Via Politico's James Hohmann, here's the opening to Rick Santorum's latest radio ad:
Ok. A liberal, a moderate and a conservative walk into a bar. And the bartender says...Hello Mitt. Funny, but true.
By the typically humorless standards of campaign politics, that's not half bad. It's also unoriginal. The line might be familiar to those poor souls who have been following the Republican nomination obsessively. At CPAC this past February, Foster Friess, the eccentric billionaire who has provided the bulk of the money for the pro-Santorum Red White and Blue super PAC, took the stage to introduce Santorum. During his freewheeling intro, Friess jested:
Life is just so much fun and so filled with humor. There's a little bar a couple doors down, and recently a conservative, a liberal, and a moderate walked into the bar. The bartender says, "Hi Mitt!'
As The New York Times reported yesterday, the candidates are "increasingly reliant" on their affiliated super PACs to help boost their meager campaign coffers. The lines between those super PACs and the candidates is persistently blurred; candidates like Santorum make no qualms about their cozy personal relationships with their funders. Obama's super PAC, for example, was created by two former White House staffers and will host events featuring current members of the administration. The only technical barrier is that the campaigns and super PACs are not supposed to coordinate messages, but as with the bar joke, the public channels already make it pretty clear what lines and ideas the candidate hopes gets propagated.
