Obama’s Romney money war

Barack Obama’s latest email appeal for campaign funds – entitled ‘we could lose if this continues’ – doesn’t seem altogether sincere. The president’s re-election team wants more money, of course – who doesn’t? – and they must be concerned by the fact that Romney and his plutocratic committees are beating them in the fund-raising stakes. As Obama says, ‘we can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more’.

Yet anyone with half a brain can see what Obama and his strategists are trying to say (again): Romney is a super-rich agent of the super-rich. He represents big business, not ordinary Americans. He is, as one White House adviser put it, trying to ‘purchase the White House’.

But, hang on. Isn’t that also what Barack Obama is attempting to do – for a second time?  No, insists his campaign’s Chief Operating Officer, Ann Marie Habershaw. ‘None of us would be fighting this hard just to win a money war… We’re here because we believe in something bigger – because none of us wants to see this country go back to the policies that drove our economy into a ditch, which is exactly what the other side wants to do.’

Fair enough, Ann, except the vast majority of Americans believe that Obama, in his four years in office, has driven America further and further into that ditch. A recent poll found that 56 per cent of Americans believe that Obama – that 2008 agent of ‘change’ – has ‘transformed the country in a negative way’.