Bu$h Donors Back Obama

President Bu$h’s approval rating is so bad that even people who donated to his campaign are not only jumping ship, but are not donating time and support to the campaign of Senator Barack Obama. A McClatchy computer analysis report found that hundreds of people who gave at least $200 to President Bu$h 2004 campaign have donated to Senator Obama’s campaign. Among them are Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the former Republican President Richard Nixon and wife of former Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson; Connie Ballmer, wife of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Ritchie Scaife, the estranged wife of tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife; and boxing promoter Don King.

Many of the donors are moderate Republicans or independents who are dissatisfied with the direction of the country and are looking for change.

“There is a large block of Republicans who just feel that the Republican Party has completely let them down by failing to control spending and address other problems,” said a professor at Colby College, who specializes in campaign finance.

A lawyer from Massachusetts contributed $2000 to President Bu$h’s 2004 reelection campaign, but said he gave Senator Obama the maximum $2300 in hopes he can use his skills to rebuild fractured foreign alliances. He said that Bu$h promised to bring people together and has failed to do so, while Senator Obama has demonstrated in his campaign that he has the ability to connect in ways that no other candidate can. A Detroit attorney who backed President Bu$h with $3000 in 2004 said he donated to a Democratic candidate for the first time this year because Senator Obama offers the greatest hope for healing divisions at home and abroad.

The switching donors have various motives for their shifts from the president’s policy with the Iraq War to the economic policies that have added $3 trillion to the U.S. national debt to the Republican Party propaganda and selling of the war. An 84-year-old New England woman who gave Bu$h $2000 in 1999 and 2004 said that she can not get over her name being in there for sending money to that miserable president. She also said, “I think Obama is something we all need badly, really badly…”