GOP ad grants voters permission
to vote against President Obama
This is a pretty interesting contrast: On the one hand you've got the RNC's new independent expenditure unit
putting up a new ad granting voters permission to vote against President Obama ...
In a campaign fast growing nasty, the Republican National Committee is trying a gentler approach. President Barack Obama tried to fix the economy, says an ad running in seven battleground states, then tells viewers: "It's OK to make a change." [...]
The RNC ad is "geared to independent voters, especially women, who are disappointed in Obama and about the economy, but who still like him and are sort of pulling for him," said Charlie Black, an informal adviser to the Romney campaign who was not involved with the commercial.
It lacks a "mean tone," he said, yet focuses on Obama's economic record, which is at the core of the GOP attempt to defeat him.
... and
on the other hand you have the Romney campaign itself promising a nastier tone:
In speeches from Des Moines to Dallas, Romney has always been careful to hedge his tough digs at Obama with a civil nod toward the president's moral character: "He's a nice guy," the Republican has often said. "He just has no idea how the private economy works." But Tuesday's speech included no such hedge — and one campaign adviser said there's a reason for that.
"[Romney] has said Obama's a nice fellow, he's just in over his head," the adviser said.
"But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he's really disappointed. He believes it's time to vet the president. He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it."
And with that promise to be nastier, Mean Mitt emerged in fine form yesterday. The day started with Romney surrogate John Sununu
calling the president a pothead socialist foreigner who needs to "learn how to be an American" and ended with Romney
making up something that the president said in order to accuse him of being against Steve Jobs. This isn't entirely new, though: Last week, a new Romney ad
declared the president to be a liar.
Whatever you think about the relative merits of each approach, the Mean Mitt message is obviously at odds with the softer tone of the RNC's new ad—and it turns out the gap between the two messages illustrates why Mitt Romney's financial edge won't be as big an advantage as pundits initially thought.
The key thing here is that both Romney's campaign and the RNC's independent unit are funded by the same source, the Romney Victory Fund. When you hear that Romney raised $100 million in a month, that's not his campaign, it's the victory fund. Individuals are allowed to give up to $75,000 each to the fund, but only $5,000 of that can go directly to the Romney campaign itself. The rest of the money goes to the RNC and affiliated committees. Because Romney's fundraising is so top heavy, coming from donors contributing more than $5,000 each, that's where much of his money goes. (We won't have current figures on the precise allocations until Friday.)
So how does the money that goes to the RNC and its affiliated campaigns get spent? Well, it turns out that Romney is allowed to directly coordinate with the RNC on some of that spending, but the limit is $21 million. Anything above that level needs to be run through an independent expenditure committee which is not legally allowed to coordinate with Romneyland. The RNC announced the independent unit last week, and that's the entity responsible for the "softer touch" ad.
Assuming that they actually follow the law, the implication of this is that while Romney may be able to outraise President Obama from here on out, the money he gets will be less useful on a dollar for dollar basis. In theory, it's better to have a $10 million ad buy than a $7 million ad buy, but if your ad buy is split into two $5 million campaigns with conflicting messages, you're probably going to be worse off than if you'd just spent less on a coordinated campaign.
Moreover, candidate committees qualify for lower ad rates than party committees. So not only will Obama have a more coordinated message than Romney, every dollar he spends will buy more in advertising than Romney. In the end, Romney will certainly outspend Obama. But he probably won't get more value.