Obama Campaign Finally Recognizes They Will Need Hundreds of Millions in Super Pac Money to Compete

Why Was This Obvious to Everyone but Them?

This Forum has long argued that President Obama cannot win the fall election, but that his opponents can lose it.  The point is that the President had wasted so much of his political capital that only overreach and mistakes by the Republicans could light his path to victory.  That Republicans are trying to do so should not give comfort to the President or his re-election team.

Two reasons for the lack of faith in the President’s re-election chances were (1) the emergence of Super Pac money and (2) the general incompetence of the people running the re-election effort for Mr. Obama.  Now these two factors have come together as at long last the folks concerned with the re-election of the President are wondering whether or not it is too late for them to counter the hundreds of millions of “independent” expenditures by ultra conservative billionaires with their own “independent” expenditures.

Early indications are that the Democratic super PACs are facing an uphill climb. While Mr. Obama’s decision last month to endorse super PAC fund-raising — a reversal of his longstanding opposition to campaign spending by independent groups — has made potential donors more receptive to Priorities USA Action and similar groups, few so far have written the kind of six- and seven-figure checks that Republican super PACs are collecting.

Duh?  Just what have these supposedly brightest people in the room been doing for the past two years?  One must think that they are so enamored of their own brilliance and so dismissive of the quality of the opposition that they felt they didn’t need to engage in the dirty side of politics.  It seems they must have thought, let the other side spend a billion dollars in negative ads, we don’t need that. 

Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting the president’s re-election, will report $2 million in February donations, group officials said, including $1 million from the television host Bill Maher. Those amounts are substantial for Priorities USA and a related group, which together raised about $6.1 million through the end of 2011.

But it leaves them far behind American Crossroads, the leading Republican super PAC, which took in $51 million in 2011 and expects to eventually raise $240 million. Charles and David Koch, the billionaire conservative oilmen, expect to raise an additional $200 million for other groups opposing Mr. Obama. The disparity leaves the president largely reliant on the tens of millions he is raising for his own campaign to counter an expected onslaught of negative advertising.

So once again let’s make sure everyone gets the message.  Mr. Obama can only win the campaign through the mistakes of his opponents, the equivalent in football of letting your enemy march down the field, have first and goal on the one yard line and hope that they fumble away the victory. 

Yes, that is about the best the Democrats can do.