New Jeremiah Wright Ads Might Never Air
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Bill Pugliano/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — New Republican ads featuring President Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright and his inflammatory comments may not be made after all.
The New York Times reported Thursday that a new “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney was planning to replay the indignation over Wright’s controversial sermons that were a highlight of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The news of Wright being resurrected in 2012 threw the Obama and Romney campaigns into spin mode early Thursday.
Romney’s campaign manager quickly said in a statement that the team doesn’t support “efforts on our side” to run ads of “character assassination.”
But the leaked proposal, authored by the GOP ad man Fred Davis and brokerage firm guru Joe Ricketts, has made things complicated now that it’s public. A person familiar with the super PAC tells ABC News that the leaked document was simply a proposal that was never acted on, and that no plan had been made to make any ads.
Davis told ABC News a month ago that he’d lined up the main donors for the new super PAC to target Obama, and that he expected the war chest to be in the millions. “The money’s already here,” he said.
Obama’s campaign manager countered by saying that Romney had “fallen short of the standard” set by John McCain in 2008, when he rejected the idea of a negative campaign.
Both campaigns, however, have used negative ads. Obama’s latest ads portray Romney as a corporate “vampire” who bankrupted a steel company while profiting off of it. And Romney survived the primary season partly by flooding the airwaves with commercials that portrayed his opponents negatively.
Democrats also are highlighting an interview Romney gave to Sean Hannity in February in which he mentioned Wright unprompted, in response to a clip of Obama saying “we are no longer a Christian nation.”
“I’m not sure which is worse: him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation,” Romney said at the time.
The new Republican proposal to bring Wright back into the fray says, “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way.” The proposal reportedly involves $10 million.
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