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The following article is from FactCheck.org and fact finding organization. I will put my expressions in parenthesis.

Obama says McCain is “fueled” by money from lobbyists and PACs, but those sources account for less than 1.7 percent of McCain’s money.

One reason, he said, is that “John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.”

We find that to be a large exaggeration and a lame excuse. In fact, donations from PACs and lobbyists make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain’s total receipts, and they account for only about 1.1 percent of the RNC’s receipts.

A Lame Excuse

However, the first of the two reasons he gave for his decision doesn’t square very well with the facts. In a video recording sent to supporters, Obama said:

RNC – The Republican National Committee has raised $143,298,225, of which only $135,000 has been come from lobbyists, according to the CRP. That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent. It also took in about 1 percent of its receipts from PACs, CRP said. Taken together, that’s about 1.1 percent from PACs and lobbyists.

Obama’s Advantage

It’s not our place to comment on the wisdom or propriety of Obama’s financial strategy, except to note that it is perfectly legal and also that McCain and Obama both refused to accept public funds or spending limits during the primary campaign.

We also note that Obama’s decision – whatever may have motivated it – is likely to give him a big financial advantage over McCain in the weeks just before the November election. This is a reversal of the historic pattern, in which Republican candidates have nearly always been able to out-raise their Democratic rivals. Had Obama accepted public funds, as McCain is expected to do, both candidates would have been limited to spending $84.1 million, all of it from taxpayers. But Obama has shown the potential for raising and spending much more.

The Obama campaign already has raised $265 million through the end of April, more than two-and-a-half times as much as McCain has taken in. Figures for May are due out soon. The Obama campaign said on May 6 that it had surpassed 1.5 million individual donors, and it probably has many more than that by now. All of those primary donors are legally free to make new contributions to finance Obama’s general election campaign, which officially commences after he becomes certified as the Democratic party’s nominee at the convention at the end of August.

Footnotes

The lobbyist figures we give here could stand some minor refinement. The totals might be reduced somewhat if the CRP used Obama’s rather narrow definition of “lobbyist.” Obama makes a point of refusing money from those who are currently registered to lobby at the federal level. The CRP has a broader definition, counting money from anyone working at a lobbying firm, registered or not, state or federal, and their families as well. By CRP’s definition Obama himself has taken in $161,927 from lobbyists.

On the other hand, CRP does not count registered lobbyists who work in-house for corporations, industry groups and unions, but classifies them with their industries. Adding those in-house lobbyists to the total could increase the amounts somewhat. But adding donations from in-house lobbyists and subtracting donations from those who don’t meet Obama’s strict definition would not be likely to change the total by much, and certainly not by enough to justify Obama’s claim that McCain and the RNC are “fueled” by such donations.

Also, for what it’s worth, the Democratic National Committee has historically been far more reliant on PAC and lobbyist money than the RNC. In 2004, PACs provided about 10 percent of the DNC’s total fundraising and only about 1 percent of the RNC’s total, according to the CRP. Obama, after he sewed up enough delegates to win the party’s nomination, sent word to the DNC to stop accepting PAC and lobbyist donations.
-by Brooks Jackson

Sources

Ritsch, Massie. “Obama Puts Lobbyists, PACs on DNC’s Do-Not-Call List.” Center for Responsive Politics, 5 June 2008.

“Selected Industry Total to Candidates.” Center for Responsive Politics Web site, accessed 19 June 2008.

“Summary Data: John McCain.” Center for Responsive Politics Web site accessed, 19 June 2008

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obamas_lame_claim_about_mccains_money.html

And it goes further back. Obama has had many Lobbyists help him to the top in the past. Read this:

By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | August 9, 2007
Using campaign appearances, e-mails to supporters, and Iowa TV ads, Illinois Senator Barack Obama has repeatedly reminded voters that his presidential campaign does not accept contributions from lobbyists or political action committees, casting his decision as a noble departure from the ways of Washington.

In addition, Obama’s own federal PAC, Hopefund, took in $115,000 from 56 PACs in the 2005-2006 election cycle out of $4.4 million the PAC raised, according to CQ MoneyLine, which collects Federal Election Commission data. Obama then used those PAC contributions — including thousands from defense contractors, law firms, and the securities and insurance industries — to build support for his presidential run by making donations to Democratic Party organizations and candidates around the country.

Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that after seeing the influence of lobbyists firsthand during his two years in Washington, Obama decided before he entered the presidential race that he would take a different approach to fund-raising than he had in the past.”He’s leading by example and taking steps that he feels need to be taken on the national stage to clean up the undue influence of Washington lobbyists on the policies and priorities of Washington,” Psaki said. “His leadership on this issue is an evolving process.”

Psaki said Obama believes that healthcare lobbyists have blocked progress toward universal health coverage, and that oil company lobbyists have blocked badly needed changes to America’s energy policies.

Though Obama has returned thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from registered federal lobbyists since he declared his candidacy in February, his presidential campaign has maintained ties with lobbyists and lobbying firms to help raise some of the $58.9 million he collected through the first six months of 2007. Obama has raised more than $1.4 million from members of law and consultancy firms led by partners who are lobbyists, The Los Angeles Times reported last week. And The Hill, a Washington newspaper, reported earlier this year that Obama’s campaign had reached out to lobbyists’ networks to use their contacts to help build his fund-raising base.

This activity, along with Obama’s past contributions from lobbyists and PACs, has drawn fire from opposing campaigns. Some political analysts say Obama, by casting himself as an uncorrupted good-government crusader, has set himself up for charges of hypocrisy.

“If you’re running a campaign about credibility, that credibility and persona are so important you better be squeaky clean,” said Richard Semiatin, a political scientist at American University. “While he’s getting good traction out of this, I think in the long term he’s really got to be careful.”

From the day he entered the presidential race, Obama has projected an outside-the-Beltway persona, positioning himself as the Washington change agent that Americans are pining for. Last week, his campaign began running a new TV spot in Iowa, in which the narrator says, “He’s leading by example, refusing contributions from PACs and Washington lobbyists who have too much power today.”

In the Democrats’ previous debate, on July 23, Obama was unequivocal when challenged by former Alaska senator Mike Gravel about who his donors were.

“Well, the fact is I don’t take PAC money and I don’t take lobbyists’ money,” Obama said, touting his work on an ethics reform bill that just passed Congress. “That’s the kind of leadership that I’ve shown in the Senate. That’s the kind of leadership that I showed when I was a state legislator. And that’s the kind of leadership that I’ll show as president of the United States.”

And on June 25, right before the second quarter ended, Obama sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to contribute to his campaign to make up for the lack of special-interest money.

“Candidates typically spend a week like this — right before the critical June 30th financial reporting deadline — on the phone day and night, begging Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs to write huge checks,” the e-mail said. “Not me. Our campaign has rejected the money-for-influence game and refused to accept funds from registered federal lobbyists and political action committees.”

Obama’s main Democratic target on the issue of lobbyist and PAC contributions has been Clinton, whom Obama has been working to paint as a figurehead for the broken politics of Washington. Through June, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton had collected $413,000 from lobbyists and $533,000 from PACs — leading all 2008 presidential contenders in both categories. Clinton has also raised about $3 million from PACs and $400,000 from lobbyists for her Senate campaigns, according to the group.

Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, said Obama, given his record of raising special-interest money throughout his political career, was taking a “gamble” in holding himself up as a beacon of purity.

“He probably will be hurt if he’s put in a position where he’s trying to draw very fine distinctions between his present campaign and his past behavior,” Squire said.

Obama’s campaign is relying almost exclusively on an unprecedented network of grass-roots donors and activists — nearly 260,000 of them had given him money through June alone.

And some good-government activists say that, past fund-raising practices aside, Obama has genuinely been a champion for ethics and campaign reform, both in the Illinois Legislature and in Congress.

“On the one hand, sure, he rose to power as many people do in this town, which is to raise money from the people who have the money,” said Gary Kalman, of the advocacy group US PIRG.

At the same time, he added, Obama has championed public financing for elections and he fought hard to pass the federal ethics reform bill.

Pardon the sarcasm. But given Mr. Obama’s earlier pledge to “aggressively pursue” an agreement with the Republican nominee to accept public financing, his effort to cloak his broken promise in the smug mantle of selfless dedication to the public good is a little hard to take…

Mr. Obama didn’t mention his previous proposal to take public financing if the Republican nominee agreed to do the same — the one for which he received heaps of praise from campaign finance reform advocates such as Mr. Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, and others, including us. He didn’t mention, as he told the Federal Election Commission last year in seeking to preserve the option, that “Congress concluded some thirty years ago that the public funding alternative . . . would serve core purposes in the public interest: limiting the escalation of campaign spending and the associated pressures on candidates to raise, at the expense of time devoted to public dialogue, ever vaster sums of money.”

Instead, he cast his abandonment of the system as a bold good-government move. “This is our moment, and our country is depending on us,” he said. “So join me, and declare your independence from this broken system and let’s build the first general election campaign that’s truly funded by the American people.” Sure, and if the Founding Fathers were around today, they’d have bundlers, too…

Fine. Politicians do what politicians need to do. But they ought to spare us the self-congratulatory back-patting while they’re doing it.

Of course this little white lie (can we say that?) won’t stop the Washington Post from endorsing Mr. Obama, or campaigning for him within their pages every day until the elections.

Indeed, if the Washington Post or any of our watchdog media were truly incensed at this latest flip-flop from their hero, they would investigate just how Mr. Obama is raising so much money in such desperate economic times.

They might start by looking at Mr. Soros army of 527s and his other nefarious money laundering operations. For whom it would be child’s play to donate to the Obama campaign in dribs and drabs of $250 or less — which are then untraceable.

But they won’t.

And we know why.

And speaking of 527s, what about those those heavily funded Republican attack machines Mr. Obama claims he is up against?

Even the Politco admits they simply don’t exist:

According to Glenn Thrush of Newsday, Democracy Alliance members report that their organization ”advises Democratic donors on where to spend their political contributions” and, in so doing, “steered more than $6 million to [David] Brock’s group” — Media Matters — between 2004 and 2006.

(As we have previously noted, even the Soros organization the Open Society Institute lists its contributions, including those from the US government and a Palestinian Relief agency.)

Why this lack of curiosity about the left, when a handful of highly suspect characters are pouring millions of dollars into one party, indeed into the efforts of one candidate?

But despite giving millions of dollars to liberal candidates and 527 political committees, the donors came away with nothing. At about the same time another group of wealthy Democratic donors was meeting at a hotel in Washington, D.C. feeling the same way. “The U.S. didn’t enter World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,” political consultant Erica Payne told the meeting. “We just had our Pearl Harbor.”

Determined to bring the Democratic Party back from the political wilderness, Soros and the others decided they needed a long-term strategy to regain power. Former Clinton official Rob Stein urged them to copy conservatives who had spent four decades investing in ideas and institutions with staying power. Over the next year Stein would become well-known for a PowerPoint presentation called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix.”

He used graphs and charts to show how the conservative movement was comprised of an intricate network of organizations, funders and activists. Stein’s presentation was apparently convincing. In 2005 the Democracy Alliance was born. It was an odd name for a loose collection of superrich donors committed to building organizations that would propel America to the left.

In April 2005, Soros gathered together an even larger group. Seventy millionaires and billionaires met in Phoenix, Arizona, to firm up the details for their fledging political financing clearinghouse. The attendees heard presentations on why all the pro-Democratic Party 527 groups on which they lavished millions of dollars failed to deliver the election to Kerry. But now they had a new strategy to make a difference.

Finances

To join the Democracy Alliance, there is one requirement: You must be rich. Members, who are called “partners,” pay an initial $25,000 fee and $30,000 in yearly dues. They also must pledge to give at least $200,000 annually to groups that Democracy Alliance endorses.

Partners meet two times a year in committees to decide on grants, which focus on four areas: media, ideas, leadership, and civic engagement. Recommendations are then made to the DA board, which passes them on to all DA partners. The Alliance discourages partners from discussing DA affairs with the media and it requires its grant recipients to sign nondisclosure agreements.

As a result, it is hard to learn much about the Alliance’s grant making. There were no grants voted on at the DA’s April 2005 organizing meeting in Phoenix. However, when the group met in October of that year at the Chateau Elan Winery & Resort in Atlanta, Georgia, it decided behind closed doors to dole out $28 million to nine grantees. Most of that money went to well-known groups, including the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America…

The DA’s third round of funding was expected to be decided at a Miami, Florida, meeting scheduled for November 2006. Details of the meeting were not available at Foundation Watch’s press time.

DA’s managing director, Judy Wade, said she hopes the Alliance will work with other funding groups and eventually give out $500 million in grants each year.

Selected Grant Recipients

We can identify a number of left-wing groups that have gone through the DA’s vetting process and received funding. Some grant amounts have been reported in the press but there is no official tally.

*Media Matters for America: Former conservative journalist David Brock’s group claims to expose right-wing news bias. The Internet-based media watchdog, launched in May 2004, describes itself as “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

*Center for American Progress: Former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta heads the think tank that received $5 million from the DA. The organization aspires to be the Heritage Foundation of the left. Spinoffs include Campus Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) lobby group. The Action Fund’s “Kick the Oil Habit” campaign is led by actor-environmentalist Robert Redford.

*Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): This Soros-funded group sees itself as a left-wing version of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group that filed a barrage of lawsuits against the Clinton administration in the 1990s.CREW executive director Melanie Sloan is a former U.S. Attorney and Democratic counsel for the House Judiciary Committee….

*Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN): ACORN is a radical activist group active in housing programs and “living wage” campaigns in inner cities neighborhoods in more than 75 U.S. cities. In recent years it has been implicated in a number of fraudulent voter-registration schemes. *EMILY’s List: While the political action committee boasts that it is “the nation’s largest grassroots political network,” it is essentially a fundraising vehicle for pro-abortion rights female political candidates…

*Center for Community Change: This longtime group dedicated to defending welfare entitlements and leftist anti-poverty programs was founded in 1968. Activist Deepak Bhargava is its executive director.

*US Action: This group works closely with organized labor. It is the successor to Citizen Action, the activist group discredited by its involvement in the money-laundering scandal to re-elect Teamsters president Ron Carey in the late 1990s. *Data Warehouse: This group was created by Clinton aide Harold Ickes and Democratic operative Laura Quinn. Ickes is critical of the Democratic National Committee under chairman Howard Dean and aims to create a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation that rivals the Republican Party’s. Ickes proposes to build detailed voter lists that will be made available to Democratic Party candidates, and also to advocacy groups. According to a report in the Washington Post, George Soros put $11 million at Ickes’s disposal because he distrusts Howard Dean. Does It Have A Mission?

“The top four donors to 527s in 2004 — and the only donors to spend in the eight figures on that election — all gave exclusively to pro-Democrat groups. Of the top 25 individual donors—all billionaires or multi-millionaires— 15 of them gave to pro-Democrat groups, and 10 gave to Republican- supporting groups. From this elite group of super-rich donors, the Democratic side got $108.4 million, compared to the Republican side’s $40 million. Soros and Lewis together spent more to defeat Bush than the ten most prolific Republican fat cats combined spent supporting the President.”

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/even-the-wp-mocks-obamas-finance-flip-flop\

By James Dellinger and Matthew Vadum