Obama Corporate Candidate?

[medeak]

was truly shocked to read this on guerrilla news:

Barack Obama, Just Another Corporate Candidate?
Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:33:42 -0700

Getting in deep
By Joshua Frank
Follow the money
One cannot scale the ranks of the Democratic establishment without selling out to Washington insiders, and presidential aspirant Barack Obama is quite adept at playing the game. Since announcing his candidacy in early February, Obama has raised millions of dollars from corporate fat-cats and multinational corporations. While the young candidate has leaned heavily on law firms to which he has professional connections – he’s also not been afraid to dip in to the trough of Big Business. And it’s a sure sign Obama is a real contender for his party’s nomination.

When Howard Dean’s campaign began to gain momentum during the 2004 elections, the former Vermont governor had not flipped through his party’s corporate black book, and instead relied heavily on the grassroots to provide fuel for his presidential bid. The party’s elite, nervous and unsure that Dean could be one of them, taught the naïve doctor a harsh lesson: the establishment quietly sacked Dean for America because he had not accepted the way business is done in Washington.

Insiders were brought on at safe distance from John Kerry’s campaign, and a group, founded by Democratic fundraiser David Jones, ran vile ads attacking Dean during the Iowa caucus. Moderate Democrats labeled Dean a radical despite his conservative tenure in Vermont. John Edwards called him unelectable. The DLC was against him. Soon Dean was crushed at the polls and never recovered after his screaming speech following the disaster in Iowa. The elite had prevailed with Kerry and Edwards. The Deaniacs’ hopes were crushed. And it now seems Obama has vowed to make the same mistake.

more: http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/3064/Barack_Obama_Just_Another_Corporate_Candidate

[Bombtrack]

1. guerrilla (punkass) news would never deal in bullshit ...

[medeak]

3. interesting comments re Joshua Frank n/t

[skipos]

2. Yawn

I like many candidates, and they are all going to take corporate cash.

[IndyOp]

4. From Harpers article, "Barack Obama Inc."

Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma’s arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.

Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation’s manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama’s top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a “leadership PAC,” a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians’ campaigns—and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.

<snip>

The question, though, is just how effective—let alone reformist—Obama’s approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.

Link to Harper's article: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275

If the sources of BIG money have a lot to say about the groups to whom a candidate is beholden -- and I believe they do -- then I prefer John Edwards' funding from Unions and Trial Lawyer's Associations.


Edit: Add link

[medeak]

9. thanks... was looking for article n/t

[Adelante]

5. You were shocked?

The only thing shocking is the writer's pretense that this story is only about Obama. It's about 99.9% of politicians.

[iamjoy]

6. Oh, For Pity's Sake!

I'm not an Obama supporter, but cut the crap.

So he takes money from corporations. Reality Check - in the current political climate it is almost impossible not to do so and be a viable candidate for national office. You can have big ideals and refuse to budge and shout your ideas from a street corner or you can be pragmatic, get elected and start implenting small changes.

Think it doesn't matter? Bill Clinton was "corporate" too, but he still signed FMLA into law (George HW Bush vetoed it). As some one who has had to take medical leave, I can say it made a big difference to ME that Clinton won in 1992.

I'm for being practical.

[brentspeak]

7. Clinton also signed NAFTA into law

And look how well that turned out...

He was on the take, or just plain stupid.

[illinoisprogressive]

8. How stupid. Just by his Harvard classmates he's going to know big shots. duh.

Besides, how do you propose he run against the clinton machine and pay for a presidential run. Plueeeezee!
In the real world no candidate is without big shot friends and backers.