Amid a report by the New York Times that a Republican Super PAC is considering in essence playing the race card (even to the extent of thinking about hiring an African-American as a kind of front-man to combat allegations of race baiting) and planning a $10 million attack on Barack Obama by dredging up all the Reverend Wright mantras, Andrew Sullivan gives us our political Quote of the Day on why he now believes Mitt Romney could win the White House:
And the Tea Party, utterly indifferent to massive spending in good times by a Republican, had a conniption at a black Democrat’s modest measures to limit the worst downturn since the 1930s. Conniption isn’t really he right word: this was a cultural and political panic in the face of a president who was advocating what were only recently Republican policies: tax cuts, Romneycare on a national level, cap-and-trade, a W-style immigration reform, and a relentless war on Jihadism. They reached back to a time, when there were only three kinds of Americans – native, white and slaves. They even wore powdered wigs.
To ignore this cultural turmoil is to miss the forest for the trees in this election. No one represents the new and future America more clearly than Obama: a mixed-race, pro-immigrant, pro-gay pragmatist. And Romney’s great strength in this election is that he looks and speaks and acts like a generic American president from the 1950s.
His Mormon faith adds heft to his American brand (Mormonism is more purely American than any other branch of Christianity and until recently, was rooted in white, racial superiority.) His style is comforting, even as his policies (so far as we can glean them at all) are more radical than any Republican in decades. (He is, for example, far to Reagan’s right on entitlements, taxes and spending, as well as on immigration.) His slogan is: “Believe in America.” Not too subtle, is it?
Expect the subtext to become text in this election. Look at the currents that push more powerfully than the surface’s waves and ripples. Are we afraid of this future? Or eager for it? I’d say it’s about 50-50 right now, but the passion this time lies with the resistance and the fear. Which is why I have come to think that, unless the future America turns out this year in the vast numbers they represented in 2008, Romney is the favorite to win this election.
And, indeed, Democrats have often had a smug attitude going into major political races that was, in effect, “there’s no way the Republicans can win this.”
But — to paraphrase a famous Democrat — yes they can.
Talking Points Memo’s Banjy Sarlin notes that Wright isn’t the real threat to the Dems: the GOP’s strength with Super PAC money most assuredly is:
The outside money game is “likely to skew towards Republicans, but we won’t know for sure until the numbers are in,” Rick Hasen, a law professor and campaign finance expert at UC Irvine, told TPM. “There are questions about how much unions and others on the left will be able to come up with.”
Overall, though, Republicans — and especially Romney — have proven more adept by far at raking in game-changing amounts from big donors. Romney’s own fundraising is also catching up fast: He raised $40 million in concert with the RNC in April, close to Obama’s $43 million in the same period and leaps and bounds ahead of his $12.5 million haul in March.
While detailed FEC reports are not yet out, there are a number of likely reasons for Romney’s surging fundraising. Republicans who supported other candidates and others who sat on the sideline, are likely rallying behind the presumptive nominee. Another possible boost: Romney has struggled with small donors this race and many of his top backers have already given the maximum amount allowable to a candidate, $2,500. But now that he’s fundraising with the RNC, supporters can give up to $75,800 to a Victory Fund operated by party, potentially opening up a huge new well of cash.
It’s not entirely clear how these unprecedented amounts of money will affect the presidential race. After all, there is a saturation point when it comes to advertising where an extra million on top of hundreds isn’t likely to reach anyone it hasn’t already, and both sides could hit that limit. The bigger impact may be on down-ballot races, which will help determine the effectiveness of the next president regardless of party.
“Somebody dumps $15 million on the presidential election and they won’t be overwhelming the race,” Hasen said. “But $15 [million] on a Senate or congressional race will be huge and have a major effect, especially with control of the Senate up for grabs.”
In politics you can just sense how things are going and this week there is a growing sense that Team Obama may have an even tougher race than they thought they had. Have they listened to James Carville?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.