Sure President Obama has been on a huge fundraising kick lately. And yes, he's clocked 160 fundraisers thus far in the reelection season, "more than double the 79 events that President George W. Bush had held by this time in the 2004 presidential race," the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza confessed today in his 11-paragraph page A6 article. [The print article was a condensed and updated version of a June 12 The Fix blog post that you can find here.]
To make a big deal out of this would just be silly, Cillizza insisted, taking it upon himself to spin for the Obama White House against Republican charges that the president is more interested in beefing up his campaign war chest than he is in governing.
"[C]omparing the amount Bush raised -- or how many events he held to raise it -- to what Obama is doing is misleading," Cillizza complained. "Remember that while Bush raised and spent north of $270 million during the primary season... he accepted public financing for the two-plus months between, roughly, Labor Day and Election Day," Cillizza added, noted that, "Obama on the other hand, opted out of public financing for the general election in 2008."
"[T]rying to base political attacks on how much money the other guy (or gal) is raising and spending rarely works," Cillizza concluded, adding that "[p]ersuadable voters -- unaffiliated and independents -- don't follow politics closely enough to be very interested in who raised what from whom."
That may very well be true, but it cuts against the liberal media's larger narrative that independent voters are turned off by massive amounts of money -- particularly Super PAC money -- in politics. It's amusing to see folks like Cillizza argue that massive mega-bucks fundraising doesn't matter as a campaign issue... when it's Democrats who are doing it.
