Fundraisers

Yesterday, Barack Obama spent the evening having dinner with Hollywood celebrities, hmm..., which cost the celebrities almost 30,000 dollars a plate to attend. That was followed by a concert by Barbra Streisand which cost concert goers 2500 dollars a piece. Now, you want to talk about greed and wasteful spending, all of this qualifies. I believe everyone has the right to spend their money as they see fit, so I'm not even really for limiting campaign contributions individuals can make, but regardless of that, Obama is running as a change candidate who wants to tax the wealthy. Obviously, the people in attendance at this fundraiser don't think he's going to tax them and they all qualify as wealthy if they can afford 30K dollars just to go eat. I don't even like to spend more than $30.00 to go eat for my family of four. This event supposedly raised about 9 million dollars for Barack. Good for him (I'm all for him being free to raise however much money he wants for his campaign), bad for his image since this is exactly the kind of frivolity people look at and despise. Now we move on to McCain, who had a fundraiser in Miami on Monday night that raised 5.1 million for his campaign. Again, good for him. However, he is running as a change candidate in regards to lobbyists, special interests and earmarks. I couldn't find much information about the Monday night event that was worthwhile (hmm... I wonder why, could it be that the media didn't want to report on a successful McCain fundraiser? No, that'd be biased reporting) but I know it made 5.1 million and supposedly a lot of Miami bigwigs and lobbyists were present. This would appear to be bad for his image as well but aside from one article in the Miami Herald, it doesn't appear that as many people cared about this event as they did the Obama one. Hmm... maybe the media finally decided Obama isn't the country's savior enough to report something negative. Oh, nope, that's not it. Because in every story about the Obama fundraiser, right in the first paragraph, they ALL state that McCain had a similar event the night before. So, in reality, they (the media) only care because McCain criticized Obama in his speech for this event last night and they want to make sure everyone knows that McCain made (about half as much) in a fundraiser the night before. It isn't really about criticizing Obama. At any rate, all of this is politically irrelevant because donors tend to give their money to both parties in order to be able to say "I gave you this much, what will you do for me?" Oh wait, that would be true of the donors at McCain's fundraiser, but not the one's at Obama's. Those are individual people who decided to forgo the $2300 individual donation cap by choosing to pay 30K dollars to go out to eat. Well, they aren't going to do the same for the Republican party like John McCain's lobbyist attenders will for the Democrats, I guarantee that, so the fundraisers aren't comparable after all. I guess that means Obama does have egg on his face for this one. Even if you won't see it portrayed that way in the media.