It looks like the Democrats and Obama are trying to ape part of the campaign playbook perfected by Republicans: the fake scandal a la Swift Boat Veterans, the New Black Panther Party, and ACORNgate.

Find a hot-button issue, create an angle to raise dark suspicions about your opponent, and run with it—evidence be damned. Sure you may go to hell for it, but you’ll raise your opponent’s negatives!

This business from the administration about the Chamber of Commerce and foreign funding probably focus-groups well: “Danged furreners are stealin’ our jobs and secretly buyin’ our elections (spit).”

But it’s awfully thin gruel—almost certainly a bogus story trumped up because Obama & Co. has a bum hand with this economy thing—one exacerbated by his lowball economic predictions when he came into office. Expectations game, dude! That’s politics 101.

Anyway, let’s look at the report from the Think Progress blog that set this off. It reports that:

According to legal experts consulted by ThinkProgress, the Chamber is likely skirting longstanding campaign finance law that bans the involvement of foreign corporations in American elections.

Alas, ThinkProgress doesn’t name any of these legal experts.

And there’s lots of innuendo here:

Here’s how it works. Regular dues from American firms to the Chamber can range from $500 to $300,000 or more, depending on their size and industry, and can be used for any purpose deemed necessary by the Chamber leadership. For example, the health insurance giant Aetna has reported that it paid $100,000 in annual dues to the Chamber in the past. But for specific advocacy or advertising campaigns, corporations can hide behind the label of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and give additional money. Last year, alongside their regular dues, health insurance companies like Aetna secretly funneled up to $20 million to the Chamber for attack ads aimed at killing health reform (publicly, health insurance executives claimed they supported reform). Last week, Politico reported that News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, gave an extra $1 million to the Chamber for its election season attack campaign.

That’s bad! But ThinkProgress doesn’t have any evidence that the Chamber is taking money on the sly from foreign companies and laundering it to run anti-Dem ads. In case you didn’t catch that insinuation, here’s the lead-in to the above paragraph (emphasis mine):

Of course, because the Chamber successfully lobbied to kill campaign finance reforms aimed at establishing transparency, the Chamber does not have to reveal any of the funding for its ad campaigns. Dues-paying members of the Chamber could potentially be sending additional funds this year to help air more attack ads against Democrats.

Now that’s a weasel-word combo! “Could” and “potentially.”

The Obama administration doesn’t have any evidence either, for that matter, which led to this embarrassing exchange for chief Obama consigliere David Axelrod with CBS’s Bob Schieffer:

“This part about foreign money, that appears to be peanuts,” said CBS chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer. “Mr. Axelrod, do you have any evidence that it’s anything other than peanuts?”

“Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” the White House adviser replied. “The fact is that the Chamber has asserted that, but they won’t release any information about where their campaign money is coming from.”

Ah, the ol’ prove-the-negative thing. “Please prove to me that you don’t beat your wife.”

Schieffer’s pushback is part of a pretty good performance by the old-school press on this story, though there have been some weak he-said/she-said stories, like this one from the Washington Post.

The New York Times’s Eric Lichtblau pointed out how thin the ThinkProgress/Obama storyline is:

But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.

Unions have international branches, too, as the Times points out, and the Democrats get the lion’s share of labor’s campaign spending.

The Associated Press also was good to flatly say there was “no evidence” to support the charges.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.