I think Dave Weigel, or the Democrats he's talking to, is really missing the point of the controversy over the Chamber of Commerce's political activities here:
1) Voters hate watching these ads. Yes, negative ads work. But voters, of their own volition, have expressed confusion and anger about negative ads at events for Democrats and Republicans that I've been covering. And attacking the sources, as I heard Michael Bennet do yesterday, is a way to side with the voters.
2) As good as the Chamber's image is (witness how many times Chris Coons name-checked it yesterday), fear of the foreign is a powerful, powerful argument to traditional Democratic voters who think the party has abandoned them. I've talked to union voters here who are angry at the Democrats but plan to vote for their House and Senate candidates because they think the Republicans will outsource jobs. Foreign = bad. Just keep repeating it.
I'm not on the SCARY FOREIGN MONEY train, but like Antonin frickin' Scalia, I think democracy works best when people are publicly accountable for their political speech, that anonymity under these circumstances undermines civic responsibility, and that the First Amendment protects your freedom to speak and doesn't confer a freedom not to be criticized, particularly if you're an individual with the means to spend millions to swing the outcome of a political contest. Who is saying something, and who is paying them to say it, matters.
In fact, I think most conservatives would agree with that, if they weren't simply looking at this through a partisan lens. As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, a recent poll found that 80 percent of Republicans believe voters have a right to know who is paying for ads for a particular candidate.
