I found one very interesting fact in Campbell Brown’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the Obama Administration’s ambiguous message on gun violence:
Almost a third of the $1 million-plus donors to the president’s Super PAC were entertainment and media heavyweights including producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. In one Obama fundraiser alone, held at the home of George Clooney, the campaign brought in an estimated $15 million.
Most of the attention on the president’s political contributions goes to the large number of small donors. Less goes to the reality that the majority of his donations comes from large donors (more like two-thirds in 2007).
Entertainment and media are actually a very tiny part of the U. S. economy: roughly 3%. But that 3% is enormously dependent on government subsidies.
I am not alleging that the “entertainment and media heavyweights” who have contributed so heavily to the president’s campaigns and to his PAC are doing so for personal gain. Those contributions do, however, represent a wonderful confluence of interests.
Regulatory capture.
Much of the big money is generated on the left’s behalf, with Obama being their man. This fact, though, is covered up, by not being media-covered, as the left prefers to cultivate an image of being the sympathetic ‘little guy’ party fighting for all the other little guys. There is even a huge lopsidedness in big foundation monies being insidiously funneled into an array of liberal causes, contrasting the smaller amounts coming from more conservative trusts and foundations.
Tying into this money disclosure, just look where Obama traveled, after he made an orchestrated gun-control stop-over in Colorado. He then few on to S.F. for two 2014 fund raisers, while the clock continues to tick back in DC dealing with submitting a Presidential Budget — now extremely late. But, I guess the travails (and fun) of campaigning trump the tribulations of muddling though a $16.7+ trillion deficit.