A Clarification On Obama-Chamber of Commerce Spat

I posted several articles and wrote a couple of my own regarding this "October" surprise by our inept administration.  I promise this is the last one unless events warrant posting more on this subject.

It dawned on me that I never explained well how Obama campaign in 2008 accomplished what, according to NYT and Fact Check, they are baselessly accusing the Chamber of.

The Chamber of Commerce collects $100,000 in membership dues from foreigners out of a $200 million operating budget (0.0005% of the budget is foreign contributions) and spends some of that budget on campaign ads.

Yet Obama adviser David Axelrod says it's up to the Chamber to prove it's innocent.

There are a couple of odd things here. One is that the 2008 Obama campaign, by deliberately not using the address-verification software most enterprises use to determine it's really your credit card, took in a lot more illegal foreign money than its rivals.  In fact, the McCain campaign played by the book and, as Pamela Geller found, were clean of these types of charges.  The Obama folks may be projecting their own sins on their opponents.

The other is that this charge of foreign money doesn't fit into any familiar political narrative. At least when the Obamaites attack evil rich people, some voters think of 19th-century caricatures of fat cats (and ignore the fact that Obama carried voters with incomes over $200,000 in 2008).

Foreign Villains

But who are these evil foreigners who are trying to inject their dirty money into American campaigns? The guys who got the jobs that were supposedly outsourced from Youngstown, Ohio? Americans who gave up their citizenship to avoid taxes? James Bond villains like Auric Goldfinger?

I seem to remember that it was candidate Barack Obama (not John McCain or Hillary Clinton) who gave a big election year speech in the Tiergarten in Berlin. It was Obama cheerleaders who told us that foreigners would love us once again if we sent George W. Bush back to Texas and installed their multicultural champion in the White House.

Back in 2008, we were supposed to vote for the candidate foreigners loved. Now, in 2010, we are supposed to vote against the party foreigners support.

You can be pretty sure that this is not where the Obama Democrats wanted or expected to be three weeks before the 2010 election. They operated on the assumption that history is a story of progress from no government to big government and that American voters would be grateful for little bits of economic redistribution, like the $400 tax rebate in the 2009 stimulus package.

Obama likes to say D in Democrat stands for drive (as in driving forward). Instead, it looks like D stands for demagoguery and desperation.