Obama has been narrowing his targets for attack and derision ever since the 2008 campaign.
Everywhere he looks, he finds some group to hold up for public scorn, and that group has narrowed from the top 5% to the top 2% to the top 1% to Wall Street to the 400 or so people to be affected by the Buffett Rule
But as I predicted, even that group of 400 is too broad for a political flogging.
Now the Obama campaign is singling out a small number of donors to Mitt Romney’s campaign for public scorn, via Kimberley Strassel:
This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
The intense need for Obama to run against a group has been evident for years. It goes beyond politics, it’s a part of his political persona.
Maybe Obama personally is a “nice guy” as Mitt Romney says, but he doesn’t play one in politics.
Barack Got Enemy I wrote on March 1, 2009. He still does.
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