Swiftboat Inc.

Here's something that will slip through the cracks right up until a few years from now when all these attack ads are coming out of the woodwork and we don't understand why?

A political consulting firm run by two battle-hardened Republican operatives has developed a plan to set up private companies to run attack ads against candidates.

Private companies would be free of many of the contribution limits and reporting requirements that campaign committees must abide by.

The Black Rock Group, run by Carl Forti and Michael Dubke in Alexandria, is seeking the approval of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for key aspects of its plan.

“BRG intends to approach multiple individuals and suggest that each individual establish a limited liability company … for the sole purpose of sponsoring independent expenditures that expressly advocate the election or defeat of one or more federal candidates,” wrote Black Rock's attorney, William J. McGinley of Patton Boggs, in a May 27 letter to the FEC.

Carl Forti blows a lot of smoke, but I think they've figured out a key loophole here. If private companies can be set up for the sole purpose of running attack ads, really all bets are off from the standpoint of transparency and disclosure. Right now a 527 group needs to disclose their membership and donors. A private company, not so much.

They never stop...




The main point of the letter is to confirm that Black Rock and the companies can work together and share information without following the rules for political committees.

In an advisory opinion issued in April, the FEC determined that such limited liability companies are treated the same as individuals under campaign finance law. Limited liability companies shield the people involved from some lawsuits.

They also wouldn't be seeking tax-exempt status under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, further reducing the documentation they must make available to the public.

Forti is a former communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee and an executive at the conservative issue advocacy group Freedom's Watch. He also worked on Mitt Romney's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Dubke is the former president of Americans for Job Security, a conservative, business-oriented advocacy group founded to counter the AFL-CIO.

Freedom's Watch and Americans for Job Security were both criticized by Democrats as front groups for rich donors created to avoid campaign finance restrictions.

Falling Flat Because They Were Never Inflated

It's something of an interesting question why the Swiftboat-style attacks on Barack Obama have gotten no traction this year. Ari Berman does a scholarly analysis in The Nation. It could be the general lack of desire for irrelevant attacks at a time of financial crisis; it could be that the implosion of the conservative movement has fractured the message; it could be that the money simply isn't there to back John McCain; it could even be that the Obama campaign counter-punched effectively and refused to allow these attacks to get traction.

I think it has something to do with the utter stupidity of this year's attacks. Jon Swift, the reasonable conservative, has the definitive list of election-year blogging from conservatives. Bloggers are pretty important in amplifying attacks, and look what they've gone after this year:

During Obama’s dark, mysterious years at Columbia, he was involved in domestic terrorist bombings

Although some mainstream media sources have alluded to Obama’s mysterious years at Columbia, only one intrepid reporter, Tom Maguire of Just One Minute has made the cognitive leap required to connect all of the dots. Noting that Obama admitted in his book Dreams of My Father that he was “interested in South Africa divestment,” Maguire does some digging and discovers that some protests against the 1981 tour by the South African Springboks rugby team resulted in violence and even some bombings. Guess who “was involved in some fashion” in these bombings? The Weather Underground! “These are just dots and it may be impossible to connect them,” says Maguire, modestly, “but we have Barack Obama at Columbia working on South African divestment (as were many peaceful protestors) while other radical elements with a Weather Underground flavor are setting bombs, killing cops, and working on South African divestment. As a bonus, Bill Ayers is studying at Bank Street College a quarter mile from Columbia.” Wow! How can the mainstream media possibly ignore the fact that Obama must have been “involved in some fashion” in domestic terrorism because he was “interested in South African divestment.” “Tom Maguire steps pretty far out on a limb with this bit of speculation,” says CPAC Blogger of the Year Ace of Spades, who links to the story. “But it would explain why Barack Obama's ‘lost years’ at Columbia have remained so very very secret.” It makes me wonder how my friend Tom Watson, who was at Columbia at the same time as Obama and was also “interested in South African divestment,” was connected to the Weather Underground, not to mention hundreds of other former Columbia students who today freely walk the streets despite their terrorist connections. I wonder if Tom has mentioned his radical connections in his upcoming book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, or if like Obama, he mysteriously left it out.

That's just one of them. It's must reading and really a seminal document. Americans may not have the smartest bullshit detector, but they can ferret out complete ridiculousness. And that accurately describes the conservative movement in 2008.

Maybe He Needs To Go Back To Iraq

I guess the right thinks this "Obama's afraid to visit Iraq, nanny nanny poo poo" taunt is a political winner for them. It certainly fits in with their strategy to paint the Illinois senator as un-American and weak. Of course, the exact phrases that John McCain is using in making the taunt match the words from Vets for Freedom, a 527 group which is off limits to any McCain supporters, but OK for the Presidential candidate as far as coordinating messages, I guess. McCain is also using unauthorized images of American military personnel in pushing this message along.

“The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways,” wrote the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest-ranking officer. “It is and must always be a neutral instrument of the state, no matter which party holds sway.” [...]

Three days [after Mullen’s advice was published], Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, sent a fundraising solicitation using an image of him and Gen. David Petraeus.

“Something is wrong with your judgment when you want to sit down unconditionally with Raul Castro and Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but you don’t take the opportunity to sit down with General Petraeus and learn about the situation in Iraq firsthand,” the letter reads. “My friends, this is not the ‘change’ we need in our next president.”

I believe this comes very close to McCain breaking the law.

But let's break down his substantive "point," if we can dig it out. He's saying that you cannot show proper judgment about Iraq unless you physically set foot in the country. But, as Michael Ware notes, McCain has been in Iraq multiple times, and yet has screwed up assessments of the situation on the ground over and over again, most recently... yesterday:

All week we've been hearing about all those trips McCain has made to Iraq. We know about some of them. Like the one where he claimed he could stroll safely through a Baghdad. Or the one recently where he didn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shi'as.

Just yesterday, McCain was talking about how "quiet" Mosul is. But, Nico Pitney compared McCain's words to what was actually happening yesterday in Mosul:

"Moreover, McCain's claim that Mosul is "quiet" was disproved earlier today in grim fashion. Three suicide bombings -- two in Mosul and another in a surrounding town -- left 30 Iraqis dead and more than two dozen injured, according to press reports."

And the reason for that is that there's no such thing as a legitimate "fact-finding mission" in Iraq. The trips are highly sanitized dog-and-pony shows which make it nearly impossible to get a real picture of things. So on every level, McCain "killer attack" is more like a lead balloon.

Suicide Mission

So Barack Obama has pretty fairly taken advantage of Hillary Clinton's campaign being caught flat-footed by not wrapping up the nomination on Super Tuesday, and he has swept 10 straight contests by huge margins. She still has a chance to pull this out, but it would take a major change in the current dynamic and I simply don't see that happening. This YouTube from last night, where an Obama surrogate can't name any of his legislative accomplishments, has potential, but that's kind of the fault of the surrogate, not the candidate, who has as many accomplishments as Clinton (ethics reform, finding loose nukes, pandemic flu preparation, death penalty reform in Illinois, health care in Illinois, anti-racial profiling bill in Illinois, shall I keep going?).

Clearly they need to change the dynamic. And there are two debates in the next six days, so there will be chances. An example of what not to do is to shovel soft money into an anti-Obama 527. I can't tell you how stupid this is. And for me it's personal.

The new pro-Clinton 527, the American Leadership Project, incorporated with the IRS on Feb. 15, and lists as its chief a former Clinton White House deputy press secretary and former Gray Davis aide, Roger Salazar, according to its federal filing [...]

The group is targeting through TV ads, mail, and phone communications white women under 50 in the Ohio area — specifically Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, Charleston (W.Va.), Wheeling- Steubenville, Zanesville, and Parkersburg (W.Va.).

White men will also be a focus, and if there are any excess funds Latinos in Texas and middle class families in Pennsylvania will also be targeted.

ALP has developed three ads aimed at tarnishing Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a talker and not a doer — the ads are called “If speeches could solve problems" — and they will contrast Obama and Clinton on issues of importance to middle-class voters, such as the economy, health care, and the mortgage crisis.

Jake Tapper has more. The description makes them sound at least somewhat substantive, but something tells me that they'll eventually head into this territory:

Tom Buffenbarger president of the machinists' union (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers) was the the latest in a string of Clinton junkyard dogs unleashed upon Obama. Prior to Hillary Clinton’s speech last night in Youngstown, Ohio, Buffenbarger delivered nothing short of an Obama diatribe [...]

Buffenbarger called Obama a “thespian,” and he sarcastically referred to the junior senator from Illinois as a “wunderkind.” He compared Obama to “Janus, the two-faced Roman god of ancient times.” And he pleaded with the crowd to boo Obama’s labor record [...]

But it was Obama supporters for whom Buffenbarger saved his most vitriolic contempt, and he proved that the Democratic Party’s coalition is nothing if not fragile. Channeling Howard Beale from the movie "Network," he yelled into the microphone, “Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”

This is EXACTLY the language used to demonize Howard Dean in a famed Club for Growth 527 ad in 2004.



Clinton has been trying this "speeches vs. solutions" thing for a couple weeks without success. You can't tell me that a massive soft-money operation isn't eventually going to go down this road. I don't think it'll work either way, but in desperation, I can't see this being a completely clean operation.

And here's my biggest problem. Roger Salazar and Jason Kinney are two of the leaders of this project. Salazar is a spokesman for the California Democratic Party, and Kinney is the Communications Director for State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata. My party dues money goes in part to these guys, and they are now engaging in a suicide mission against a fellow Democrat.

You stay classy, California Democratic Party...

(where's concern troll Steve Maviglio to tell us that they should all focus their energies on the Republicans instead?)

UPDATE: Here's their first ad:



If this is all they've got, they ought to save their money. "If speeches could create jobs, we wouldn't be facing a recession"? Um, wasn't the worst speechifyer in Presidential history, George Bush, the President overseeing this recession?

It's not negative at all, and this seems to be just creating financial parity so they can keep going in Ohio and Texas. But it could, of course, metastasize. Plus the soft-money aspect, after the Clinton campaign criticized Obama for not being committed to public financing, is pretty weak.