Subject: Fwd: Fw: Daily Beast
From: Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>
To: David Plouffe <[email-masked]>, John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Robby Mook <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 16:47:43 -0500

I wanted to flag this to discuss with you all

----- Original Message -----
From: Huma Abedin
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 08:54 AM Eastern Standard Time
To: cdm
Subject: Daily Beast

What Joel relayed last week that axelrod has been saying privately. Guess
its now public too.

Is Hillary Ditching Senate Dems?
by Eleanor Clift
Feb 11, 2014 5:45 am EST
A super PAC is giving up on midterm elections to focus its fundraising
efforts on Clinton in 2016, which is causing confusion and outrage in
Washington.

The news broke in a tweet late Friday afternoon that Priorities USA would
be focusing on Hillary Clinton in 2016, and wouldn't be raising money for
Democrats in the upcoming 2014 midterms. The reaction was fast and furious
with former presidential advisor David Axelrod tweeting, "With the Senate
seriously at risk, and the Koch Brothers spending prodigiously, shouldn't
Dem funders be focused on '14 and not '16 races?"

The uproar shed light on the undercurrent of suspicion and distrust between
the Obama and Clinton camps. Priorities USA was founded in 2011 as an Obama
super PAC and retooled late last year to back Clinton. Clinton looks like a
shoo-in for '16 while Democrats need all the help they can get to survive
in red states carried by Mitt Romney. If Republicans win the six seats they
need to control the senate, that would sour President Obama's final two
years in office.

Anything that looks like the Clinton forces cannibalizing donor money to
stockpile for '16 instead of backing Democratic candidates in '14 does not
sit well with the Obama side of the divide. But Bill Burton tells the Daily
Beast it's more complicated than that. A former White House deputy press
secretary and co-founder of Priorities USA, Burton remains informally
connected with the organization now that it has switched over to
Hillaryland. The Buzzfeed tweet that sparked the controversy "was read as
not doing anything to help Democrats in 2014," says Burton. But that's a
misnomer. "They're still partnering with other organizations and helping
Democrats out across the board," he says, citing Ed Markey's (Senate) race
in Massachusetts, Alex Sink's (Congress) in Florida, along with Planned
Parenthood and Emily's List.

Priorities USA relies on a relatively small number of high-dollar donors,
and they're asking these contributors to defer giving them really big
checks until after the midterms so the money can go to that effort first.
Jim Kessler with Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, describes it as
"getting out of the way...more service than hindrance."

That jibes with what Burton says. "People who have been involved in
democratic politics know that donor confusion is your biggest enemy," he
says. The Democrats' 2012 fundraising was successful because everyone
stayed in their lanes, he explains, citing the House and Senate super PACs
focusing on Congress, American Bridge providing research and tracking, and
Priorities USA, which raised 65 million for Obama's reelection.

The array of super PACs doesn't quiet Democrats' anxiety about being
outspent by the Koch brothers, whose primary organization, Americans for
Prosperity, spent $25 million in the last six months on ads assailing red
state Democrats for their votes on Obamacare, the earliest start in memory
for such a targeted effort. When I asked Axelrod to elaborate on his
original tweet, this is what he wrote in an e-mail: "My Tweet wasn't aimed
at any one group or people in particular. It was rooted in my sense that
the Senate is very much in play, and D groups and funders should be focused
on that, because the Koch Brothers and Republican establishment surely are."

Justin Barasky, press secretary at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee, points out that the DSCC and other campaign committees are
consistently out raising their Republican counterparts, but that doesn't
take into account the array of outside groups, like the Koch Brother-funded
campaign vehicles. What's happening now on the Democratic side is the
brutal and necessary process of triage. "Not even the most diehard
optimists believe the House is within reach for the Democrats," says Bill
Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Clinton
domestic policy advisor. House Democrats that survived the 2010 midterms,
which restored the GOP to power, are a hardy bunch, "and you can make a
pretty rational argument about not pouring a lot of money into House
races," he says.
On the other hand, the senate is very much in play and control will likely
turn on hard fought close contests in half a dozen states. "So the stakes
are higher and the difference an investment at the margins could make is
significant," says Galston, who fully expects Democratic donors to do their
part once the threat becomes clearer and key races are fully engaged.
Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of Priorities USA's major
backers, has already raised a million dollars for Alison Lundergan Grimes,
who is challenging Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

The emotions of Democrats are on a tripwire, ready to react at the
slightest provocation. They've seen the price Obama paid for his lackluster
effort during the lead up to the 2010 midterms. Many remember 1994 when the
Republicans won both House and senate from the Democrats, casting President
Clinton into a months-long funk until he figured out how to work with newly
installed House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Galston worked at the White House during that difficult time with Clinton,
and now worries that something deeper and more troubling is going on, "a
sense of resignation about the next three years." He hears Democrats say
that even if they manage to hold onto the senate, what difference will it
make? The sense of powerlessness has hardened to the point where people
looking ahead to 2016 seem consigned to writing off the next three years,
an unacceptable outcome for the world's most influential democracy. To the
extent that Hillary Clinton, or any present or future candidates, can
affect that mindset will be played out on the campaign trail next year.
Clinton is not expected to announce in 2014, but it's becoming close to
obligatory that she campaign wholeheartedly on behalf of a senate that, if
she wins in '16, could make her or break her.