President Obama has previously voiced dismay about the presence of super PACs. Obama embraces the super PAC

President Barack Obama — in an act of hypocrisy or necessity, depending on the beholder — has reversed course and is now blessing the efforts of a sputtering super PAC, Priorities USA Action, organized to fight GOP dark-money attacks.

On Monday morning, Obama reviled the “negative” tone of the super PACs, a dominant fundraising source in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. But by the evening, word leaked to POLITICO that Obama had offered his support for Priorities USA Action, which thus far has raised a fraction of what GOP-backed groups have raked in.


Obama’s top campaign staff and even some Cabinet members will appear at super PAC events. The president himself will not address super PAC donors, although there’s nothing to legally prohibit the president, first lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden from expressing their support for the group — as GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has done for the super PAC that backs him.

“We decided to do this because we can’t afford for the work you’re doing in your communities, and the grass-roots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads,” campaign manager Jim Messina told supporters in an email Monday night.

The timing of the announcement seemed rushed, several Democrats told POLITICO. It was made in a 10 p.m. call to Obama’s top bundlers, known as the National Finance Committee. Several party fundraisers raised the possibility that the campaign wanted to offset bad publicity generated by a Monday New York Times story, which reported that the campaign had returned $200,000 to the family of a wealthy Mexican fugitive seeking a pardon for drug and other criminal convictions.

Another awkward timing issue: Last week, Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer of New York, announced plans to hold hearings into whether Republican-backed super PACs had violated federal law banning coordination between super PACs and campaigns.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test to say some of these groups aren’t coordinated,” Schumer told reporters.

But, as POLITICO reported last month, the fundraising prowess of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future — and the effectiveness of its withering ads in degrading the popularity of rival Newt Gingrich in Iowa — alarmed officials at Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, prompting the campaign to take the baby step of allowing national finance committee members to solicit contributions for Priorities USA Action.

But that wasn’t enough, sources say, to pull major players such as George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing and others into the game. And many top Democratic donors were afraid of giving to Priorities USA until Obama made clear he wouldn’t stand on the sidelines and criticize their efforts.

Senior advisers to Obama had been discussing whether to inch closer to Priorities for weeks, a senior campaign official told reporters Tuesday, and decided to do so as it became clearer — especially after fundraising filing disclosures last week — that Republican super PACs are building massive war chests that will pummel Obama in the general election.

Republicans lost no time in blasting Obama’s move.

“Yet again, Barack Obama has proven he will literally do anything to win an election, including changing positions on the type of campaign spending he called nothing short of a ‘threat to our democracy,’” said Joe Pounder, the Republican National Committee’s research director. “In less than 24 hours, Obama has gone from decrying super PACs in the morning to opening up the door to their money during a conference call with his big money donors in the middle of the night.”

Advocates for stricter campaign finance rules, who have supported Obama’s efforts to increase transparency, also weren’t pleased by the decision.

“It is time to return to reality and put an end to these corrupting super PACs whose purpose is to circumvent and eviscerate the limits on contributions to candidates,” Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer said in a statement.

Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) took a similar position, saying in a statement that it’s “wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs. … It’s not just bad policy; it’s also dumb strategy.”

Messina portrayed the decision as necessary for Obama to compete effectively.

“In 2011, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney raised $30 million from fewer than 200 contributors. Ninety-six percent of what they’ve spent so far, more than $18 million, has been on attack ads. The main engine of Romney’s campaign has an average contribution of roughly $150,000,” Messina wrote to supporters. “The stakes are too important to play by two different sets of rules. If we fail to act, we concede this election to a small group of powerful people intent on removing the president at any cost.”

Messina stressed that the campaign was taking this step “only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law.”

The focus on disclosure, which dovetails with Obama’s criticisms of secret-donor-backed GOP groups, raises questions about Priorities USA Action’s close relationship with a non-profit affiliate called Priorities USA that does not disclose its donors. Priorities USA raised $2.3 million in undisclosed donations last year, and it transferred $215,000 of that to the super PAC to cover administrative expenses.

Priorities USA raised $2.3 million in undisclosed donations last year, and it transferred $215,000 of that to the super PAC to cover administrative expenses.

Bill Burton, a former Obama spokesman helping to run both Priorities groups, suggested the campaign’s blessing might require the groups to distance themselves from each other.

“We’ve been considering alternative ways of handling shared costs,” he said.

Obama had voiced dismay about the presence of super PACs and negative campaigning in an interview that aired Monday morning.

“Would I love to take some of the big money out of politics? I would,” the president told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “Unfortunately, right now partly because of Supreme Court rulings and a bunch of decisions out there, it is very hard to get your message out without having some resources.”

A pair of 2010 federal court rulings, including the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, paved the way for super PACs and nonprofit groups to accept unlimited sums of money to air campaign ads.

In April 2011, Burton and former White House aide Sean Sweeney formed the two Priorities USA groups, with hopes of raising $100 million to support Obama. But so far, its funding has been dwarfed by that of Republican groups. In all of 2011, the Priorities groups reported raising $6.7 million while a single donor, casino owner Sheldon Adelson, has poured $10 million into a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich.

Obama will have to reconcile his campaign’s move on Monday night with his previous opposition to the super PACs, especially his memorable 2010 State of the Union speech in which he denounced Citizens United and called out members of the Roberts Court to their faces for overturning the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections,” he said at the time. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.”

There is some precedent for Obama placing political realities over his commitment to reducing the influence of big money in politics. In 2008, when it became clear that his campaign had historic fundraising potential, he broke his pledge to participate in the Watergate-era public financing program if his Republican opponent agreed to do the same.

David Axelrod, a senior Obama campaign adviser, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the president’s position on super PACS remains unchanged.

“We’re going to support that effort, and we’re going to insist that everything that is raised is disclosed as required by law… But that doesn’t mean that we believe that this is the best way for the system to function,” Axelrod said. “The bottom line here is that the Citizens United decision was a bad decision from our perspective. It did open the floodgates. But now the rules are what the rules are.”

Kenneth P. Vogel and Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.