Alexander Ryking

Conservative super-PACs are attempting to gin up disillusionment among President Obama’s supporters and keep their turnout low in November’s election, in part by highlighting his ties to Wall Street.

Within the past month, three separate ads — two from the American Future Fund and one from Crossroads GPS — have assailed Obama from broadly comparable perspectives. Especially striking are the American Future Fund ads which make the kind of anti-Wall Street argument heard largely on the left.

The outside groups’ message contrasts with the one being pushed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, who has called the Obama’s “the most anti-business administration” since President Carter’s.

[T]he threat to [Orrin] Hatch really isn’t [his Tea Party challenger Dan] Liljenquist and anything he might say and do; it’s an outside group or individual deciding to target the race and pour big money into the anti-Hatch effort. If this were to happen, it might not matter that Hatch has given his enemies little in the way of ammunition. With enough money, anyone can be made to look bad. And the one thing Hatch can’t run away from is his political longevity, which is a liability to today’s outsider/purity-obsessed GOP base.

Mahtesian notes that the Club for Growth seems unlikely to enter the fray, but in the super PAC era, a billionaire or millionaire could at any moment take a random interest in any race and alter the outcome with a hefty investment. The best illustration of this came Tuesday night in Kentucky, where Tom Massie won a GOP congressional primary after a rich 21-year-old Texas college student spent more than $500,000 on his behalf. A week before that, another plutocrat fueled the unexpected rise of Deb Fischer in a Nebraska Senate primary.

The pro-Fischer money didn’t come in until the final few days of that race. Which means that even though he’s in good shape now, Hatch still has a month of sweating ahead of him.

A trio of wealthy Texans have donated more than half of the money the pro-Republican super-PAC American Crossroads has received, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity.

Bob Perry, Harold Simmons and Robert Rowling have combined to donated $30.5 million to the group, more than half of the $56 million the total the group has raised since its creation.

All three are longtime Republican donors: Perry and Simmons provided the bulk of the money behind the controversial Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which [smeared] Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)… Rowling was a major fund-raising bundler for President George W. Bush’s (R) 2000 and 2004 elections.

[E]lectoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.

If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is “the year of the big donor,” when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC. “In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires,” wrote Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

Republicans celebrated two years ago when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed groups, corporations, unions and individuals to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns, as long as those efforts were not coordinated with the campaigns.

They now realize that the new unregulated money is one of the main reasons, whether for good or bad, that the race continues and remains so unpredictable.

Before that ruling, when a campaign ran out of money, the candidate usually dropped out. Fundraising networks were also the tool by which the establishment bestowed its benediction upon a favorite contender and crowded everyone else out.

President Obama has publicly condemned the Citizens United decision and has publicly opposed the role of Super PACs in campaign finance. Recently, though, he signed off on a plan to actively support Priorities USA Action, a leading Democratic Super PAC that’s had trouble raising as much money as its Republican counterparts. “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back,” explained Obama’s campaign manager. “With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules. Democrats can’t be unilaterally disarmed.”

Is this hypocritical of Obama? For the thousandth time, no, no, no. The playing field is the playing field, and once a public policy has been legally put in place you’d be a sap not to play by the same rules as everyone else. If you oppose the mortgage interest deduction as a matter of policy, you still have every right to take the deduction as long as the rest of the country keeps it in place. If you’re a Republican governor who objects to the stimulus bill, you’d be actively irresponsible not to take your share of the money once it’s there. If you oppose earmarks, you still have an obligation to your district to take them as long as they exist.

This trope needs to go away. Seriously. Just deep six it. We should never hear this nonsense again.

[T]his cycle, our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it currently stands.

Over the last few months, Super PACs affiliated with Republican presidential candidates have spent more than $40 million on television and radio, almost all of it for negative ads…

With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.