Obama vs. Brand X
On April 4, Barack Obama’s unofficial campaign team made the announcement everyone had been expecting for weeks: the President would be seeking a second term. Why make the announcement so early? There’s only one reason: the announcement allows the campaign to start fundraising. If political prognosticators are right, we are about to witness the world’s first billion-dollar election campaign. The Obama 2008 campaign was known for its social media savvy and their ability to use this talent to create the most efficient fundraising operation the political world has ever seen. This savvy will come in handy for the 2012 election. However, one may reasonably ask, “Why does the Obama camp need to raise so much money?”
Simply put, President Obama will need the funds as he isn’t running against the GOP, but rather he’s running against the moneyed operations of the Koch (pronounced coke) brothers. Charles and David Koch, oil billionaires, happen to be two of the wealthiest people in the country. They also happen to be two of the largest donors to the Tea Party. They have spent millions of dollars on a concerted effort to cripple labor unions, defeat environmental regulations, and to squash any other regulation that would curtail the power of corporations. Recently, it has been revealed that the two Kochs are the key financial supporters of :
- Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker, who stripped the state’s public workers of their collective bargaining rights.
- Karl “I-haven’t-predicted-an-election-accurately-since-2004″ Rove.
- The Washington D.C.-based Chamber of Commerce, a group which lobbies on behalf of corporate America and which has become increasingly right-wing.
Vanity Fair’s March issue ran an in-depth expose on the brothers and their influence on the American political system. This piece shocked many people and made the Kochs the poster boys for everything that is wrong with campaign finance in the US. Given all of this, Democratic activist groups are already gearing up for what promises to be a very ugly and expensive presidential race.
The only thing more surprising than the amount of money that is going to be raised for the 2012 election cycle is the unspoken fact that the identity of the Republican presidential candidate will be largely irrelevant. Think about that for a moment. It is irrelevant which of the Republican presidential wannabes gains the nomination, for whoever it is, he/she will only serve as a mouthpiece for the right-wing corporate backers who are paying the bills. So, we are going to see a national incumbent running less against an identified opponent and running more against an entire cadre of very rich, very conservative people who think the only role government should have is to serve the interests of corporations.
Now, how will this affect the “puppet” GOP candidates themselves? Sure, each of the candidates running has their own differing views on various policy issues, but they will all share the same source of election dollars largesse: Tea party types and the corporations who are looking to unseat Obama. The candidates will not take any position that runs counter to these special interests, no matter how radical these interests may be. They are going to have to run so far to the right (to keep these people happy) if they want to have enough donor dollars to get past the primaries.
The Supreme Court’s decision to allow virtually unlimited money into the political process, via its Citizens United ruling, has opened the floodgates for the likes of the Koch brothers and the groups they support. Get ready for some extreme right-wing lunacy. Think I’m wrong? You don’t need to look much further than the nightly news to see how the extremists are already taking center stage; consider: the “Birthers,” the “Deathers,” the “Tenthers” and the “Obama is a socialist/fascist” contingents.
I’m not going to be naïve and state that “running dark” is bad for campaigns. Negative ads are a fact of political life, and voters still respond to them. But imagine 24/7 ads about “birtherism,” socialism, fascism and any other “ism” that the corporate power base will contrive to highlight Obama’s “otherness.” It’s going to be a media war like we’ve never seen before, and it will be funded by people whom the majority of Americans will never see or know.
