Washington Post reporter Bill Turque swallowed the Democrats’ spin hook, line, and sinker. He reports in Friday’s paper:
The Potomac estate of IT entrepreneur and philanthropist Frank Islam seemed more fitting for a Republican soiree than a Democratic fundraiser, some of Maryland’s top elected officials said Wednesday.
But big-time donors, including developers Aris Mardirossian and Fred Ezra, hotel and nursing home magnate Stewart Bainum and auto executive Tammy Darvish, gathered there to raise big bucks for the re-election campaign of Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D).
“There are not too many people who own homes like this who are great Democrats,” Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D‑Md.) told the audience of about 400.
I’m not surprised that Senator Cardin would press the line that Republicans are the rich guys with mansions. But why would the Post report it as fact? Consider a few other news articles from the past few days. Here’s the Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reporting from California:
As he toured a series of mansions,…at the home of Walt Disney Studios chief executive Alan Horn… at an event hosted by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, and Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator…At the home of Irwin Jacobs, founder of the telecom giant Qualcomm,…Obama put the blame for failing to make progress squarely on the Republicans — “a party that has been captive to an ideology, to a theory of economics, that says those folks, they’re on their own and government doesn’t have an appropriate role to play.”
Later that day, the Associated Press reported,
Obama was to attend a fundraiser hosted by Anne Wojcicki, a biotech entrepreneur who founded the personal-genomics startup 23andMe. The event is advertised as a Tech Roundtable, with 30 guests and tickets set at $32,400 — a nearly $1 million potential haul for the Democratic National Committee.
A couple of days later the AP reported:
In what’s become an election-year routine for the president, Obama took the mic at an opulent Manhattan apartment and urged Democrats not to let their party’s tendency to neglect midterm elections hand Republicans a chance to capture the Senate.
Money-and-politics watchdog Ken Vogel wrote up a monied Democratic gathering in Politico two weeks ago:
During a gathering here of major Democratic donors this week that has raised more than $30 million for liberal groups, questions about the party’s split personality on the issue were dodged, rejected or answered with an array of rationalizations. That is, when they weren’t met with recriminations or even gentle physical force.
Those who did address the issue at the annual spring meeting of the Democracy Alliance donor club at the Ritz-Carlton sounded not unlike the conservatives who bristle at questions about their own big-money activity.…
San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, whose aides delivered a Tuesday morning presentation to DA donors on his plan to spend $100 million in the 2014 midterms boosting environmentally minded candidates, has invested in renewable energy initiatives that could be boosted by his advocacy.
And here’s a San Francisco Chronicle story from a year ago:
About 100 guests gathered at the home of Democratic billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer to hear President Obama Wednesday — an event inside a three story stucco home which overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge (and lists for $5.8 million on Zillow).
The setting was spectacular — at the end of a peninsula and a dead end road in the tony Sea Cliff neighborhood.
Seems like Democrats don’t have much trouble finding billionaires and mansions for fundraising events. Reporters shouldn’t act like it’s an unusual event.
