Obama's Foreign Money

From Bud and Phyll:

ON THE POLITICAL FRONT--- the news this week regarding the US presidential campaign was that Sen. Obama's money-raising efforts had hit all time highs; that the sums involved were enormous, but that they were taken in by the campaign in small, not large, individual sums, indicating that the Senator had tapped into some broad, common, public general psyche; that this was all representative of the Senator's "common touch" and that this was bad... indeed, horrid... news for Sen. McCain. But something in the numbers struck us as being incomprehensible. We found it odd that $200 million could come in to the campaign's war chest and that it came in average $15 "units." We did the math. That meant that the campaign had to take approximately 13.3 million campaign contributions if the averages held. Believing that that might be an incorrect use of easy statistics, we thought, let's allow that $50 million of the $200 million came in much larger sums, averaging perhaps $5000 "units." That would still leave $150 million to be divided amongst what would still be millions upon millions and upon millions more of individual, small contributors. We thought to ourselves, this is an impossible task for the campaign staff, for those contributors have to be logged in; data collected, and names secured in order to comply with current election regulations. But then we thought, if Sen. Obama's campaign stands for anything other than far-left-of-centre economics, it stands for transparency and "above board" policies, so we dismissed our concerns as those of an old guard, curmudgeon fearful of the rise of a left-wing government.

Then we read Ms. Maureen Dowd's editorial in The NY Times recently that raised these exact same concerns. This caught our eye because Ms. Dowd is one of The Times' most openly left-of-centre editorialists. Her positions have always been centre-left. Thus when we found out that she is concerned that "the bulk of the contributions were clearly coming in from overseas internet service providers and at the rate and frequency of transmission it was clear these donations were "programmed" by a very sophisticated user," we became all the more concerned. So too should others be.

Ms. Dowd went on to say"while the security people were not able to track most of the sources due to firewalls and other blocking devices put on these contributions that were coming in, seemingly from individuals, the funds were from only a few credit card accounts and bank electronic funds transfers. The internet service providers (ISPs) they were able to trace were from Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. One of the banks used for fund transfers was also located in Saudi Arabia.... Another concentrated group was traced to a Chinese ISP with a similar pattern of limited credit card charges."

This is not some centre-right ideologue making these accusations, nor were these from Pat Buchanan's organization or from some other centre-right think tank. This is, instead, an accusation made by one of the Left's most ardent supporters, and it warrants further consideration. We wonder when the national media will pick up on Ms. Dowd's concerns? Our bet is never.