Opinion: Obama And Solyndra Reunite At High Dollar Fundraiser
Imagine almost losing your job, house, and other wanted possessions due to an encounter you had with people a couple of years ago, and then you end up having a friendly dinner encounter with them again. The question would be: Are you nuts? Why would you even entertain the thought of hanging out with those people again?
That was the reaction many had when they learned of President Barack Obama’s fundraising event on Monday evening in California which included remnants of his 2010 Solyndra stimulus package catastrophe.
Quite unbelievably, President Obama put himself in the company of persons related to the 2010 Solyndra energy company scandal, which has sullied the reputation of the White House for the past two years. Not only was Obama in the presence of such individuals again, but he was repeating the same reasoned-method of contact. Obama and the Solyndra-related people were together to raise funds for Obama’s election once again.
The last time Obama and Solyndra-related people gathered to raise funds for Obama’s election, it was the beginning of a nightmare that still hasn’t quite ended for the White House.
As the story goes, President Barack Obama received good-sized donations from Solyndra during his 2008 presidential campaign. After Obama assumed power, as one most certainly remembers, the President began handing out controversial stimulus packages which would help businesses in financial ways. Many, including national politicians, thought the entire stimulus set-up smelled of “Chicago politics” which is a phrase commonly used for “crooked” and unethical dealings in politics. Basically, it’s a “you help me” and “I’ll help you back even better” relationship.
In spite of criticisms when Obama was giving his hefty 2008 donors generous stimulus packages, the President continued to hand out enormous amounts of money to his former donors. Those stimulus packages, incidentally, are financed by all United States taxpayers via their hard-earned taxes.
In spite of the great assistance from American taxpayers’ dollars via the president’s stimulus packages, Solyndra folded. In other words, Americans’ tax dollars went up in smoke. To make things much worse for Obama, it was later revealed that he was warned about companies such as Solyndra not having a prayer for survival – even with stimulus assistance – but yet Obama and his administration rushed the stimulus check for well over $500 million to the dying green energy firm.
So here we are in 2012, when one would think that Obama and his White House would want to keep the name Solyndra as far from the headlines as possible as to not remind Americans of Obama’s alleged past questionable and shady dealings. Yet, President Obama is basically rubbing elbows with two key players in the Solyndra stimulus disaster of 2010, Matt Rogers and Steve Westly, again at a high-priced fundraiser where donors paid $35,800-per-person.
Matt Rogers was instrumental in getting the loan for Solyndra under Obama, as he was a former Energy Department senior adviser when the loan was approved. Westly is a financier who knows the ins-and-outs of fundraising well enough to have landed on Obama’s energy advisory board via his fundraising expertise.
So what’s with President Obama blatantly fundraising via people knee-deep – make that chin-deeper – in his past shady-appearing dealings with Solyndra? Perhaps he thinks the press would be asleep at the wheel during Monday evening’s fundraiser. Surprise – they weren’t. Perhaps he believes that he managed to hoodwink the public into giving him a pass on the Solyndra controversy of the past and he’ll go after the big bucks again – even if the money has remnants of Solyndra fingerprints on it. Or, more likely, maybe Obama is a fundraising puppet and doesn’t even know who he’s going to run into at these poorly-organized events which only have one purpose – money!
Obama and his fundraising organizers obviously don’t care how his fundraising looks from the outside, what he’s expected to do in return for the extremely large donations, or any other possible concerns that a clear-thinking politician and his organization would be concerned about.
All Obama apparently cares about is that the money keeps coming in and that he gets reelected. After all, he’s already learned that he can worry later on about returning favors to companies, just as he returned the favors to Solyndra in the past. And he’ll never have to worry about the bad press because he’s got people like Harry Reid to take care. Last week, Reid claimed that “angry old white men” are determining who will win the election for Romney in 2012.
No, Harry, apparently “angry old white men” won’t be determining who will win this election. More failing businesses that will likely receive huge amounts of wasted stimulus money from Obama are apparently going to win the election again in 2012.
About Scott Paulson
Scott Paulson writes political commentary for Examiner.com and teaches English at a community college in the Chicago area. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.
