Unfortunately for his boss!
Just about every week, the Obama administration finds a new target for its Two Minutes Hate, after their failure with the previous week’s target. This week they’re going after the United States Chamber of Commerce. The Hill:
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has the burden of proving false the charge by Democrats that the business group is funneling foreign money to Republican campaigns.
Axelrod was pressed by CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday for evidence that the foreign campaign contributions benefiting the GOP is more than “peanuts.”
“Do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” Axelrod said on “Face the Nation.” “The fact is that the Chamber has asserted that, but they won’t release any information about where their campaign money is coming from. And that’s at the core of the problem.”
There are several problems with this. First and foremost, they’re demanding proof of a negative. Dan Rather found out why this doesn’t work back in 2004, and now you don’t see him anymore. Making an accusation, and then demanding the accused prove otherwise, doesn’t cut it.
Even the Obama administration’s favorite newspaper isn’t falling for this crap:
In two campaign stops Thursday, Mr. Obama invoked what he portrayed as a specific new example, citing a blog posting from a liberal advocacy group as he teed off on a longtime adversary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over its political spending.
“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”
But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.
Dumbest of all, Obama and his comrades are reminding everybody about their own campaign’s donor controversy during the ’08 election. As Newsweek reported that October:
The Obama campaign has shattered all fund-raising records, raking in $458 million so far, with about half the bounty coming from donors who contribute $200 or less. Aides say that’s an illustration of a truly democratic campaign. To critics, though, it can be an invitation for fraud and illegal foreign cash because donors giving individual sums of $200 or less don’t have to be publicly reported. Consider the cases of Obama donors “Doodad Pro” of Nunda, N.Y., who gave $17,130, and “Good Will” of Austin, Texas, who gave more than $11,000—both in excess of the $2,300-per-person federal limit. In two recent letters to the Obama campaign, Federal Election Commission auditors flagged those (and other) donors and informed the campaign that the sums had to be returned. Neither name had ever been publicly reported because both individuals made online donations in $10 and $25 increments.
And the Washington Post reported:
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.
But then everybody forgot about it, because they were so excited about how awesome Obama was! And now, just when a majority of Americans are realizing how awesome he isn’t, he’s being helpful enough to point directly to one of his own past improprieties. He’d better hope it’s not too late to back off.
Once again: If you want to know what these guys are doing, just listen to what they accuse their opponents of doing.