Dan

Calabrese

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June 23, 2008

Obama Knows When He Can Give His Supporters the Finger

Give Barack Obama this: He knows when he can give his adoring fans the finger and get away with it.

Once Obama realized he could probably out-fundraise John McCain by a factor of three to one, he would have been insane to accept public financing of his campaign – and with it, the resulting $84 million spending limit. His small problem was that he had vowed back in February to do just that. He even said he would personally meet with McCain to draw up parameters that both campaigns would agree to stick to.

So, what would he say about his pledge now that it was clearly not in his own best interests to honor it?

Never mind! Also: The Republicans made me do it. Citing his need to defend himself against right-wing 527 groups the McCain campaign wishes existed, Obama claimed that his highly efficient system of collecting small donations online is pretty much the same thing as being publicly financed.

Hey! They’re taxpayers! They just skip the government and send the money directly to Obama. (Oh yeah, and three times as much of it, but otherwise it’s exactly the same.) If I didn’t know better, I’d think Obama was starting to appreciate the virtues of free-market capitalism.

His explanation is ridiculous, and the East Coast editorial boards are beside themselves because Obama is their guy and public campaign finance is the cornerstone of their good-government fetishes. But Obama will escape this unscathed regardless, perhaps because he understands something his oh-so-disappointed establishment fans do not.

No one cares about campaign finance. Oh, they care in Washington because they’re obsessed with campaigns and elections. And they care in a lot of newsrooms, because they think the way a campaign is funded is just as important as what a candidate would actually do once in office. (And it’s harder to cover the latter.)

But the people who will decide this election do not sit around talking about campaign spending limits, financial-disclosure forms and the like. They’ll get to that right after they finish watching mold grow on bread.

And Obama’s grassroots supporters only cared about campaign finance restrictions when it appeared that Republicans would always have more money. They’d be happy to forgive Obama’s apostasy, but to them, there’s nothing to forgive. They want one thing and only thing only: Win, baby. These people have suffered through Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry’s pathetic campaigns. They accepted Bill Clinton because he found a way to win, but they had to grin and bear it when he distanced himself from them for his own political benefit.

Liberalism, presented in its pure and unadulterated form, does not win presidential elections. The Democrats have topped 50 percent in the popular vote once in the past 10 contests, and that was when Jimmy Carter nudged his way to 50.1 percent in the aftermath of Watergate. Absent a huge Republican scandal or the help of a third-party interloper like Ross Perot, Democrats can’t win.

So with the emergence of Obama, who presents himself brilliantly and makes liberalism sound like the uplifting game plan of hope it is certainly not, grassroots liberals will need a lot to become disillusioned. A hell of a lot more than the breaking of some campaign finance promise.

Obama knows this. Just like he knows he can go back on his statement expressing interest in a series of town-hall meetings with McCain. He was all for that until McCain actually proposed it. That’s when Obama remembered that he doesn’t do so well when he has to think on his feet and know what he’s talking about, so once again, never mind.

Political junkies may be disappointed, but regular voters don’t care about debate formats. And come November, left-leaning editorial pages are hardly going to abandon him because of issues like these.

This doesn’t mean Obama will win. If the McCain campaign is smart, and goes after him about his preposterous stances on national security, energy and the economy, they have a very good chance of persuading enough people to get over the tingling in their legs and think about how Mr. Inspiration would actually govern the nation.

But if the political establishment thinks Obama is going to be vulnerable on issues like campaign finance and debate formats, they really need to get over themselves. No one cares, and because Obama knows this, he is able to pick the spots where he can be completely disingenuous.

Now that’s a new kind of politics.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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