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.”

Pitch me, Priorities USA

I read with deep distress Robert Draper's Times Mag chronicle of how the Democrats, taking their cue mainly from Obama, unilaterally disarmed in the Super PAC battles in this election cycle and are now staring down the barrel of a billion dollar GOP juggernaut while Priorities USA struggles to raise $100 million tops.

Draper's look back at the relative potency of Democrat-supporting 527s in 2004 and 2006 carried me back to the 2004 campaign, the first in which I used online phone tools for voter outreach. Obama's innovation in 2008 was to center those tools in his own campaign organization; in 2004 I relied on MoveOn and I think ACT, Americans Coming Together, or possibly other outside groups, to set me up. I got their emails and sent them money, sometimes in response to requests to fund a particular ad -- including one of a not-yet-famous Cindy Sheehan weeping into the camera as she made a "Bush-lied-my-son-died" accusation. That one was created by a tiny outside group, but MoveOn briefly took it up and did ad buys for it. 

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: