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.
Technorati tags: democrats elections Barack Obama Obama Politics vote McCain John McCain Republican West Virginia
5 comments:
The Dems and their go-for-broke environmental platform lost West Virginia forever in 2000, and it was entirely their fault.
I covered the coal industry extensively in the last decade. Through the 1990s, the West Virginia coal industry, profoundly union and profoundly Democratic, was stabbed in the back by the Dems on coal, PM 2.5 regs and global warming. And they knew it.
Then, in 2000, Dems had the nerve to nominate Al Gore, the enemy of coal, and then go back to the West Virginia UMWA and demand allegiance. They got a lukewarm endorsement from the union leadership but everyone knew it was for show ... West Virginians voted strongly for Bush and now instead of being characterized as stalwart, reliable union men and women, after eight years of G.O.P. support, they're now mouth-breathing, spittle-flying deer-killers who are supposed to be happy that Obama is looking out for the little guy.
None of the Gore-global warming-coal connection is ever broached in any of the MSM analyses I see about West Virginia ... not even the lengthy AP report over the weekend. I guess the truth hurts too much to bring it up.
=)
Axelrod to Obama before the campaign: "You wanna know how to get the presidency? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get the presidency. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?"
Cribbed from a certain movie...
John,
Do you realize that McCain's campaign is ranked worse than Obama's by the non-partisan Open Secrets money tracking organization in terms of "Full Disclosure" about their donors? Obama's in the 90th percentile and McCain's down in the 80th.
This whole baloney of going after real Americans just because they're contributing to Obama more than they are to McCain is the ultimate in sour grapes.
Heck, McCain was telling everyone who would listen that it'd be ideal to have real Americans giving small donations to candidates en masse as he praised what Howard Dean had been doing in terms of his short-lived 2004 presidential campaign.
My how times have changed.
If McCain had a nickel for every time he and his supporters whined about this you guys could get $150mil in a month too.
PS: Brrrodie...
I hope you've canceled all your fishing trips to West Virginia's once-great mountain streams.
Thanks to the last 8 years of Pres. Bush the "mining" industry has destroyed Appalachia's flora and fauna up and down the state, turning all that coal into money that goes straight to Wall Street ... with those "profoundly union" West Virginians seeing nary a penny of it.
And once the Republican-supporting Wall Street fat cats have stripped out the last bit of every coal seam in West Virginia there'll be nothing left for people who live there ... no coal, no tourism, not even anything for a dad and his boy to go catch while camping in the woods.
But you go right on ahead and keep on lying about Obama and the Dems if it makes you feel better.
PPS: did the article's author bother to actually read up on the 2004 Senate race in Illinois?
It was retired Gen. John Borling's campaign manager who publicized the Ryans' divorce papers before the GOP primary. While the media (incl the Trib) did report on the fact that this numbnuts was running around yelling "Look what I got here!" none of them (IIRC) actually published anything about Jack Ryan's divorce details before the primary.
Gen. Borling fired that guy as soon as this all came to light. And the media, including the Trib, went to court in California to get the previously public records re-opened because Borling's former campaign mgr. had broken the story with his illicit copy of the paperwork.
Post a Comment