There's been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.
That's because, after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama's Democratic Party, Obama's strategists have changed their approach.
An Obama adviser privy to the campaign's internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies -- what another campaign aide termed "the cavalry" -- will come to Obama's aid.
The Obama campaign can't ask donors to form outside groups; it can only communicate, through the public and the media, with body language, tells and hints.
The upshot: Obama's campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. "I assume with their 527s stirring, some ones will as well," another senior campaign official said.
The money is there. The top two 527s -- the Service Employees International Union and America Votes -- are liberal in orientation. The SEIU fund has contributed to other 527 efforts, and America Votes has earmarked most of its money for what it calls the "largest grassroots voter mobilization" in history. The third largest 527 -- American Solutions Winning the Future -- belongs to Newt Gingrich, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The AFL-CIO has budgeted more than $53 million for messaging and turnout efforts and has run a limited flight of ads featuring veterans criticizing McCain. But they've shied away from larger-scale campaigns in part because they believe -- or believed -- that the Obama campaign did not want them mounted.
In April, after Progressive Media USA, a group formed headed by Republican-turned-Democratic media critic Matt David Brock (originally, by Tom Matzzie), announced plans for a $40 million ad campaign against McCain, the Obama campaign send word through associates that donors would be discouraged from raising money for it. After the primaries ended, Brock turned the group into a much-less expensive opposition research concern. Brock bowed to the reality that the Obama campaign wanted to centralize everything -- message, advertising and field operations -- in Chicago.
The campaign cannot coordinate with most outside groups, and they worry that a major 527 effort by Republicans could tilt a balanced electorate toward McCain and erase the resource advantage that Obama and Democrats have accumulated.
The New York Sun reported Monday that a Sacramento Republican linked to a McCain bundler is raising money for a new group called "Leadership for America's Future."
** The American Issues Project is spending $3m on a battleground state ad campaign that ties Obama to ex-Weatherman William Ayres.
** Freedom's Watch, which plays mostly in House elections, has spent nearly $500,000 worth of hard money on ads against Obama.
** Vets for Freedom plans a $10m campaign on ads touting the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
** The Republican Majority Campaign has tallied more than $1.3 million in independent expenditures against Obama. 
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