What a difference 24 hours makes.
Today:
(WaPo) — Fearing a tide of spending by outside conservative groups, President Obama is giving his blessing to a pro-Democratic Party “super PAC” that will work to help his reelection, his campaign said late Monday.
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a message to supporters that “our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it stands,” which he said gives a large financial advantage to Republicans and their allied groups. Messina said Obama will throw his support to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC founded by two former White House aides that until now has been unable to match its conservative competitors in fundraising.
“We can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm,” Messina wrote.
The move marks a clear political risk for Obama, who has staked much of his political career on opposition to the outsized role of “secret billionaires” and other monied interests while also attempting to win reelection in a struggling economy.
Yesterday:
(Politico) — President Barack Obama didn’t disavow his big-money fundraising machine, but did voice dismay about the presence of super PACs and negative campaigning in an interview that aired Monday morning.
“One of the worries we have obviously in the next campaign is that there are so many of these so-called super PACs, these independent expenditures that are gonna be out there, there is gonna be just a lot of money floating around and I guarantee a bunch of it’s gonna be negative,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview taped before the Super Bowl on Sunday.
“It’s not gonna be enough to say, ‘the other guy is a bum.’ You’ve got to explain to the people what your plan is to make sure that there are good jobs at good wages and that this economy is growing over the long term. And whoever wins that argument I think is gonna be the next president,” he said.