So today I receive a follow-up mass email from the Obama campaign, purportedly written by Senator O himself. It started as follows:
I want to add some more news to David’s note about the state of the race.
As you know, we’ve won 27 of 41 contests and have maintained our commanding lead among pledged delegates.
But today I want to share another staggering number: supporters like you donated more than $55 million to this campaign in the month of February.
OK. Great. I knew that already. So I read on:
… more important than the total is how we did it — more than 90% of donations were $100 or less, and more than 385,000 new donors in February pushed us past our goal of more than 1,000,000 people owning a piece of this campaign.
Impressive. Congrats are definitely in order. Then, this:
… unlike Senator Clinton and Senator McCain, we have never taken money from lobbyists or PACs.
Whoa. Wait minute. Slow down there, Barack. People in glass houses and all that. I can’t speak to the ban on PAC money, but the ban on “lobbyists” depends entirely on how narrowly you define “lobbyists.” I think all of those industries and companies identified here by McQ are going to attempt to “lobby” you for something, at some point. And in that sense, they may not reside officially on K street, but they are in fact lobbyists.
Please understand: I’m not trying to be overly critical. The Obama campaign’s ability to raise a lot of money in small amounts from diverse sources is to be commended and applauded; it’s precisely how campaigns should be mounted and maintained in my opinion. Hell, I’d like to see a law that no campaign could take more than $100 from any given source. But that’s not the point. The point is that a post-partisan/unity candidate needs to be a little more discreet about how he employs partisan/divisive claims. Especially when those claims are less than accurate.
As Andrew Sullivan suggested earlier today, it’s time for Obama to get down off the pedestal, and re-focus on the core promise of a new approach, in deed as well as words, which has served him so well to date and made him so appealing to so many of us, from all corners of America. Obama set the higher standard, and now, like McCain, he should be held to it.