Democrats are responding to the Romney campaign and RNC goal of raising $800 million and spending a combined $1 billion with their allies to defeat President Obama. The figures come from a memo circulated by top Romney fundraisers and reported in the New York Times.
Via the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent:
“The fact that the Romney forces are going to be able to amass at least $1 billion should be a tremendous wake-up call for our side,” Paul Begala, an adviser to Priorities USA, the main pro-Obama outside group, tells me.
Begala gave Sargent three reasons he sees Democrats’ fundraising numbers lagging behind Romney’s:
“Dems are used to giving late — we’d have an ad blitz in the last eight weeks, but before then it would be all about building up the ground game,” Begala said. “Now we’ve got a different timetable. We want to define Romney now, as he’s trying to define himself.”
“The second reason is that our donors are not transational,” Begala continued. “For the Koch brothers, this is a straight return on an investment deal.” A Republican president, Begala continued, “would preserve tax breaks for their oil companies and kill off Obama’s investments in green energy.”
Begala’s third reason: “Many progressive donors think President Obama has it in the bag. But he doesn’t even have it in the shopping cart yet, much less in the bag.”
