A Hypocrite Turns 'Super'

Boston Herald

All that special interest money that goes to those superPACs, the ones Barack Obama called a “threat to democracy,” well, that was then and this is an election year.

So Tuesday the president let it be known that it would be just swell if some of those 1 percenters, those millionaires and billionaires begging to be taxed more, would give to his superPAC, Priorities USA.

“We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back,” Jim Messina, manager of the president’s re-election campaign, told The New York Times.

Of course, the Democrats haven’t exactly been reduced to begging in the streets to fund their political machine.

In fact, the Associated Press reported that Obama’s campaign and its supporters at Priorities USA and the Democratic National Committee actually have outspent their Republican counterparts by nearly two to one. Financial reports as of late 2011 show Obama’s re-election campaign collected some $253 million in contributions and had $95.9 million still on hand.

Of course the president, the vice president and the first lady won’t be directly involved in this aspect of the fund-raising because that level of coordination is forbidden under the law. But he has already picked a gaggle of surrogates who will do the job on behalf of Priorities USA. And that’s where incumbency has such an advantage — and a real dark side. Because those being asked to make the campaign pitches are also those with enormous clout within the White House and the executive branch — the kind of folks in a position to do favors. They include Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and senior advisers David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett.

Haven’t we seen this movie before? How many Solyndra scandals do we need?

But mostly it’s the hypocrisy of this president who says one thing and does another that has grown tiresome.

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A Hypocrite Turns ‘Super’