Rogers reveals that as of July 2nd, the Obama campaign and affiliates has raised $471,400,000. The Romney campaign comes in at $264,223,126. Yet if major labor union promises are fulfilled, President Obama will be the main beneficiary of the more than $400 million labor leaders have promised to spend electing Democrats in 2012. If only 15 percent of that money is directed towards Obama’s campaign, that pushes his above total over $530 million, giving him a 2-1 spending edge over Romney. Thus, President Obama’s lament that he cannot win if he is being “outspent 10-1″ is revealed to be utterly disingenuous.
One other X factor rarely mentioned in the media is the amount of money Obama is spending — courtesy of the taxpayers — on trips that bear a striking resemblance to election campaigning. In April, RNC chairman Reince Priebus wrote a letter of complaint to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), noting that President Obama “has been passing off campaign travel as ‘official events,’ thereby allowing taxpayers rather than his campaign to pay for his reelection efforts.” White House spokesman Eric Schultz countered that such travel “has been part of the president’s official responsibility.” Yet a report complied in 2011 by Brendan Doherty, a U.S. naval academy assistant professor and expert on presidential travel revealed that Obama had conducted “official business” in critical battleground states more times in a shorter time span than either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.
Reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes the difference between official business and overt campaigning, but it would be exceedingly difficult to argue that there is no bleed-through whatsoever and that total campaign expenditures on such trips equal zero. It is hard to put a dollar amount on the advantages of incumbency, but that advantage exists, nonetheless.
Yet even without incumbency, President Obama outspent Sen. McCain in 2008 by a more than 2-to-1 margin of $778 million to $384 million. He was able to do this because he broke his promise to finance that campaign using public funding, despite answering “yes” regarding the subject on a questionnaire from the Midwest Democracy Network. “I have been a long-time advocate for public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests,” the president wrote at the time.
One year later, Obama was more than willing to take money from “moneyed special interests” including his favorite class-warfare whipping boys in the financial sector. They accounted for 20 percent of what Obama’s top fundraisers collected during the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, the $15.8 million collected by Obama from Wall Street during his 2008 run represented the largest take by any politician in history.
Yet in spite of the realities of both 2008 and today, the president continues to portray himself as a victim. “In 2008 everything was new and exciting about our campaign,” Obama said, according to a recording of a call obtained by The Daily Beast. ”And now I’m the incumbent president. I’ve got grey hair. People have seen disappointment because folks had a vision of change happening immediately. And it turns out change is hard.” Joe Trippi, a leading Democratic strategist explained the rationale behind such an effort. “People have to perceive that they are threatened before they give,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
In other words, never let a crisis — even a totally manufactured one built on a tissue of lies — go to waste.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Pages: 1 2
