John Byrne explains how The Establishment bet on a loser and is now catching up.
Employees in nine major industries are beginning to turn their money toward Barack Obama’s campaign — a potential new sign that US business is placing their bets on Obama to win the Democratic nomination.
Campaign finance reports now show that employees of nine major US industries — including defense, communications, health, construction and Wall Street — gave the lion’s share of their contributions to the junior senator from Illinois instead of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in the first three months of 2008. All of these industries favored Clinton in 2007.
These people would throw money at Dennis Kucinich if they became convinced that he was going to be our next president. But I’m sure some Clinton supporters will jump on this to say that there’s no difference between the candidates. The ‘he’s as bad as me’ argument never was very compelling.
Obama will return the money of any federally registered lobbyist, Clinton won’t. Obama’s average donor gave $96. The fact that the Fat Cats are throwing dollars at Obama is only significant in the sense that it proves he has crossed a threshold of viability.
