Dems find someone to blame for Obama's failures

In 1998, when the Clinton White House found itself in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, one of its key defense strategies was to attack the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife as the dark power behind the allegations against the president. The Clinton camp believed Scaife to be "the Goldfinger of the right-wing conspiracy," as Newsweek put it in a February 1998 report.

Now it's the Obama White House that is in trouble. The president isn't engulfed in scandal, but his political fortunes are waning, with historically low job approval ratings for this point in his term and an administration struggling to pass its initiatives, even with big Democratic majorities in Congress. And now, as in the Clinton years, White House surrogates are looking for a billionaire to blame. This time, they've found two.

"The Billionaires Behind the Hate" is the title of a new report published by the Center for American Progress, which is the liberal think tank run by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who also ran the Obama transition and serves as an outside adviser to the Obama White House. The supposedly hateful billionaires in the article's title are brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, one of the nation's largest conglomerates.