UPDATE: Via Ben Smith, you can see the first ad produced by the 527. It's not on the air yet. The head of the 527 claims they are all about the positive. That's all. Just positive. The first line of the ad is "If speeches could create jobs, we wouldn't be facing a recession"....but, remember, they're going to stay positive. We shall see. Anyone watching MSNBC last night surely knows that Clinton media guru Mark Penn wants to go negative against Obama. He was sending that message loud and clear through Howard Fineman.
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It had to come to this. Clinton allies are raising millions in a desperate, last ditch effort to defeat Obama by ruining his image with a Swift-Boat-style 527.
ABC's Jake Tapper reports the new group, called "The American Leadership Project," is planning to run anti-Obama ads in Ohio -- and maybe Texas and Pennsylvania, too. According to Tapper, the ads are "aimed at tarnishing" Obama. Marc Ambinder adds these details:
Allies of Hillary Clinton plan an expensive, stealth campaign to buttress her standing in the must-win states of Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania.Not so stealthy anymore.
They're canvassing Clinton donors for pledges of up to $100,000 in the hope of raising at least $10M by the end of next week. The money will be placed in the account of a political committee organized under section 527 of the tax code.
You know, this campaign has, for the most part, stayed on the high road. There have been some bursts of negativity of late, but by and large, it's been pretty clean. Looks like that is about to end.
Clinton's supporters are absolutely obsessed with driving up Obama's negatives. You get the sense that they cannot believe that Obama's campaign is making them work for what they rightly deserve. Now, instead of picking out their White House office furniture, they're forced to raise large amounts of money to tear down the Democratic front-runner. After all these years in power, the Clintons clearly have rich, rich friends who can chip in $100,000 on their behalf. To contrast, Obama's campaign hit an unprecedented landmark today: over 500,000 contributors. Clinton's campaign couldn't come close to that -- so she needs her wealthy friends to bail her out.
Over the past year, Obama has shown he can withstand the Clinton's negative onslaught. But, it does make one wonder how far the Clintons and their allies are willing to push this fight. If they want to make this ugly, it's not like she (or her husband) have got the cleanest records around. Far from it. And, I'm just talking issues, like those votes where she supported Bush on the Iraq war in October 2002 and the Iran resolution in September 2007.
Do we really want to go down the path of trying to make our candidates damaged goods should they win the nomination? Clinton and her allies says yes.
