WASHINGTON — A conservative billionaire has reportedly rejected a $10 million proposal put together by a group of former John McCain strategists to target President Barack Obama’s ties to his old pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It was reported Thursday that TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts was mulling a 54-page proposal titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”
Wright’s incendiary comments — including “God damn America” and “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” which he said in the aftermath of 9/11 — became a focus of the 2008 campaign, prompting the president to abandon the pastor and deliver a widely praised speech on race.
A spokesman for Ricketts on Thursday told Politico that the businessman had turned down the proposal, saying it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects.” He added that “it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.”
The plan called for a $10 million TV and newspaper advertisement campaign that would run around the time of the Democratic National Convention in early September. It aimed to link Obama to his former pastor and “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists — including high-profile GOP operative and former McCain aide Fred Davis — wrote.
Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina was quick to slam the report Thursday.
“This morning’s story revealed the appalling lengths to which Republican operatives and superPacs apparently are willing to go to tear down the President and elect Mitt Romney,” he wrote. “The blueprint for a hate-filled, divisive campaign of character assassination speaks for itself.”
Earlier, Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades released a statement saying, “We repudiate any efforts on our side” to run a campaign of “character assassination,” accusing the Obama team of doing exactly that.
Messina slammed Romney for not criticizing the report more forcefully, saying that the presumptive GOP nominee had “fallen short of the standard that John McCain set” four years ago by refusing to run ads linking Obama to Wright.
A 30-second commercial put together by McCain’s team linking Obama to Wright never aired.
The new proposal opened with a quote from Ricketts, saying, “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”