9/09/2008

First Obama changed his position on public financing, now he has changed his mind on using 527s

Is there any promise that Obama has stuck with? Will somebody please tell me what it is? When a promise comes in conflict with self-interest, the promise is tossed aside. The Atlantic Blog has this:

after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama's Democratic Party, Obama's strategists have changed their approach.

An Obama adviser privy to the campaign's internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies -- what another campaign aide termed "the cavalry" -- will come to Obama's aid.

The Obama campaign can't ask donors to form outside groups; it can only communicate, through the public and the media, with body language, tells and hints.

The upshot: Obama's campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. "I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well," another senior campaign official said.

The money is there. The top two 527s -- the Service Employees International Union and America Votes -- are liberal in orientation. The SEIU fund has contributed to other 527 efforts, and America Votes has earmarked most of its money for what it calls the "largest grassroots voter mobilization" in history. The third largest 527 -- American Solutions Winning the Future -- belongs to Newt Gingrich, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The AFL-CIO has budgeted more than $53 million for messaging and turnout efforts and has run a limited flight of ads featuring veterans criticizing McCain. But they've shied away from larger-scale campaigns in part because they believe -- or believed -- that the Obama campaign did not want them mounted. . . .

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