As I was doing a little dirt digging on opensecrets.org today I noticed an alarming fact.
Since 1990, Goldman Sachs has contributed roughly 20 million to Democrats compared to only about 11 million to Republicans. In every two year period between 1990 and 2010, Goldman gave more to Democrats than they did to Republicans.
It won't take long for Republicans to use the series of tubes to figure this fact out.
Indeed, Drudge, always known as one of the more sophisticated tube navigators on the right has already done so.
Clearly there is a political minefield out there for Democrats if they want to start painting Republicans as the anti-reform party. Just picture the deceptive ad that would call Obama's financial reform "another bailout" and features a big bold number with the amount that Democrats have taken from Goldman compared to Republicans. It would be pretty persuasive to the low information voter who doesn't understand what's really at stake in financial reform and what's actually in the bill (which let's face it is a lot of us). At the very least it would totally cancel out the Democratic message that Republicans are obstructing financial reform just to serve the interests of big banks.
I think this is what is apparently giving Democrats pause as they come up with a plan B in the face of a certain Republican fillibuster.
The problem is there aren't a lot of good options. Either they
- water down he bill to attract a Bob Corker, thereby opening themselves up to attacks that they are pro-Bank by virtue of the weakness of the bill.
Or
- They stick to their guns and paint Republican opposition as being driven by financial industry donations, at which point they open themselves up to a pretty persuasive counter attack that Dems have taken in more from the prime perpetrators of the financial collapse Goldman Sachs.
It's kind of an unfortunate side effect of the internet revolution. Democrats want to be the party of reform, but access to this kind of data puts them in a catch-22 of sorts. It's hard to distance oneself from the past and the truth. Unfortunate because it seems as if the Democrats were starting to get really serious about being the party of reform when it comes to Wall St.