What a week this is starting to be! Obama is tying up a controlled and well thought out campaign with the support of more and more people (including leading Republican spokespeople and influential Independents), while McCain and Palin, supported by the most extreme 527 groups, are trying anything to smear the Democratic candidate and are resorting to tricks to turn the numbers around.

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We're up against 3 formidable independent forces in this election: a complacent (or complicit) media pushing pro-McCain, anti-Obama stories, 527 groups that are waiting to attack, and voting machine problems.

We tell ourselves "never again" about 2000 and 2004 - these three forces were in large part to blame for the losses in those years.  What are we willing to do to ensure that "never again" do we repeat 2000 or 2004?  In other words, how can we, independent of the Obama campaign's machinery, overcome these forces?  How much of a vote margin do we need to give Obama to overcome these 3 forces?

Read on to see why I believe we must recruit 198,000 new volunteers who will garner 9.9 million new votes.

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Conflict of interest, anyone?

John McCain's campaign asked a prominent Republican consultant, Craig Shirley, to leave his official campaign role Thursday after a Politico inquiry about Shirley's dual role consulting for the campaign and for an independent "527" group opposing the Democratic presidential candidates. The campaign also released a new conflict of interest policy barring such arrangements.

Shirley, a conservative public relations veteran, doubled as a consultant to McCain and to the group Stop Her Now, a 527 group barred from coordinating its activities with presidential campaigns. He is not currently on the McCain campaign's payroll, but would also step down from his role on McCain's Virginia Leadership Team, a McCain spokesman, Brian Rogers, said.

"If you're working for a 527 involved in the presidential race, you won't have a named role in our campaign," said Rogers.

I'm not quite sure what that means -- people can't have named roles in the McCain campaign and still work on 527 organizations trying to impact the outcome of the presidential race. Does that mean that the McCain campaign is alright having people working on such 527s secretly advising the campaign in non-named roles? Is there another meaning to such a statement that I'm missing? Either way, campaign finance experts aren't terribly impressed.

Campaign finance experts expressed surprise that a McCain consultant would moonlight for a 527, a dual role that could trigger inquiries from the Federal Elections Commission.

[...]

"When you involve the same people there's at least the risk that coordination will be found," said Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law issues. "The question is why a campaign would want to run that risk -- especially a campaign like McCain's or Obama's that tries to put itself out there as supporting campaign finance reform and opposing 527s."

This type of attitude towards campaign finance from McCain -- not exactly following the spirit of law, playing games despite having previously spent so much time demagoguing on the issue in the past -- should come as little surprise to MyDD readers as it's something we've written about over and over and over again. And even if it seems that the establishment media haven't fully embraced and accepted this reality, believe me when I say that McCain's shenanigans are not being overlooked by a lot of voters who by November aren't necessarily going to see McCain as so righteous or so honest.

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Last week, this question was asked in reference to 527s organizing against Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton, although the diarist neglected to mention her) in the General Election:

So - do we figure this out now or do we ignore that two-ton elephant in the room and hope like hell all those 527s ignore it too come the general?

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The New York Times' Michael Luo has the story.

The conservative group Freedom's Watch, headlined by two former senior White House officials, had been expected to be a deep-pocketed juggernaut in this year's presidential election, heralded by supporters on the right as an aggressive counterweight to MoveOn.org, George Soros and the like.

But after a splashy debut last summer, in which it spent $15 million in a nationwide advertising blitz supporting President Bush's troop escalation in Iraq, the group has been mostly quiet, beset by internal problems that have paralyzed it and raised questions about what kind of role, if any, it will actually play this fall.

The group was conspicuously absent this week as Gen. David H. Petraeus, the United States commander in Iraq, returned to Congress to testify. Moreover, the troubles at Freedom's Watch come as some Democratic-aligned groups are seeking to take the offensive, with one group, Progressive Media USA, planning to raise $40 million to spend on advertisements and other efforts to undermine Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.

[...]

Backers of Freedom's Watch once talked about spending some $200 million, a figure that officials now say was exaggerated. Lending to the aura of ambition, the organization moved into a state-of-the-art 10,000-square-foot office in Washington and hired a staff of about 20, with talk of bringing in scores more for a vigorous campaign to promote conservative issues.

[...]

Although the organization was founded by a coterie of prominent conservative donors last year, the roughly $30 million the group has spent so far has come almost entirely from the casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Sands Corporation, who was recently listed as the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine.

It's not a terrible surprise that yet another right wing 527 organization that was supposed to be the savior for conservatives and Republicans has failed. While organizing a group as a 527 rather than a normal political committee allows contributors to donate unlimited and unregulated sums of money (instead of $5,000 checks that must be disclosed), Republican donors aren't stupid -- their chances this year aren't great, and there isn't necessarily much upside in throwing good money after bad (particularly when longer-term investments might be a better bet given the John McCain's relatively low likelihood of victory and the near impossibility that the GOP will retake either chamber of Congress).

But what Luo misses is this: The reason why Freedom Watch and all of the other right wing 527s billed as the new Republican version of MoveOn (there have been at least four others in recent memory) is that there is nothing grassroots about these organizations whatsoever. MoveOn started as a grassroots organization fighting against the right wing's attempted coup that was the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even today, although the group does get significant funding from large dollar donors, much of its energy comes from the several million members who get involved and stay involved, whether in elections or in key issues (net neutrality, FISA, Iraq, etc.)

In the end, that's what politics should be about. The money can make a big difference, no doubt. But the money cannot trump the people when the people are active, involved and paying attention. So no matter how many $30 million donors they have on the right, if the left can continue to organize and activate the American people, no one or two donors dumping tens of millions of dollars will be able to override the will of the public.

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