President Obama admitted last night that his campaign will, more or less, coordinate with the SuperPAC raising unlimited corporate money to reelect Obama.
In order to continue to paint President Obama as the scourge of the special interests, the Obama campaign will again and again put out false or misleading claims. Meanwhile, they’ll convince much of the media that they are running an honest and fair campaign against dishonest Republicans.
The one man who peddles the most false Obama-vs-Special Interests is Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. Messina’s latest Huffington Post article, announcing Obama’s plan to use his cabinet to raise corporate money for reelection, is full of falsehoods and misleading claims.
Here are some of Messina’s whoppers:
“He put in place the most sweeping ethics reforms in history to close the revolving door between government and lobbyists.”
From this claim you might conclude that Obama closed the revolving door, but that’s not even close to being true.
First off, the revolving door works just fine as an in-door. Obama has hired at least 50 former lobbyists for senior administration positions, including four ex-lobbyists in his cabinet, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as chief-of-staff at Treasury, and a lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association as the chief counsel at the IRS.
The revolving-door is also spinning out lobbyists just fine, too. As early as 2009, senior Obama administration officials began cashing out to K Street firms like the Podesta Group and the Glover Park Group. In late 2010, the entire White House legislative affairs shop parlayed their experience as Obama’s lobbyists into jobs as industry lobbyists. Obama’s mortgage-subsidy chief left to work for the mortgage-industry lobby. Those are just a few.
[H]e’s overseen the most open administration ever — reversing Bush-era policies designed to limit Freedom of Information Act requests and disclosing White House visitor records so that Americans can see how their government works.
Obama has taken steps in the direction of transparency, like regularly publishing White House visitor logs, and creating a “transparency czar.” But then he abolished the position of transparency czar and replaced him with a DNC lawyer who publicly derides the virtue of transparency. The administration refuses to disclose the substance of its potentially illegal dealings with the drug industry that resulted in a Pharma-friendly ObamaCare and millions in pharma-cash for Democrats.
Obama Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan required lobbyists meeting with the Department to pledge to secrecy about the meetings. Those are just a couple of examples of the administration’s Audacity of Opacity.
On FOIA, the administration has a poor track record, and even planned to officially become less transparent.
It’s a point of pride that 98 percent of all our donations are $250 or less. Mitt Romney won’t reveal that number about his own campaign
This is misleading clap-trap. I reported last time Messina was spouting it: “Of the $31.1 million the DNC has raised in contributions this year, almost two-thirds — $19.3 million — has come from individuals giving $10,000 or more, according to my analysis of FEC data. So, judging by all available data, rich people cutting big checks are providing an overwhelming majority of Obama’s re-election money.”
The Obama campaign has a consistent story about the nature of its fundraising and the administration’s relationships with lobbyists and special interests. That story is consistently false.
