David Sirota
03.02.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/obama-asks-regular-folks-_b_42465.htmlObama Asks Regular Folks to Buy Into His Campaign; D.C. Calls It Scandalous
The Hotline, the uber-insider journal of Beltway conventional thought, claims today to have a scandalous scoop of "opposition" research on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D). Are you ready for this? There's a YouTube video of Obama asking a working class crowd in Cleveland for - gasp! - small campaign contributions. Obama, the Hotline breathlessly recounts, dares to ask "everybody here to pony up five dollars, ten dollars for this campaign. I don't care how poor you are, you've got five dollars."
The real scandal, of course, is the shock that emanates from the Beltway when a major political candidate has the audacity to ask regular people to be a big part of a presidential campaign. Washington would like us to believe that there is only one way to run campaigns these days: by getting a bunch of corporate lobbyists from D.C. and a few super-rich people from New York and Hollywood into a few ballrooms to bundle tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. It's government of, by and for Big Money - a Smokybackroom-ocracy - and any other model is seen as a big scandal. If you are wondering why so many politicians sound like Halliburton press flacks or ExxonMobil PR representatives, and why the entire political debate could be dominated by the comments of a Hollywood billionaire to the New York Times' glorified gossip columnist, look no further: it's because of this innately corrupt model, and the media's glorification of it.
But there is another model that very few people talk about - the one where lots of working people give lots of small dollar contributions. People like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) have been doing this for years. Howard Dean did it in his presidential primary run. It's a much harder path, of course, because it's much harder to organize lots of people than it is to organize a few wealthy fat cats. But in the absence of public financing of elections, campaigns that try to rely on lots of little contributions are the next closest thing to a small-d democratic election system.
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Let's be clear - big donors and philanthropists will always play a role in politics - and some of them play an extremely constructive role (personal example: the Progressive States Network could never have gotten off the ground without generous support from some visionary philanthropists). But the idea that its somehow scandalous for candidates or organizations to ask regular working stiffs to ALSO financially buy into a movement is a false construct designed to rationalize plutocracy.
Though Obama certainly has his share of Big Money interests funneling money to his operation, I'm thrilled to see that he's drawing on his community organizing roots to - at least in public appeals - try to bring working people into the part of presidential campaigns too often left exclusively to the fat cats. That folks in the Beltway see this as "controversial" is only a commentary on how many in the nation's capital truly believe politics should be the exclusive gated community of the rich and famous.
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