In 1992, future president Barack Obama led a very successful Project VOTE! campaign in Chicago. Seventeen years later, he was inaugurated. In 2004, I led a very successful Project Vote campaign here in the suburbs of Philadelphia. There is no word yet on whether I will be inaugurated in 2021. You know, he has a twelve year lead so I’m not worried yet. I guess I should be shooting for senator in 2016. Watch out, Pat Toomey!
I have a lot in common with the president, and that’s probably why I was drawn to him in the first place. In some significant ways, I have walked in his shoes. I know what it’s like to work to empower marginalized and under-represented voters, and he knows it, too. That’s why stuff like this fills me with murderous rage.
Billionaire conservative casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who helped keep Newt Gingrich’s failed presidential campaign alive during the Republican primaries, is giving $10 million to the super PAC supporting the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The leader of the super PAC Restore Our Future, Carl Forti, wouldn’t confirm the donation and said his policy was to not comment on donors or potential donors. Mr. Adelson’s spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
Yeah, I know it’s not confirmed, but Adelson has already done enough. I can organize a county and get out the vote, but it takes a ton of shoe leather and sweat and tears. This guy writes a check, and suddenly the air waves are filled with attack ads that more than wipe out whatever I’ve been able to accomplish. If the Supreme Court had ruled that money equals work instead of speech, then I might understand. But the truth is that money cancels out work. There were some rich people who gave money to Project Vote. They paid us to work. Adelson is just paying people to make ads. “Go ahead,” he’s saying, “mobilize as many people as you want. I’ll poison the well and all your work will be for naught.”
I consider what he’s doing to be a crime against democracy and representative government. It’s an absolute crime. I want to say this diplomatically, but I think real patriots should see these billionaires as a serious problem. I really do think that if we can’t change the laws to prohibit this kind of behavior then some people with pitchforks might have to have some kind of conversation with these folks. A man who makes his fortune in large part off of degenerate Chinese gamblers ought not to have the ability to take that foreign money and use it to cancel out the best efforts of those of us who fight for the least of us. Frankly, the foreign money makes it worse, but it is beside the point. There’s no such thing as one person, one vote when our campaigns are financed this way.
