I suppose some people still don't think campaign finance is the problem.
Campaigning in 2008, Obama proclaimed:
"Make no mistake about what we're up against. We're up against the belief that it's all right for lobbyists to dominate our government, that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we are not going to let them stand in our way anymore."
When he took office the following year, an executive order was signed banning registered lobbyists from the administration. But then exceptions were made, and exceptions and exceptions. Just a couple of weeks ago, Politico calculated that "the Obama administration has hired about 70 previously registered corporate, trade association and for-hire lobbyists. And many of these former lobbyists work at the highest levels of government." What's more, Mark Felsenthal at Reuters recently reported that, "President Barack Obama is loosening restrictions on lobbyists who want to serve on federal advisory boards." There are more than a thousand such committees, room for plenty of mischief.
Now the revolving door has started spinning in the other direction, as the Obama campaign and administration insiders hear the siren call of green (and we don't mean the environment). The website Buzzfeed pointed to Obama adviser and campaign manager David Plouffe's deal with Uber, the on-demand car service doing its best to please yuppies while breaking the taxi unions. Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and 2012 campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt are being paid to run a PR campaign against the teachers unions and Obama campaign manager Jim Messina is working for the re-election of Britain's anti-union Prime Minster David Cameron and his Conservative Party. Talk about betraying your base!
"The key staff from Obama for America are translating their political success into personal economic success," Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen told Buzzfeed. "If anything this points to the need for the rest of us to build a movement that gets big money out of politics so the change we voted for in 2008 can become real."
But how do we get that change when the candidate who promised it embraces the status quo of the well-heeled elite? After all, there were the Obamas and Bill and Hillary Clinton at Vernon Jordan's party on the Vineyard, cheek to cheek with the CEOs of Xerox and American Express. Chances are there were no working people at that shindig to present an opposing viewpoint (except for the hired help serving the pasta and surf and turf). But there were both wings of the Democratic Party: the corporate-center right-Wall Street-lobby wing (the Clintons and Jordan) and the putatively progressive wing (the president) hobnobbing in splendid surroundings with corporate poobahs as police battled residents in Ferguson, Missouri, refugees were being bombed in Iraq, fatal disease plagued West Africa and drought in America dried up 63 trillion gallons of water.
As the world burns, our political class whoops it up with the plutocracy, whether in Martha's Vineyard or at the Kochs' posh retreat in southern California. They raise their Champagne toasts, quietly reinforce their networks and connections, and then return to the "mainland" and the pretense of once again attending to the people's business, all the while servicing the accounts that pay the campaign bills and nourish all those inside deals -- tax breaks, subsidies, contracts -- that many would call corruption but Chief Justice Roberts says are merely gratitude.
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