The conservative group Right Change released three new anti-Obama ads yesterday attacking Senator Obama as a tax and spend liberal. The group plans to spend $1.5 million on cable networks including Fox and CNN.
Right Change self-describes as:
RightChange.com is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to helping Americans see through the haze of politicians’ “spin” to understand the facts about crucial policy choices. Our goal is to make sure that the coming wave of political change in America is the “right” kind of change, in terms of conforming to the facts and common sense.
The group is not nonpartisan. It is tied to Republican interests. Fred Eshelman, a pharmaceutical executive, is the primary backer of Rightchange.com. He served as Senior Vice President for former Glaxo, was recently appointed to the management board of Anton Pharma, and founded his own consulting firm, Pharmaceutical Product Development. He is a max-out donor to McCain, and has contributed more than $200,000 to Republicans since 2002. More from Accountable America.
Just as a reminder, the Obama campaign is spending $3.5 million a day on television ads. So a $1.5 million ad buy is still lost in the Obama advertising tsunami. I have to concede that the Obama campaign will rank as one of the best run and managed campaigns in modern history. It will rank on a par with the other stellar campaign in terms of fundraising from US history, the 1896 Presidential campaign of William McKinley. McKinley’s campaign manager, the wealthy industrialist Mark Hanna, is credited with running the first modern campaign. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hanna raised in excess of $3 million and perhaps as much as $7 million for the McKinley campaign. It outspend the William Jennings Bryan campaign by at least 5:1 and perhaps as much 12:1. As a percentage of GDP, this is equivalent to $3 billion to $7 billion today. Obama won’t come close to that figure but he is outspending the McCain campaign and the RNC by about 3:1.
More on the 1896 McKinley campaign beneath the fold.
From the Buying of the President:
Mark Hanna, the Ohio businessman who chairs the Republican National Committee and runs McKinley’s campaign, systematically hits up businesses for contributions. Hanna instructs officers of banks to cough up a quarter of a percent of their total capital and assesses other companies according to their “stake in the general prosperity of the country.” In the case of Standard Oil, for example, that stake amounts to $250,000. In this fashion, Hanna raises, by various historians’ estimates, somewhere between $3.4 million and $7 million for McKinley. (In today’s dollars, that translates to between $79 million and $164 million.)
With the ability to outspend Bryan by as much as a 12-1, Hanna stages the most elaborate political advertising effort ever seen — peddling his candidate, in the words of future President Theodore Roosevelt, “as if he were a patent medicine.” Hanna buys boxcars full of campaign posters and lapel buttons and prints 275 different pieces of campaign literature in nine languages. Because McKinley is reluctant to travel because of his wife’s illness, crowds are brought in — with the help of free tickets provided by railroad companies — to hear speeches from the front porch of his home. To counter Bryan’s eloquence and grass-roots appeal, some of Hanna’s 1,400 paid campaign workers shadow the Democrat’s whistle-stop tour, saturating the places where Bryan appears with McKinley posters and literature.
Hanna’s work pays off. In November, McKinley narrowly bests Bryan in the popular vote, 51 to 47 percent, but crushes him 271-176 in the Electoral College. Democratic activist Harold L. Ickes will later lament: “I have never doubted that if the Democrats had been able to raise enough money, even for legitimate purposes, Bryan would have been elected.”
Money can buy (really lease) you the White House. Obama has it, McCain doesn’t.
