"Mr. Obama's victory marks the death of the campaign finance system"

When it's poached chicken sandwiches for lunch, Baby doesn't stand on ceremony.

We caught the sanitized portrayal of Obama's record fundraising extravaganza on local Boston TV stations this morning. Their reports were bland and insight free. They never bothered to go beyond the AP headline gushing that the LOTFW-elect's presidential campaign had "raised $104 million in the weeks around Election Day, a grand finale to a successful bid that shattered fundraising records." The story behind the story — Obama's cynical and politically astute manipulation of campaign finance laws and pandering to his own mindlessly adoring acolytes — was left on the cutting-room floor. Two cold, hard facts were nowhere to be seen or heard on morning TV. If you stayed around to read the whole article on their website, you could find the facts, ma'am, just the facts, hidden away in later paragraphs. The words of former Obama "spiritual advisor" Jeremiah Wright following Obama's throwing of Wright "under the bus" came to mind:

Whatever it takes to win.

"To diminish criticism, Mr. Obama's campaign spun the storyline that he was being bankrolled by small donors," writes Karl Rove in the Journal:

Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, calls that a "myth." CFI found that Mr. Obama raised money the old fashioned way — 74% of his funds came from large donors (those who donated more than $200) and nearly half from people who gave $1,000 or more.

But that's not the entire story. It's been reported that the Obama campaign accepted donations from untraceable, pre-paid debit cards used by Daffy Duck, Bart Simpson, Family Guy, King Kong and other questionable characters. If the FEC follows up with a report on this, it should make for interesting reading.

Mr. Obama's victory marks the death of the campaign finance system. When it was created after Watergate in 1974, the campaign finance system had two goals: reduce the influence of money in politics and level the playing field for candidates …

Ironically, the victim of this broken system is one of its principal architects — Mr. McCain. He helped craft the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform along with Sen. Russ Feingold in 2002.

No presidential candidate will ever take public financing in the general election again and risk being outspent as badly as Mr. McCain was this year.

Overall, the institute found that Obama collected about 26 percent of his total haul from people who gave less than $200 — about the same as President George W. Bush did in his 2004 campaign, but less than Democrat Howard Dean's small-donor take of 38 percent in his unsuccessful primary bid that year.

And like other campaigns, Obama's relied for nearly half of its fundraising on big donors, those who gave $1,000 or more, a finding that "should make one think twice before describing small donors as the financial engine of the Obama campaign," the institute reported.

Oh, yes. Yes. That is mine.

"On Wednesday, a spokesman for Mr. McCain suggested that Mr. Obama was trying to have it both ways, preserving the possibility of taking public money if he could not bring in enough private donations," reported the NYT way back in February of 2007:

''Is he asking for the option of whatever is the higher number?'' Matt David, the spokesman, asked.

A year later, this last February, the answer to that rhetorical question was clear:

Now, awash in private contributions, Obama and his strategists are beginning to back away from his pledge to rely solely on public money. Pressed on the issue by moderator Tim Russert at Tuesday's debate, Obama refused to restate his commitment.

"Obama, 47, was the first major party nominee to bypass taxpayer funding for the general election, and his large base of donors [Don't they mean his base of large donors?] gave him a massive advantage over McCain," reports Bloomberg.com:

During the last six weeks of the campaign, the Democrat was able to run twice as many commercials as McCain, 72, according to the Nielsen Co.

It never fails to astonish us that our fellow Americans are still buying what admen are selling. One born every minute?

Update: Forget about ads. We're buying what Mind of Mog's Carnival of the Cats #247 is selling, all cats all the time. One of the most beautiful blogs around.

Comments

[commander0]

Ummmmm, no sh**. McCain hoist by his own unconstitutional petard. The dumb ass. Now we have this lunatic. Oi.

[Webutante]

Wonderful post, Sissy.

[goompa]

An excellent picture of American politics. It is one of basically unprincipled people who have no hesitancy to doing the dishonest thing if there is little chance of failure.