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Thursday, March 27, 2008

Clinton Campaign Lies About Obama Donations

I'm pretty sure I'm breaking a story here.

In response to Senator Obama's excellent speech today on the economy and the need for a new framework for governmental regulation of the financial markets, the Clinton campaign has issued a statement from its policy director, Neera Tanden. She says, in part, that:

Senator Obama announced a series of broad, vague principles, while offering no new concrete solutions to provide Americans with greater confidence in the market or keep them in their homes. The contrast could not be clearer -- on Monday, Senator Clinton announced a detailed, specific plan to address the housing and credit crisis. On Tuesday, Senator McCain announced that he had no plan. And today, Senator Obama offered just words.

In addition, the Clinton team circulated a list of what they claim are the donations Obama has received from "the top 10 issuers of subprime loans."

According to the document, they claim "Obama has taken more money from the top 10 issuers of subprime loans than BOTH Senator Clinton and Senator McCain."

To this claim, I have two points, the first is stylistic and the second is substantive (and where her big lie comes in).


1. Claiming that a candidate has "taken... money from" a certain entity is false and misleading.

Several times during this campaign, you have heard certain candidates claiming that another candidate takes in certain donations from a particularly disliked industry (e.g. John Edwards claimed that Clinton and Obama "accept[ed] money from drug companies").

The problem with this is that when a candidate makes this claim, they are relying on reports submitted to the Federal Election Commission by their opponents, which contain a variety of details on each of their donors. Federal law requires that these donor reports contain the name of each donor's employer.

As a result, when a candidate makes a claim that their opponent "accept[s] money from" a certain company they are simply saying that certain employees of that company made a donation to their opponent. In other words, it could be a VP of that company, or a Secretary, or a Janitor.

With this laid out there, I'm sure you see where I am going with this.

When John Edwards says that Obama has "accept[ed] money from drug companies" or Hillary Clinton says that Obama "has taken more money from the top 10 issuers of subprime loans", they are purposefully using this statement to implant an insidious implication in the listener that somehow the company or industry in question is somehow undertaking a company-wide effort to bankroll Obama.

However, if you stop and think about it, this is ludicrous. Especially when you consider that corporations are prohibited by federal law from making donations to a presidential candidate!

As a thought exercise to flesh this out in your mind, go to a site like Open Secrets that lets you search the donor records for the presidential candidates. Then go ahead and search for donations by your employer or a well-known employer like Wal-Mart. If you do a Wal-Mart search, you'll see that a variety of people have donated to presidential campaigns, including a Dock Worker, a Buyer and a Computer Consultant.

Wrapping up this point, my ultimate complaint is that when Hillary Clinton says that Obama "has taken more money from the top 10 issuers of subprime loans", she is basically laboring under the assumption that we are either idiots or ignorant of what she's really talking about. She is intentionally trying to plant a false and misleading insinuation that somehow the subprime lenders are in the tank for Obama and making nefarious plans to get him elected. This is categorically untrue.


2. The Clinton campaign is lying about how much money she and Barack Obama have received from the so-called "top 10 issuers of subprime loans".

I have put together a spreadsheet that sets out the money that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have received from what she describes as "the top 10 issuers of subprime loans". The Clinton campaign cites as its source for its numbers the site CQ.com, to which I don't have access. As a result, I compiled my donation numbers using Open Secrets, the site I mentioned above that provides access to the donation numbers from the FEC reports (you can also go to any other site, including the FEC, that hosts FEC donor records). In fairness to the potential disparity, I included two columns in my spreadsheet -- one with the total donations for Barack Obama from Open Secrets and one with the numbers that the Clinton memo claims.

As my spreadsheet shows, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has received a variety of donations from the companies her campaign identified.

However, according to the Open Secrets data (which is current up to March 20, 2008), Hillary Clinton received $1,332,720 from employees of these companies whereas Barack Obama received only $1,174,212 -- which means that Clinton received $158,508 more than Obama! Not only that, if we were to use the numbers that the Clinton memo claims, she received even more: $199,716.

Although not surprising, this is truly astounding. The Clinton campaign is basically using the same tactics and assumptions we have grown so disgusted with over the last 8 years with George W. Bush:

(1) Saying something makes it true.
and
(2) Americans are idiots and will lap up whatever B.S. is fed to them.

Please, don't let Clinton get away with it!

I cannot stand to find myself again in an America where lying, obfuscation, misdirection, and mendacity are the key traits we find in our President.

Please forward this on to everyone you know!


Please digg this story if you like it.

Posted by Metavirus at 3/27/2008 06:57:00 PM  

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting.

Does this mean that Clinton's Policy Director was one of those children "Left Behind" in 3rd grade math class?

March 28, 2008 at 3:40 PM  
Anonymous said...

USA needs urgently someone like Obama to take its main lead. The image of the country is now so affected worldwide that its consequences are being reflected in many areas such as economy, respect for US opinions and so on. The world is looking closely to the actions and attitudes of all main candidates, specially now after a disastrous management by the egocentric cheater Bush.
Certainly Hillary with her dirty tricks to pressure-impose her win is not going to help her in the future. Unfortunately most of US voters are mood motivated people that don´t hav a clue what going on. They are just manipulated by the big shark US media that exactly knows how to implement their influences to these masses. It seems what most US people want is to choose the nastier, cheater person and they wrongly think that such person is more capable to lead the country. They are totally wrong.
USA needs urgently to have a positive image around the world and this image will only be achieved by someone honest, more human, and more conscientious about the issues that matter most.
Manny of you might say “we don´t give a darn about the rest of the world thinks of us, we are just better. Period.” This attitude is utterly wrong and if it continues, other economies will take over, leaving US on an eternal crisis.

April 17, 2008 at 1:25 PM  
Malaika said...

Thank you for doing this research. I really appreciate you taking the time to lay the issues out.

April 23, 2008 at 1:50 PM  

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