With the dates for this summer’s national conventions closing in fast, Democrats have discovered a serious shortfall in financing for their Charlotte shindig.
So who are they turning to for a bailout?
Who else? The bank of Big Labor.
Bloomberg News reports that the North Carolina host committee has raised only half of its $36.6 million goal for the convention.
So Democratic officials have reached out to major US unions — including the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers — to make up the difference.
Any doubts about what they’ll expect in return? (Hmm. So many choices — more stimulus money, card check . . .)
Apparently, the problem at hand is the party’s self-imposed refusal — unlike four years ago — to take cash from all those “dirty” corporations, which are just “special interests.”
Unlike unions, of course.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s fund-raising itself is well below 2008 levels — notwithstanding his 10-to-1 cash advantage over Mitt Romney. So he’s also trying to steer money into his own “independent” super PAC .
Think: More desperate calls to the most faithful lapdogs in the Democratic kennel — the unions.
Then again, what the unions don’t cover, it looks like taxpayers will. After all, Obama has been campaigning on college campuses in recent days at public expense, insisting they’re all “official business” trips.
True, he’s been very careful never to mention Mitt Romney by name — because that would remove the political fig leaf and reveal these publicly funded events as the campaign rallies they actually are.
Isn’t it nice to know that the president is committed to genuine campaign-finance reform?
But the Dems’ cozy relations with the unions, and their reliance on them as their ATM — all while they heap scorn on corporate America — is telling, indeed.
After all, government unions (a key part of that relationship) feed at the public trough.
(And feed. And feed. And feed.)
Corporations, on the other hand, produce jobs. And wealth. And live or die based on prevailing economic winds.
Dems side with the wealth-eaters.
Everyone’s got priorities.