Reality Confronts Mr. Obama on Super Pac’s – and Reality Comes Out a Winner

Maybe, Just Maybe the President and His Team are Starting to Get It

The new facet to campaigning in 2012 is the emergence of what are called “Super Pac’s”.  These are organizations that can raise and spend unlimited amounts in a political campaign, as long as “quote quote” they do not coordinate with the candidate’s campaign.  Thanks to the Supreme Court any billionaire, or even any person on welfare can now contribute tens of millions to the Super Pac of his or her choice. And a really neat thing is that if they want to, the donor can remain anonymous.

The President has rightly decried this trend, which is about as great a danger to democracy as has been seen in decades.  But the reality of the situation is that Mr. Obama will be faced by at least $500 million, and probably $1 billion or even more in opposition spending by Super Pac’s.  He has two choices, he can join the trend or he can suffer a defeat at the polls.

It now appears that the Obama team has looked at this reality and now realizes that they will have to use Super Pac’s despite their aversion to the structure.  Failure to do so is like unilateral disarmament.  So the Democrats are starting to make the first steps in collecting the money. 

Late Monday, in an email to supporters, the Obama campaign said members of the administration would help raise money for Priorities USA, one of the new independent groups known as super PACs that may raise unlimited amounts of cash. . .

Mr. Obama changed his mind about relying on super PACs after campaign-finance reports last week showed Democrats being trounced by Republicans in donations to these and other outside groups.

"Republicans have a blazing torch right now. This is our attempt to throw a little water on it," said Chris Korge, a longtime Democratic donor from Miami.

Not surprisingly Republicans are criticizing  Mr. Obama  for now adopting the same tactics that they are using.

The Republican National Committee called the president's move "a blatant flip-flop."

which is true, but admirable.  In the past the deal has been the Republicans get the most money and Democrats get the best ideas.  In an equal contest, of course, Republicans almost always lose, so they need to heavily tilt the money in their favor.  But if it is too heavily tilted towards Republicans even the better ideas of Democrats will lose to the onslaught of money by Republicans.  And the moneyed interests are not even very rational sometimes.  Look at this.

 

Wall Street donors, who went for Mr. Obama in 2008, are donating heavily to Mr. Romney.

Yep, that’s right.  Wall Street which has seen a total reversal of the stock market collapse that occurred when Mr. Bush was President and has seen a market with almost uninterrupted gains under Mr. Obama now wants to go back to the Bush era policies.  Kinda makes one wonder how people this ignorant of what is in their own bests interests even have a job on Wall Street, much less make lots of money.