False Equivalency

by Steve

Sometimes, the media works way too hard to insert a "both sides do it" narrative into political coverage, because reporters and their editors simply lack the guts to tell it straight. Case in point this weekend is a story in this morning's New York Times by Richard W. Stevenson about the purported risks in making wealth and class a campaign issue.

Polling suggests that the Bain-based attacks on Mr. Romney are filtering through to voters in swing states. But wealth, class and politics are a combustible mix that can blow up in unpredictable ways, and Mr. Obama is not without his vulnerabilities on that score.

Like Mr. Romney, he has spent a good part of the campaign prospecting for donations among the 1 percent, rubbing shoulders with Anna Wintour and George Clooney and exhorting his wealthiest backers to give more.

That's right; Mr. Stevenson wants you to believe that President Obama's critiques about Mitt Romney's background and economic loyalties suffer from Obama's fundraising from celebrities. Seriously. A member of the mainstream media wants to draw a sense of equivalency between Obama's amount of "1%" fundraising, and Romney's.

Stevenson goes so far to make the case that doing these type of class-based distinctions is risky in a campaign, and trots out the complaints from wrong-side Democrats like Cory Booker and Bill Clinton, even though Stevenson says in his own story that his own paper's recent polling shows the argument works with voters.

Mr. Stevenson, what percentage of Obama's overall fundraising base comes from the "1%", compared to Romney? Even your own paper today reports the following:

Mr. Romney arrived in this town of outsized homes and conspicuous consumption for the first of three major fund-raisers on Sunday afternoon, his motorcade of Chevrolet Suburbans passing a gleaming line of Bentleys, Porsches and a Mercedes Benzes waiting to deposit guests who paid up to $25,000 a head to hear him speak.

A luncheon fund-raiser was held at the sprawling home of Ronald O. Perelman, the billionaire financier and chairman of Revlon. Widely described as the largest estate in East Hampton, it has 40 rooms, nine fireplaces and takes up a mile along Georgica Pond.

After that, Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, was also scheduled to attend fund-raisers at the Hamptons homes of Clifford Sobel, the former United States ambassador to Brazil, and the billionaire industrialist David H. Koch, a major donor to conservative causes.

Are you seriously trying to make an equivalency test between George Clooney doing fundraisers for Obama, and Romney's fundraising, where hundreds of millionaires and billionaires are donating over a billion dollars to buy the U. S. government for their own purposes through shadow organizations with limited disclosure? You're trying to tell us that Obama's attacks on class and wealth are undermined because of this false equivalency?

Really? For God's sake man, do you read your own paper?