Secret Cash Baiting Officials Leaves No Trace In U.S. Attack Ads

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Ben Nelson doesn’t face re-election to the U.S. Senate for another year and won’t know his opponent until next May. Yet advertising attacks on the second-term Democrat began months ago.

“Can Nebraskans trust Ben Nelson?” began a radio spot in January sponsored by American Future Fund, a tax-exempt group that backed Republicans in the 2010 election. Two other independent organizations aired commercials in July criticizing him over federal spending. A third sponsored rallies in August accusing him of hiding from constituents.

The last election was barely over when airwaves began humming with messages blasting lawmakers for the next one. Many of the ads don’t count as political spending under federal rules because they’re appearing so long before November 2012, and they don’t urge an explicit vote. This helps independent associations such as American Future Fund keep their tax-exempt status as groups whose primary activity can’t be political campaigning.

The early barrage means incumbents in Congress and President Barack Obama are stuck in “permanent warfare,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research group, in an interview. The amounts of money surged since court rulings wiped out limits on corporate contributions and as government requirements for disclosing donors eroded.

“We have seen the virtual collapse of the regulatory system governing campaign finance in this country,” said Mann, who co-edited the 2000 book, “The Permanent Campaign and Its Future.” Today’s environment of unlimited, undisclosed and uncounted funding amounts to a new reality that “flows against everything we’ve been trying to do to not allow large concentrations of money to dominate our politics,” he said.

Campaigns ‘Don’t End’

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