A campaign funded by millions of everyday Americans
Barack Obama was the only major presidential candidate this year to completely reject contributions from the Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs that have dominated our politics for years. Instead, this campaign has been owned by the more than 3.1 million everyday Americans who have donated in small amounts.
The Obama campaign has complied fully with federal election law, including donor eligibility and contribution disclosure requirements. Any donation that has not met federal requirements, the campaign has fully-refunded.
But false and deceptive email rumors posing as a “column” by respected New York Times writer Maureen Dowd or as independent “research” by a concerned citizen are spreading cynical misinformation about Barack’s alleged foreign ties. These smear attacks use fake information and false claims of credibility to scare people who aren’t very familiar with Barack by making it sound like he’s doing something un-American or illegal.
The independent fact-check site Snopes.com determined that both the Maureen Dowd and research smears are definitively “false.” Snopes.com found that the research smear “combines a good deal of supposition and some elaborate conspiracy theory” to support its lies. And Snopes.com said of the fake Maureen Dowd smear, “aside from the article’s bogus attribution, the facts it posits about contributions to the Obama campaign are wrong.”
Some versions of these smears also take on the Obamas’ personal lives, making paranoid insinuations about how they paid for their educations (truth: student loans, just like millions of Americans) or where their friends were born (truth: Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran while her American-born parents were helping set up a hospital for the pro-American Iranian government at the time).
These smears are circulating all over the Internet. Fight back with the truth: make sure anyone who has seen this smear also sees this page.
Watch Barack talk about the broken public financing system and the importance of donations from everyday Americans.
The Atlantic debunks the smears:
Read this ArticleI’m torn by my desire to destroy these ridiculous smears (Valerie Jarrett was born to American parents working in Iran!) and ignore them. When conspiracy-theorists direct their malevolent energies at Jews, I usually try to ignore the particulars of their arguments, simply to avoid crediting them in any way. So let me do the opposite: Instead of debunking, I’ll bunk:
Barack Obama has called Israel America’s strongest ally in the Middle East; he wants to stop Iran from getting the bomb; he is a stalwart enemy of Hamas and Hezbollah; he is the darling of Chicago Jewry; he is the protege of Sen. Dick Durbin, whose election was aided immeasurably by AIPAC; he himself is close to AIPAC; his advisers include Dennis Ross, Jim Steinberg and Richard Clarke; and on and on and on.
Newsweek covers Barack’s trip to Asia as a young man:
Read this ArticleBarack Obama’s trip back to Asia was equally mind-opening. With a Pakistani college roommate, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, he went vagabonding around South Asia in 1981. He found himself overwhelmed by Karachi—a vast and chaotic metropolis clogged with the poor, and then, as now, rife with sectarian tensions. “Part of the most memorable portion of the trip,” Obama told NEWSWEEK earlier this year, “was traveling to … a more provincial area outside of Karachi, seeing what was essentially a feudal life“—peasants who were eking out a subsistence living in the middle of a modern democracy. Obama was relearning as a young man, in other words, what he had only dimly understood as a child in Indonesia: most people around the world are looking to fulfill basic needs like shelter, jobs and education for their kids. Their primary concern is development, not democracy. Later, these experiences contributed to Obama’s concept of “dignity promotion“—working to ease conditions of misery rather than focusing only on elections and other trappings of democracy. “He’s very much committed to the challenges of strengthening the capacity of weak states to deal with poverty and good governance,” says his top foreign-policy adviser, Susan Rice.
The New York Times shows Barack’s college friends to be hard-working American citizens:
Read this ArticleDuring his years at Occidental College, Mr. Obama also befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student who was an immigrant from Pakistan and traveled with Mr. Obama there, the Obama campaign said. Mr. Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in New York, and according to public records, has donated the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign and is listed as a fund-raiser for it.
Mr. Chandoo is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk, N.Y. He has also donated the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s primary campaign and an additional $309 for the general election, campaign finance records show.
Politico: Obama camp denies Sutton story
Read this ArticleSutton’s story is particularly difficult to follow at one point: that al-Mansour was “raising money” for Obama. Obama attended Harvard with the help of student loans, as the Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet reported in detail at one point, writing that he had $42,753 in debt.
Politico: Sutton Family Retracts Obama Story
This evening, a spokesman for Sutton’s family, Kevin Wardally, e-mailed over a statement that (because there’s absolutely no other evidence for the story, and much that contradicts it) seems to put the story to rest for good:
The information Mr. Percy Sutton imparted on March 25 in a NY1 News interview regarding his connection to Barack Obama is inaccurate. As best as our family and the Chairman’s closest friends can tell, Mr. Sutton, now 86 years of age, misspoke in describing certain details and events in that television interview.
We regret this unfortunate incident and we ask good conscientious people to extend compassion and grace to Percy Sutton, a man who has served America in many capacities; an officer with the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and as a public servant who was the first elected African-American Manhattan Borough President.
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