Barack Obama’s new embrace of Super PACs is a concession to the reality of running for President in 2012: it’s not enough to be an incumbent President, with one of the best networks of small donors in history. In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires.
“The difference this year,” an adviser to Mitt Romney, who asked to speak on background, told me, “is that instead of party hierarchies, we have clans.” Leading the clans are wealthy donors, many with access to corporate treasuries. Arming them: some of the best political professionals money can buy, including veteran hardball players like Larry McCarthy, the ad man I profiled this week, who’s working for the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future. Although the Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the official campaigns, they are, for all intents and purposes, the lead warriors on this new political battlefield.
Leader of the PACs
via newyorker.com
