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.
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.
Early life and education 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.
During his high school years, Creamer lived in Shreveport, Louisiana where he became involved in the civil rights movement. At Duke, he expanded his activity as a student activist organizing for civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, and economic justice.
Creamer helped organize "the Duke Vigil" after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The silent "Vigil", which ultimately included thousands of students, demanded that Duke increase the pay of its mainly African American non-academic employees, take steps leading to the recognition of their union (Local 77 of AFSCME), and that the President of the university withdraw from the all-white Hope Valley Country Club. Soon after it began these demands were bolstered by a strike of the non-academic employee union and many in the Duke faculty. Four days after the Vigil began, the University Administration came to an agreement with the demonstrators that ultimately met the protester's demands. Creamer served as Chair of the Vigil Strategy Committee.
Career
Community organizing and political consultancy 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.
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.
However, the organization had money problems, defaulting on several loans and owing back taxes. It was also criticized for the support it received from special interest groups, including personal injury lawyers and a loan from what was then one of the world's most profitable casinos, and for Creamer's failure to register as a lobbyist under Illinois state law. Creamer directed the organization for 23 years. He resigned after being questioned by federal law enforcement about a Citizen Action affiliate's $1 million bank overdraft.
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.
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.
During the Obama Administration Creamer worked closely with the White House to coordinate the effort to mobilize support for the Iran nuclear agreement, pass the Affordable Care Act, mobilize support for Obama nominees to the Supreme Court, and pass the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
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
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.Signers of the Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality . The Progressive Agenda.
To document the history of community organizing during the 20th Century in the United States, the Center for Community Change created the Community Organizer Genealogy Project. Brown University maintains this archive, which includes an interview with Creamer concerning his work and career.
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.
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.
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.
Stopping the Crosstown Expressway in Chicago 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.
The campaign's major constituency consisted of people who lived along the proposed route. In many areas it engaged the pastors of the big Catholic parishes that would be impacted. It also involved leaders in the parishes that mattered to the pastor: the group that ran the Holy Name, the Altar and Rosary societies; the crew that ran the church bingo; the leaders at the church parochial school. In some sections it engaged more traditional community organizations, small business associations and block clubs.
Many of the tactics involved "actions" where middle-class whites and blacks took on public officials with TV cameras in tow. CAP held mass meetings with officials. It released reports on the impact of the highway and it organized a march of 10,000 people near Midway Airport. In the end, the coalition of groups conducted a voter education project that helped the Democrat Dan Walker defeat Republican Governor Dick Ogilvie. Walker had promised to kill the project if he won and transfer the funding to mass transit.CAP Achieves at the University of Illinois, Chicago, https://findingaids.library.uic.edu/sc/MSCAP_75.xml , Box 1, Folders 3 and 4 and Box 5, Folders 40, 41 and 42.
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.
Bringing Field Operations Back to Center Stage in National Democratic Campaigns 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.
In addition to recruiting members, raising money and motivating people to take action on issues, these door-to-door canvasses would tell voters about the endorsements of the Illinois Public Action's PAC. Senator Paul Simon often credited his defeat of Republican Chuck Percy to Illinois Public Action's canvass.
Creamer worked for years in Chicago, where door-to-door operations were often key to winning elections, and where progressive candidates often had to compete with the patronage army of the first Mayor Richard Daley. One of those progressive candidates was Abner Mikva, a progressive icon who was elected to Congress against the Daley machine by organizing his own army of volunteers.