Robert Creamer (political consultant)

Creamer also worked with his partner in Democracy Partners, Heather Booth, who served as Director of Progressive and Senior Mobilization for the Biden for President campaign in the 2020 General Election.

Starting in early 2017, he convened twice-weekly Progressive Mobilization calls for the broad Progressive Community. His firm has worked with progressive organizations and unions to mobilize support for progressive initiatives in Congress like COVID-19 relief, gun violence prevention programs and tax cuts for the wealthy – generating tens of thousands of calls to Congress through its patch-through call programs from constituents.

In June 2017, Creamer, and Democracy Partners filed a lawsuit against O'Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas, seeking a million dollars in damages for various violations of DC and Federal law. The case was heard in Federal Court in Washington, DC. In September, 2022 a jury ruled against Project Veritas on a claim of fraudulent misrepresentation, awarding $120,000 to Democracy Partners. The judge had not yet ruled on some of the damages and claims in the case.

Since 2016, Creamer devoted much of his time to the progressive movement organizing against the policies of then President Donald Trump – and electing progressive Democrats.

In October 2016, activist James O'Keefe's Project Veritas Action released hidden-camera videos showing Creamer and others who worked for firms hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign engaging in conversations about voter registration. The videos have together garnered over 12 million views as of October 2016. One clip in the video shows Creamer meeting with an undercover activist posing as potential donor. After the actor suggests finding a way around voter registration laws, Creamer responds "my fear is that someone would decide that this is a big voter fraud scheme."

As a result of the video, Creamer announced he was stepping back from his firm's contract with the Democratic National Committee. Creamer's Democracy Partners released a statement on October 18, 2016:

Creamer spoke at the 2010 America's Future Now Conference. Creamer signed The Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality, an initiative launched by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on May 12, 2015.

After President Obama's administration had completed negotiating the agreement to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA), it had one final obstacle to consummate the deal.  It had to assure that the agreement had sufficient support in Congress to assure that the President could veto any legislation that might pass Congress to invalidate the deal without the threat that the veto would be overridden by two-thirds of both the House and Senate.

He and Americans United for Change went to work in early 2015 to help set the stage for the coming battle over the Iran Nuclear Agreement by commissioning a poll by Hart Research to determine the most persuasive arguments for the agreement.

Strategic Consulting Group (SCG) organized field operations for scores of Congressional and state-wide races. In 2011, SCG joined with a number of other progressive consultants to form a group practice, called Democracy Partners.

Strategic Consulting Group, led by Creamer, and other progressive consultants across the country organized into a larger group practice of political consulting firms, forming Democracy Partners in 2011

In December 2009, conservative Fox News host Glenn Beck criticized Creamer for accompanying his wife, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, to a November 2009 state dinner at the White House (the same dinner was noted in the media for its security breaches). On his show, Beck highlighted Creamer's convictions and called Creamer's book a "prison manifesto", claiming that it had been the basis for the Affordable Care Act. Creamer later retorted that "[t]his is a man who lies about everything" and called Beck a part of a "new McCarthyist movement of the far right."

Democratic presidential campaigns expanded their field focus as well, culminating in the massive field effort for Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential Race.  Creamer was asked to teach at the "Camp Obama" sessions for early interns and organizers in that effort.

At the time, Creamer was General Consultant to Americans United for Change (AUC), and had been working closely with the Obama White House to mobilize public support for Obama's initiatives. He had served as a consultant to the Obama Campaign and the DNC for Obama's original Presidential Campaign in 2008, and his reelection campaign in 2012.

J Street was especially crucial.  Since it was founded in 2007, J Street had established itself as the major organization in the Jewish Community that was both pro-Israel and in favor of a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. By 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had come to represent a shrinking minority of more right-wing American Jews – and had increasing allied itself with the Republican Party. It had also become increasing clear that J Street represented the vast majority of American Jews.

In 2007, he published Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, which outlined Creamer's framework for a new progressive political strategy. During his five months in the Federal Prison, Creamer used his time to write a book on his experiences as a progressive organizer and strategist, and to describe the strategies necessary to create a progressive movement and realign American politics.

Robert Creamer is an American political consultant, community organizer, and author. He is the husband of congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the Representative for Illinois's 9th congressional district. His firm, Democracy Partners, works with progressive electoral and issue campaigns and has 34 partners located throughout the United States. In 2006, Creamer pled guilty to bank fraud and failure to pay withholding taxes and was sentenced to five months in federal prison.

By early fall, the pundits began writing the obits – Bush's plan to privatize Social Security was dead. In the spring of 2006, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, "The collapse of the Social Security initiative was thus more than a policy failure. It was a decisive political defeat that left Bush and Rove with no fallback ideas around which to organize domestic policy."

After the 2006 mid-term election victories, Rick Klein of the Boston Globe wrote, "Democrats made huge gains in the mid-term elections for a variety of factors – an unpopular war in Iraq, congressional scandals, frustration with Bush's style of leadership."

On April 5, 2006, Creamer was sentenced to five months in prison and 11 months of house arrest. Creamer served his five-month incarceration at the Federal Correction Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana and was released on November 3, 2006.

Creamer advised the campaign to take on the presidential road show that was intended to promote the proposal. The president formally announced his plan in his State of the Union message in January 2005. He also announced an extensive tour to sell the plan. Over the next four months he held 60 events throughout the country, focused on target congressional districts.

The closing act in the privatization battle was a celebration of the 70th anniversary of Social Security, held in August 2005. The event gave Americans United the opportunity to highlight the importance of Social Security's guaranteed benefits. AU organized 70th anniversary celebrations around the country, especially in targeted districts.  It also organized a commemoration ceremony at the Roosevelt Memorial that was widely covered nationally.

Late in 2004, President George  W. Bush began to hint that he would propose a plan to privatize Social Security. It was to be the underpinning of his ownership society – the central domestic initiative of his second term. The fight over the proposal to privatize Social Security would become one of the defining battles of Bush's second term domestic policy.

On March 11, 2004, Creamer, then the former executive director of the Illinois Public Action Fund, was indicted in federal court on 16 counts of bank fraud involving three alleged check-kiting schemes in the mid-1990s, leading several banks to experience temporary shortfalls of at least $2.3 million. Though the check kiting was widely reported in 1997, the Justice Department did not seek an indictment until 7 years later. In August 2005, Creamer pleaded guilty to one count of failure to collect $1,892 in withholding tax and one count of bank fraud, for writing checks with insufficient funds. All of the money was immediately repaid from the organization's receivables. His wife, Jan Schakowsky was not accused of any wrongdoing, although she served on the organization's board during the time the crimes occurred, and signed the IRS filings along with her husband. The U.S. district judge noted that Creamer was not a typical bank fraud defendant and that he had no intention of causing a loss. He went on to note that no one suffered "out of pocket losses," and Creamer acted not out of personal greed but in an effort to keep his community action group going without cutting programs, though prosecutors argued that Creamer paid his own $100,000 salary with fraudulently obtained funds. More than 200 people wrote letters of support on Creamer's behalf, including U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Cook County Clerk David Orr, consultant David Axelrod, and Rev. Jesse Jackson.

By 2000, Strategic Consulting Group's Campaign Management Program did 20 key swing Congressional races at a time when many Democratic political consultants still believed that the TV was the new "precinct captain." Creamer believed that person to person, door-to-door and phone contact were the critical to persuasion – and essential for serious get out the vote operations.

That was the model Creamer adopted to support his wife, Jan Schakowsky, when she first ran for Congress in 1998. Creamer and Schakowsky Campaign Manager, Jerry Morrison, put ads out across the country offering aspiring young organizers the opportunity to come to Chicago to participate in a progressive campaign for Congress and learn organizing first-hand in a "campaign school" coupled with a field program. The campaign hired 15 organizers, provide the regular training seminars with top notch political strategists. Those organizers built an army of 1,500 volunteers who identified 30,000 Schakowsky voters and turned them out door-to-door Election Day.

In fact, as late as 1998, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) did not have a national field director.

Following their 1998 victory, Creamer and Schakowsky lobbied the DCCC to hire Cathy Duvall, who had served as a DCCC regional political director, to run the DCCC's field program. Duval was hired and over time the DCCC's field operation has taken on the responsibility of consulting and supervising massive field programs in all of its swing races.

In 1997, Creamer co-founded the Strategic Consulting Group, a political consulting firm that works with issue and electoral campaigns. His clients have included MoveOn.org, Americans United for Change, and USAction. He helped organize a successful campaign to stymie the privatization of Social Security. He has acted as a consultant for campaigns geared towards ending the Iraq War, enacting comprehensive immigration reform, and passing universal health care legislation, and enacting gun violence prevention legislation. Creamer has worked on numerous Democratic Party campaigns.

Creamer was previously married to Day Piercy. He married Jan Schakowsky in 1980. She has served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois's 9th congressional district since 1999. Schakowsky and Creamer have three children and six grandchildren. They live in Evanston, Illinois.

Creamer founded the Illinois Public Action Council (later known as Illinois Citizen Action) in 1974, a statewide coalition of progressive organizations that included unions, farm groups, senior citizen organizations, community groups, consumer advocates, environmental and peace organizations. It became Illinois's largest consumer advocacy organization, advocating for lower utility rates (including the formation of a state-sponsored utility rates watchdog organization), environmental concerns, and legislation benefiting senior citizens. In addition to conducting issue mobilization campaigns to promote progressive policies in Springfield and Washington, it established a political committee that supported progressive candidates. The organization led a national shift of grass roots citizen organizations into electoral politics. At its height the organization was a substantial presence in Illinois politics. It ultimately had offices in five cities, 130 organizational affiliates and 150,000 individual members, across Illinois.

In 1974, Creamer was approached by a former door-to-door encyclopedia salesman named Marc Anderson, who believed that public interest organizations could use door-to-door techniques to organize members and raise money.  Anderson joined with Creamer in setting up the Illinois Public Action Council which immediately launched a door-to-door canvassing program.  The program eventually operated out of five offices in Illinois and contacted thousands of people each night at the door. It continued for 23 years. Anderson set up similar programs throughout the country for other Citizen Action organizations and public interest groups and environmental organizations that still use them today.

Election night 1972 ended with a declaration of victory by Walker, and his announcement that the Crosstown Expressway would not be built. Many of the decisive votes had come from the “Crosstown Corridor.” Eventually, much of the money that had been set aside to build the Crosstown Expressway was transferred to fund two major mass transit projects – building the Orange Line from downtown Chicago to Midway airport, and expending the Blue Line rapid transit service to O’Hare airport.

Creamer began his organizing career in 1970 working with Chicago's Citizen Action Program (CAP), the last project of community organizer Saul Alinsky. At CAP, Creamer was trained by the organization's Executive Director, Peter Martinez. Creamer and Martinez are now both partners in the consulting firm Democracy Partners. During his tenure, CAP successfully campaigned to reduce the sulfur dioxide in Chicago's air by almost two-thirds and stopped a major urban expressway.

In the early 1970s, Peter Martinez, then Director of the Citizens Action Program (CAP), asked Creamer to become lead organizer of the campaign to stop the Crosstown Expressway in Chicago. Had it been built, the Crosstown Expressway would have been, per mile, the most expensive highway in the history of humankind. It would also have displaced 30,000 residents and 10,000 places of business. Just as importantly, CAP felt that its construction would have continued the diversion of money to urban expressways and away from mass transit.

The campaign was organized around Catholic parishes on Chicago's Northwest and Southwest sides, as well as the town of Cicero. On the South Side, African-American churches were the main building block. It brought together a multi-racial coalition in a common battle that didn't happen often in 1970s Chicago.

Creamer has been a progressive strategist and political organizer for over 50 years, beginning during the Civil Rights and anti Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. He worked as an organizer with Saul Alinsky's last major project in Chicago. Later he founded and then led Illinois's largest coalition of progressive organizations and unions for twenty-three years. Creamer became a political consultant in 1997, and served as a consultant to the Democratic National Committee during the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Presidential election campaigns. In 2005, Creamer was one of the architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security. He has also been a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, increase the minimum wage, and pass progressive budget priorities, pass and defend the Affordable Care Act, oppose right wing judicial nominees, and pass comprehensive immigration reform.

Creamer was born in 1947. He graduated from Duke University in 1969, writing his thesis, "Duke Employees Local 77: Confrontation over Impartial Arbitration of Grievances", about the AFSCME Local 77 union. He later did graduate work in Ethics and Society at the University of Chicago.