By Mr. Curmudgeon:
Democrats left their gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, not having paid "their fair share." According to Bloomberg News, the party of the "little guy" left Charlotte "with more than $5 million in immediate obligations and may require a direct cash infusion from the Obama campaign to pay vendors," said Bloomberg.
These vendors were located inside the Charlotte Convention Center and the Time Warner Cable Arena. Vendors located outside were equally short changed.
Legacy Village was the vendor's area situated under a tent outside the convention hall, where delegates voted to expel God and Jerusalem from the party's consciousness before its convention chair blunted their wishes, reinstating them into the party platform. Legacy Village vendors paid as much as $3,000 for the privilege of setting up shop close to the delegates, hoping for a little change. It didn't quite turn out that way.
"We've lost so much money from the way things have been set up, said Nila Nicholas, who sold marshmallows decorated with Michelle Obama's face. Ken Toltz, of Denver-based Obama-Bling.com, who sells political pins, said, "I did probably about 50 percent of what I hoped to do," reported the Tacoma News Tribune.
It seems that security barricades, set up to prevent the press from asking Democratic delegates if they were better off than they were four years ago, also drove foot traffic away from Legacy Village, Democratic Party-approved, Solyndra-like entrepreneurs.
However, free-spirited capitalists were undaunted. "They paid $3,000 for a rip-off," a T-shirt seller said of the Legacy Village vendors to the Tribune. He and many other nimble thinkers made bank down the street - having paid no fee to gain access to the crony-capitalist zone established outside the convention hall. "It was unclear ... whether the city had given the vendors outside the convention center permits to sell," said the Tribune. While Charlottes' regulatory bureaucrats slept, little entrepreneurs saw an opportunity, a need and met it. You could even say, "They built that."
The Democratic Host Committee, needless to say, was embarrassed. "When we heard that our vendors were frustrated, the host committee made several efforts to publicize their presence, directed visitors to their space, and waived contractual penalties for early departure, giving vendors the option to leave." Yes, the best laid schemes of mice and men.
In his Charlotte speech to his party's delegates, the presidents said we should forget the failures of his last four years and, instead, look to his next term for "achievable plans that will lead to new jobs, more opportunity and rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation." He couldn't even do that in Charlotte, and convention vendors desperately await an Obama campaign bailout.
That little T-shirt seller in Charlotte encapsulated the economic effects that spread-the-wealth-around Obamanomics has had on the nation - "rip-off."
