Three days later, The Wall Street Journal reported that the conservative casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson had just pledged money to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. The amount Adelson was donating was $10 million — 10 times that of the Mostyns’ hard-won contribution, and the sum total of Priorities USA’s entire ad buy. A couple of days later, The Huffington Post reported that Adelson might also be cutting $10 million checks to American Crossroads and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. All told, the casino magnate was telling friends, his contributions to right-leaning candidates and causes might well reach $100 million — a figure by a single Republican donor that matches the amount Priorities has set as its financial goal for the entire 2012 cycle.

After Burton read the story about Adelson’s contribution to the Romney super PAC, he could think of only one thing to do. “I sent that article out to every single Democratic donor that I know,” he would later recall. The subject heading of Burton’s e-mail — minus a profane verb — was: “So apparently they’re not messing around.”

But in late May and early June, it wasn’t Sheldon Adelson who was drowning out the Priorities ads. Rather, the Obama campaign was inadvertently doing so. Apparently the campaign did not know or did not care about Priorities USA Action’s planned mini-blitz, for it released its own two-minute attack video focusing on Bain’s closure of GST Steel, which concluded with, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

Reaction to the ad was swift and overwhelmingly negative. A procession of Democrats — starting with the Newark mayor and Obama surrogate Cory Booker, followed by former Congressman Harold Ford Jr., the former U.S. Treasury adviser Steven Rattner and former Governor Ed Rendell — publicly criticized the president for speaking so harshly of private-equity firms.

Burton and Sweeney waited out the chatter. They knew that Booker and the rest had deep associations with the financial sector. They also believed in their polling data — which would be validated in early June by focus groups of suburban mothers conducted in Richmond, Va., and Las Vegas, and also by an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showing that voters were twice as likely to have a negative opinion of Bain’s practices. Besides, beneath all the bluster coming from Obama’s fellow Democrats lurked a basic political verity: the leader of the free world is widely seen as having better things to do with his time than trash Mitt Romney’s past business life. It was beneath him. But it was hardly beneath Obama’s friends residing in the shadows of super PAC world. Quite the opposite: this was exactly what Priorities was set up to do.

Burton and Sweeney’s creation now appears to be on relatively solid footing. As of late June, the super PAC has amassed a total of $40 million, with almost $20 million in the bank and about a dozen million-dollar donors onboard. Among the most recent is Qualcomm’s co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs and his wife, Joan, newcomers to the world of political mega-giving, whom Burton and other Priorities surrogates spent a year courting in person, on the phone and by e-mail before the couple relented and gave $2 million. Priorities’ $100 million goal is within reach but by no means assured. “In order to do that,” Ickes says, “we’re going to have go get some $5 million and $10 million donors.” Another Priorities representative says wistfully: “Maybe there’s someone we never heard of. Is there a Charles Koch out there on our side?”

On June 21, Burton returned to Buffalo to deliver the commencement address at City Honors School, from which he graduated in 1995. “While men and women are remembered for how they succeed,” the former White House spokesman told his young audience, “they are defined by how they fail. And by how they come back.” Late that evening, while Burton was dining out with old high-school buddies and faculty members, a Washington Post article about Romney and Bain Capital appeared on the paper’s Web site. The story analyzed filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that showed Bain to have “owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories.”

From the restaurant, Burton e-mailed Sweeney and their team. By 10:45 p.m., they had drafted a memo that would be sent to the e-mail addresses of several hundred political reporters by 7 the next morning: “Despite his phony rhetoric on standing up for American workers, today’s Washington Post details how Mitt Romney directly profited from the outsourcing of American jobs overseas.” Soon they would be adding more Bain-related questions to their polls, seeking to add depth to their narrative, the one best shot their modestly financed super PAC had at persuading swing voters and thereby making a difference in a closely contested presidential election. Burton and Sweeney were doing what they do best, telling the story — though when it came down to it, getting enough people to listen would still be the hardest part.