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As only he can do, Karl Rove drills into Obama’s fundraising results. This will help you understand why he has stiffed the Senate and House Dems.
Last July, President Obama’s campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign’s goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.
Seven months later, I’m even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.
It’s not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor’s pace).
The president faces other fund-raising challenges. For one, there are only so many times any candidate can go to New York or Hollywood or San Francisco for a $1 million fund-raiser. Team Obama is running through its easy money venues quickly.
For another, many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again. The Obama campaign itself reported that fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign. That’s about one-quarter to one-third of a typical renewal rate: In the first quarter of the Bush re-election campaign, for example, about 20% of the donors renewed their support. …
Ross Douthat, NY Times columnist, tries to figure why Obama’s polls are so weak.
Why aren’t President Obama’s poll numbers higher? That’s the question unsettling the Washington conventional wisdom this week. Amid improving economic growth, a grim and grinding Republican primary campaign and the White House’s skillful exploitation of Rush Limbaugh’s boorishness, Obama’s reelection was being taken almost for granted in many political circles. But then came a pair of surveys – one from the Washington Post and ABC and one from the New York Times and CBS – that showed the president’s approval ratings sinking this month back toward the lower 40s after a steady winter climb.
Everyone has a theory. Maybe it’s rising gas prices. Maybe it’s anxieties over Iran and Afghanistan. Maybe it’s a backlash against the president’s overconfident selling of a still-weak recovery. Maybe it’s evidence that the White House’s claim that religious resistance to its contraception mandate represents a “war on women” isn’t finding as many takers as the media narrative suggested.
But maybe the specific “why” doesn’t really matter all that much. Whatever tugged the president’s numbers back downward is clearly a small issue (or issues), not something huge and earth-shattering – and it’s precisely that smallness that should have the White House worried.
The message of the latest polls isn’t that springtime gas prices and culture war debates will determine who wins the White House in November. Rather, it’s that Obama’s political position is tenuous enough that it doesn’t take all that much bad news – particularly on the economy — for his approval ratings to go negative. …
Remember the end of last week when we had Ann Coulter who wrote on the White House campaign to keep Romney off the ballot. Of course, the press wants to help their man. Ross Douthat spotted The New Yorker doing it’s best for Obama.
And the beat goes on: Mitt Romney loses a couple of primaries that he was always likely to lose (while winning the majority of the night’s available delegates), and there’s a rush to declare that the race might still be wide open, Rick Santorum might be the nominee, we might have a convention surprise, etc. This time, it’s the New Yorker’s John Cassidy’s turn to set my teeth on edge: …
So how do the Dems deal with the shortages of cash? Andrew Malcolm notes the number of campaign bundlers invited to last week’s state dinner. The pliant press was invited too.
… state dinners are Big Deals in the suck-up social hierarchy of Big Deals in D.C. and beyond. Soldiers are assigned to stand stiffly at attention watching the designer dresses pose and mingle. Music plays. The presidential party and Joe too make grand entrances down the staircase from the private quarters.
People would bundle a lot of campaign cash to wangle a pair of those invites.
Funny you mention that because dozens of the 360 attendees Wednesday evening were actually current money bundlers for Barack’s reelection campaign that wants a billion bucks this time. Guys like Harvey Weinstein, Barry Karas, Gerald Acker and some of the boys from the Chicago gang, Neil Bluhm, Wally Brewster Jr. and, of course, Fred ‘Count on Me’ Eychaner.
These are not your middle-class Americans that Obama says he sees through his teleprompter. They donate to the max, then collect similar checks from numerous friends who do the same to their friends. Like those junior high chain letters, only this money’s wonderfully real.
They say raking in millions to enable a politician to buy an office also buys the bundler special access later that ordinary Americans simply don’t have. Well, first, why should un-rich Americans have access to elected representatives simply for donating a vote? How does that help the current system work? Or just because a citizen pays their taxes, unlike three dozen Obama aides, according to the IRS? Makes no sense in 2012.
And anyway that special access stuff is bunk. If being a multi-million-dollar campaign bundler really bought special treatment, then one of them from somewhere such as Oklahoma would have gotten like a $545 million federal loan guarantee for his solar panel company that was going bust. …
Marc Thiessen shows how this works for the crony capitalists.
In a speech this morning to the United Auto Workers Local 12 Hall in Toledo, Ohio, Vice President Joe Biden declared:
“Stated simply, we’re about promoting the private sector. They’re about protecting the privileged sector. We’re a fair shot, and a fair shake.… And ultimately that’s what this election is all about. It’s about a choice. A choice between a system that’s rigged, and one that’s fair.”
This is laughable. If Obama and Biden want to run on the idea that Republicans are defending a “rigged” system while they are “promoting the private sector,” they are going to run into a little problem of their own making called the Obama green energy program. …
Carl Cannon posts on the Rutherford B. Hays misquote.
… Speaking yesterday about energy, the president found it necessary to casually slander Rutherford B. Hayes. In Obama’s telling, Hayes was a Luddite who, when confronted with the invention of the telephone, wondered who would ever want to use one.
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama intoned. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
It’s hard to know where to begin unraveling this, but a good place to start is the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, where resident scholar Nan Card confirmed to any journalist who bothered calling her — which is more than you can say for the White House speechwriting crew — that Hayes never said anything of the kind about the telephone, or any other invention.
According to contemporaneous accounts, what Hayes really said when he first used the phone was, “That is wonderful.”
In fact, Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House, along with the first typewriter, and invited Thomas Edison in for a visit to show off the phonograph — and was no one’s idea of a technophobe. “He really was the opposite,” Card told Benjy Sarlin of Talking Points Memo. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”
This is not first time Obama and his communications team have fallen for a quote they apparently ripped from the Internet. …