Interest Groups Step Up Efforts: MoveOn, SEIU, Minutemen, BornAliveTruth, '04 Swiftboaters

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Interest Groups Step Up Efforts in a Tight Race
By JIM RUTENBERG and MICHAEL LUO
Published: September 15, 2008


(MoveOn)
A new advertisement from the group MoveOn that ties Senator John McCain to lobbyists.

WASHINGTON — After largely staying on the sidelines, the types of independent groups that so affected the 2004 presidential campaign are flooding back as players in the final sprint to the election this fall, financing provocative messages on television, in mailboxes and through the Internet.

MoveOn, a progressive group started a decade ago, says it will double its advertising budget to $7 million and start a campaign this week that ties the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, to lobbyists. The Service Employees International Union has begun a $2.1 million advertising campaign that criticizes Mr. McCain’s economic record, while a smattering of smaller liberal groups are testing out more limited television campaigns, including one by two groups — Brave New PAC and Democracy for America — that asserts his experience as a prisoner of war “is not a good prerequisite” to be president.

The Minutemen, a group calling for stricter border security, has filed paperwork with election officials reporting that it is running mailers against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for president. An anti-abortion group, BornAliveTruth.org, announced Monday it would begin running an advertisement against Mr. Obama in New Mexico and Ohio that features a woman who survived a botched abortion. And the American Issues Project, a conservative group whose main backer is a major fund-raiser for Mr. McCain, said it was considering whether to expand its efforts beyond its existing advertisement that links Mr. Obama to the 1960s radical William Ayers Jr.

Hewing to their reformist themes, the McCain and Obama campaigns initially tried to discourage such activities on their behalf. But as the race has intensified in its closing weeks, the campaigns have increasingly turned a blind eye to the activities of these groups, which sometimes operate outside campaign finance rules and with little accountability....

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One of the largest groups, American Issues Project, received its initial $2.8 million from the financier Harold Simmons, who, aside from raising tens of thousands of dollars for Mr. McCain, also financed the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group’s president, Ed Martin, said that donations continued to come in and that his group was weighing its options as it contemplated its final moves....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/us/politics/16group.html?ref=todayspaper