A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and
divines.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Senator Barack Obama, showing a steely resolve and
harder-than-imagined edge, bit the bullet and abandoned the measly
$85 million of federal campaign dollars for the general election
campaign. Heck, he will raise
more than that amount in a month, this month in fact.
Obama will, no doubt, be kicked around by Senator McCain and a
lot of good government ("goo-goo") types because he decided to go
into the private money markets of a sort, one dominated by small
donors and not Wall Streeters, to raise unprecedented amounts of
cash. Rather than taking Caesar's coin and restricting himself to
the paltry sums deemed morally acceptable by enlightened people or
goo-goos, he is going to embrace his inner blogger and stick with
those faithful Internet contributors for the duration of the
general election campaign.
As the Great Reformer of American campaign finance, Arizona
Senator John McCain is about to be hoisted on a petard of his own
making.
Obama will be lambasted for supposedly violating an earlier
pledge to work out some kind of agreement with McCain to come up
with a fine-tuned, optimal, perfectly calibrated amount of campaign
money to be spent by each side, presumably within the
speech-rationing framework of the federal campaign law.
Fogettaboutit. He changed his mind.
For all his gauzy talk of change and caring and bringing the
country together, Illinois Senator Barack Obama appears to be made
of pretty tough fiber. Blowing off conventional liberal thinking,
enduring charges of hypocrisy and flip-flopping, and playing to his
remarkable strength in base-of-the-pyramid, online marketing and
organization, he is ignoring left-leaning campaign reform advocates
and editorial writers whom, he calculates, will eventually come
around to his side. He is going for the gold.
What about GOP attacks on Obama's campaign spending? Seriously,
who is going to listen to Republicans complain about Big Money in
this or any other campaign? Other than Senator McCain, who declined
federal money in the primary campaign, not many Pachyderms could
bring themselves to launch such a Jacobinical attack, at least with
a straight face anyway. Besides, with McCain's campaign awash in
lobbyists, he would be subject to pretty effective push-back, given
the lobbyist-free fundraising capabilities of the Obama campaign.
And the Republican National Committee is doing very nicely, thank
you, with traditional fundraising, beating the Democratic National
Committee in the traditional game of political fundraising.
In truth, Obama may want to just steer clear of the big-money
Clintonistas coming on board, just to preserve his independence.
But there is little chance of that happening either. Campaign
finance is just not a big issue for the American people now or
ever. The economy, the war, oil prices and health care dwarf the
quibbling over how many millions of dollars should be spent on
campaign advertising versus that which is spent on cars, soap, cell
phones or beer. You decide.
Through his electronic grassroots fundraising, Obama has changed
the rules of the game and inoculated himself from the charge that
his fundraising success is anything other than a quintessentially
democratic, qua egalitarian, phenomenon which engages more
citizens in the political process than any number of Hollywood,
Silicon Valley, Pioneer, Wall Street, and K Street fundraising
events combined. Power to the people, bro!
Senator Obama seems to have taken to heart Ralph Waldo Emerson's
famous words about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of
little minds. He is living large in the green fields of Internet
fundraising.
topics:
Health Care, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hollywood, Law, NATO, Oil
