In his new e-book, “Obama’s Last Stand,” Politico’s Glenn Thrush describes President Barack Obama’s “failure to adequately form a strategy to deal with the avalanche of unregulated cash crashing down on him from GOP and Romney-allied super PACs” as “arguably … the greatest unforced error of his political career.” He also assigns Obama the “blame” for this.
But, as I write in this week’s New Yorker, Obama is in a bind, forced to choose between principle and post-Citizen United finance rules that he and most other Democrats revile. This isn’t just a tactical matter, nor is it a problem of his own making. And it couldn’t have been solved simply by picking a more high-profile figure to run a pro-Obama Super PAC. (Thrush reveals that some thought was given to trying to draft Penny Pritzker, a Chicago businesswoman and an heiress to the Hyatt hotel chain, who had been Obama’s finance chair in 2008.) How can Democrats who support progressive taxation, an ample social-safety net, and government regulations and oversight compete in a system now overwhelmed by money from corporations and very wealthy individuals? There is no simple or easy answer. It goes to the heart of what many see as the corruption of America’s democratic electoral process.
Don’t get me wrong: Thrush is one of the best political reporters working today, and his e-book is bursting with juicy inside details about friction and intrigue within the Obama campaign. Anyone following the campaign closely should download it immediately.
But describing Obama’s fund-raising difficulties as an “unforced error”—a term from tennis—suggests that elections are just games, and trivializes the campaign-finance crisis. And, really, who was doing the forcing here? As I explain in my new piece—and in previous stories on the political rise of the billionaire Koch Brothers, and on the growing influence of the North Carolina tycoon Art Pope, an ally of the Kochs—by 2010 hugely wealthy conservative players had joined forces with Republican operatives, such as Karl Rove, to sway American political campaigns by flooding them with money. They invented a dizzyingly complex system of ostensibly independent shadow campaigns that could receive unlimited donations from individuals and corporations while, in many cases, allowing those donors to remain anonymous.
Such stratagems were given legal protection by a series of controversial court decisions in 2010, including the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Obama, of course, had nothing to do with that case: it grew out of a lawsuit brought by a right-wing political group, Citizens United, and it was reframed as a bullet to the heart of the post-Watergate campaign finance system by Chief Justice John Roberts, as my colleague Jeffrey Toobin revealed, in fascinating detail.
As both Thrush and I report, Obama’s advisers were split between those who thought it smarter to resist competing with the Republicans for huge outside donations and those who argued that it was suicidal not to try. And Thrush adds names to the debate: according to his book, while David Axelrod was reluctant to embrace Super PAC funding, Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina led the way in pushing for it. (Thrush reports that Emanuel told an associate that “voters don’t give a fuck about that stuff”—this despite polls showing that upwards of eighty per cent of Americans disapprove of the Citizens United decision.) Most reluctant of all, Thrush reports, was Obama himself, who waved his campaign aides away when they brought up Super PACs, saying that he wasn’t going to go there.
Of course, in February, 2012, Obama and his campaign did go there. By then, the amount of money on the other side had grown impossible to ignore. But, as I report, longtime progressive supporters, such as Arnold Hiatt, the former chairman of Stride Rite shoes, still couldn’t get Obama to speak directly to Democracy Alliance, a group of wealthy liberal donors that has a Super PAC. Hiatt told me he believes that Obama felt such a speech would have violated the spirit of campaign-finance laws—it would have been “too close for comfort,” as Hiatt put it. Is that the greatest “error of [Obama’s] political career”? Or one of his greatest shows of principle? As Hiatt said, “Obama is in a bind.” But it is not of his own making, and he is not the only one caught in it.
