In the wake of Mitt Romney and his supporters out-fundraising President Obama for the third straight month, the Obama campaign emailed its latest fundraising plea to supporters on Monday in a sleek graphic, rife with factual inaccuracies and misleading figures.
Seemingly resigned to Romney’s success in outperforming the president, the plea asks supporters to merely help close the spending gap; but false humility is no excuse for false figures. Red Alert Politics breaks the graphic down, piece by piece:
This much is true, and thank goodness that is all the time we have left to deal with the perpetual craziness of an election season.
Despite shattering fundraising records in his 2008 campaign, Obama has indeed been out-fundraised by Romney three months in a row.
Here is where the graphic gets interesting.
The Obama campaign is displaying a new level of class by mentioning Sheldon Adelson by name; it reminds us of when one of Obama’s campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors,” naming and shaming Romney supporters—private citizens—by claiming they have “less-than-reputable records.”
Adelson, in his towering faceless figure, is supposed to make you, the little guy in your blue overalls (how cute!), motivated to support Obama, organized with your fellow countrymen, and get angry that the big bad Wall Street fat cats can donate more money than you.
In a not-so-surprising turn of events, those Wall Street fat cats Obama has been denouncing, however, have actually been major Obama backers. Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $14 million from the securities and investment industry through April this year. That means that the securities and investment sectors still hold the third spot among the top 10 interest groups of individual donations to the Obama campaign and the DNC.
Although Obama tells his supporters they are “up against billionaires and super PACs that are funneling unprecedented amounts of money” to Romney, Wall Street raised $28.2 million for Obama in 2008. However, enthusiasm for the president has cooled since Obama adopted a relentless class-warfare strategy.
Perhaps because it would prove the Obama campaign is hypocritical, the graphic makes no mention of unions’ pledge to spend more than $400 million to help re-elect Obama-- which would tower over forty Adelsons.
The above graph includes spending on television advertisements over the course of only six days (July 24, 2012 - July 30, 2012). That sort of manipulation is convenient for graphing red bars that tower over blue bars like the towering Adelson figure in the previous graphic, but the real and long term spending habits present a different picture.
A National Journal analysis of television advertisements in nine swing states between May 1 and August 6 show that while Romney outspent Obama $129 million to $118 million, spending margins show a close contest between the two campaigns. Furthermore, Obama and his allies lead TV ad spending from significant sources in four states: Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
TV Ad Spending
Obama Romney
Colorado
$13,995,215 $11,518,472
Florida
$24,812,689 $27,159,751
Iowa
$10,266,941 $12,958,829
Nevada
$9,389,096 $9,101,821
New Hampshire
$6,372,602 $7,425,827
North Carolina
$12,298,964 $18,770,636
Ohio
$29,954,302 $26,402,369
Pennsylvania
$7,230,776 $6,024,219
Virginia
$18,210,380 $21,497,528
Total
$118,535,750 $129,340,980
47.82% 52.18%
The president needs more organizers because the key groups who propelled him to victory in 2008 are pulling back their support. Young voters are increasingly disenchanted by the president because he refuses to enact policies that would foster economic growth. Black voters, though overwhelmingly in Obama’s camp, are split because of the president’s support of gay marriage. And Wall Street may still be giving to the president, but they have dwindled as Obama vilified high earners.
The Obama campaign is asking folks to “Pitch in today” to “close the gap” because the fundraiser-in-chief is unable to do so. The graphic asks supporters to continue “fighting people like” the Wall Street fat cats Obama pretends don’t support him. Curiously enough, when the campaign asks people to instead fund folks like average Americans as the graphic displays, he is ignoring that these average people make up the unions that he asked to pay for the National Democratic Convention costs.
See, Obama really does care about the working class. He’s young. He’s hip. He’s accessible. You can relate to him. He fist-bumps with janitors/maintenance men/men of the working class (remember those blue overalls in the image above?).
But if the president is so accessible, why has the White House Press Corps gone seven weeks without a question? And it isn’t likely the average American can relate to a man whose most lucrative donors are Hollywood A-listers. And the president can hardly be advocating policies that favor the working and middle classes when the national unemployment just increased to 8.3 percent.
If you are interested in donating to Obama, go right ahead, but the appeals aren’t going to stop anytime soon. It’s been a long, long campaign for Obama, and you can be sure he is going to drag the rest of us through it.