Leader of the PACs

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/02/leader-of-the-pacs.html

Barack Obama’s new embrace of Super PACs is a concession to the reality of running for President in 2012: it’s not enough to be an incumbent President, with one of the best networks of small donors in history. In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires.

“The difference this year,” an adviser to Mitt Romney, who asked to speak on background, told me, “is that instead of party hierarchies, we have clans.” Leading the clans are wealthy donors, many with access to corporate treasuries. Arming them: some of the best political professionals money can buy, including veteran hardball players like Larry McCarthy, the ad man I profiled this week, who’s working for the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future. Although the Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the official campaigns, they are, for all intents and purposes, the lead warriors on this new political battlefield.

Obama’s decision to make high-level campaign and Administration officials available to speak at events held by the Super PAC that supports him is part of a belated effort to goose liberal donors, many of whom have been reluctant to write big checks to the group. And it’s a result of Democrats’ alarm at the most recent financial disclosures to the Federal Elections Commission, which were made public at the end of last month. Obama’s campaign has been out-raising Romney’s, but the pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has lagged far behind its Republican counterparts.

As the New York Times reported,

Two groups that were formed with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, raised $51 million between them last year for the Congressional and presidential races. Groups supporting specific Republican presidential candidates brought in roughly $40 million, including $30 million for the group backing Mitt Romney.

But the major Democratic groups, including Priorities USA Action, raised only $19 million for the year.


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