As Shakespeare wrote, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends…”
I recently received a nostalgic letter from Barack Obama, looking back with fondness on his tradition of hosting dinner parties and saddened that his next raffled shindig will be the last. I, too, am grieving the inevitable loss of a campaign tradition that is coming soon, but not soon enough.
As much as we need to see a new president, I’ll admit, I’m going to miss the creepy, Kim Jong-il-esque requests for fanatical, dogmatic commitment to his campaign.
Knowing that there would be some hair-brained, crazy scheme to lower the integrity of the executive office waiting for me in my inbox gave me a sense of anticipation. Like dessert at the end of a meal, I knew I could count on a good chuckle- What would it be today? Will he ask me to sell my home for the good of the campaign? (He’s already asked me to open my home to his stooges.) Will he ask me to sell my great-great-grandfather’s pocketwatch for the glory of his righteous cause? Not knowing what insanity awaited me was always half the fun. I’m gonna miss that.
But wait, there is one crazy, last-ditch effort for our Dear Leader:
A grassroots group endorsed by the Obama-Biden Campaign is asking that you sell you possessions for the good of the cause. Yes, they want you to have an Obama yard sale, where the proceeds go to the Glorious One. You just can’t make this stuff up…
In a short ad with cringe-worthy acting, yuppies squabble over all the things they’re going to sell to help the Obama Campaign, each trying their darndest to make the necessary cuts necessary to beat back those evil corporate donors. After they decide they must all sacrifice, they then decide to encourage others to sell things for the cause.
However, while the ad keeps with the tired narrative that Republicans run off of corporate money alone, the ad conspicuously omits the massive corporate donations on which the 2008 Obama Campaign relied as well as the $14 million the 2012 Obama Campaign took from those fat-cats in the securities and investments industry. And, of course, let’s not forget Obama’s patron Saint of check-writing, George Soros. So let’s drop the “noble, starving underdog” fable.
While the ad ends with the narrator claiming, “We can all take back power from the billionaires and corporations,” it does not address a central question, “What is so wrong with billionaires and corporations having a voice?”
There are central issues we overlook and take as a given, one of which is that those with more money have a better ability to get their voice heard. However, why is that a bad thing? Certainly the owner of a corporation’s vote does not count more than mine, but why is it inherently bad that with money comes greater responsibility and, yes, more influence?
As these hipster do-gooders labor under the delusion that evil, corporate Bond villains are angling to control all the power, they have lost sight of just how ridiculous and backwards this campaign has become. Presidents used to believe that campaigning was undignified, and we have come so far from that that liberals are selling their waffle irons to fund the candidate who has been reliably failing them for four years?
When did we lose sight of the fact that presidential candidates should be explaining to us how they’re going to make our lives better, not the other way around? We should cherish our hard-earned right to vote, and be content to speak up on matters of importance. We should donate to causes about which we feel strongly. But we should not labor and sell our possessions, open our houses to strangers, sacrifice our wedding gifts or fall on any proverbial grenades to bolster a candidate out of some perverse and misguided sense of loyalty.
Get a hold of yourself, people!
The less you have the more dependent you can be on the almighty wee one…..for the sake of ….dependence on….Because it’s only fair after all!