Roots of Rickett's rage against Obama

NY Times:

When news broke last week that the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts had considered financing a $10 million advertising effort linking President Obama with the fiery race-based rhetoric of his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Ricketts quickly distanced himself from the proposal and Mitt Romney’s campaign denounced it.

But Mr. Ricketts is continuing to play a provocative role in the effort to defeat Mr. Obama.

He is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by Dinesh D’Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the “anticolonial” agenda of his Kenyan father.

Mr. Ricketts’s aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film’s budget. But his involvement shows how the more strident attacks against Mr. Obama, which Mr. Romney’s aides view as counterproductive, continue to find backing even as the Republican Party and the Romney campaign seek to keep the focus on the economy.

The episode involving the proposed Wright advertisement put new attention on the ability of wealthy donors, working with groups independent of the candidates, to shape the presidential race, and stoked further debate about whether outside groups were driving politics to become increasingly negative.

It also made Mr. Ricketts, who founded TD Ameritrade and is the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, the subject of intensive scrutiny and left his family’s business empire exposed to political backlash. He has refused several interview requests since The New York Times obtained a copy of the proposed Wright campaign. He is not affiliated with the Romney campaign, although he shares a legal adviser with Mr. Romney in Ben Ginsberg, the prominent Republican lawyer in Washington.

But interviews with friends and associates over the past week, along with a review of Mr. Ricketts’s own publicly expressed views, show why he is willing to put millions of dollars behind an effort to defeat the president.

... Mr. Ricketts’s aides said he was primarily motivated by his concern for the budget deficit and government spending. And he has developed a reputation for supporting Democrats as well as Republicans when he believes they will act on his calls to rein in the deficit. 

His political action group Ending Spending is financing a book by the husband and wife economists Ayse and Selahattin Imrohoroglu that in effect argues for an embrace of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan. (Called “The Fiscal Cliff: How America Can Avoid a Fall and Stay On Top” and due out late next month, it has a clinical, academic approach.) 

In explaining the rejection of the Wright proposal questioning Mr. Obama’s character, which was drafted after Mr. Ricketts held two meetings with the strategists behind it, a top aide said that it reflected “an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects” and that his role this year would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally.” 

Yet the film Mr. Ricketts is helping to finance, called “2016: Obama’s America,” is built on the premise that “Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized,” according to a trailer....

I view Obama's association with Wright as a question about his honesty and integrity.  How could he not know after hearing 20 years worth of sermons that his friend was a racist demagogue who made statements indicating an antipathy for America.  He has never answer that question to my knowledge and many in the media don't want to know so they act like a protective squid spewing ink every time someone raises the issue.  In Klein's book The Amateur there is evidence of an attempt to silence him through a bribe.  I cannot explain why the NY Times does not think that is interesting.

I think a majority of Americans share Ricketts' concern about the coming debt crisis.  It is not clear how the film he is showing addresses that issue, although some may say Obama is deliberately making the US weaker with his economic plan.  I think that overrates Obama's intellect.  He is not that smart, although liberals think he is a genius because they agree with his policies.  Liberals have always had this conceit that they are smart and those who are conservatives are not smart.  It is one of the things that causes them to blunder into policy debacles like Obamacare and the stimulus bill that didn't.

I do not think that Wright is a major issue in this campaign.  For Romney, Wright is a distraction from the main issues, the economy, health care and energy.  But if other people think the guy is interesting to talk about, let them discuss what they think is important and let the votes decide if they have a point.  The left in this country has been actively trying to suppress speech of late and this is another topic they do not want people to hear about.

Ricketts could probably get more bang for his buck on his major issue by making a donation to American Crossroads and let them create an ad on the debt crisis.