Of the rich, by the rich & for the rich

[Guns Guns Guns]

Five wealthy people, led by Dallas industrialist Harold Simmons and Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, have donated nearly $1 of every $4 flowing to the super PACs raising unlimited money in this year's presidential race, a USA TODAY analysis shows.


Those donations have helped new Republican-leaning outside groups swamp Democratic-friendly super PACs in fundraising — money that is used largely for attack ads. The large sums also have rejuvenated the underfunded campaigns of principal challengers to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the race for the GOP nomination.



"Without the flow of super PAC money, the Republican race would be over," said Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert at Colby College in Maine. "Super PACs have become a vehicle for a very small number of millionaires and billionaires who are willing to spend large sums in pursuit of their political agenda."

 

[RockX]

:lol:

Dems bash, bank secret cash


In recent days, Obama released an ad blasting “secretive oil billionaires” for attacks on him, Nancy Pelosi unveiled a campaign slogan, calling for “a new politics free of special interest influence,” and the Democratic National Committee released a accusing Mitt Romney of lying about his ties to a super PAC that’s spent millions supporting him.
Maybe that would have sounded better in 2008, when Obama put the kibosh on the Democratic outside money infrastructure — or even in 2010, when Obama led a chorus of Democrats assailing Republicans’ outside spending.
But this year, Democrats are playing the same game. Obama’s team has blessed a network of super PACs trying to raise the same seven-figure checks as Romney’s. And Obama’s allies have gone even further than Romney’s, setting up nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors at all.
In fact, top Democrats are so adament about the need to raise unlimited — and sometimes secret — cash this year that some operatives aren’t pleased about the recent attacks. It’s a whole lot tougher to get wealthy liberals to fork over mega-checks when the politicians who’d benefit are ripping Republicans for taking the same types of contributions.
Then there are doubts about the effectiveness of such attacks, considering how they went the last time Democrats tried them in 2010. Obama and his allies spent the final weeks before Election Day complaining bitterly about GOP-allied spending groups, hinting they could be awash in illegal foreign money, only to watch Republicans notch historic gains in the House.
And, beyond that, the Obama campaign’s juggernaut fundraising makes the president an especially poor messenger for the attacks, reasoned one Democratic operative familiar with the party’s outside money operation.
“When you’ve been talking about raising $1 billion, you really shouldn’t be talking about money in the political process,” the operative said. Democrats “should talk about issues that people really care about like whether their taxes are going to get raised, whether their kid is going to get sent to Afghanistan, or whether they’re going to get blown up on a plane,” the operative said, adding “campaign finance isn’t a particularly resonate issue other than for those who are talking about it.”
But party leaders suggest the secret money attacks forecast in Obama’s ad — his first of the cycle — are part of a broader messaging strategy that seeks to cast Republicans as secretive and unethical pawns of big business who couldn’t care less about the plight of regular Americans.


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72104.html