A few months ago I wrote about the SuperPAC's and the Politico commentary, "Big Dem donors stiff SuperPAC's". Politico is on the case again, with "Obama's not-so-super PAC". BTW, if you haven't followed Stephen Colbert's depressingly hilarious attempt to educate young audiences about the fiasco of the Roberts Supreme Court decision on Citizen United, do so now. Here is the Politico story:
Obama's not-so-super PAC
By: Glenn Thrush and Kenneth P. Vogel
January 18, 2012 04:29 AM EST
Last spring, Sean Sweeney — a co-founder of Priorities USA Action, Barack Obama’s not-so-super super PAC — rode an elevator up to a donor’s office atop a Chicago skyscraper, hoping to ride down with a big check.
His pitch: Sure, Obama has made a career of railing against the power of big money in politics — but the president’s 2012 campaign needs a handful of his rich supporters to write six- and seven-figure checks to counter the hundreds of millions Karl Rove and others plan to raise for Republicans.
Sweeney’s host leaned back in his chair, pained expression on his face, and asked: “Is this what we’ve become?”
Unfortunately for Sweeney — who declined to comment for this story — Obama feels the same way.
That’s a major reason Priorities USA Action and its nonprofit affiliate raised only about $5 million through the first half of 2011 — less than half of the $12 million collected by the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney.
But the scorching effectiveness of the pro-Romney PAC attack on Newt Gingrich in Iowa, and the lack of a defense from any super PAC supporting the former speaker, has some of the president’s top campaign officials questioning a clean-hands stance born of principle and circa-2008 political packaging.
“I don’t think the president is just ambivalent about his super PAC. He’s flat-out opposed to it,” said former South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee who has raised more than $200,000 for the president’s Chicago-based campaign so far this cycle.
“I was at the national finance committee in Chicago, and these are the people with these connections, and nobody was talking, even behind the scenes, about writing checks to the super PAC,” Harpootlian said. “That’s a problem. We didn’t make the rules. The president has called out the Supreme Court on Citizens United to their faces. … But it’s the state of play now, and we have to look at what Romney’s PAC did to Newt in Iowa. It’s dangerous. We can’t unilaterally disarm.”
So far, Obama and his inner circle have mostly avoided the kind of donor schmoozing that made rich supporters want to open their wallets wide to help Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and that’s made fundraising tough for Sweeney, his partner Bill Burton and allied outside groups.
Obama’s campaign has pledged that neither the president nor his aides will raise money for super PACS, but his team recognizes the magnitude of the threat. For the first time, Obama’s senior campaign staff will allow their top bundlers to ask wealthy contributors for donations to Priorities USA Action, POLITICO has learned.
A pair of 2010 federal court rulings, including the seminal Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, paved the way for super PACs and nonprofit groups to accept unlimited contributions to air campaign ads. While federal law bars them from coordinating with the campaigns they’re trying to assist, team Obama’s decision to greenlight bundler cross-pollination sends a clear message of support.
And Obama’s campaign has found other ways to reach out to potential super PAC contributors, including dispatching Vice President Joe Biden to speak to an invitation-only meeting of major donors in November, hours after attendees heard pitches from representatives of Priorities USA Action and its affiliate Priorities USA, as well as other Democratic outside groups.
Still, the Gingrich knee-capping clearly has shaken a campaign brimming with confidence on the cash front. “It’s like when China got the bomb. People are a little shocked and asking, ‘Who lost the super PAC?’” a Democrat close to the PAC said. “We thought we were the ones with cash supremacy. That’s clearly not the case.”
Paul Begala, a veteran Clinton aide and CNN mainstay who is helping Sweeney and Burton make their pitches to prospective donors around the country, wants to create a nucleus of big Obama donors that will later draw in former Clinton supporters.
“Super PACs are like guns,” said Begala, hours after returning from his family deer hunt in Texas. “In the right hands, a gun is useful, essential for defending your country and perfectly acceptable. In the wrong hands, they kill people. … My goal is to make sure the president doesn’t get outgunned.”
Obama’s PAC men are now making Romney’s obliteration of Gingrich a central part of their pitch to prospective donors, hoping that will compensate for the president’s own unwillingness to sacrifice his brand and his principles for cash.
“That’s not his job; it’s our job,” Begala said.
Moreover, Obama aides — including senior campaign adviser David Axelrod — have embraced the message that Democrats will never be able to match donors to Republican outside groups, who could profit from a GOP victory in the form of lower taxes and lighter regulations.
The pro-Obama PAC faces other challenges, even as his reelection campaign is on pace to match its historic $750 million 2008 haul. It’s one thing for big-money Democrats to donate the $5,000 maximum to Obama’s reelection campaign, and quite another to write the type of checks Sweeney is seeking for the Priorities groups. Wall Street donors, angry with the president’s tax-hike talk and regulatory stance, are flat-out hostile.
Then there’s the Clinton hangover. The president and his team have done little to win over Bill and Hillary Clinton’s most loyal big-cash contributors — titans such as Steve Bing, Peter Lewis, Haim Saban and Ron Burkle — who would be most able to write big checks.
Bing, according to several Democratic sources, is considering a “seven-figure contribution” to a Democratic super PAC, most likely one formed to support outgunned Senate Democrats, although he’s yet to make up his mind. Unlike the Priorities groups, it has received fundraising assistance from star principals, including Sens. Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Al Franken.
But Bing’s chilly relationship with Obama’s team makes a contribution to Priorities less likely, and it’s possible he might not play a major role in the campaign.
The same holds true for iconoclastic Democratic mega-donor George Soros, who largely has foresworn major political giving since his $20 million foray into the field in 2004 failed to power Democrat John Kerry past Bush.
Soros has hinted he may be getting closer to jumping back into the game, sending a video message to the November donor conference that said he planned to be at their next conference in May “because there is a lot of work to do.”
But a source close to Soros said the billionaire financier, who recently returned from a visit to Myanmar, has been focused on international affairs such as the economic crisis in Europe — not the 2012 election.
And someone familiar with Democratic fundraising said the only recent super PAC contribution made by Soros, who had donated $75,000 to a House super PAC earlier this year, was $100,000 to the Senate super PAC.
Soros, Lewis and Bing are closely watched in Democratic finance circles as bellwether donors. If they give, the thinking goes, others will quickly follow.
Many West Coast liberals are turned off by Obama’s failure to follow through on climate change regulation or to embrace gay marriage. Jeffrey Katzenberg, a DreamWorks co-founder who cut a $2 million check for the Obama super PAC, is a notable exception.
Obama’s refusal to offer free-range policy chats with donors means Sweeney, Begala and Burton have found themselves peppered with questions from disappointed liberal supporters about marriage equality and the Keystone pipeline, sources say. By contrast, Romney has attended multiple events for his super PAC.
“This is not a White House that’s gone out of its way to create connectivity with people,” said a top Obama bundler, expressing a frustration echoed in other interviews with party fundraisers.
Until recently, Obama’s team was, in fact, pushing in the other direction.
In 2008, Obama’s brain trust quashed an attempt to organize a major independent expenditure effort on his behalf, in part because they wanted tighter control of the message. Burton, ironically, was one of the Obama campaign staffers tasked with killing it. In 2010, Obama blasted GOP-allied outside spending efforts before his aides retreated from their opposition and ultimately delivered a tacit blessing to the Burton-Sweeney group.
“I go back and forth on whether this is something where they just want control, versus whether they are true believers,” said one Democratic operative familiar with fundraising efforts by Democratic outside groups. “I sometimes get the sense of both from the Axelrods of the world — that they think they can do it better and they can also do it in a more high-minded way.”
Added the operative: “If the Clintons were still in office, they would have brought every single major donor in. Yes, they would have pushed back against Citizens United, but they also would have said ‘Game on,’ and they wouldn’t have let Karl Rove get this huge start.”
In lieu of major fundraisers featuring Obama, the Democratic outside groups have adopted a lower-profile approach that banks on one another’s fundraising connections. For months, they’ve been sending their biggest names into a series of joint briefings around the country with major donors.
So far, they’ve yielded mixed results, prompting the groups to lay the groundwork for a more formalized, but yet-to-be-unveiled, umbrella fundraising mechanism led by Harold Ickes, a former Clinton White House official who helped raise more than $200 million for a pro-Kerry independent expenditure effort in 2004.
Until Iowa, the surprisingly poor kickoff of the PAC earned shrugs. Democratic donors, Obama’s staff reasoned, would pony up after Romney won his party’s nomination and aimed his fire at the president.
But that’s happened sooner than expected. Jim Messina and David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and senior adviser in the White House, along with Axelrod, have swallowed their aversion to the super PACs, signaling to potential donors they are OK with the necessary lapse in Obama-ian good-government principles in the name of self-preservation.
“[One] thing that worries me are these big super PACs that we see Gov. Romney and others benefiting from right now. I think there’s going to be a ton of money aimed at the president,” Axelrod said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“They’re talking upwards of half a billion dollars in negative ads aimed at the president from interest groups who don’t disclose and who can raise unlimited amounts of money,” he said. “That is a very, very concerning thing to me.”
Maggie Haberman contributed to this report.
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment