If Obama can’t part them, maybe Erica Payne will.

Sep 29, 2011
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO

The latest email from the Obama campaign carries the subject line “Why we’ve been sending you emails.” Here’s the answer, which appears over the signature of Rufus Gifford, national finance director of Obama for America:

I know we’ve been sending you a lot of email lately. That’s because we’re staring down a critical fundraising deadline tomorrow at midnight. . . .

That’s why we’ve been emailing this week, and that’s why I’m obligated to remind you once more that the deadline is coming up in a matter of hours.

If you’re able to, will you chip in $3 or more today?

So apparently these guys think their supporters aren’t bright enough to figure out that the reason they’re sending fund-raising emails is to raise funds.

The Great Deflation also seems to be hitting the president’s campaign treasury. The emails used to ask for $5, so the request for $3 amounts to 40% off. At this rate, pretty soon Obama will be asking for change rather than promising it.

For bigger donors, discounts run as deep as 75%. Next week in St. Louis, Obama speaks to Generation 44, an organization of supporters who aren’t as young as they used to be. “The group has a limited number of $1,000 tickets available for $250,” KSDK-TV reports.

Once you’ve made your 1,666th $3 contribution, you’re up against the legal limit of $5,000 for a presidential nominee. What then? Blogger William Jacobson calls our attention to an equally worthy cause, Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength. “Fiscal strength” is a euphemism for what Obama, in a moment of candor, called “massive, job-killing tax increases.”

It occurred to us that it would be especially rich if donations to PMFFS turned out to be tax deductible. The donation page on the group’s website doesn’t say, but our best guess is they are not. PMFFS turns out to be a subsidiary of something called the Agenda Project, whose own donation page stipulates that it is a 501(c)(4) like Citizens United. This is a nonprofit corporation that engages in political activity and may collect donations only in after-tax dollars.

The Agenda Project is the brainchild of the delightfully named Erica Payne, a prog political consultant. “Our goal,” the project’s “What We Do” page explains, “is to return normal Americans to the center of the policy debate.” Among the project’s earlier efforts, as New York’s Daily News reports, was an ad “that shows a man resembling Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) shoving a wheelchair-bound senior citizen off a cliff.”

Another one, reported by Politico, is called “F*ck Tea” (we can’t link to the URL, which spells out the obscenity). Apparently in the world of Payne, so-called patriotic millionaires are more normal than the ordinary Americans who make up the Tea Party movement.

And the Agenda Project fully subscribes to the prog notion of “civility,” which is to say that it is sanctimonious as well as foul and obnoxious. Yet another of the project’s offshoots is called “Hate Begets Hate.” But the Agenda Project itself refutes this assertion. For all its hatefulness, it seems to have inspired only amusement and indifference.

On the other hand, if the “patriotic millionaires” have their way and we get massive, job-killing tax increases, we will be able to say that Payne begets pain.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576600941942394156.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

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