Obama maintains hope, but not in comity

Much of Obama's speech was the same as always: I ran because the American Dream, the "basic bargain," is slipping away; we need to renew our commitment to shared prosperity, opportunity for all; to build sustainable broad-based prosperity by investing in green energy, education, infrastructure; to secure our budgetary future by controlling healthcare costs without denying care. And of course, the other side is about trickle-down, the failed policies of the Bush years, the toxic post-Reagan conviction that government is the problem.

What struck me as different was a subtle bid to tie his opponents to the wholesale corruption of our politics threatened by the unleashing of the Super PACs and the 501(c)(4)s post-Citizens United and Speechnow.org. Democrats have always suggested that Republican policies serve the wealthy.  Obama cast Romney and co. as pretty much owned and bound.

It began at the beginning, with a suggestion of corrupted process that's encompassed him too:

A plea to Warren Buffett and his ilk

There's nothing new here, but it kills me to read comments like this* from Obamaite billionaires:

Warren Buffett, America’s second-richest man, is one of Obama’s most high-profile supporters, but he has declared that he will not support Super PACs, saying, “I don’t want to see democracy go in that direction.”

The day American democracy died?

Here's a news snippet, as excerpted in Mike Allen's Playbook, that perhaps lays bare the arc of U.S. history since 1980. And it doesn't bend toward justice:

NINE-FIGURE DONATION TO ROMNEY? "Adelson's Pro-Romney Donations Will Be 'Limitless,' Could Top $100M," by Forbes' Steven Bertoni : "Sheldon Adelson, along with his wife Miriam, ... donated $10 million to the leading Super PAC supporting ... Mitt Romney-and that's just the tip of the iceberg. A well-placed source in the Adelson camp with direct knowledge of the casino billionaire's thinking says that further donations will be 'limitless.' Adelson, who has built Las Vegas Sands into an global casino empire, will do 'whatever it takes' to defeat Obama, this source says. And given that Adelson is worth $24.9 billion-and told Forbes in a recent rare interview about his political giving that he had been willing to donate as much as $100 million to his initial presidential preference, Newt Gingrich-that 'limitless' description telegraphs potential nine-digit support of Romney." http://onforb.es/KpzkDk

The "arc" has been sculpted by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who, beholden to an ideology that admits no distinction between money and speech, have literally sold American democracy down the river to the GOP's corporate and megarich individual backers.

Citizens United* has changed...me

I was a little shocked when I caught my own train of thought after reading this:

A high school classmate of presidential candidate Mitt Romney told ABC News today that he considers a particular prank the two pulled at Michigan’s Cranbrook School to be “assault and battery” and that he witnessed Romney hold the scissors to cut the hair of a student who was being physically pinned to the ground by several others.

Yes, Citizens United did unlatch the Super PAC floodgates

Wendy Kaminer is the latest in a chorus of commentators complaining that the media in general, and The New York Times in particular, is misleading the public by asserting repeatedly that the Superme Court's Citizens United  decision has enabled the new Super Pacs:

Like Fox News, The New York Times has a First Amendment right to spread misinformation about important public issues, and it is exercising that right in its campaign against the Citizens United ruling. In news stories, as well as columns, it has repeatedly mischaracterized Citizens United, explicitly or implicitly blaming it for allowing unlimited "super PAC" contributions from mega-rich individuals. In fact, Citizens United enabled corporations and unions to use general treasury funds for independent political expenditures; it did not expand or address the longstanding, individual rights of the rich to support independent groups. 

Kaminer, like Steven Brill and Dan Abrams before her, is making a mountain out of a molehill -- or worse, promoting a misapprehension more consequential than that of which she accuses the Times.  As she herself acknowledges, while Citizens United did not directly address the rights of individuals to make unlimited contributions to organizations advocating directly for a candidate, it shaped the subsequent decision that did create the Super Pacs:  SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, decided by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in March 2010.

Kaminer's account of the relationship between the two cases is misleading. She implies that the Citizens United decision had merely a clarifying rather than a controlling role in Speech Now:

The Supreme Court opens markets

E.J. Dionne, lamenting the escalated corruption of our politics triggered by the Citizens United decision, begins by implicitly questioning why Wall Street and so many business interests are gunning for Obama:

The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats.

Dionne doesn't bother to ask why -- he focuses on the how, i.e. the new freedom to anonymously donate unlimited amounts of cash to groups deploying political ads. But as to why, as noted here once before, Bill Clinton explained succinctly to Taylor Branch in 1995: