The millions of people who signed up to get email from Mitt Romney in
2012 would be pretty irked if they started getting messages now from
his team about a super new bill in Congress that raises taxes, cuts the
Pentagon’s budget in half and forcibly marries every registered
Republican man to Neil Patrick Harris.
So you can imagine how members of Organizing for Action, or OFA, felt
when they got email on Friday telling them about a super new “Trade
Promotion Authority” bill. Passage of the Trade Promotion Authority,
better known as “fast track,” would pave the way for the Trans-Pacific
Partnership treaty, or TPP, which includes a grab-bag of things the
Democratic base absolutely loathes. It would would raise the cost of prescription drugs, give Obama an environmental trade record “worse than George Bush’s,” create a special legal system for multinational corporations to kill any domestic law that hurts profits, and much more.
The OFA email was especially head-turning because OFA is a successor
organization to President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns (which had the
same initials, then standing for Obama for America), built on the email
lists developed during those campaigns of millions of volunteers and
supporters. And any political campaign’s email lists are, in a real
sense, the shared creation of everyone involved in the campaign.
The OFA email did not ask members to take action supporting fast
track; instead, it appears to be an attempt to mollify them enough so
they don’t take action opposing it. In any case, the email is filled
with assertions clearly crafted to mislead OFA members:
