Photograph by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama delivers remarks from the wharf near the PortMiami tunnel project in Miami, Florida on March 29, 2013.

With a quartet of California fundraisers, President Barack Obama will test his ability to replenish his party’s campaign accounts without the threat of his defeat to motivate Democratic donors.

Obama leaves Washington today for a Western trip that is four parts fundraising and one part presidential business. He will begin with an official event in Denver, Colorado to press Congress to pass a bill to address gun violence. Then he heads to the San Francisco area for the fundraisers.

The president will be pressing his contributors to help him win back Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 2014 and shore up the national party’s finances.

He may be met with some donor fatigue.

“Raising money is never easy,” said Bill Burton, a former White House spokesman who is co-founder of Priorities USA, a political action committee that supported Obama in the 2012 election. “But it’s particularly difficult following a general election cycle that started earlier and burned through more money than any other in history.”

The president’s fundraising starts tonight with a reception at Pacific Heights home of Thomas Steyer, the founder of Farallon Capital Management LLC, and his wife, Kat Taylor, at a cost of $5,000 per person, according to a copy of the invitation. That event, with proceeds going to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, will be followed by a dinner at the home of Ann and Gordon Getty at a cost $32,400 per seat.

The next day, Obama will raise money for the Democratic National Committee, which had $21.9 million in debt at the end of February, with a $32,400-per-person brunch at the Atherton home of Liz Simmons and Mark Heising, the founder and managing director of Medley Partners, according to a person familiar with the matter. His final event, also in Atherton, is at the home of Levi Strauss heir John Goldman. Tickets there range in price from $1,000 to $20,000.

Obama is expected to raise $1.8 million at the two DNC events, and has committed to total of six fundraising trips before June 30, said the person, who requested anonymity.

The president reactivated his campaign’s donor network last month to raise money for Organizing for Action, a nonprofit advocacy group founded this year by former campaign aides. The events today and tomorrow mark a return to traditional party-building.

“Democrats should be heartened by the fact that even though donors may be a little low on enthusiasm, the president is not,” said Burton.

Original post is Obama’s Post-Election Fundraising: Replenishing a Party by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton briefs reporters at the White House in Washington, on June 21, 2010.

Former White House aide Bill Burton is joining the Global Strategy Group as executive vice president in its Washington office.  Burton is co-founder and senior strategist for Priorities USA Action, a super-political action committee that helped re-elect the president.

Burton has “a deep understanding of the communications and political landscapes in Washington,” said Jon Silvan, the consulting group’s chief executive officer.

Silvan’s clients have included Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who was re-elected in November along with Obama. Another member of the firm, Stephen Sigmund, served as New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s communications director.

In Washington, Burton will be reunited with Jim Papa, Obama’s former special assistant for legislative affairs. Papa was also a senior adviser to Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when he served in the U.S. House. Burton worked for Emanuel at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Original post is Obama Re-Election Behind Him, Burton Joins Consulting Firm by Political Capital.

Priorities’ Bill Burton says the ad, “Stage,” is back by popular demand.

Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing President Barack Obama, has spent millions portraying the business career of Republican Mitt Romney as ruinous to the lives of people who worked for some of the companies that Romney’s Bain Capital took over.

Now it’s commercial featuring Mike Earnest, who built a stage at his plant only to to see executives use it to announce his firing, is returning to the air in several critical states where Obama hopes to build his Electoral College victory: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Priorities’ Bill Burton says the ad, “Stage,” is back by popular demand:  “In our Ohio focus groups this week, we asked swing voters to name the television ads that stood out most to them, in all the welter of advertising they have seen. `Stage’ is the ad that most frequently came to mind: participants were able to describe it in detail and recall theemotional impact it had on them, despite the fact that it had not run in that market for over six weeks.

Priorities USA Action, run by former Obama aides, is reporting $15.2 million in September contributions today at the Federal Election Commission, according to an aide with knowledge of the report.

That marks its best fundraising month yet, as Bloomberg’s Julie Bykowicz reports.

Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney group, reported to the FEC yesterday that it collected $14.8 million in September, making it the group’s second most lucrative month. Restore Our Future raised about $21 million in June after Romney defeated a field of primary competitors.

Restore has raised $111.5 million since the beginning of 2011, more than double the $50.9 million Priorities has collected.

Original post is `The Stage’ is Set in Ohio: Priorities by Political Capital.

Photograph by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Protesters march through downtown Tampa.

Updated at 10 am EDT

Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election,  is launching a $30 million anti-Mitt Romney offensive today. It kicks off with a new advertisement timed to the first day of the Republican National Convention.

The ad centers on Olive Chase, a registered independent and small business owner in Massachusetts who voted for Romney in 2002 and gave money to his gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts. Ten years later, she’s no longer a supporter.

“Governor Romney cares about big business, he cares about tax cuts for wealthy people, and I certainly do not believe he cares about my hardworking employees,” Chase says in the ad. “I feel like I was duped by Mitt Romney. I’m going to vote for President Obama.”

The project builds on the group’s earlier ad campaign. In the spring and summer, Priorities spent $20 million trying to define Romney and his character by undercutting his business experience, focusing on the former private equity executive’s time at the helm of Bain Capital LLC. Highlighting workers employed by companies in which Bain invested and shed jobs, the campaign contended that Romney was focused on creating profits at the expense of working-class Americans.

Today’s spot will run online and on television in the key battleground states of Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia. It’s the first in a series of ads the group will run focusing on Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor and the impact he would have on the middle class were he to be elected president.

“Americans are going to hear a lot of about Mitt Romney this week. These new ads are designed to make sure voters hear the whole story,” said Bill Burton, senior strategist for Priorities. “Looking back to his record in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney failed the people who made him governor, leaving the Bay State 47th in the nation in job creation. At issue now is that Romney wants to bring those same failed policies to the White House.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign donations, Chase hasn’t donated to Obama’s presidential campaigns. She did give $1,000 in April to Rep. Bill Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat.

“This is a desperate attempt by the president’s allies to try and distract voters from President Obama’s failed record,” Romney campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg wrote in an e-mail this morning. . President Obama’s policies have  devastated the middle class and led to record unemployment and less take-home pay. We are happy to compare the 4.7 percent unemployment rate Mitt Romney achieved with President Obama’s record of 42 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent any day.”

Original post is Obama-Backing Super-PAC Launches $30 Mln Anti-Romney Ad Campaign by Political Capital.

Photograph by Luke Sharrett/The New York Times via Redux

Supporters at a campaign event with President Barack Obama at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 21, 2012.

President Barack Obama’s campaign doesn’t want to cede the spotlight this week, yet with Tropical Storm Isaac scuttling plans at the Republican National Convention in Tampa and elsewhere, Democrats have scurried to determine how best to get out their economic message out and defend the president’s record.

Sensitivity is key, particularly as Isaac is poised to hit New Orleans on the 7th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But Democrats say they will take their cues from decisions being made by Republican Mitt Romney and his party on the ground in Tampa.

Priorities USA, the super-PAC supporting Obama, is ready to deploy a new on-air offensive. Bill Burton, who heads the group, wouldn’t provide details, but said the ad will air this week and called it “one of the better ones we’ve done so far.”

“It’s just important that Democrats will be on TVacting as surrogates and just making sure that people have a very clear sense of who Mitt Romney is and what he stands for, regardless of what he might say on the convention floor,” Burton said in an interview from the Bloomberg Link in Tampa.

Obama, for now, plans to launch a college tour that kicks off  Wednesday in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The campaign also has deployed top surrogates including former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland on bus tours through Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And the campaign also unveiled a new Web ad — with a mock movie preview trailer dubbing this week “Mitt Romney’s convention re-invention.” The production about Romney’s attempt to convince the country that his plan to “cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires on the backs of the middle class is a blockbuster” is rated “N” — for “Not Gonna Work.”

Original post is Romney’s ‘Re-Do:’ Obama-Rated `N’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image

A worker removes the plastic from a mirror on the floor ahead of the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 26, 2012.

“Here’s the problem with money in politics,” says Mike Murphy, a seasoned and semi-retired Republican TV ad strategist:

It’s the content.

“I’m less worried about the plumbing than I am the quality of the water,” Murphy said today in Tampa, as the Republican Party whose candidates that he advised for many years was preparing to open its presidential nominating convention. With about $9.37 being spent on every voter for TV ads, he said, “the number has a shock value, but in my view it’s the content — the quality of the discourse.”

In his day, he joked, they’d keep the percentage of untrue statements to under a third.

The money is the problem, says Bill Burton, one of President Barack Obama’s backers.

“Money in politics is bad,” said Burton, director of the Obama-backing Priorities USA Action super-PAC.  Pointing to the likes of Las Vegas casino Sheldon Adelson, who has donated $10 million to a super-PAC backing Republican Mitt Romney, Burton suggested that “the voices that get drowned out are the folks of the middle class.”

The two and others met at a discussion today sponsored by Bloomberg, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication, Leadership and Policy and the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, one of many events Bloomberg and its partners are sponsoring across the river from the Republican National Convention.

The independent money flooding this election is a double-edged sword, Murphy suggested — it’s a big “cannon,” but it’s uncontrollable, and candidates will still be held accountable for what’s said on their behalf.

“We have opened up the gates, and the truth is, neither side is incentivized to spend less,” Murphy said.

Charles Spies, founder of the super-PAC Restore Our Future backing Romney, maintained that committees such as his and the candidates are operating independently.

“These are not unsophisticated people,” Murphy said. They at least “know how to join in the chorus” and sing from the same “sheet music,”  he said,  suggesting that they are complying with the laws of independent operation while acting “in concert.”

The talk turned to Joe Soptic, a former steel worker who lost his job after Bain Capital took over his company. He appeared in a video produced by Burton’s super-PAC suggesting that his wife died of cancer because she lacked the insurance the family had before Bain entered the picture. Romney — who made his fortune at Bain and left before the episode in question — simply doesn’t care, Soptic says in the ad.

From the start, Burton said, Obama’s super-PAC knew that it would have to challenge Romney’s business record, on which he is running for president. Burton said: “We didn’t think those stories ought to be off-limits just because they are sad and uncomfortable. ”

The ad has aired only once on TV, by accident, in Ohio.

Yet the ad, which Burton says cost $8,500 to produce,  has caught 1.2 million views on YouTube.

Original post is Money in Politics: Plumbing’s not the Problem, It’s the Quality of the Water by Political Capital.

Photograph by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times via Redux

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

Tax-exempt nonprofit groups account for some of the biggest, yet most mysterious, spending in the presidential election. And now they’ve attracted the attention of New York’s attorney general.

Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, has asked two dozen nonprofits to explain how they raise and spend political money, Bloomberg’s David Voreacos and David McLaughlin write this morning.

Groups including Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, guided by former Preisdent George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, and Priorities USA, run by former President Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton, have received letters of inquiry from Schneiderman, according to an unnamed source cited in the story.

Those and other nonprofits claim tax-exempt status by spending less than 50 percent of their money on politics. The majority of their budget goes into issues advocacy, the groups say. They operate under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. Aside from the tax break, the nonprofit status enables them to keep their donor lists private — something super-political action committees and candidates cannot do.

The Internal Revenue Service recently indicated it, too, has questions about the 501(c)(4) groups, writing in a letter to campaign-finance watchdogs that it will “consider proposed changes” to the section of the tax code. The IRS did not give a timeline for any action.

ProPublica reported recently that Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit founded by billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch, have spent an estimated $60 million in TV ads — more than all of the super-PACs combined.

Original post is Tax-Exempt Political Groups Probed by NY Attorney General by Political Capital.

Photograph by Landov

An abandoned building from the bankrupt GST Steel Company in Kansas City, Missouri.

The super-PAC backing President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has focused attacks on the impact that Republican Mitt Romney’s work in private equity had on some of the businesses it took over.

While Romney speaks of an overall gain in employment among the businesses his company handled, Obama’s allies are pointing to the failures.

The newest attack features Joe Soptic, a former employee at GST Steel in Kansas City, Kansas, who lost his job and health benefits after Romney’s Bain Capital closed the steel plant.

In its message, the Priorities USA Action ad is playing on so many levels: Appealing to a finding in polls that voters are more likely to say that Obama cares more about people like them, and appealing to the importance of health care — an issue on which Obama has prevailed in the Supreme Court.

*I don’t think Mitt Romney understands what he’s done to people’s lives by closing the plant,” Soptic says in the ad  “I don’t think he realizes that people’s lives completely changed.”

When the plant closed, he says, he and his family lost their health care.

“And a short time after that my wife became ill. I don’t know how long she was sick and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew that we couldn’t afford the insurance, and then one day she became ill and I took her up to the Jackson County Hospital and admitted her for pneumonia and that’s when they found the cancer and by then it was stage four. It was, there was nothing they could do for her.”

“And she passed away in 22 days,” he says.

“I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” the widower says in a pointed closing, “and furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

Original post is Romney Doesn’t Care: Obama-Backing super-PAC’s Ad Appeal by Political Capital.

Photograph by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

George Soros, founder of Soros Fund Management LLC.

Wealthy donors whose net worth begins with a “B” and whose politics are “D” have emerged.

A trio of billionaires contributed more than $3 million in June to a super-PAC supporting President Barack Obama. Their checks accounted for half of Priorities USA Action’s record fundraising haul last month, according to our Bloomberg News story this morning.

Irwin Jacobs, who built Qualcomm Inc., gave $2 million, and Jon Stryker, an architect whose fortune comes from his family’s medical supply business, gave $750,000. Haim Saban, a media executive who was one of President Bill Clinton’s top fundraisers, gave $1 million to an umbrella Democrat group — a third of which went to Priorities.

Also last month, George Soros, a billionaire financier who underwrote much of the failed effort to oust President George W. Bush in 2004, cut a $1 million check to American Bridge, a super-PAC that focuses on opposition research.

So why all the sudden generosity?

Priorities co-founder Bill Burton says there are three factors: polls showing a close race between Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the impact of the super-PAC’s ads disparaging Romney’s business experience and the enthusiasm of wealthy Republican donors.

That last part is clear. The top two super-PACs backing Romney, Restore Our Future and American Crossroads, so far have  raised $122 million — six times as much as Priorities.

Original post is Billionaire Democrats? They Do Exist by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jim Spellman/WireImage/Getty Images

Actor Morgan Freeman at the 'The Dark Knight Rises' world premiere in New York City.

When Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing President Barack Obama, reports its $6 million monthly haul to the Federal Election Commission, one of the donors listed will be the actor Morgan Freeman.

He gave $1 million.

“President Obama has done a remarkable job in historically difficult circumstances,” Freeman said in a statement released by Priorities, founded by former Obama aides. “He ended combat operations in Iraq, put in place sensible reforms of Wall Street, saved the auto industry and protected the health care of every American.”

“He has led our nation to be more tolerant and placed impressive, accomplished women on the Supreme Court,” the actor said. “In return, he is the target of hundreds of millions of dollars from right-wing sources.  I am proud to lend my voice – and support – to those who defend him.”

Priorities co-founder Bill Burton said last week on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt”  that the group raised $6 million in June, its best month ever. Other donors last month included Irwin Jacobs, former chairman of Qualcomm Inc., and his wife, Joan, Burton said.

A Republican-allied super-PAC, Restore Our Future, reported $20 million.

Original post is Morgan Freeman’s $1 Million: Obama by Political Capital.