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vote hope?

My friend Michael just forwarded me an email from the Obama campain, alerting donators and supporters about the American Leadership Project that was announced yesterday. I'd been meaning to donate to Obama's effort for a while, so the missive lit a fire under my ass and I did it right away. Then I read the email more closely. The disconcerting part the message was this:

The so-called "American Leadership Project" will take unlimited contributions from individuals and is organized the same way as the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Groups like this are forbidden from working primarily for the purpose of electing or defeating a candidate. Yet here we have a committee that springs up on the eve of an election, promotes a specific candidate, and has no history or apparent purpose of lobbying specific issues outside the benefit to the candidate of these communications.

Yet, in the article I linked to above, they say

Obama has been aided by an independent group, Vote Hope, which has spent more than $1 million.

On Vote Hope's website, they state that they're an organization of activists with histories of working toward improvement on the same issues Obama stands for, which circumvents the whole "no history or apparent purpose" thing. However, who's to say that the ALP won't release a statement or launch a website touting the same thing? Thus far, they have not revealed who is funding the organization, but the public could be exposed to a whole new round of side-of-the-mouth talking.

The other night, while I was gushing about Obama and the galvanizing effect he's having on our nation, Skye said to me, "He's still just a politician." That statement startled me, and I actually took slight offense to it. I suppose that's the most disingenous part of this whole election process, though: here we have this bastion of hope and change, who is single-handedly inspiring the youth vote in ways the Vote or Die and Rock the Vote campaigns could have only dreamed of, yet, at the end of the day, after all the speeches and rallies are over, it's still just politics as usual.