The Center for Responsive Politics and seven other watchdog groups recently asked asked John McCain and Barack Obama to disclose more information to the public about their fundraising “bundlers” and their small donors.  McCain responded; Obama ignored them. McCain also fares better overall on donor disclosure.
At the Politico, Ben Smith notes:
Obama’s bundler figures don’t include the bundlers raise for other committees connected to the campaign, which renders the disclosure pretty incomplete, and providing a way for somebody who wants to keep a low profile and raise a lot of money for the campaign to do so.
Lynn Sweet noted back in November 2007 that Obama “is making government transparency a centerpiece of the latest phase of his campaign, [but] does not always practice what he preaches when it comes to his own business.” At that time, Obama promised he “would run the most open and transparent government in history.” Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded to Sweet by claiming Obama “has gone further than any other candidate when it comes to transparency in making public his tax returns and his bundlers.” As to the latter, not really.
Moreover, while Obama’s website still claims that an Obama administration would create all sorts of transparency regarding lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings, with independent oversight and so on, the secretiveness has been a trend throughout the campaign. Information on Obama’s fundraisers, small donors, tax records, medical records, state senate records, and law firm records are incomplete at best, and often completely undisclosed.
Perhaps one reason some voters seem uncomfortable with Obama is that, for someone who has written two autobiographies, he seems to want to keep a lot of information about himself and his campaign under lock and key.
(h/t Memeorandum.)
Nah, I’m not worried b/c he’s secretive. Its more b/c he’s got the cult of personality thing going. And b/c the press is unhinged. And b/c he thinks he’s already president. And b/c he’s a socialist.
“he seems to want to keep a lot of information about himself and his campaign under lock and key.”
I want to know how often O! checks the air pressure in the SUV he’s riding in.
Teh journos just haven’t had their hearts in it yet. After that 8 question Rezko presser when Baracky practically ran away to stop the pain, I thought the journos would smell blood and sharklike swim to the attack, not stopping until nothing but tiny scales and bits of fat floated about. Didn’t happen. If not then, I wonder, when? There’s an awful lot there to poke and prod, enough to make a career to dine on for the rest of the life of the enterprising journo brave enough to take it on. Look they’ll point, there goes the woman that brought down the great hope of mankind.
It seems like there’s a huge risk that something will emerge later, when it’s too late to help people decide if he’s someone that should be president really. Maybe NPR can spare that guy that drools over McCain’s biopsies to look into it?
Crazy risk, right?
Like opposing an ongoing war you approved to start with and abandoned mid-stream even while you see the thing getting better day by day and can easily imagine will be won in a couple of months, but no, you say, we’re going to lose this thing, must leave soonest.
Or flatly refusing to deal with a world-wide shortage of crude oil in the face of an ever growing middle class in the two most populous countries on the globe, the govs. of which are telling you straight out that they will never cede their right to greater energy resources to anyone. When you know your inaction is like putting a gun to the head of you economy and pulling the trigger. Man are your constituents gonna love you when that collapse comes.
Crazy risk I can’t fathom it’s so crazy. Saving the planet crazy.
Teh journos just haven’t had their hearts in it yet.
Maybe, but you know, when you pour syrup on your waffle, you’ve got about 45 seconds between golden-crispy-sweetness and amorphous-mushy-disappointment.
So I think he rightly gets a pass on that one.
Has the nickname “waffles” been ruined for use because of Kerry? If so, what a shame.
If you look at Axelrod’s past clients you can see why the penchant for omerta is so strong. Part of what we are [not] seeing involves stonewalling due to the very heavy stench and part of it is due to the northeastern journalistic proclivity towards a blind eye to Kennedy/Daley shenanigans. The Kennedy/Daley machines have worked more or less in tandem since 1960 and Axelrod has been helping to elect bums who don’t bear close inspection since the early ’80’s. Stiffing the lickspittle journos at the Trib or NYT/Globe just hasn’t been a problem for Axelrod – whether he was jamming Spitzer into the governor slot in NY or Patrick into the governor slot in MA or Obama into the Senate in IL.
I think that Axelrod has yet to overcome the scaling problem. That and the fact that his “successes” have come in deep blue states where taking the primary assures success. His current candidate is a real mush mouth who does not appear to be light enough on his feet to be able to be trusted in an interview and that means the “access” carrot doesn’t work well. The empty page has to be filled and not every journo is a bootlicker (please, don’t ask me to name one who is not).
The nicest thing about journos is that they start biting when they aren’t fed regularly. That, and some of them actually feel that Clinton would be the better candidate. Which happens to be absolutely true.
#3
– Four things:
* He can’t seem to “break away”, and snag the large typical bump that all Democrats need for the final push in order to pull together a coalition, meaning take the hits when they displease somebody in their base, but hang onto a lead. Without it, even “Black magic®” won’t save him in the fall.
* The press is bitching about his overseas bearing. The campaign promised a lot of “open private interviews and exclusives to the most prominent of the Left wing media outlets, but what they got was bupcuss. They’re starting to notice their messianic adoration is not showing him to be a giver, and some campaign advance-men talking heads are starting to talk “yeh, lots of press, but a lot of it bad” sorts of comments. If its real, and not just a head fake to throw off some of the obvious MSM bias, it may be some cracks are starting to show. If he losses the press its pretty much over. Celebrities die fast without favorable face time.
* Sooner or later he’ll have to come out of his spidey hole, and it just may be the worse melt down since Reagan versus Carter when he has to appear on the same stage as McCain, and speak from the hip, and answer ‘in your face’ questions, particularly with the Iraq freight train, and the gas mess, plus he own comments and associations.
* “Teh conventionâ„¢”. With the dozens of protest groups already fighting the homeless for city park space to pitch their tents, ’nuff said.
BBH, you are right about the vibe with the people and the little betrayals beginning in the media. What I had expected to see was the journos doing their jobs rather than leaving all the good stuff for Karl and Gateway and Barnett and the Powerline boys to scoop. And really his astounding hauteur combined with the shallowness and ignorance ought to be so easy to take apart…..as I have said over and over again, he will be his own undoing.
Heh. Really?
Yep.
– But if all that doesn’t make the bet, I’ll tell you Sdferr, heres my pen-ultimate ace in the hole.
– If Obama can’t close the “woman gap” over McCain, he can’t win. This time around when you shuffle all the beans seven ways to Sunday I keep coming back to the basic idea that this time around the woman in all party’s, as a group, will be the decider’s.
– Can’t say why, just a feeling.
“rather than leaving all the good stuff for Karl and Gateway and Barnett and the Powerline boys to scoop”
The bare outline is still being produced by journos for the most part. What Karl and the other guys are doing is using a different lens to examine and analyze reported facts.
You have to grant access to journos to really get them to turn over and piddle on their bellies. Obama cannot handle any type of even mildly intensive questioning without going into an um, ah, uh routine that reveals the utter translucent lightness of his being. It takes the real bootlickers from the Trib, Times and McClatchy or the newsporn journos from People, Newsweek et al to keep that halo shiny.
I may not be doing it much longer. Check the home page.
So we recognize once again what a great loss we have in Tim Russert’s death. He could at the very least manage “mildly intensive questioning” and I believe would have, were he here now. Brokaw? *shrugs* I dunno, maybe. Baracky won’t soon be back on FNS. Stephanopolos will wuss out. That only leaves the scribes.
Hey, sorry to hear that Karl.
Time for the Phoenix to hatch.
Even though Obama has done much to write his own narrative, the alternative narrative always seems to read like this …
(Clears throat;knows he couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles on it…)
Say it’s only a paper moon,
Sailing over a cardboard sea.
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me.
(Exits stage just two steps ahead of a rotten tomato; goes to nearby pub to steady his nerves with a medicinal potation…)