Richard Baehr in the American Thinker: Obama attempting to buy the presidency

Yesterday I wrote about Barack Obama's the obscene amounts of cash for his "Change We Can Believe In" campaign. Yeah, it's legal, but remember, Obama explicitly promised that he would accept public financing--and the spending limits it holds candidates to--and play by the same rules as John McCain.

But after clinching the Democratic nomination, Obama went back on his promise, and complained that public financing is broken. And I'm going to say it again: Obama broke it.

Richard Baehr has more to say in today's American Thinker:

The state where the Obama campaign has been carpet bombing the airwaves most vigorously this past weekend was West Virginia. If you watched TV over the weekend in the Mountaineer State, you could not have missed the Obama ads -- an extraordinary buy of $1.2 million per day for 5 days, with ads running in every media market in the state. The McCain campaign, had it spent all of its $84 million for the general election on TV ads, would have had $1.4 million to spend per day for campaign ads for the last two months for all 50 states. Obama has just spent almost that much per day in one state with fewer than 2 million people and but 5 Electoral College votes.

In every battleground state the story is the same. Obama has run ads 3 to 4 times as often as McCain and the gap is widening each week. Most of the Obama ads, of course, are negative ads about McCain, and in most cases false or misleading according to factcheck.org. It is as if one basketball team is playing with a rule that its players foul out after committing 2 personal fouls, while and its opponent is allowed six personal fouls per player. Or maybe one basket is two feet lower, or one team can not include any player over six feet tall.

In essence, we do not have a fair fight. Obama has always liked it that way when it comes to his campaigns. Obama said at one point that if the McCain campaign brought "a knife to the fight, we would bring a gun" -- revealing that he did not care about a level playing field . Anyone familiar with his campaign against Alice Palmer in 1996, where he used challenges to nominating petitions to completely eliminate all his challengers in the Democratic primary for the Illinois State Senate, should have realized this aspect of Obama's campaign style. Michael Barone's "The Coming Obama Thugocracy" describes Obama's effort to silence critics. And of course, there were the revelations by the Chicago Tribune of two sex scandals relating to Obama's opponents in the U.S. Senate race in 2004: the first served to eliminate Blair Hull, who held a solid lead over Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination before the story broke, and the other forced Jack Ryan, the GOP nominee, from the race. Did Obama or his campaign have a role in supplying damaging information to the media about these stories (Obama's campaign manger once worked for the Tribune), or is he just the luckiest politician alive?

More...

How a candidate runs his campaign is an important indicator of the character of the man or woman we may elect. In the case of Obama, the evidence is that he is a very skillful, ambitious, and driven candidate, and also a very, very cynical and dishonest one. What Obama says means very little. He is after all a clever lawyer. We have had a recent experience with a very smart lawyer as President and how he parsed words. In Obama's case, the lies have been pretty blatant, despite the best spinning efforts by the campaign.

Election Day is 15 days away.

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