RUTHFULLY YOURS

Politics: An authentic grass-fire political movement threatens Democrats on all fronts. So as November’s reckoning approaches, what does their president do? Why, whip up fear of foreigners in a throwback to the 1850s.

Having rammed costly and unpopular measures through Congress by questionable means, Democrats are in big trouble come November. As their president’s popularity tanks, the vast national Tea Party movement is mobilizing the public to vote them out, and America’s private sector is at long last standing up for free markets.

For Democrats, it’s like the sun — a reality they cannot stare in the face. So instead we see the recrudescence of one of the oldest and worst traditions in American politics: the demonization of foreigners. Not since the days of the nativist Know-Nothing movement in the 1840s and 1850s has it been so egregious.

The most recent example is President Obama’s stepped-up attack on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insinuating that its $10 million ad campaign couldn’t possibly be a real expression of the political climate, but only the work of foreigners.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” said the president, according to a New York Times report. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

Curiously enough, Obama has no prosecution in the works; he’s just playing the politics of fear of “the other.”

For the record, the chamber takes in $100,000 in dues from foreign members, an amount it says is scrupulously kept separate from political activity. Besides, it’s now spending 100 times that on its advertising to defend American companies under siege.

Obama’s attack is as hypocritical as can be, given that Team Obama really did take cash from foreign sources, having disabled a detector of foreign cash for online credit card donations during the 2008 presidential campaign. Democrats also accepted $400 million from labor unions whose foreign cash intake is higher than the chamber’s.

The Washington Examiner reported that in one instance Obama took $32,000 or so from a credit card from two brothers on the Gaza strip. Meanwhile, the husband of Obama’s secretary of state, former President Clinton, accepted millions from foreign sources for his foundation in a direct risk of conflict of interest for U.S. foreign policy.

But even amid these red flags, Democrat attacks against foreigners are piling up.

China-bashing, for example, is the order of the day. Massive trade war legislation is in the congressional works, and the Times reports that 29 congressional candidates — “Democrats, in particular” — are using China as a punching bag. Some campaign ads are veering into racist territory, like that of Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak whose TV advertisement menacingly featured the banging of a Chinese gong to condemn his Republican rival, former Club for Growth President Pat Toomey.

Lies also abound. Democratic strategist James Carville advised Democrats to blame free trade with countries such as Colombia and South Korea for America’s economic woes as an electoral strategy — a false charge given that those pacts have not even passed.

American firms, moreover, pay Colombian tariffs on U.S. goods under existing arrangements while Colombian goods sail in duty-free. But because these allies are foreigners, any lie can be told.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ main line of argument against California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is that she was, heaven forfend, an outsourcer. Unable to counter her ideas, they’re making an issue of Fiorina’s moving jobs offshore as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, which she has said was a response to their tax policies. In ads, they’ve claimed she was “proudly stamping her products ‘Made in China’.”

Then there was the White House’s frontal attack on Koch Industries, a private company whose owners support free-market causes. According to President Obama, Koch could be funded by, woot, woot … foreigners.

“Right now all around this country, there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates across the country,” Obama told an audience last August in Texas.

“And they don’t have to say who exactly Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation,” he said, knowing that group was funded by Koch. His adviser later accused the company of dodging taxes because it earned money overseas, too.

The whole anti-foreigner campaign seems to have its origins in Obama’s attack machine. Obama’s blast at the Chamber is based on a errant claim by Think Progress, a blog of his Center for American Progress. Meanwhile, MoveOn.org launched a campaign last summer against Target Corp. over a new law that permits companies to make campaign donations. Its blog allies charged the company with being owned by — you guessed it — foreigners.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, stunned by the numbers of people in the streets opposed to Democrat policies, has implicitly accused Tea Parties of “astro-turfing” and foreign funding.

It all adds up to a Democrat strategy of using xenophobia for political gain. Unstable dictators, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, do this all the time to deflect attention from their failures. But in American history, secretive political interests, such as the Know-Nothings, adopted the same sort of irrational hatred of foreigners as political parties were cracking up ahead of the Civil War.

“The new campaign against foreigners not only shows a party unable to accept the unpopularity of its own policies. It’s also consistent with the Obama administration’s effort to draw the U.S. inward by shutting out free trade, insulting allies and projecting new weakness abroad.”