Tweet
A recent court ruling resulted in a flood of campaign spending by a very small group of ultra rich people into our elections and the latest example could be a Super PAC bankrolled by Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade. A group of conservatives is looking into a $10 million campaign to highlight President Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. according to the New York Times.
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.
While I think this particular campaign would be rather ineffective at swaying voters this election, its impact going forward could be much more important.
I often fault Obama for not going after those in the financial industry for wrongdoing; but if people in the financial industry make it clear they will spend millions on a smear campaign against anyone they dislike, it is unlikely our system will produce better candidates willing to take on the industry.
It is not just a question of will these ads convince regular Americans to distrust Obama, it is a question of will this type of spending convince good people to not get into politics in the first place. We are a country in desperate need of some public campaign finance reform.
UPDATE: apparently Mr. Ricketts has reconsidered.
37 Comments
Because Barack Obama has been so mean to white people!
I think Obama has been equally vicious to all Americans. He’s been the worst to people in the ME.
Rev. Wright attacks? now? Says a lot about Ricketts’ racism, and yes, we surely need campaign finance reform.
Time to move any accounts you might have from Ameritrade.
JMO but I think all the Republican negativity is going to turn off a lot of voters. The Rs haven’t said anything positive in years and I believe it’s going to hurt them.
Twain !
Is Mark Penn running Meth Romney’s campaign ?
PETRO ! How you? I don’t think anyone is running Mitt’s campaign. It’s a total mess and they can’t seem to get him to just shut up. And it’s getting crazier every day with jaw-dropping statements being made. I love it!
Ricketts and his family own the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
I dunno about that. I’d like to think so, but I’m inclined to disagree.
It seems that some portion of the populace just loves loves loves to wallow in negativity & shit. I don’t get it, myself, but for ex, just look at the majority of “reality” tv shows, which glorify bullying, being mean-spirited & gossipy & negative.
Beyond that, I’m starting to see an upsurge in the typical Obama “conspiracy” crap steadily growing amongst at least some conservative circles – the usual birther madnes, plus junk about how Michelle has gazillions of ladies of in waiting while Laura Bush only had one assistant blah blah blah. You’d think that conservatives would be tired of this balderdash, but believe me, there’s no end to people who rush forth to diss Obama & his wife for idiotically stupid, but basically racially motivated, nonsense.
Why do you think the 1% does this? Because it’s “insanely” successful in *distracting* a huge swath of the populace who’d rather wallow in their bigotry than really confront what the REAL problems are.
Is Obama part of the problem? Most definitely. But it has NOTHING to do with Obama being black or having Rev Wright as a preacher.
Annoying how citizens can be so easily misled & manipulated.
H L Menken (b. 1880) said “”No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Regarding this particular ad campaign: what a frivolous waste of money by someone whose taxes should obviously be much higher. Four years ago Obama was a largely unknown quantity and implying that he was in thrall to a Scary Negro Preacher and thus was a Scary Negro had some effect. Like him or not, Obama is now a known quantity and character attacks are much less likely to be effective. Anyone who would be convinced by this already won’t vote for him, and nobody else cares. It will change almost no votes.
Regarding SuperPAC spending in general – this is why it is not as scary as it might be. Republicans have been in non-stop attack mode against Obama since the moment he locked up the nomination. What are they going to say that they haven’t already said? Whose mind are they going to change? Here is someone just repeating the old attacks.
Meg Whitman’s campaign in California showed that you can reach a point of saturation where additional ads simply have no effect. Once your target audience sees your messages three or four times a night, running another dozen ads doesn’t help, people just tune it out.
I pity the people who are still watching television. Two billion dollars in attack ads over the next six months – it will be brutal. You’ll be begging for an ad for cars, pizza, or adult diapers.
Totally agree, but Fox viewers will dutifully snap to attention & get their panties in a huge wad bc of Scary “N” word Wright & even Scarier “N” word Obama. Sad to say…
Those of who either never watch tv or watch very little are not for whom those ads are created. “They” don’t give a shit about the likes of us DFHs, and anyway Obama’ll just send out one of his mouthpieces to tell us how ret*rded we are. So there!
Don’t you folks think there’s a very good reason Wright was bribed to be quiet?
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/the_bribe_to_silence_wright_io9jneobl3fUF0cb7LpcNM
Meanwhile let’s remember that Wall St is primarily Democrats, not Republicans.
Mitt has to spout every teaparty and fundy line they tell him, in order to garner their support …
Teach the controversy.
With the Republcans anything goes when it comes to winning an election. As of yet they haven’t committed an assassinations of which they’ve been charged but they have given a wink and a nod to their zombies-like followers to “stand up for America.”
Are we waiting for the declaration that we are in de-illusion?
see what I mean?
If you guys haven’t read any of the fairly recent articles on how/why liberal and conservative brains differ in how they process data, check this out at (pretty reputable) “Discover” magazine.
Conclusion, liberals are smarter and better able to process complex data and seperate valid from invalid input.
Conservatives are paranoid, selfish, desperately trying to protect their “little corner of the world” from ill-perceived threats. Their basic philosphy, “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”
I may be taking some of that too literally. sorry :-)
And then “temper” those comments so as not to alientate the indeoendent voters.
Hey, straddling the fence is difficult.
Excellent point. But totally wasted on republicans who feel “nothing succeeds like excess.”
As I’ve said before, no matter how much you lower the ethical limbo bar, the GOP and it’s followers seem be able to squiggle under it.
If we could rec comments here you would get a rec for “ethical limbo bar”.
Direct public financing of political campaigns. The only target Occupy should aim at. The highest leverage target.
Meg Whitman’s excess of Ads in CA also didn’t work bc, at the end of the day, CA does trend more “liberal” than conservative.
Whitman’s approach *may* have worked better in a thoroughly red state, but I don’t know for sure.
I think, also, that the timing was against Whitman bc the excess glut of money that she spent – when the nation was (and still is) in a depression – just didn’t sit well out here in Cali.
So that campaign excess does come with some caveats. That said, it was ridiculous, but I certainly know many Republicans who were more than THRILLED to vote for Meg Whitman, although they couldn’t really elaborate why.
I was not at all thrilled to vote for Jerry Brown, but I can state that Gov Moonbeam has not *disappointed* me, only insofar as I figured pretty much he’d do exactly what he’s doing. He could go much further, but at least he’s proposing a higher tax level. Whitman would’ve enacted a scorched earth policy that would’ve made Scott Walker totally green with envy. So I guess there’s that… small crumbs for the 99% is about the best we can expect, sadly.
Sarah is just going to love this!
I see Meg’s new company., Hewitt Packard, is about to dumb about 25, 000. Job creators eh?
Agree, as usual. It was nice to see that, at least with Whitman,, money could not BUY a political office. Granted she probably tried to buy the wrong office at the wrong time.
It will be interesting IF Romney and the 1% are unable to win this election. Not from our perespective. But from from theirs.
You should give yourself a minute or two to think this shit through before you post it.
‘Braking’ news: Ricketts “won’t air Obama-Wright campaign ads”.
And the corollary: Decent candidates not only will be attacked viciously and expensively, they will also be comparatively starved of funding.
Is there much difference between the hush money to Rev. Wright and the payments that have got John Edwards answering federal charges right now?
It’s not surprising people would be planning to exploit this story. Why would anyone not try to get the word out? If Ricketts doesn’t spread it, someone else will. The president will have only two possible stories to tell: he tried to get Rev. Wright to shut up until after the election, or he’s accusing his long-time trusted spiritual advisor of lying about him. Neither story reflects any credit on the president’s judgment.
fox viewers already saw this 24/7 four years ago. i think they’ve already milked all the votes they can from the rev. wright angle.
Gee, I thought SuperPac’s weren’t to coordinate with the campaign.
via Balloon Juice:
Joe Ricketts, Government Handout Hypocrite
I hope Rev. Wright takes out one ad that exposes the real Obama as the puppet he is, and throws him under the bus.
When there’s so much racism in the open it gets people at Fox so excited they forget what their saying and jump in. Same with Rushbo. He can’t control himself. The upside is the public gets totally sick of the constant racist attacks. Except for hillbillies who get so aroused the have sex with their pets and family.
You realize, of course, that makes no sense at all.
Like hell it doesn’t – Obama would not be President today if white well-heeled DNC “undecideds” and fence jockey centrists didn’t have a convenient boogie man — real or Memorex — they needed to be hocked and pawned in exchange for feeling safe and secure in holding their noses and casting their fucking retarded votes for him.
Rev. Wright was their convenient boogie man, and the moment Obama hocked, pawned, and house-wiggered his black lippy, uppity, activist ass for telling the truth, I knew he was gonna hock, pawn, and house-wigger anybody or anything in order to score the DNC’s white inverted-racist vote at the cost of the truth.
Sure as shit, that’s exactly what happened. He’s been hocking, pawning, and house-wiggering people ever since — from Brad Manning, the jobless, the foreclosed, the great unwashed Occupy rabble, dead corpses in the middle east, etc. — in order to maintain their held noses and fucking retarded votes, and keep up appearances. Whether those appearances are his fake and farcical “progressive” street cred, the appearances of the DNC being that big tent party of liberals and progressives, or the utter fucking fiction that the DNC does not have any racists, misogynists, misandrists, and homo-bigots absolutely bursting with gay-hate (despite the fact that every single one of them were the very “undecideds” who were wearing sheets or in the middle of waterboarding the wifey every time the pollster called) …
Ohhh nooo … it’s all Ron Paul, Rush Limbaugh, and “Teh Big Spooky RePugs” that indefinitely and irrevocably have the racist/bigot/spouse beatin’/child abusin’/deadbeat daddy markets cornered. Never mind that John McCain was never gonna be President – he was Uncle Fester without the laugh track (until he found one in Wasilla). Never mind that Hillary Clinton was never gonna be President – she doesn’t stand on enough dead corpses from economic sanctions like Maddie Albright did …
Gee, who does that leave?!?
President Aceveda *cough* I mean, Barack Obama – the Pawn-Star in Chief!
The perfect personification of center-left “Malignant Optimism” in the wake of Bush/Cheney “Malignant Narcissism”, and by far the biggest scam and the largest instance of kabuki theater that America’s dumbed-down and distracted voter-drones ever foisted on themselves so far. Because they were the biggest marks for it.
I’m convinced that the average American did not want a President that would deliver substance and results – quite the opposite; they wanted a convenient over-idealized and over-romanticized bullshit story to cover up their weakfished spinelessness and paralysis in the face Bush/Cheney fear. In other words, they wanted someone exactly like them: big on smoke, mirrors, platitudes, and talk; low to non-existant in walk. They wanted a Leader to play them like fiddles in a GEICO commercial … and not only did they vote accordingly, they look forward (not backward) in voting accordingly again this November.
It’s unfortunate that fitley lacks the ability to see the real Obama. Proof that the koolaid drinkers comprise the majority in the USA. Probably believes Obama’s rhetoric and disregards his actions.