Opinion: Reported $7.8-million night for Obama, but the bus goes astray
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Well, welcome back from vacation, Buster. Barack Obama had a boffo bundling night tonight in San Francisco.
He reportedly raised a total of $7.8 million at three different stops in the same hotel, the Fairmont. That’s what you call efficiently raking it in. Not even taxi fare between ballrooms.
That’s also supposedly the most money the freshman senator has raised in a single night so far.
According to the arcane rules of political campaigns, designed to protect people who sometimes tell what Huckleberry Finn colorfully called stretchers, we’re not allowed to tell you who gave us that grandiose figure. Suffice it to say, it was not the Chris Dodd or Rudy Giuliani campaigns.
The lucrative night was capped by the Obama traveling press bus smoothly pulling in and joining a motorcade away....
...from the hotel. Later, everyone realized they were in the wrong motorcade.
They were following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who no doubt was flattered. But she wasn’t going to the airport and on to Albuquerque like the Obama campaign tonight.
Don’t worry. The press bus, including The Times’ dutiful Seema Mehta, caught up with the correct motorcade.
This Obama trip to San Francisco turned out better than the one last spring where he was caught talking about those gun-loving, faith-believing, bitter small town people in the Midwest, remarks at an allegedly private fundraiser that hurt him significantly in places such as Pennsylvania, where he lost badly to Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.
The first group of Sunday night donors in the Fairmont was about 60 South Asians, each of whom had shelled out $2,300. Obama told them that he had a lot of friends at Occidental College who were Indian or Pakistani, that he liked their food, had affection for the region’s people and added: ‘The future of America is built on the strength of immigrant communities.’
The next stop was the main ballroom with 350 VIPs, which means they paid $28,500 per couple. They heard the about-to-be-Democratic nominee say that Americans are desperate for change and maybe suggest something about Republicans being the devil.
‘They [Americans] understand,’ Obama said, ‘the disaster of these last eight years. But we also know that change is always tough. Even when people are having a tough time, sometimes the devil you know may be preferable to the unknown.’ He said he would have to work hard these next 79 days.
Then Obama added: ‘Democrats, because we’ve been burned in the last few elections, get nervous and skittish right around this time. They say, ‘Oh no, here the Republicans come -– they’re so mean and they’re going to be doing all these things. Obama is a funny name and who knows what they’re going to do.’ ‘
At the evening’s final stop Obama was introduced by Pelosi, who called him ‘a leader that God has blessed us with at this time.’
Obama sounded revved up too. ‘It would be nice to think that after eight years of economic disaster,’ he said, ‘after eight years of bungled foreign policy, of being engaged in a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, that cost us a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, that people would say, ‘Let’s toss the bums out. Toss the bums out. We’re starting from scratch. We’re starting over. This is not working.’
‘So I understand why a lot of folks are saying, this [Obama’s election] should just happen. Why are we having to run all these television commercials? Why do we have to raise all this money? Just read the papers. These are the knuckleheads who have been in charge. Throw ’em out. But American politics aren’t that simple.’
He said the next few weeks could get ugly. Obama predicted Sen. John McCain would talk only about Obama. ‘They know they can’t win on the issues,’ Obama said. ‘So what they’ll do is they’ll try to scare people. ‘He’s risky. He’s risky. We’re not sure.’ ‘
Obama said he would hit back swiftly. ‘You have a candidate who doesn’t take any guff,’ he said about himself.
--Andrew Malcolm