Obama Campaigns For Re-Election On Public Dime

What a total waste of our money and time and it is more important than ever to change this administration from in to out. mc

Posted 12/01/2011 04:04 PM ET

Election '12: President Obama jammed traffic in Manhattan on Wednesday. State business? No, he was raising campaign funds. It's just the latest example of his questionable strategy of running for re-election by taking from the public.

And no, the public was not invited. Three stops the president made were strictly for fat-cat donors who paid as much as $36,000 a plate for the privilege, while reporters weren't even permitted to cover the protests outside the hotels.

But the trip was hardly just between Obama and his donors. The three trips disrupted rush hour traffic in New York City and the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, something that very much cost the public time and money. The only winner was Obama, who flew home with $2.4 million.

That's emblematic of the arrogance of this president and the kind of re-election campaign we can expect him to conduct: always leaning on the public and its government to get his.

Earlier this week, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper noted that Obama's flight schedule had a curious concentration of U.S. swing states in the upcoming election. Tapper asked White House spokesman Jay Carney if it wasn't just disguised "campaigning on the public dime." Carney denied it, disingenuously claiming that Obama spends only 5% of his time on politics.

But maybe that's because he's showered his allies at Acorn's front groups, like Acorn Housing, with as much as $27 million in taxpayer cash, according to research by Matthew Vadum, writing in the Washington Times.

Acorn, remember, was the community organizing group supposedly disbanded over fraud and corruption, but like a boiler room somehow keeps reappearing under new names and raking in taxpayer cash.

Acorn's members already have openly bragged that>>>