Could Our President Be Any Whinier?

In recent weeks, I have published several fundraising emails I have received from Barack Obama or his surrogates. They are notable, I think, for their desperate tone. Which is good: a campaign that thought it was doing well would not address its supporters in such humiliating fashion. Here is today’s plea from my good friend Barack. I am reproducing it in its entirety, with comments interspersed, as you really have to read the whole thing to get the full flavor of desperation:

John —

When I’m out there talking to voters, we talk about what we’ve done, what we plan to do over the next four years, and why the other guys have dangerous plans to go back to the policies that failed America for almost a decade.

This takes a certain amount of nerve. The Bush years look like a golden age compared to the fiasco of the Obama administration.

But there is another question that keeps coming up, and you need to know about it: “Why do I see so many more ads for the other guys?”

You don’t need me to tell you that the Romney campaign is outraising us — that billionaire ideologues and corporate interests are piling on tens of millions more in negative ads trashing us, and that all of it means that undecided voters in battleground states like Iowa could be seeing false, misleading, negative attacks at a rate almost twice as often as they hear from us.

Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.

Poor widdle Barry! Four years ago, when he broke his promise to accept public funding of his campaign and became, as I have termed him, the greatest money machine in the history of politics, and outspent John McCain four or five to one through the heart of the campaign, you didn’t hear any whining about being “outraised,” or about “billionaire ideologues and corporate interests.” Before they found out through bitter experience that he is a lousy president, the corporate interests were on Obama’s side. Many of them still are.

It also should be noted that the ads Obama is whining about–the ones that “trash” him–simply point out his terrible record as president. He is the one running a smear campaign, not Romney.

But the folks asking me about this don’t want an explanation — they want to know what I’m going to do about it.

And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you.

Close the gap on the air by making a donation of $5 or more now.

You’re getting this email because you know what the stakes are in this election. You know the facts about what we’ve done to prevent a deeper crisis and to start building an economy that works for the middle class.

But for someone who’s not as engaged, these ads may be an important and possibly even primary source of information about the choice in this election.

So it’s a bad situation if 90 percent of them are false, negative attacks on us.

We’re losing this air war right now.

Obama’s plea exhibits his trademark dishonesty. The fact is that so far, he has vastly outspent Mitt Romney. It is true that in the last couple of months, Romney has outraised him. Altogether, however, Obama still has hauled in something like $300 million more than Romney. Obama decided to use his money advantage by blanketing the airwaves pre-convention, in hopes of “killing Romney,” as one of his advisers put it, before Romney had a chance to introduce himself to voters. Unfortunately for Obama, that strategy hasn’t worked. While he did succeed in damaging Romney’s image with lots of voters, Obama’s smear campaign can’t wipe away the memory of four years of failure. So now, despite the enormous media advantage he has enjoyed so far, Obama finds himself tied with Romney in the polls, while Romney, in the words of John Paul Jones, has not yet begun to fight. No wonder the Obama campaign is panicking!

I don’t have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.

I assume the humor is unintentional. If Obama means to imply that he is actually working at the job of being president, I don’t think anyone is fooled. He has devoted more time to fundraisers, by far, than any president in history.

Donate now to close the gap on the air:

https://donate.barackobama.com/72-Days

Thank you,

Barack

Every time I get one of these emails, I wonder: how bad must Obama’s internal polling be, to cause him to whine and beg in such pathetic fashion?

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