Thursday’s New York Times story on the Ending Spending superPAC and a proposal the organization received from GOP media consultant Fred Davis continues to reverberate thru the political world.
The Times reported that Davis pitched Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, on a plan to link President Obama with his former pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, who became a source of controversy in the 2008 campaign for several of his sermons while pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.
Mitt Romney has already repudiated the strategy and the Obama campaign has also denounced it.
The Times followed up with a story today, writing: “By early [Thursday] afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration.”
This morning, Ending Spending president Brian Baker joined us to discuss the issue and to say Ending Spending “never asked for a proposal on Rev. Wright.”
Baker said the proposal “troubled” and surprised him. “It surprised me, in part, because we run an organization based on fiscal responsibility, and the proposal itself notes we asked for a document based on ending spending, based on fiscal responsibility, jobs and the economy. This was far afield from that. So far afield that they even proposed setting up a new and separate organization called Character Matters. That was the first we’d ever heard of it. We had no input into that. We didn’t author this plan or proposal. We didn’t commission anything based on Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright.” Baker also noted Mr. Ricketts would “never do anything to divide this country socially or culturally.’ “His policy is based on restoring economic responsibility to our country,” Baker said.
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