Change the Subject

Barack Obama is a lawyer, and over the past week he’s applied a well-worn lawyer’s creed. When your client (in this his administration) is guilty (in this case, of malefeasance, bad decision-making and overall political ineptness with regard to jobs creation and the economy), change the subject.

The New York Times reports:

PHILADELPHIA — With his party facing losses in next month’s election, President Obama pressed his argument Sunday that the opposition is trying to steal the election with secret special-interest money, possibly including money from foreign companies.

In a speech to a large rally here and in a new television advertisement, Mr. Obama and the Democrats escalated their efforts to present the Republicans as captive to moneyed interests. But Republicans and their allies fired back, dismissing the assertions as desperate last-minute allegations with no evidence to back them up.

Even the Times, a true and generally unquestioning ally of the President, found his unsubstantiated allegations to be a bit much. The President’s comments have been coordinated with a DNC national TV commercial that suggests: “They’re stealing our democracy, spending millions from secret donors to elect Republicans to do their bidding in Congress.” A bit later, the ominous TV voice says, “It appears they’ve even taken secret foreign money to influence our elections.”

Not a shred of evidence is presented to substantiate this, but what is far more ironic is that real evidence of foriegn campaign contributions did surface during the Obama presidential campaign. Takes one to know one. The Washington Examiner provides a few details.

Here’s The Washington Post on this back in October 2008:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed. Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged.”

And here’s our own Washington Examiner editorial from the time:

“Then there’s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that’s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers’ cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.”

The MSM generally chose to ignore hard evidence of foreign contributions to candidate Obama (as they chose to ignore any fact that reflected badly on their candidate, and it was never fully investigated. And today, when the unemployment rate has been 9.5 percent for 14 straight months, President Obama seems more concerned about the Chamber of Commerces’ fund-raising tactics than correcting his many strategic mistakes in dealing with the economy.

David Zurawik comments:

Here is what's so appalling to me: The ad makes the totally unsubstantiated charge that the Chamber of Commerce is taking money from foreign interests and using it to "steal our democracy." And worse, President Obama is out on the campaign trail, according to the New York Times, creating an echo chamber by making the same reckless claims just as the ad hits the airwaves. And when CBS newsman Bob Schieffer Sunday asks David Axelrod if there is any proof for the claim, the senior Obama aide says they don't need proof -- it's up to the Chamber of Commerce to prove it isn't true.

The Democratic National Commitee is using the same sort of tactic and logic that Sen. Joe McCarthy used in the 1950s: Level a headline-grabbing and unsubstantiated charge, like the State Department is filled with communists, and then say it is up to the State Department and the employees so charged to prove it is not true.

Barack Obama promised us all a “new kind of politics”—bipartisan, transparent, you know, all that good stuff. How’s that working out for all of us?