Is Obama campaigning on the taxpayer dime—again?

posted at 2:55 pm on November 30, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Elections ]   

Granted, ABC News’ Jake Tapper, CBS News’ Mark Knoller, and NBC’s Chuck Todd are not your typical MSM automatons, which is to say that not every word that trips off their tongues follows strict liberal doctrine. And Jay Carney, despite glowing notices from critics on FOX News Channel when he first signed on as a replacement to the ever-bumbling Robert Gibbs, is not your average press secretary. He is infinitely worse than most because of his occasional bursts of willful idiocy delivered up with a straight face, such as his claim that extending unemployment insurance creates jobs.

On Monday, Tapper and Knoller went head to head with Carney over the president’s mostly taxpayer-funded 56 visits to battleground states so far, a number that puts him far ahead of any of his predecessors at the same point in the reelection cycle.

In this video clip of a White House briefing, Tapper can be heard saying:

President Obama seems to travel to battleground states more so than any other president before him. And I’m wondering if you could respond to this. It looks like the president is campaigning on the taxpayer dime more than any other president has done.

Playing the role of dutiful lackey, Carney replies, “I reject the premise of that,” adding that since Obama “expanded the political map” by winning some red states, so many more states are considered “purple” or swing-states now.

Carney’s answer may explain the large number of visits, but it fails to respond to the second part of the question, which is how the Obama campaign justifies using taxpayer money to finance the trips.

It is a point that Knoller picks up on about halfway through the clip, prompting Carney to offer up one his most Gibbsian answers to date.

But the dialogue doesn’t end there. On Tuesday, Todd asks more or less the same question. This time Carney comes up with an estimate—presumably out of thin air—of the amount of time Obama spends campaigning versus the time he spends governing the nation. Carney’s estimate? The president spends 5% of his time campaigning for reelection.

That explains why the country is in such dire straits. If Obama spent more time running for office and less time running the country, we’d probably all be far better off.

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