Flickr/Beverly & Pack
So begins the 2012 presidential campaign’s outside spending money war.
Priorities USA Action, a super PAC run by two former Obama White House aides, has launched a new ad pushing back against a multi-million-dollar attack campaign targeting President Obama’s economic record by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. Priorities’ $750,000 ad buy was significantly less than Crossroads’, but the spots will air in states—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Virginia—that are all crucial to Obama’s re-election.
Titled “Portraits,” the add calls Crossroads’ most recent offering—blaming President Obama for the lagging economic recovery—”politics at its worst.” Set against a montage of purportedly ordinary Americans, the ad’s narrator hews closely to Democratic talking points, criticizing Republicans for opposing “economic reform,” wanting to “end Medicare,” and cutting education funding, all the while supporting subsidies for big oil companies and tax breaks for the wealthy.
Here’s the ad:
Like American Crossroads, Priorities USA Action is a 527 organization, or super PAC, which means it has to report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. The public will eventually know who funded this ad and others from the Democrat-led group.
The takeaway here is this: Democrats got shellacked in the 2010 midterms, in part because they didn’t have the outside spending firepower to counter the barrage of ads from Crossroads and other like-minded groups. Not anymore. November 2012 is still almost a year and a half out, but already we’re getting an early glimpse at the outside money wars sure to dominate the airwaves the closer we get to election day.
