Welcome, friends. The purpose of this regular series is to promote enthusiasm and action among Daily Kos members. Romney will likely out-fundraise President Obama. However, we believe that we can still win if (1) we can remain competitive financially, and (2) we volunteer our time and energy (GOTV, canvassing, phonebanking, LTE, ...).
ObamaNightlyNews posts every night at 9:00 ET, 8:00 CT, 7:00 MT, 6:00 PT
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AURORA, CO. — President Barack Obama again steps into the role of consoler-in-chief during a visit Sunday with distraught families of those gunned down in a minute and a half of horror at a midnight movie showing in Colorado.
While authorities gather evidence on the suspect and the nation tries to fathom what drove the gunman, Obama planned to meet with loved ones struggling with pain and grief.
He is scheduled to land in Colorado at 5:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Update
The President spoke briefly this evening from Aurora, CO after spending time with the victims' families.
For the full remarks, this link will take you to C-Span.
The Daily Kos Transcripts Editors have provided us with a full transcript of President Obama's remarks in President Obama's remarks after hospital visit, Aurora, CO, July 22, 2012.
Both campaigns have dialed back campaign events for this weekend out of respect for the losses in Aurora.
Leaving Colorado, the President will overnight in San Francisco before heading to Reno on Monday to speak at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention. Although unlikely to meet, both candidates will be in the Bay Area tonight.
Romney is starring at three Bay Area fundraisers Sunday – a luncheon at the Woodside home of billionaire Tom Siebel, a Fairmont hotel reception and a Pacific Heights dinner hosted by Shaklee Corp. chairman Roger Barnett and his wife Sloan.
As we reported previously, both the luncheon and the dinner are “intimate” $50,000 a head events where donors have been promised meetings with Romney.
The meet and greet at the Fairmont is priced between $2,500 to $10,000. After his appearance at the VFW Convention, the President will return to the Bay Area for fundraising events on Monday evening.
Late Monday, the president will star at three fundraisers in Oakland: a small tech-oriented gathering, a major Fox Theater event — where tickets are $100 and up — and a dinner in Piedmont at the home of major Obama bundler and real estate executive Wayne Jordan and his wife Quinn Delaney. Tickets to that event are $38,500 per person.
Money is destined to play too big a role in this year's election, forcing a sitting President to spend much of his time raising money to compete. And according to
Devin Dwyer of ABC's Political Punch blog, he has already attended 185 fundraising events, for his party or his campaign, more than doubling the number the W attended at the same point in his term.
Why is Obama spending so much time on the money trail?
Experts say that Obama is the first modern incumbent to forgo public financing for the general election campaign, forcing him into a non-stop sprint for cash to compete. He faces an army of pro-Republican super PACs and nonprofit outside groups which have amassed significant war chests. And, experts say, contribution limits (capped at $2,500 per person by the FEC) have not kept pace with the skyrocketing cost of campaigns and paid media. That means candidates have to reach more donors in a race to keep up.
It is interesting, to me, that Dwyer feels that Obama's decision to forgo public financing is a more significant factor than is the money now flooding into politics as a result of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Interesting, but not surprising.
ClikZ, an interactive "Marketing and News Source," has noted that the Obama campaign is spending 25% of its funds, and outspending the Romney campaign, in digital outreach.
Since each campaign launched in Spring 2011, Obama for America spent $26.9 million on digital ads through May 2012, including text messages, according to ClickZ Politics analysis. That's 3.5 times Romney's $7.6 million. In 2011, Obama's online ad expenditures merely doubled Romney's.
I would suggest that digitally is how you connect with most of the young voters which Obama will need in November.
As we go from money to lies, Paul Krugman exposes the Emperor's new clothes in "The Conservative Onion":
I really don’t think there’s been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign, with a pretty good chance of winning, that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said. No, Obama hasn’t apologized for America; no, he hasn’t denigrated achievement. Yet take away those claims, and there’s nothing left in Romney’s rhetoric.
Krugman then explains the onion-like levels of the lies in Republican arguments. He shows how when one argument is refuted, another magically appears:
Thus someone like Paul Ryan starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. (That’s also what happened in my UK debate on Newsnight.) But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that things like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.
This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society. Oh yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of more socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in Atlas Shrugged.
So what we are up against this year are lies and money. We are fighting the lies with the truth, in barber shops, on Facebook and Twitter, and across the Sunday dinner table with family.
We can fight the money with money of our own. It may not be a level playing field, but we should be used to that by now. We will just have to dig a little deeper and encourage others to do the same.
As part of that fundraising effort, the Obama retro magnetic bumper stickers are out! I still have mine from 2008 and will now be able to sport a matched set.
2012 OBAMA FALL ORGANIZING FELLOWSHIP
Whether you're a student who wants to learn the ins-and-outs of a political campaign, retired and hoping to raise your level of commitment, or anyone in between, the Obama Organizing Fellowship program is for you. We're relying on energetic and passionate people from across the country to help build our grassroots campaign.