Pouting Political Funders
People are miffed. Many of Barack Obama’s strongest supporters are getting angry at his policies, and they are beginning to speak out about their frustrations.
I don’t mean those of us who are somewhere between dismayed and outraged about Obama’s equivocating, establishment-appeasing policies on such huge issues as health insurance reform, the Wall Street bailout, and the escalation of his Afghanistan war. No, I’m talking about some of his wealthiest campaign funders.
It seems that they’re in a deepening pout because the president is not giving them the attention they feel they so richly deserve. Some are practically having hissy fits that Obama’s rather stringent ethics policies are excluding them from getting such perks as sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom or such plum jobs as ambassador to the Island Republic of Nirvana.
“I’ve had almost no communication with the White House,” whined a funder from Miami who had raised $5.5 million for Obama. “There is no connection between the administration and money people …
as far as the fun stuff,” he moaned.
Likewise, a Hollywood funder who had bundled beaucoup bucks for Obama complained that all he has received is an invitation to a policy briefing in Washington. “Is that a perk?” he asked incredulously. “Under Clinton,” this donor pointed out, “we did spend time in the White House. We did spend time in Camp David.” But under Obama, he says with palpable frustration, “there’s so much less of that than I think ever occurred in the past.”
No doubt you share their pain. Or, perhaps you share my delight that instead of coddling big money donors with business-as-usual favors, Obama has had the integrity to say: “Thank you, but no.” As one sensible fundraiser put it, “It would be silly for me to say we wouldn’t all love to be invited to the White House, but it isn’t why we [support him]. I have no aspiration to [get] the perks.” And that’s how it should be.
Nutty for Health Care
One advantage of seeing our stalwart solons engage in such a heated, drawn-out legislative tussle as the present health care debate in Congress is that it’s so edifying for the masses. The debate allows many ordinary citizens to see firsthand that their own representative is, indeed, dumber than a dust bunny.
Take Jim Inhofe. Please! Known as “the dumbest senator of them all” (a hotly contested honor), this Oklahoma Republican conceded to a local reporter that while he doesn’t like the Democrats’ health insurance bill at all, he really knows nothing about what it actually does. “I don’t have to read it or know what’s in it,” Inhofe explained. “I’m going to oppose it anyways.”
And they say there are no more giants under the Capital Dome.
Moving from ignorant to spooky, several lawmakers fall into the Twilight Zone, reading things into the reform bill that aren’t there. Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who seems to gargle every morning with a tall glass of goofiness, told MSNBC that the House bill “cancels every [health insurance] policy in America.” Uh … sir, no such thing exists in the bill.
But, wait – Rep. Michele Bachmann says she’s seen this apparition, too. Known as the “Wacko of Central Minnesota,” Bachmann ominously warned on Fox News that the bill will outlaw the “purchase [of] private health insurance.” Later, apparently struck by a megaton surge of wackiness, Bachmann got so feverish that she blathered to a crowd: “What we have to do today is make a covenant to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.”
These Congresscritters who are so dead-set against extending good health coverage to you get excellent socialized health care for themselves, courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers. Luckily, their coverage does include mental health benefits.
This article appears in 2009.