Wow! I may be an Obama campaign donor!


No kidding: If you read Michelle Malkin’s blistering piece on White House salaries, you’ll note that quite a few well-paid folks are working for something known as the Office of Public Engagement. The OPE sounds suspiciously like a component of a presidential campaign:



What, exactly, are all these minions paid to do? OPE describes itself as “allow[ing] the views of the ordinary American citizen to be more readily heard within the administration” and coordinating “events that bring members of the administration in contact with members of the public.”

In reality, it’s another publicly subsidized Obama spin operation by a different name. …



Actor Kalpen Modi, an “associate director of public engagement,” has been dispatched to various “youth roundtables” and Soros confabs on Obama’s behalf.

More recently, the well-compensated “engagers” have been busy organizing town-hall cheerleading sections for Obama across the country and online to bolster his base, galvanize “community leaders,” and appease the commander-in-chief’s left flank. On Wednesday, in an effort to “double down” on their “online engagement efforts,” as an administration aide told the New York Times, Obama will participate in a “Twitter Town Hall.”


It was the OPE, you may remember, that got caught trying to turn the National Endowment of the Arts into Artists for Obama. Another interesting notion emerges from the list of White House salaries: the denizens of the Obama White House are pretty much insulated from the economic perils faced by most Americans. We will be paying our employees at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a total of $37 million, up by $4 million from 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency…



…back when the unemployment rate was three points lower, the federal government workforce was 12 percent smaller, and the massive deficit was still measured in hundreds of billions, not trillions. One in three of Obama’s employees makes more than $100,000 a year.