The Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel and Alexander Burns are surely going to earn an expletive laden call from the White House for publishing this story
(Politico) Democrats have seized on Republicans as the party of unlimited secret money.
The only problem: so are Democrats.
In recent days, Obama released an ad blasting “secretive oil billionaires†for attacks on him, Nancy Pelosi unveiled a campaign slogan calling for “a new politics free of special interest influence,†and the Democratic National Committee released a web ad accusing Mitt Romney of lying about his ties to a super PAC that’s spent millions supporting him.
Maybe that would have sounded better in 2008, when Obama put the kibosh on the Democratic outside money infrastructure — or even in 2010, when Obama led a chorus of Democrats assailing Republicans’ outside spending.
But this year, Democrats are playing the same game. Obama’s team has blessed a network of super PACs trying to raise the same seven-figure checks as Romney’s. And Obama’s allies have gone even further than Romney’s, setting up non-profit groups that do not disclose their donors at all.
There does actually come a point when money in politics has gone too far. Instead of providing a sound policy for America to get elected, politicians attempt to “buy” an election, and one need not look any further than ….. Barack Obama! Team Obama wants to raise $1 billion for his re-election. He refused to take public money for the 2008 election, instead relying on his big donor base of really rich people, along with some folks giving $3. And, now, after complaining about Super PACs and secret money, Obama and the Democrats are doing exactly the same.
But party leaders suggest the secret money attacks forecast in Obama’s ad – his first of the cycle – are part of a broader messaging strategy that seeks to cast Republicans as secretive and unethical pawns of big business who couldn’t care less about the plight of regular Americans.
“The reason that it was something we led with was that it’s part of the contrast,†said DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz when asked about why Obama’s ad began with a secret money attack rather than the gauzy positive themes that typically define inaugural ads.
What else can Obama do? His 1st term has been a mess. He has a few wins, mostly in the arena of being a warmonger, which should make his base truly happy, eh? His domestic policies have been a disaster, taking a recession and extending it, as well as making it worse. He wasted almost a trillion dollars on his pork laden Stimulus. He and the Dems wasted a year on their extraordinarily unpopular ObamaCare. Rather interesting that he really doesn’t want to talk about them now. There are more people on food stamps than ever before. People are abandoning the workforce in record numbers. The price of gasoline has stagnated in the mid-to-upper $3 range, causing the price of real goods to rise. His idiotic investments in “clean energy” have actually turned the industry into a joke. And so forth and so on.
And Obama has no new ideas to solve the problems. Just an escalating whine about income inequality and people doing their fair share, which means giving the Central Government more money to waste on pet projects for campaign donors in order to get more campaign cash to get re-elected. So, Obama will whine about “secretive” money while taking the same. Will he take money from Mickey Mouse, Dela Ware, and Anonymous this cycle? Will he abandon the use of credit card donation filters as he did last cycle? And will his whines make a difference, since they failed miserably during the 2010 midterms?
Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.
