveOn.org for smearing the military that brought America this great achievement.

Yet like most Americans, I gave standalone credit to President Obama–and in my exuberance, I even had to be reminded that President Bush deserved credit, too.

But victory against Al Qaeda wasn’t good enough for some on the left and in the mainstream media, who decided to declare Obama the pre-emptive winner of the 2012 election.

In fact, they have been politicizing Osama bin Laden’s death for years.

In September 2004, Bob Woodward told Larry King that Bush might produce “the apprehension or the death of bin Laden” as a “September or October surprise” to win the election.

In 2006 and 2008, the left revived the same conspiracy theory–with Media Matters, among others, claiming that Al Qaeda had supported Bush.

Today, the propaganda factory of the left is once again politicizing bin Laden’s death, using it to smear conservatives. John Podesta’s ThinkProgress.org has led the charge, touting a supposed “deather” conspiracy theory that refuses to believe bin Laden is dead: “Andrew Breitbart, a prominent right-wing commentator with close ties to the Republican Party and the Tea Party, is pushing the theory on his website Big Peace.”

That is pure projection by the institutional left, which can neither celebrate American victories in the war on terror, nor mourn American tragedies like Tuscon, without politicizing them.

So I am challenging the left to prove what it is alleging.

If anyone can prove that I believe American special forces did not kill Osama bin Laden, I will donate one million dollars to ThinkProgress.

Put up or shut up, John Podesta. And let Americans celebrate as one.

President Barack Obama has won praise from the media — and from himself — for putting the White House visitor logs online. Yet the visitor logs may hide more than they reveal.

The White House is still holding back “tens of thousands” of visitor logs, according to congressional testimony last week by Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, who also added that “the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration.”

We also know that some of the most important presidential visitors don’t even walk into the White House. The administration meets K Street lobbyists at Caribou Coffee, and holds secret meetings in Jackson Place townhouses where there are no visitor logs.

The visitor logs that have been released are problematic, because they are simply lists of names, with no way to verify whether a specific name belongs to a particular person.

When the first names were released on Oct. 30, 2009, late on a Friday afternoon, then-White House “ethics czar” Norm Eisen noted the lists included “false positives” — “names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else.” According to Eisen, these included ordinary visitors named “Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz.”

A number of conservative bloggers noticed the names, but not Eisen’s blog post. With speed and precision suggesting direct coordination from the top, ThinkProgress, the core of the heavily funded John Podesta/George Soros “progressive” world, gleefully attacked its ideological foes for reporting “false positives.” The next release included “Louis Farrakhan” and “James Taylor,” but this time conservatives were more careful.

Yet there is no way to prove that the “false positives” really are false, because the White House refuses to reveal identifying information about visitors. In December 2009, citing visitor logs, Big Government reported that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis had likely visited the White House on a special “staff tour” on September 5. The timing of Lewis’s visit — as the far-left regrouped in the aftermath of the health care town halls — seemed suspicious.

Ben Smith of Politico then reported that an anonymous White House source said we had the wrong Bertha Lewis. I asked Smith why, if that were the case, the White House would use an anonymous flack to put down our report, rather than busting us cleanly. Smith agreed it was weird. The next day, the official emerged, but the newly revealed Jen Psaki refused to say who the real Bertha Lewis was, citing “privacy concerns.”

With no way to verify, there is no real transparency. Of course, with Andrew Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who visited the White House over twenty times through October 2009, there is little doubt that he is the Andy Stern. That information helped establish the credibility of the visitor logs. Yet there are three “Andrew Sterns” who visited with group tours–are they just “false positives”?

What is the point of listing hundreds of thousands of tourists, if not to help create “false positives”? Eisen and the White House have created a haystack that can hide a needle. Considering that Eisen, a major Obama bundler in 2008, was responsible for smearing former Inspector General Gerald Walpin, and was elevated to an ambassadorship through a shady recess appointment, that hardly seems impossible.

Evidence has emerged to suggest the White House tried to manipulate media coverage of the visitor logs to create an impression of transparency. Indeed, Fitton reported to Congress that in the fall of 2009, Eisen “encouraged [Judicial Watch] to publicly praise the Obama administration’s commitment to transparency, saying it would be good for them and good for us.” Yet the White House still refused to provide all of the visitor logs.

In the name of “transparency,” the White House has turned the guest list into the “guess list.” Tragically, the media seem fine with that. Last week, representatives from Sunshine Week — funded by the hapless American Society of News Editors, among others — tried to give the president a “transparency” award. It was postponed — but when they hold the event, bloggers reporting the news the “real” journalists won’t report ought to beware: the Newsweek reporter in the visitor logs may not be that “Tunku Varadarajan.”

**UPDATE: ASNE has indicated that it declined to participate in the transparency award, and that the open-government activists at the White House last week did not represent Sunshine Week as an organization.

CAP Action is a sister organization to the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress.  While the Center for American Progress focuses on developing new policy ideas and on “critiquing the policy that stems from conservative values,”  CAP Action focuses on how to put those policies into action – by organizing liberal grassroots groups, labor unions and other progressive partners as advocates.

John Podesta, Chairman of the Board of Directors for CAP Action, offered the following statement in the organization’s December 9th press release:

“The Center for American Progress Action Fund is pleased to welcome Anna Burger to our Board of Directors. She has been a longtime friend of the Center for American Progress and CAP Action and we’re very happy that she has agreed to help us advance our mission by serving in this new capacity.

Anna Burger has been fighting hard for progressive ideas and policies for nearly 40 years, including the visionary leadership she has provided for the progressive movement over the past decade. We face numerous opportunities and many challenges over the next two years and look forward to Anna’s help in charting our course. As we continue to push for an economy built on a strong middle class that works for all Americans, Anna’s continued leadership and experience could not come at a more important time.”

In addition to her previous post at SEIU, Burger has held many prominent positions that have played significant roles in advancing the progressive movement, including:

• Former Chair of the Change to Win Federation, the labor coalition founded in 2005 by “reformers” who notoriously split from the AFL-CIO  to build a stronger, more progressive labor movement, based on the organizing model. (Burger resigned this post when she retired from SEIU)
• Current Board of Directors, Progressive States Network, alongside other directors such as Media Matters’ David Brock, MoveOn.org’s Wes Boyd, ACORN’s Steve Kest, AFSCME’s Lee Saunders and CAP’s John Podesta.
• Board of Directors of defunct They Work For Us/Working for Us, alongside other directors such as SEIU’s Tyrone Freeman, MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser and Thomas Mattzie, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.
• Board of Directors of Economic Policy Institute, alongside other directors such as former managing director of Soros Fund Management and fellow Democracy Alliance board member Robert Johnson, The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, and most of Big Labor’s most prominent leaders, including former SEIU president Andy Stern.
• Member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board

Burger also maintains her position as Vice-Chair of the Democracy Alliance, a collaborative network of elite donors that plans and provides funding to carefully selected organizations that currently, or will be created to, serve a specific purpose within the progressive infrastructure. The organization was formed in 2005 after Rob Stein’s infamous presentation titled “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix”, which detailed the conservative movement’s funding and management network and sparked an appeal for a permanent progressive infrastructure.  Among the earliest beneficiaries of the Democracy Alliance were Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.

In a post I wrote this past August,  Anna Burger Quits SEIU and Change to Win to ‘Build Progressive Infrastructure’, I stated that “Burger’s departure marks not just the end of an era for SEIU, but more importantly, it’s indicative of a new era for the Progressive movement.”

This appears to remain the case.  Burger’s appointment to CAP Action seems to be yet another sign that a ‘Democracy Alliance 2.0′  is underway.

During a mid-November conference at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington DC, some of the left’s most elite political donors gathered at the $600 a night luxury hotel to plot their strategy for 2012.  Hosted by the Democracy Alliance for its 150 or so donor partners and some of its member organizations, the three-day conference focused on post-election analysis of Democratic losses and a strategy for going forward.

But the event wasn’t solely about elections.  Just as they were prior to the mid-term elections, Democrats seem to be split into two camps:  those focused on the next election’s financing, and those focused on building and maintaining a permanent progressive infrastructure.

The head of one of Democracy Alliance’s earliest spawns, Media Matters, is focused on initiatives specifically for the 2012 elections, like creating a new super-PAC.  The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent says that a source close to David Brock told him that the Media Matters founder and CEO is pitching his concept to donors as we speak.  The NY Times reports that Brock has already collected over $4 million in donation pledges for the organization, called American Bridge, and appointed Robert F. Kennedy’s eldest child and former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to serve as chairwoman.

With the White House now signaling it wants outside groups on the left to ramp up for 2012, Media Matters founder David Brock is in discussions to form a new group designed to raise and spend big bucks to counter the right’s powerful new infrastructure, a person who’s spoken directly with Brock about his plans tells me…

… “David is on the road right now talking to donors and strategists who would be interested in this,” the source tells me, adding that Brock intends to create a 527, which has partial donor disclosure rules. “He’s out pitching it right now.”

“There’s a general sense that in 2010 nothing was done and it cost Democrats,” the source continues. “People realize, including in the White House, that something needs to be done in 2012 or progressives will suffer at the ballot box again.”

But Democracy Alliance donor member George Soros remains partial to this infrastructure strategy.  As I recently posted here at the Bigs, since his failed attempts at trying to oust former President George W. Bush several years ago, Soros has been committed to more long-term initiatives that would help push the country permanently to the left, and less so on elections, which are more temporary in nature.  On the heels of that conference, Soros told fellow donors that Obama Might Not Be The Best Investment, indicating the focus should remain not only on electing progressive candidates, but even more so on long term infrastructure investments.

It’s a point with which Anna Burger herself agrees.

While Soros’s comment gave some attendees the impression that he’d cheer a primary challenge to the president, the point, sources say, was different. Rather, it is time to shuffle funds into a progressive infrastructure that will take on the tasks that the president can’t or won’t take on.

“People are determined to help build a progressive infrastructure and make sure it is there not just in the months ahead but one that will last in the long term,” said Anna Burger, the retired treasury secretary of SEIU. “Instead of being pushed over by this election it has empowered people to stand up in a bigger way.”

The appointment of Anna Burger to CAP Action leverages the labor leader’s strengths both in grassroots organizing and in fund-raising.  Her existing post as Vice-Chair at the Democracy Alliance is surely an added benefit – to CAP Action and to the progressive movement as a whole.  With this rebirth of sorts we’re seeing from the Democracy Alliance as Progressives try again to consume the Democratic Party, I expect we may see other similar high profile retirements/resignations and subsequent new appointments to prominent progressive posts.