How legit is this report on Obama's campaign contributors?

[cowcommander]

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/12/the-campaign-cash-behind-the-afghanistan-escalation.html

Part of me wants to believe it, but the suggestion of a million dollar campaign contribution and the escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan seems to be a bit of a stretch. Thoughts?

[laughingliberal]

1. Obama has been trying to avoid the Clinton mistake with health care but it's starting to look as if

he needs to look at the Johnson mistake. We could wind up with Viet Nam without the Medicare.

[sabrina 1]

2. Very legit, sadly.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org database, the top recipient of defense industry money in the 2008 election cycle was Barack Obama, whose haul of $1,029,997 far surpassed Republican contender Sen. John McCain's $696,948.

OpenSecrets is a very reliable source for finding out who donates to whom.

I didn't know he received so much money from the Defense Industry. Didn't he claim not to be taking campaign money from big business, or am I dreaming?

He got huge amounts of money from the Health Care industry also. These industries don't part with that kind of money just because they like someone. He's beginning to look worse and worse the more we learn, but at least at a lot of things are less puzzling now.

All those promises of change ~ did he really mean anything he said?

[lapfog_1]

3. I don't read into that anything all the nefarious.

Large corporations, especially those in the government contractor sector, make contributions to parties and candidates all the time. They and their lobbying firms don't just "spread it around", they make careful informed "investments" by contributing more to the likely "winners" of each election. Winners are more likely to be able to do something for you than losers. Pretty simple. They picked Obama to win over McCain, so they contributed more the Obama. Get the data of their contributions over the last 30 years and adjust for inflation... and I bet that Obama didn't do any better than, say, George HW Bush in 1988.

I don't think that President Obama (or even President W. Bush) would start a war JUST to please defense contributors of a few million dollars to their campaigns. Oil, sure, but that's Billions of dollars. Not 1 or 2 million.