Billionaire Attack On Obama

Obama seems to be doing a pretty good job of staying away from the media during his vacation. But fear not! The media have filled the void with nothing but hate stories, mostly from the mosqueteers (as Jon Stewart calls them).

Anyway, here's a story in the New Yorker about a couple of billionaire libertarians and their war on Obama. It's tough out there for a billionaire:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus. Read the whole thing at the New Yorker

Election in the Hands of Elitist Snobs

Obama has had to operate on two fronts -- raise money for his campaign and get his message out. 

Meanwhile, the meek democrats are not backing Obama as forcefully as they should be and the elitist snobs, the real ones with all the money, the ones who spend more money to attend a fundraiser than most people make in a year, are attending McCain's and Obama's fundraisers. 

It is they who will decide who wins (if we let them). Can you imagine the good things all that money could do? I wish Obama could just ignore the monied people and host $50 fundraisers. But I know that's not realistic. 

Right now, Hillary's elitist snobs are not that into Obama and are withholding their money and their support and making a mockery of what should be an easy election to win. As far as I can tell, Hillary is sending mixed messages and prompting her supporters to doubt Obama. I have lost all respect for Hillary Clinton. I'm hoping that none of their money will matter in the end. 

It's sad really. But just keep this in mind, Americans can withstand a McCain if it comes to that. We've made it through Bush, we'll get through McCain. It won't be pretty but it will likely be just four years. 

Can you tell I'm feeling a little down on this election this morning?

Obama Transforming the Party

"obama is leading a movement"

Obama Beats Hillary and McCain in April Fundraising

cnn: Sen. Barack Obama raised millions more than his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain in April. Obama brought in $31 million, his campaign announced Tuesday.

Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, raised $22 million in April, campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said. McCain's take of more than $18.5 million was a new high for the Arizona senator, according to his campaign's monthly finance report.

Obama, the Democratic front-runner, has $37.3 million remaining for his Democratic primary campaign, plus another $9.2 million set aside for a general election contest, his campaign announced.

Obama: The Hot Startup

in the atlantic, joshua green tells of obama's money making prowess and how he's seen by silicon valley as the hot startup. in the the technology world, youth isn't seen as a disadvantage. the story is a great read but i'd make a stronger argument-- that yes, the obama camp is raising boatloads of money because of the campaign's superior use of technology, but it's obama's progressive thinking that is attracting the money.
excerpts:

The story of Obama’s success is very much a story about money. It provided his initial credibility. It paid for his impressive campaign operation. It allowed him first to compete with, and then to overwhelm, the most powerful Democratic family in a generation—one that understood the power of money in politics and commanded a network of wealthy donors that has financed the Democratic Party for years.

What’s intriguing to Democrats and worrisome to Republicans is how someone lacking these deep connections to traditional sources of wealth could raise so much money so quickly. How did he do it? The answer is that he built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.

Here’s another thing: he is doing it almost effortlessly. That is to say, in an era when the imperative for campaign dollars demands more and more of a politician’s time and lurks behind so many recent scandals (including the auctioning-off of the Lincoln Bedroom), Obama has raised more money than anybody else without plumbing ethical gray areas or even spending much of his own time soliciting donations. During the month of February, for example, his campaign raised a record-setting $55 million—$45 million of it over the Internet—without the candidate himself hosting a single fund-raiser. The money just came rolling in.

Obama’s campaign is admired by insiders of both parties for its functional beauty—not just admired but gawked at, like some futuristic concept car leaking rocket vapor at an auto show. Obama’s campaign has made a similar leap in how it has applied technology to the practices of raising money and organizing, and it is already the clear model for everyone else.

To get a better sense of why it has succeeded, I opted to undergo the full tech immersion while reporting this piece, and soon had Obama ring tones on my phone, new networks of online “friends,” text-message updates from the campaign, and regular e-mails from its manager, all gently encouraging me to give money, volunteer time, bring in new friends, and generally reorient my life in ways that were made to seem hip and fun—and inexorably aimed at the greater glory of Barack Obama. How Obama arrived at this new model for campaigning is a tale of foresight and circumstance, his campaign’s enterprise and his opponent’s shortsightedness, and it has as much to do with Silicon Valley as it does with Washington politics.
.....

Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. But he was familiar to Silicon Valley in at least one way: like a hot Internet start-up in the glory years, he had great buzz, a compelling pitch, and no money to back it up. He wasn’t anybody’s obvious bet to succeed, not least because the market for a Democratic nominee already had its Microsoft.

This being Silicon Valley, however, Obama was quickly embraced. A few days before Obama declared, John Roos hosted a fund-raiser at his home, attended by Gorenberg and many other prominent figures. This sent an important signal to the community and added to Obama’s local mystique. “There is a lot of good feeling for the Clintons in California,” says Peter Leyden, the director of the New Politics Institute in San Francisco, a tech-focused think tank that is neutral in the presidential race. “But once the community here experienced Obama, that started to break up really quickly.”

........

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley’s unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama’s major shortcomings—his youth, his inexperience—here counted as prime assets.

I asked Roos, the personification of a buttoned-down corporate attorney, if there had been concerns about Obama’s limited CV, and for a moment he looked as if he might burst out laughing. “No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, ‘You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience,’” he explained, after a diplomatic pause. “Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook. And I’ll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.”

This was the dominant refrain as I traveled around the Valley. From a policy standpoint, there are many reasons for tech-minded types to support Obama, including his pledge to establish a chief technology officer for the federal government and to radically increase its transparency by making most government data available online. “Barack recognizes that people in Silicon Valley are not just talking about a set of technical questions,” Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and noted Valley demigod, told me. “It’s a broader generational issue of how to architect and orient the government on important issues, from privacy to security to competition, in ways that open up the process to everyone.”

The Pennsylvania Lowdown

the day before and we're swamped with what could be and where things stand.
obama has at least one thing in his favor and that is the approximate 325,000 people who are new democrats or have switched parties to vote. these people haven't been included in polling.
recent polls suggest hillary is gaining.
a new rasmussen poll puts her ahead by 5 percentage points, 49 to 44.
an insider advantage poll puts her ahead by 10 points, 49 to 39, with 12% still undecided. that's a lot of undecideds.
the poll that uses the largest sample of people, about 2,300, puts obama ahead by 3 points, 49 to 46. about 76% of the respondents were white, and the bulk of them were women, and most were in the age range of 35 -65. that's all good for obama.
but as polls go, they're not always reliable and as i stated at the start, there are hundreds of thousands unpolled.

terence samuel says obama will win by a sniggly point because of bob case and obama stands for change:

After all sound and fury, the race in Pennsylvania will come down to the strength of get- out-the-vote (GOTV) operations, and I think Obama's campaign's organizational advantages will be enough to push him past Clinton by almost two percentage points. He's got money, he's got energy and enthusiasm (despite his debate performance on Tuesday), and he's got Philadelphia and its suburbs

Broadly speaking, presidential elections are almost always decided by what and who Americans think best suits the moment. After all the wins and losses, after all the gaffes, the deceptions, and the rare moments of inspiration, Obama, is simply closer to the mood of the country than either Clinton or McCain.

Obama is selling change. Both of his opponents are selling the virtues of experience, but voters, fed up with the way things have been going, view experience as more of a problem than a solution.
.....

The importance of the Casey's endorsement of Obama is hard to overstate. In part that's because Pennsylvania's junior senator is as daring as a piece of Lackawanna anthracite coal and is seen as unwilling or unable to play cynical political games. What's more, he is an able counterbalance to Clinton's two biggest supporters -- the affably pugnacious Gov. Ed. Rendell, and Philadelphia's African American Mayor Michael Nutter.

Casey is also exactly kind of conservative, Catholic, blue-collar Democrat that Obama is supposed to have the most trouble attracting. He needs Casey's help all the more now that some of these voters think that he sees them as clinging to guns and religion out of a sense of economic frustration. In a new ad for Obama, Casey makes the election clearly about the economy, declaring on camera that "in towns like yours and mine, families are struggling with bills they can't afford and jobs moving away. It has to change -- but it won't until we change Washington."

clinton needs blowout numbers, but brace yourselves obama supporters, she may pull off a double digit win, which will give her more time to make us miserable:

bloomerg: After more than 40 Democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama, the Illinois senator, leads Clinton by more than 800,000 votes. Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow -- a landslide few experts expect -- she would still have a hard time catching him.

Clinton needs ``blowout numbers,'' says Peter Fenn, a Democratic consultant who isn't affiliated with either campaign. ``The wheels would have to come off the Obama bus, and the engine would have to blow.''

A popular-vote victory is vital to Clinton's chances because she is likely to end the primaries still trailing Obama, 46, in the race for delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

According to an unofficial tally by the Associated Press, Obama currently leads by a margin of 1,645 to 1,504 among pledged delegates and those superdelegates -- elected and party officials who get an automatic vote on the nomination -- who have indicated a preference. It will take 2,025 delegates to win the nomination.

One or the Other

``I am a big believer that she needs either one, the popular or the delegate count,'' in order to make a case for why she should be the nominee, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, a Clinton backer, said in an interview.

how about those superdelegates? some of them in pennsylvania are feeling sorry they went with clinton so early in the race. listen to that story at npr.

an overview in usa today
video from the philly inquirer on obama's final sunday.
obama goes door to door
obama has two times the cash, less debt than hillary

Hillary Tapping Wealthy Donors For More

hillary tapped elton john, now she's digging up money from her wealthy donors in a "creative" way. why would they bother to give her more money? can you imagine what we could do with all the money that has been raised by both campaigns? wow.

nyt: The Obama fund-raising juggernaut has some of Mrs. Clinton’s most devoted supporters worried and searching for a new way to support her candidacy. Alan Patricof, a national finance chairman for Mrs. Clinton, said four people had called him in the past month to discuss starting a so-called 527 group — named for the section of the tax code the groups are organized under — on her behalf.

“These are people who have maxed out to Hillary and would like to do a lot more but know they cannot do it through the campaign and thus are looking for other legal ways to give and raise more money under a different status,” Mr. Patricof said. “As I have pointed out, once they do that, they can no longer participate in the finance committee calls and they have to do it outside and away from the campaign itself.”

Such groups are potentially attractive for affluent donors because contributions are not capped as they are for candidates. But campaign finance experts say 527s can be legally treacherous; hefty fines were levied against many of the groups after the 2004 election, and the rules that govern them remain hazy.

The groups are barred from coordinating with campaigns and explicitly calling for the election or defeat of a candidate; instead they are limited to advocating on issues. But exactly what they can say about candidates when they solicit contributions or spend them is sometimes unclear.

One such group, American Leadership Project, which on Wednesday began broadcasting commercials in Pennsylvania praising Mrs. Clinton on health care, offers an indication of how challenging it could be to raise money for an independent effort.

The group has raised only about $1.5 million so far. As a result, it spent only about $425,000 in Pennsylvania, after doling out about $750,000 for commercials in Texas and Ohio earlier this year. It intends to play a more substantial role in Indiana, its leaders said.

Some potential donors have been reluctant to support an effort that they feared could get them into legal trouble. Others wanted the group to attack Mr. Obama, a tactic the group’s leaders have resisted.

Obama Up in Polls and Money

looks like obama has closed clinton's lead gap in pennsylvania. it went from a clinton 16 point lead to just 6. polls are fickle like people so i don't put my confidence in them. at the very least, they must capture the trend -- that more people are tuning into obama.

and alas, some are beginning to call the race for what it is. OVER.

New Yorker: To anyone tracking delegates, it’s been clear for more than a month that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is in mortal danger. But as long as she was battling Barack Obama at the polls every week, she could hope to control the narrative of the Democratic race, even if she was losing individual contests. And so her campaign kept sprouting new raisons d’être: the wisdom of superdelegates, the enfranchisement of Florida and Michigan, her supposed ability to carry big states.

No more. We’re now halfway through the six weeks between Mississippi and Pennsylvania, and this long interlude has washed away Clinton’s spin. Now her campaign is not only over. It’s obviously over.

Obama's Campaign Finances Strongest

this speaks to obama's ability to organize and manage finances.

nyt: Of all the candidates, Democratic or Republican, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, is in the strongest financial shape. Of the $38.8 million in cash on hand, a total of $31.5 million is earmarked for the primary race, with only $7.3 million set aside for the general campaign. This primary war chest is more than Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. McCain’s combined.

On top of that, Mr. Obama’s campaign is almost debt-free. He ended the month owing only $625,059. Over all, Mr. Obama has raised $190 million since he began his campaign, and spent $158 million — the most of any candidate.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, spent less in February — $31.8 million, or $1 million a day — in the weeks leading up to her March 4 victories in Texas and Ohio, than Mr. Obama — who spent $43 million, or nearly $1.5 million a day.