Obama campaign and super PAC donations
President Barack Obama’s impeccable image is now being questioned by his loyal supporters. Those who thought that the president was the cleanest of candidates who ever got elected as the US president are now crying foul because Obama has retraced his words over the permissibility of having super PAC. But this just marks the moment when the ever-calculating president, as every high politician needs to be, actually becomes a calculating politician instead of the clean president that he was playing.
So president Obama is now urging top fundraisers to support a Democratic-leaning outside group that is backing the president’s re-election bid. Intially Obama was very much and very volubly against “super” political action committees that can spend unlimited amounts of cash to influence elections.
It can be the basics of deduction to presume after this turnaround by Obama that initially Obama had found that his rival candidates were benefitting from super PAC but now that he is seeing his funds depleting and super PAC seems like a very good option, he is all for backing them.
Now Obama is firmly opposing the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that stripped away some limits on campaign contributions. The new ruling does not allow super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns, but yes, they can still, as they have done many a times in history, play a major role in the primary contests, raising millions of dollars to use in negative advertising in early contests.
In an email statement, Jim Messina Obama’s campaign manager stated that the president’s campaign “can’t allow for two sets of rules” in which the Republican presidential nominee benefits from “unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.”
Messina wrote, “We decided to do this because we can’t afford for the work you’re doing in your communities, and the grassroots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads.”
He defended the move in the email, writing, “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.”
He also added that while senior campaign officials, White House officials and Cabinet members would attend and speak at fundraising events for Priorities USA, they would not directly ask for money. Those directly involved in the presidential race, like Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and first lady Michelle Obama, would also not be part of the effort and instead be just directly involved with Obama’s campaign.
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