Pragmatist Obama Finds Idealism In Opposing His Own Super PACs
The pro-Obama superPAC Priorities USA isn't raising much money because President Obama just can't stand the thought of all that unaccountable anonymous big-donor money being spent on his behalf, Politico reports.
The pro-Obama superPAC Priorities USA isn't raising much money because President Obama just can't stand the thought of all that unaccountable anonymous big-donor money being spent on his behalf, Politico reports. Campaign financing seems like an odd issue for the pragmatic Obama to get all idealistic about, given he is derided by conservatives for playing "Chicago-style" politics and by liberals for being a wimpy compromiser on their closest-held ideals. But Glenn Thrush and Kenneth P. Vogel report that Priorities USA raised just $5 million in the first half of 2011, compared to $12 million raised for the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC, and that "a major reason" for that is Obama doesn't want to bring himself down to the level of raising that kind of cash.
With the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed outside groups would pour tons of money into this year's election. But Obama, who campaigned four years ago on cleaning up campaign financing, doesn't want to accept that reality, Politico reports:
“I don’t think the president is just ambivalent about his super PAC. He’s flat-out opposed to it,” said former South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee...
“I was at the national finance committee in Chicago, and these are the people with these connections, and nobody was talking, even behind the scenes, about writing checks to the super PAC,” Harpootlian said. “That’s a problem. We didn’t make the rules. The president has called out the Supreme Court on Citizens United to their faces. … But it’s the state of play now, and we have to look at what Romney’s PAC did to Newt in Iowa. It’s dangerous. We can’t unilaterally disarm.”
By 2001, if there was any maxim from community organizing that Obama lived by, it was the Realpolitik commandment of Saul Alinsky, the founding practitioner of community organizing, to operate in “the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.”
In electoral politics, operating in the world as it is means raising money.