American Leadership Project
The American Leadership Project is the new SwiftBoat Group 527 organization (so named because of the section of the Internal Revenue Code under which it is organized) which is supposedly all about “issues of importance to the middle class” and not specific candidates.
Here is an excerpt of a memo sent out by the lawyers organizing this group, defending its legality:
ALP will not air any advertisements that contain express advocacy on behalf of a federal candidate. It is soliciting funds to air advertisements that meet its purpose of highlighting the issues enumerated above, all of which it believes are important to middle class families and should be discussed and debated during the weeks prior to the upcoming primary elections. ALP’s major purpose is to convey information and urge consideration of those important issues during a time when viewers are paying closer attention to such matters.
Here is their first ad, courtesy of Pam’s House Blend and MSNBC:
After you watch the ad, can you possibly reconcile what the lawyer’s memo says with the text and images in the ad? The Obama campaign doesn’t think so, warning the Clinton camp that they are breaking the law in pretty strong language:
Bauer argued on a conference call with reporters that the group’s “major purpose” is supporting Clinton and that it’s “a very clear runaway case of lawbreaking” because it hasn’t filed papers with the Federal Election Commission or reported the money it spent producing its ad and posting it to YouTube.
“There’s going to be a reckoning here,” he warned. “It’s going to be rough — it’s going to be rough on the officers, it’s going to be rough on the employees, it’s going to be rough on the donors.”
As someone who works with the Internal Revenue Code on a daily basis, I agree. This is just too blatant, almost too blatant to be believed. Someone has gone completely off their rocker in spinning an argument for why this “committee” isn’t flying in the face of the law.
From the Obama memo concerning the formation of this “project”:
(b) Organizational “major purpose” is then determined by a whole range of factors, any one of which will be decisive. How does the organization explain its purpose? What other evidence is there of its purpose? Has it conducted other activities, beyond the communication it disseminates about particular candidates in particular elections? What is the timing of those activities — immediately before an election?
Here we have a committee that springs up on the eve of an election, promotes a specific candidate, and has no history or apparent purpose of lobbying specific issues outside the benefit to the candidate of these communications. Its “major purpose” is no mystery.
Trust me on this: Substance matters. The Clintons cannot expect to rely on form and have substance ignored. Facts and circumstances determine outcome, and this one is fairly obvious.
More fundamentally, it seals the fate of Senator Clinton as one who is so desperate to win that she will abandon all principles in order to achieve the goal. For that reason, I would not assume that she will go quietly into the night after this week’s rout in Wisconsin and Hawai’i. Instead, she’s playing the same underdog she played before New Hampshire, borrowing lines from other, already eliminated, candidates in an effort to garner sympathy from the Texas voters.
I just don’t see her going quietly into the night if there are big-money donors waiting to toss $100,000 into a “project” for the benefit of influencing outcomes in Ohio and Texas.
Technorati Tags: campaign finance, FEC, 527, SwiftBoat