NEW YORK — Looks like President Barack Obama’s allies got the hint.
An independent group with deep ties to the president’s re-election campaign launched a television ad Tuesday hitting Mitt Romney’s business practices at Bain Capital, just 24 hours after Obama’s team debuted its ad attacking the Republican candidate’s work at the private equity firm.
By law, campaigns and the outside groups are forbidden from working with each other. But at times like this, the lines of separation seem blurred.
“The idea that these groups are independent is a fiction in reality terms and, we believe, a fiction in legal terms,” said Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a campaign reform group.
The back-to-back Obama spots, to run in four of the same five swing states, are a sign of the new world of campaign finance, where “super” political action committees have wide leeway to spend as much as they want. The ads cast light on the cozy relationship between campaigns and these groups, raising questions about how independent they are.
A Romney-aligned super PAC is keeping him competitive on TV. And the relationship between Restore Our Future and the presumptive GOP nominee was vivid during the primaries, when the group spent $36 million on ads assailing the former governor’s rivals.
Super PACs, born of a 2010 Supreme Court decision easing political spending rules, can raise and spend unlimited donations as long as they don’t coordinate directly with the campaigns they support. But the lines can be blurry: The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action is run by former Obama White House aides. Restore Our Future is staffed by former Romney advisers.
Said Wertheimer: “Candidate-specific super PACs are simply arms of the presidential campaigns and need to be treated as such and be subject to contribution limits.”
Republicans have generally welcomed the emergence of super PACs, and several GOP-leaning groups spent millions to take control of the House and pick up six Senate seats in 2010. Obama sharply criticized super PACs that year but ultimately green-lighted contributions to Priorities USA Action after it became clear that his campaign and other Democrats would be vastly outgunned otherwise.
Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group, said: “Super PACs have little or no true independence. That’s why large contributions to super PACs pose just as great a threat of corruption as they would if given directly to the candidates.”
