Until recently, blatant electoral intimidation and bullying was the exclusive domain of developing nations.  Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution followers in Latin America own the blueprint for dodgy polling.  Elections in the old European countries like the United Kingdom and France may be passionate but voter intimidation is hardly a mainstream concern.  No one could accuse George W. Bush or Bill Clinton of openly threatening opponents ahead of polling day.  Westerners expect their elections to be fair.

Where is Obama leading America to...?

That is, until the advent of Barack Obama.  Now, the Chavez playbook is in use in American elections.  In a speech last week, Comrade Obama accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members have felt the full force of the president’s disastrous economic policies, of relying on money from overseas to fund political advertising: “Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations.  So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won’t tell you where the money for their ads come from… This is a threat to our democracy.  The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections.”

Obama’s claim was manufactured by Democrat Fat Cat George Soros’s Center for American Progress and posted on its ThinkProgress blog.  A week before Obama’s remarks, the Chamber responded in a letter to the New York Times that: “no foreign money is used to finance our political activities, which are only a fraction of the work we do to promote free enterprise in America.”

The object of this baseless smear is simple: to limit free speech for electoral advantage.

There are two further steps in the intimidation process.  First, the Democrat groups have demanded that the Chamber disclose the names of those companies that support the advertising campaign, although there is no legal requirement to do so.  Ostensibly, this is to authenticate that the Chamber is not using foreign money.  But it is really a means to the final step, which is to intimidate individual corporations into withdrawing from the political debate.  Once their identities are known, the left will target them for boycotts that could affect their bottom line.

Superstore Target recently experienced what this means.  It donated $150,000 to a group that backed pro-business Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer in Minneapolis.  Another Soros group, MoveOn.org, orchestrated a boycott of Target with TV ads, claiming the company – which offers benefits to domestic partners regardless of sexual preference – of being anti-gay, on the grounds that Emmer (like President Obama) opposes gay marriage.

Candidate Obama benefited from large amounts of untraceable overseas money during his election campaign in 2008.  Now, as his popularity wanes, he is accusing his opponents, without evidence, of doing what he did.  And his party has followed with TV adverts claiming that “secret foreign money” is being used to influence elections.

Obama doesn’t jail his political opponents in true Bolivarian style, but he and his supporters are taking unusual steps to silence opposition.  Americans are getting a taste of what extremism means at election time.

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