Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
from Tales from the Trail:
This time, some Democrats are embracing “Obamacare”
Fierce opposition to President Barack Obama's healthcare bill helped propel Republicans to big victories in the 2010 mid-term elections, when they won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate.
But this year, at least some Democrats are embracing the healthcare plan - touting their support for its popular provisions and attacking Republicans for opposing measures that polls show big majorities of Americans supporting.
North Dakota's former Democratic attorney general, Heidi Heitkamp, who is running for the Senate, responded to a wave of attack advertisements against her over the healthcare law by creating an emotional advertisement of her own relating her own recovery from breast cancer to her support for the law.
"Twelve years ago I beat breast cancer. When you live through that, political attack ads seem silly," she said in the advertisement, in which she speaks directly to the camera, wearing a soft blue jacket over a simple white top.
"I would never vote to take away a senior's healthcare or limit anyone's care. There's good and bad in the healthcare law and it needs to be fixed," she continues in the short spot, in which she criticizes her Republican opponent for failing to support the law.
"Rick Berg voted to go back, to letting insurance companies deny coverage to kids or for pre-existing conditions. I approved this message because I don't ever want to go back to those days," Heitkamp said.
from Tales from the Trail:
Outside campaign groups can coordinate – with each other
Super PACs and other outside campaign organizations are barred from coordinating with the candidates they support or political parties, but there is nothing keeping a Super PAC from coordinating with another Super PAC, or several Super PACs. And indeed, some of them do.
Jonathan Collegio, director of public relations for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove's conservative Super PAC and non-profit, said outside groups on the right work together all the time.
"There's a lot of coordination among outside groups on the right, all of which is allowed," he said at the Reuters Washington Summit on Monday. "Starting in 2010, Crossroads started bringing together a lot of the organizations that were going to be spending a lot of money in the issue and election debate. The goal there was to maximize the efficiency of what everyone was doing."
Although he would not list the groups, he said several have met to cooperate by sharing polling information and research, and also to minimize the risks that that the television advertisements they buy will compete with one another. "Crossroads encouraged a number of the groups to share polling information, research and also to share the scheduling of their media buy information," he said.
Media buying is an important aspect of an election season in which more than $1 billion is expected to be spent on television advertising. Collegio said he expected there might be so many ads in some areas that television stations will run out of airtime to sell.
"In some states they will," he said.
