Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, October 11, 2010 9:45:46 PM
It used to be that many voters were considered open season by both political parties until the end of October. This rule was especially firm in a non-Presidential election, where the issues were not as focused and the turnout was lighter.
Two things are different now. One is early voting, which means that many voters (and more of the likely ones) make up their minds almost a month earlier than that. The second one is the tiresome generational stuff I keep bringing up. I understand that I get annoying with it, but think about it: what do the American periods of 1770-1785, 1850-65, 1930-45 and the present have in comon? Different issues, but all of them with public debate turning into Mexican cockfights. One of the byproducts of such an atmosphere is that more than half the country had their minds made up on the issues, and then went in search of a candidate to fit them.
Like Obama in 2007. And the Tea Party this year- well, actually last year, but they were under the media radar until very late last year.
The point being, the results are not in, but the polling has been disastrous for the Democrats since last Spring, and have gotten worse. Whatever money they had has not moved them. The raw candidates, with all of their flaws, that came out of the Republican primary process has not moved them.
Everybody knows that negative politicking is a double edged sword. But everybody also knows (especially in Chicago) that, if you don't have anything else in your quiver, what is there to lose?
So have at it they will. The most entertaining to date is the attempt to connect "foriegn money", the evil Chamber of Commerce, "Bush people" (mainly Karl Rove) and GOP campaign donations. All rolled together by the DNC in a cute little spot, featuring a woman being mugged and a slo-mo of Chinese money being fanned onto a table.
And the President himself is laying it out for any crowd of college kids he can cull together for an afternoon away from classes.
The irony of all this is that the single largest violation of FEC rules in our history- before Obama- was the Clinton '96 campaign, where "bundling" donations became such a thing, especially with Charlie Trie and the Chinese connections (even more irony) that exemplified the practice. Bundling was a rich donor passing out cash to employees or supporters and they in turn writing out political donations to candidates under the legal limit for individuals. 1996 set a record for dry cleaner owners sending in checks at the legal max.
As with Obama, so much of the overt stuff happened late in the campaign that the election was long over before the FEC had anything in their hands. Obama made Clinton look small time. How?
His websites turned off their AVS (address verification), so you could donate under $200 as many times as you wanted to, with the same card number. Under that amount, there is no legal need for record keeping of any kind. No names, no occupations, nothing.
Well, Obama declined any public funding in 2008. And he raised almost a BILLION dollars, almost half of it in the last 45 days before the election. That's ten mil a day, if anybody's asking.
And this is the man now taking the Republicans to task for corporate donations! When questioned about it on CBS last weekend, Dave Axelrod conceded that they could not label any part of it as "illegal".
That's not the point, you see. It's Saul Alinsky again, and his "Rules For Radicals". If you want to sell a policy, you have to tell a story. And every story has a villain.
This will all get worse as November approaches. Nothing is working, and Obama is all in at the poker table.I'll think about this, the next time I get lectured for not being able to conduct civil political discourse in public.
It won't change anything that way, but it will feed my inner amusement.