When the WVWV wankfest was at its height, I got this mail from Michelle:

lambert —

In every state across the country, there are thousands of qualified voters who are not registered to vote.

Some believe their vote doesn’t matter, some have been actively disenfranchised, and some have been overlooked or excluded by a broken system that has lost touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans.

Barack and I entered this race because we believe there’s a chance to change that.

From the beginning, our goal has been to reach out to people of all races, ages, and backgrounds and bring them back into the political process. We must use the rare opportunity we have right now to bring people together and make this a better country for all Americans.

That’s why I’m excited to announce a 50-state voter registration and mobilization drive we’re calling Vote for Change.

Beginning with a nationwide kick-off on Saturday, May 10th, more than 100 Vote for Change events will take place in every state, organized by our dedicated volunteers who are leading this campaign for change in their own communities.

Sign up to get involved now:

…

Blah, blah, hope, blah, change, blah,ratfucking, blah, blah, pack behavior, blah, blah, blah, blah [yawn], blah, change, blah, stolen caucuses, blah, blah, hope, change, blah…

Oops, I got a little carried away. All that “blah, blah” stuff at the end is me, not Michelle. In case you couldn’t tell.

But could the ginned up OFB WVWV wankfest, which baselessly smeared an organization that registers women be a two-fer? It would be irresponsible not to speculate:

1. Since the WVWV smear was intitiated just before the NC primary, one effect of it would be to delegimitize an unexpectedly strong performance by Hillary in a state that Obama was once expected to take by 20.

2. Since the Obama organization is now organizing its own voter registration drive, why would they want any competing organization to thrive? They’ve never wanted that, all the way back to suppressing the original Obama FaceBook site, which was run by volunteers, and replacing it with one of they controlled. So, smearing the WVWV not only eliminates a competitor, it sends a shot across the bow to all those on the WVWV’s board who aren’t already Obama loyalists. Remind you of anything? I hate to use the word gleischaltung, but feel free to think it; movements often end up like that.

Why don’t we take Obama and the OFB at their word? They’re a movement. In conseqence, we can start to see them as a movement that’s trying to take power through the Democratic Party — and from a rather weak base, at that — as opposed to being part of the Democratic Party.

Treating Obama’s campaign as a movement, rather than as a party faction, would explain why they’re so willing to burn what we regard as Democratic Party assets for the general — by trying to drive the Clintons from public life by smearing them as racists, or by smearing parts of the Democratic base that don’t support Obama as racists, or Archie Bunkers, or low information voters — not to mention the Hillary hatred and the relentless misogyny. What we Democrats regard as assets, movement Obama supporters regard as obstacles to control of the party by their movement.*

Obviously, if the Obama Movement has a real institutional presence — and what’s more institutional than a massive database combined with a voter registration drive — that has implications for the drive for “unity” when the Democrat nominee is chosen.

How does a party “unify” with a movement?

NOTE * A useful metaphor might be the corporate raider: The Obama movement would rather see a smaller Democratic Party cleansed of less profitable divisions (like the old or the sick), rather than a larger Democratic Party composed of a broad-based coalition (like, again, the old and the potentially sick). The classic corporate raider maneuver is to finance the take-over by selling off assets once the takeover is complete; this would explain the willingness of the Obama movement to sell out sick people to the insurance companies (who will doubtless reward them richly in the next “campaign” cycle, assumng, arguendo, that the country is unfortunate enough to have Obama as its next President). To continue the corporate raider metaphor, we might remember the Obama movements contempt for secret ballot elections, and its preference for caucuses, which might be likened to rowdy shareholder’s meetings infiltrated by takeover artists. I’m not sure how far to take this metaphor, but it’s fun, or horrifying, to think about.

UPDATE One of the hideous consequences of this line of thinking is that we’re going to be dealing with the OFB < i>for years.