Michael Barone?s latest Washington Examiner piece discusses the latest focus of Democratic candidates and officials on the campaign stump:

I’ve been in campaign meetings. Sometimes the atmosphere is grim. Your side is down and you’re looking to turn things around.

The pollster goes down the list of issues tested. Health care? Nope. They hate your stand on that. The economy? Thumbs down. Foreign policy? Nobody cares anymore.

Then, finally, something that works. An assistant at the polling shop throws in a question about campaign contributions by foreigners. Turns out most voters don’t like them. They don’t think it’s an important issue, but, hey, nothing else works. So let’s go with it.

This or something like it seems to have taken place at Team Obama Central sometime in the past few weeks.

Back in January, the president attacked the Supreme Court for ruling that corporations and unions have First Amendment speech rights and pointed to the possibility that foreigners might try to influence American election outcomes. Now he and his spokesmen on the campaign trail and on Sunday interview programs are charging that outfits like the Chamber of Commerce are smuggling foreign money into the campaign.

Their evidence? Well, there isn’t much, as even the New York Times, Washington Post and factcheck.org agree.

The smoking gun? The Chamber of Commerce collects $100,000 in membership dues from foreigners out of a $200,000,000 operating budget and spends some of that budget on campaign ads. But Obama uberadviser David Axelrod says it’s up to the chamber to prove it’s innocent.

There are a couple of odd things here. One is that the 2008 Obama campaign, by deliberately not using the address verification software most enterprises use to determine it’s really your credit card, took in a lot more illegal foreign money than its rivals. The Obama folks may be projecting their own sins on their opponents.