Will The Government Have To Bail Out Obama? (Updated)

At The Corner, Mark Steyn quotes an email from a reader:

Subprime Campaign Contributions

Re the Obama campaign fraud now spreading faster than Joe the Plumber's wealth, a reader writes:

If the majority of these donations are in fact fraudulent but the Obama campaign has already spent the money do you think Hank Paulson will ask the taxpayers to purchase the bad debt?

Sounds reasonable to me. If Obama isn't "too big to fail", what is?

Actually, there is a point of comparison between how the Obama campaign allows fraudulent donations and the current economic crisis. Ed Morrissey writes:

Barack Obama claims to champion the consumers of America. This demonstrates worse than just callous disregard of financial security; it looks like a deliberate attempt to allow people to empty unsuspecting consumers of their savings and credit. The checks involving security codes and address verification were put in place years ago by the credit-card companies to protect their customers from having their accounts hijacked by thieves. [emphasis added]

Keep in mind that turning off the website security to facilitate this was deliberate:

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

To this claim of Obama's campaign, Morrissey responds: Hogwash!

There is only one reason to deliberately choose to bypass those security processes, and that’s to facilitate fraud. Team Obama claims that they vet the donations after the fact, but that’s hogwash. It costs far more to do that than to screen for security codes and address verification up front, and everyone knows it. Obama counts on the fact that most of the fraud will fly under the radar of its victims, and the only cost they’ll incur is when they have to process refunds after getting a specific complaint.

Back in April, Peter Beinart noted approvingly:

Luckily, Obama doesn't have to rely on his legislative résumé to prove he's capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he's run his campaign.

Indeed.

UPDATED: In another post, Morrissey quotes someone who works for the credit card industry who points out the recklessness of disabling security on the Obama website since:

disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to “ping” numbers till they get a hit. The number of “pings” should have raised flags at Visa and MasterCard, don’t you think?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Technorati Tag: Obama.