The morning after Obama's $3-million appeal to people who'd rather be watching "Knight Rider," he hit me up for a couple bucks. This is perhaps a preview of the administration:
Mary --
The next 6 days are going to be the toughest we've seen, and I need your support to reach as many voters as possible.
Donate $5 or more today to strengthen this movement for the final push.
This campaign is in your hands.
Thank you for everything you're doing,
Barack
As Andrew Malcolm notes, "Just to relieve himself of that $150 million before the polls open, Obama will have to spend $12.5 million a day," but he's still asking for fivers from his supporters.
You'd think with his website set up to accept multitudes of fraudulent donations, he wouldn't need me:
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited...
In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.
The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
We can all rest assured, however, that if a Republican candidate had explicitly promised to take public financing only to change his mind once he had gotten the nomination, then went on to raise more than $600 million dollars, roughly two thirds of which may have been raised through fraud-enabling practices, and outspent his opponent by three-to-one on TV, that'd be cool, too. Right?
Credit goes to Campbell Brown of CNN for calling Obama out for his broken promise, and to John McCain for delivering a decent soundbite on it:
In Palm Beach, Florida, today Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attacked Sen. Barack Obama's pending 30-minute prime-time address as a "gauzy, feel-good commercial," that was "paid for with broken promises."
