Conservatives Planning New Attack Group for ElectionIt’s only April, but we’ve already begun to see a flowering of outside groups. The hyper-conservative Common Sense Issues unleashed robo-voiced push polls on more than 11 million households on Mike Huckabee’s behalf. A liberal group called Campaign To Defend America has already unloaded a $1 million ad buy tying John McCain to George Bush. And the casino mogul backed conservative group Freedom’s Watch is still revving its engines.
But there is much, much, much more to come. And The Boston Globe reports that Republican insiders appear to be favoring a separate vehicle to go after Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). As one Republican strategist tells the Globe, “They’re beginning to put the book together on Obama.”
What this new group will be called isn’t clear. But it will probably be quarterbacked and funded by some of the likely suspects. Some of the bigger Swift Boat Vets for Truth funders are sure to chip in, the Globe reports. And “the chairman and founding partner of DCI Group, Tom Synhorst, is helping lead the new third-party effort this year, according to GOP strategists familiar with the plans.”
As Josh pointed out last week, Doug Davenport, a partner at DCI Group, has joined Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign as a regional campaign manager.
As the Globe reports, Republicans know they have lots of catching up to do:
Part of what’s driving Republicans’ interest in independent groups this year is the tremendous fund-raising advantage the Democratic presidential candidates have. Obama and Clinton raised nearly as much in March as McCain had overall through February.
Now, what might this group end up doing? Well, the new group is likely to closely resemble Progress for America, a DCI-run effort that ran a spate of negative ads against John Kerry, along with one memorable “positive” ad, “Ashley’s Story,” which showed George Bush comforting a teenager whose mother had been killed on 9/11 (“He’s the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe.”). The group spent over $14 million airing the ad in the last weeks of the election.