In case you couldn’t tell from the dozens of Obama campaign emails you get each week begging for $3 contributions, or donations in lieu of wedding gifts, the president’s reelection team is apparently nervous about its money game. Exhibit B: The Daily Beast obtained a recording of a frantic 18-minute fundraising solicitation made by President Obama during a donor conference call on Air Force One:
The president’s 18-minute pleading—a recording of which was provided to The Daily Beast by an Obama contributor—hardly sounded like a man doing a victory lap after Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding ObamaCare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known. Or, for that matter, like a candidate who has been beating his Republican opponent in recent polls of key battleground states.
Rather, Obama sounded like a dog-tired idealist forced to grapple painfully with hard reality. “In 2008 everything was new and exciting about our campaign,” Obama said. “And now I’m the incumbent president. I’ve got gray hair. People have seen disappointment because folks had a vision of change happening immediately. And it turns out change is hard, especially when you’ve got an obstructionist Republican Congress.”
Romney has been playing up his cash windfall in the wake of the ObamaCare decision, and the Obama campaign doesn’t want to get crushed in the money competition like it did in May. The candidates will be disclosing their June fundraising numbers soon, and Saturday was the last day for donors to get in under the wire. The Obama campaign claims it raised even more money than Romney off the SCOTUS decision, but won’t disclose the figures, which tells you all you really need to know:
Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said via Twitter on Friday that the former Massachusetts governor had raised the money through 47,000 online donations. “Thanks for everyone’s support for #FullRepeal!” she tweeted, referring to the candidate’s vow to repeal and replace the healthcare law if he is elected president on November 6.
Obama’s campaign said they had also raised a lot of money since the Supreme Court issued its ruling, but officials would not give any figures to back up the assertion.
Obama is under pressure to provide evidence he outraised Romney, which explains the desperate phone call. As the Daily Beast reports, Obama reassured donors he still has a superior ground game, and noted that early money is better than late money — in other words, it’s not a major problem if he’s lagging behind Romney at this stage in the election. This isn’t entirely true, as Obama wasn’t raising remarkable figures, even early on. He’s also been burning through money at a much faster rate than Romney.
Then there’s the legal questions about raising money on Air Force One. The plane must count as federal property, so is fundraising solicitation prohibited on it? President Clinton came under fire in 1997 for making fundraising calls on the Oval Office phone, which seems like a similar situation.
Making campaign fundraising calls from federal property, even if a special campaign phone was used, is definitely illegal. I worked for an incumbent office holder who ran for federal office and had to research this issue with the FEC. Because it is illegal, we made certain that the candidate only made or received campaign calls from his campaign office, home or anywhere besides his government offices.
Change is hard, especially when there are others who disagree with you, and you are apt to be a horrible consensus maker. Whether it was an illegal call or not matters not, Obama is above the law and would execute executive privilage if needed.
When the president's campaign suggested that democrats make donations to president's reelection in lieu of wedding gifts, I found another reason to oppose democrat marriage. Let's face facts–the reason democrats get married is to mooche off the system. Now the president wants a cut of the action. I wonder phony democrat marriages there will be by the time November comes around.
Personally, I think it is quite a bit more serious than making phone calls from the white house because the cost is negligable — not so for a call from AF-1, which has secure communications (has to) and that stuff costs money to use. I neither know nor want to know exactly what the secure communication is/involves, but I am thinking electronics that likely has a fairly limited lifespan (and, accordingly, a "replace after X hours of use" protocol), folk both on the plane and ground who have to monitor the link, this very quickly becomes a whole lot more expensive than your cell phone. n nEven if it is just a commercial satellite phone, that is a dollar a minute to use and why should the taxpayers have to pay this?
One other thing — government landlines are physically secured — they weld down manhole covers, put alarms in tunnels, etc. You simply aren't going to be wandering around the White House basement with a pair of alligator clips without someone noticing you (I hope!). n nA plane has to transmit to the ground via a radio signal that anyone else can pick up as well. There are ways to make it difficult to do so, but the laws of physics are absolute, the radiation is there and can be picked up by an antenna. And you also encrypt, but any encryption can be broken as it won't work if the machine at the other end can't "break" it back into real language. n nAnd folk like the ChiComs would LOVE to know what the POTUS is saying on his telephone, particularly when he is at diplomatic meetings and such. And remember the Rosetta Stone — having some of the unknown "dead" languages in Greek that we knew how to read gave us the entirety of the other languages. n nSo having the actual 'real language' version of what was said on the telephone would be invaluable were one in possession of the raw scrambled frequency-shifted transmission because you can essentially reverse-engineer. Or in other words, Obama may have blown the security of the phone on AF-1 with this stunt…. n nThat's not treason, just stupidity, kinda like Biden telling everyone about the secret bunker under his house.