Politician who benefited most from big money blames it for failure to solve problems
Refreshed from three months of vacation, former President Barack Obama returned to the spotlight Monday to highlight the next phase of his career — inspiring young people to overcome cynicism about money in politics.
If not for “special interests,” the former president told a group of high school and college students during an event at the University of Chicago, America could reach the consensus he failed to achieve on vexing issues like climate change, violence, economic inequality, and excesses in the criminal justice system.
“What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress, really has to do with our politics and our civic life,” he said.
Obama blamed political gerrymandering but especially political money.
“Because of money in politics, special interests dominate the debates in Washington in ways that don’t match up with the way the broad majority of Americans feel,” he said.
It takes a special kind of chutzpah for Obama to complain about money in politics, considering he was the biggest beneficiary of it. According to Federal Election Commission reports analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama broke all campaign funding records in 2008 when he raised close to three-quarters of a billion dollars.
“What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress, really has to do with our politics and our civic life.”
Previously a strong supporter of public financing for presidential campaigns, candidate Obama abandoned those principles as soon as he realized he could raise and spend more outside of the federal financing limit. And it was not because he had to keep pace with the opposition; 2008 GOP nominee John McCain stuck to the system, and the spending limits it imposed, leaving him at a severe disadvantage in the fall campaign.
The Arizona senator raised 368.1 million, less than half of Obama’s total. That included $84.1 million in federal matching funds. He was the last major candidate to accept federal funding. Obama’s decision to bypass the system helped drive a stake through it.
The donors Obama relied on included plenty of fat cats, too. Campaign-finance reports indicate that he took in $56.8 million from contributors to give the maximum $4,600 donation. Obama also benefited from more than $89 million spent by outside organizations that could not coordinate their activities with his campaign but supported his candidacy.
For his 2012 re-election campaign, Obama again relied on big money, raising a total of $722.4 million. That included $315.2 million in donations that the Center for Responsive Politics classifies as large individual contributions; more than $58.6 million came from donors who gave more than $5,000.
And outside spending on Obama’s behalf totaled nearly $50 million.
The financial advantage allowed the Obama campaign to pummel 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney between the time when he sewed up the nomination and when he formally accepted it. Unable to respond in kind after spending his cash during a contentious primary fight, Romney found himself largely defined as an out-of-touch wealthy businessman before he even had a chance to introduce himself to a general election audience.
Yet, there was Obama on Monday, telling idealistic students that special interests were the obstacle to solving America’s problems. To that complaint, he added another — the emergence of new media voices outside of the traditional news gatekeepers.
“Because of changes in the media, we now have a situation in which everybody’s listening to people who already agree with them, and are further and further reinforcing their own realities to the neglect of a common reality that allows us to have a healthy debate and then try to find common ground and actually move solutions forward,” he said.
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