With the Wisconsin and Hawaii losses behind Hillary Clinton, her allies have set up a political committee to run ads in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania specifically to help her standing.
First reported this morning by a blogger at the Atlantic magazine's website, the committee was later identified as the "American Leadership Project" by another blogger at ABC News.
From the Atlantic blog:
Two Democrats said that the 527 [political action committee] plans to run television ads and send pro-Clinton literature in all three states. One of the Democrats said that the ads will also include contrast messages against [Barack] Obama. Plans for the 527 were conceived in late January, when Clinton's campaign was nearly broke. Since Feb. 5, she has raised nearly $20M, but still faces a resource disadvantage. Obama's aides said they're approaching their goal of raising money from 500,000 new donors since Jan. 1 and project a total haul of more than $35M for February.
No doubt this move will produce reaction from Obama supporters along the lines of "more of the same Washington Beltway insider fundraising." But Clinton's comeback might well be to point out the $227 thousand in contributions Obama drew from high-level nuclear-power executives at Exelon, the largest nuclear-power provider in the nation. Obama is not the stranger to corporate money he likes to portray himself as. Nor, according to the Atlantic blog, is his campaign a stranger to union tactics as usual:
Perhaps as early as today, a consortium of Service Employees union locals will disclose its own plans for mobilization in Ohio and Pennsylvania on behalf of Barack Obama, an irony that will not be lost on those covering the race closely: a similar SEIU compact in Iowa ran ads praising John Edwards and drew strong protests from Obama's campaign.
The aphorism: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Obama version: "Hope + Change = Same old, Same old."
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