No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Now in Bus & Driver – using donors as wheel grease

by @ 15:38 on June 24, 2008. Filed under Politics - National.


Photoshop from Geepers of LGF via lawhawk

Jim Geraghty found an ancient bus-tossing incident in Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. Quoting from the book:

Increasingly, I found myself spending time with people of means – law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart,interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment…

I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population – that is, the people I’d entered public life to serve.

While Jim focuses on what Obama thinks of those donors, I’ll point out that they’re using Obama and his friends to keep the numbers of those that can afford the $2,000 (now adjusted for inflation) donations to the absolute minimum. After all, some animals are more equal than others, even though the grease is the same.

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