By Heidi Przybyla, Bloomberg, on March 26, 2012

One of the political ads airing in the run-up to the April 3 Wisconsin primary accuses Rick Santorum of voting with former Senator Hillary Clinton in favor of granting voting rights to violent convicted felons.

Santorum’s campaign says the commercial is untrue, yet that hasn’t stopped Restore Our Future, a so-called super-political action committee supporting Mitt Romney, from running it and another attack ad more than 1,647 times on Wisconsin television stations, according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, a firm that tracks advertising.

The firepower, to which Santorum has yet to respond, fits a pattern that has become a defining feature of the 2012 Republican presidential primary race. Since the contests began, Restore Our Future has spent $35 million on commercials attacking Santorum, a former Pennsylvania U.S. senator, and Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker, the two candidates who have come closest to knocking Romney out of front-runner status, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political money. The super-PAC has spent just $1.1 million promoting Romney, the data shows.

“They need to demonize and destroy, they need to slash and burn their opponents,” said David Johnson, a Republican strategist from Atlanta who worked on former Senator Bob Dole’s Republican presidential bid in 1988 and is unaffiliated with any candidate this cycle. “That’s the only way Romney can win” because he has “no base of support,” he said.
Three Majority-Vote Wins

In the 34 primary competitions thus far, Romney has exceeded 50 percent of the vote only three times, in his home state of Massachusetts; in Virginia, where Santorum and Gingrich weren’t on the ballot; and in Idaho.

Both the Romney campaign and Restore Our Future declined to comment through their spokeswomen, Andrea Saul and Brittany Gross.

John Brabender, a Santorum senior adviser, called the ads “troubling,” particularly since they are aimed at Republicans. “Why in the world didn’t he spend his $35 million running ads against Obama instead of brutally attacking Republicans?” Brabender said.

Romney’s campaign has run fewer positive ads to promote his candidacy than Restore had spent on negative commercials aimed at his top rivals. The campaign has aired 12,817 spots, almost all of them positive, since January of 2011, according to CMAG. The commercial run most often is called “Moral Responsibility,” which touts Romney’s commitment to be a strong financial steward for the nation.
Super-PAC Influence

In Wisconsin, and elsewhere, the campaign ads illustrate the role that super-PACs are playing in presidential elections after the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that independent third parties have a constitutional right to raise and spend as much as they want on political ads.

In the case of Santorum and Gingrich, wealthy donors to their friendly super-PACS, called respectively the Red, White and Blue Fund and Winning Our Future, have helped keep them in the race when their own fundraising faltered. Restore Our Future has helped Romney by ensuring neither of those candidacies gain momentum.

The only court stipulation is that the groups can’t coordinate their activities with a campaign. Candidates found a way around that hurdle by dispatching aides to operate them. Restore is run by former Romney advisers, including Charles R. Spies, who was Romney’s general counsel in the 2008 Republican primary. Its board of directors includes Carl Forti, who was political director four years ago.
Parallel Campaigns

“The way they function is essentially a parallel presidential campaign,” said Anthony Corrado, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “The notion that these PACs are independent is nothing more than a legal technicality.”

The pro-Romney group’s leading contributor last month was Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, according to Federal Election Commission records. Perry helped fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads that attacked Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam War service in the 2004 race. Restore’s ads are being made by Larry McCarthy, who in 1988 produced the “Willie Horton” ad that linked a murderer to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, a former Massachusetts governor, a smear even Republicans said was unfair.
Sixteen Negative Ads

Since Jan. 1 of last year, Restore has aired the same 16 negative ads 41,612 times in the major media markets of primary states from Michigan to Florida and Colorado, according to data provided by CMAG.

The committees backing Gingrich and Santorum ran 8,172 and 8,121 negative spots, respectively, according to data from CMAG.

Brabender said while the negative ads sponsored by Restore Our Future have been effective, they’ve also “offended” voters. “He’s given voters little reason why they should vote for him and spent the gross national product of a small country brutally attacking Republicans,” he said.
First Target Gingrich

Restore concentrated its firepower first on Gingrich in Florida after his Jan. 21 victory in South Carolina and then on Santorum in Ohio after his wins in Colorado and Minnesota on Feb. 7.

Its charge that Santorum supported giving convicted felons voting rights was repeated 2,671 times in two separate ads before the Ohio March 6 primary.

Santorum confronted Romney about the ad in a debate in South Carolina on Jan. 16, saying it gave the impression that he allowed felons currently imprisoned to vote.

Santorum said he supported voting rights for people only who had served their sentences. He also pointed out that Massachusetts gives voting rights to felons who’ve served their time and that Romney never tried to change it. Romney said he was dealing with a Democratic legislature and opposed voting rights for felons who are released.

A CMAG analysis as of March 7 found one of the anti- Santorum ads, titled “Values,” has aired a total of 4,650 times, making it the fourth-most-run spot of the campaign season, including those in support of President Barack Obama.
Voting Record Attack

That commercial flays Santorum for voting to raise the nation’s borrowing limit five times. Santorum did vote to raise the debt ceiling -- though he was joined by most of his Republican colleagues in granting the authority to a Republican president.

In March of 2006, he was one of 52 Republicans to do so, including Senators Jon Kyl and Mitch McConnell, now the chamber’s top two Republicans, and former Senator Bill Frist, then majority leader. Only four Republicans opposed it.

In all, Restore ran 3,313 ads in the 10 days before Ohio’s March 6 vote, compared to 722 by the pro-Santorum PAC. Santorum lost narrowly to Romney, by four-fifths of a percentage point.

“He did the same thing in Michigan and Mississippi and every place,” said Brabender. “In Gingrich’s case, he did basically knock him out of the race.”

After his South Carolina win, Gingrich went into Florida’s Jan. 31 race in a dead heat with Romney, according to a Quinnipiac University (78104MF) poll conducted Jan. 19 to 23. In the final days before the primary, Restore ran five different ads in the state’s major media markets, every one of them attacking Gingrich and rated as negative by Kantar.
‘Storm Rained Dollars’

“Overnight a storm rained dollars on the television,” said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political scientist. “They had a big impact,” said MacManus, who also serves as a Tampa television station analyst.

“Newt has more baggage than the airlines,” one of the ads said, citing consulting fees he earned from government-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac. It also claims Gingrich joined with top House Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, to grant $60 million to a United Nations program supporting China’s “brutal one-child policy.”

China’s one-child policy refers to the country’s efforts to limit population growth to one child per couple and human rights advocates say it has led to forced sterilizations and abortions.

PolitiFact Florida, a project by the Tampa Bay Times, rated the claim “pants on fire,” or completely inaccurate. While Gingrich did co-sponsor a resolution with Pelosi to propose funds for the UN Population Fund, the bill prohibited using any of it for involuntary sterilization or abortion.

Romney won 46 percent to Gingrich’s 32 percent, walking away with all 50 of Florida’s delegates. Gingrich picked up no more than 13 percent of the vote in the next four contests.

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