WaPo: Obama Campaign Purposefully Accepting Questionable Donations
Less than a week before Americans will elect their next president, the Washington Post decided to do some origional reporting and research. As many bloggers, pundits and even National Journal have made clear in recent weeks, and the WaPo confirmed today: the Obama campaign is purposefully accepting untraceable donations.
Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.
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.
The excuse of the Obama campaign is that there were so many individuals who wanted to donate through the Internet, that they felt forced to make it easier for such individuals to do so. Which is, of course, not much of an excuse; instead, it is a reason.
In common language we use such reasons greed.
Is the system abused? Darn right it is:
The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.
The Obama campaign defends itself as well by arguing that it does a ‘rigorous’ investigation afterwards. The only people who believe that, of course, are apologists. Obama et alia take their time to refund illegal donations, and have purposefully done so in order to be able to use the money first, in the most expensive campaign in history.
This was done on purpose. There are, as the WaPo makes clear, security measures, used by all other campaigns. The Obama campaign decided not to use those measures because… they wanted money.
Washington Post is only reporting this now because they think the polls are accurate and there’s no way it can keep Obama from winning next Tuesday. From CNN to NYT to Washington Post to Politico we’re finally seeing stories that reflect negatively on Obama. Of course most of us have known this information for weeks. The MSM is reporting it now so they can say they reported it.
This really is pretty shoddy. In and of itself, it might be shrugged off. But when you look at it in the context of the sheer magnitude of money being raised, the lack of transparency, the broken promise to take public funding, the lust for big campaign donations, and the deep and broad connection between the Obama campaign lobbyists and major corporations, it is getting pretty ugly. The Axelrod/ATT connection is particularly troubling in light of Obama reneging on his explicit promise to fight Telecom Immunity, but then voting for it.
Now now, they’re just using the same screening system they hope will be used for screening votes for legitimacy.
They borrowed the idea from ACORN.
Be reassured though that these donations, though some may be large (and even some very large) are “ordinary people coming together to achieve extraordinary things.”
Lets not lose sight of the fact that “the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken”. The large donations(some might call them HUGE, some might use other terms) are “the only way we can truly change how Washington works”.
So “this is our moment and our country is depending on us. So join” Senator Obama “and declare your independence from this broken system and let’s build the first general election campaign that’s truly funded by the American people”.
(Please understand your conviction will require a minimum donation of….)
Thanks for picking up on this, Michael. I’ll be commenting on this shortly. Orson.