Obama counter to attacks costly

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign plowed through more than $44.5 million in May as he tried to drown out a fusillade of attacks by outside groups with a massive television ad campaign, a reflection of how independent players are driving the action of this year’s presidential race.

Obama’s team spent three times as much as it did the previous month – largely on $29 million for a television blitz in battleground states – as it tried to fend off conservative advocacy groups that have mounted an early and aggressive push to define his record. The campaigns and “super PACs” supporting them filed fundraising reports Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.

Nonprofit groups have not had to disclose their donors, however. One such organization, Americans for Prosperity, announced Wednesday it was spending an additional $5.5 million on a new ad lambasting Obama’s economic record – part of the $100 million the group has vowed to put into ads and voter outreach this year.

The air cover provided by such groups allowed Republican challenger Mitt Romney to hold his spending in May to $15.6 million, a modest uptick from the previous month.

The asymmetrical warfare has alarmed Obama campaign officials, who said Wednesday they expected he would be the first incumbent president outspent; they’re bracing for Romney and his allies to pour more than $1 billion into TV ads alone.

While Obama’s re-election team is banking on the strength of its field program, the campaign has been also forced to devote substantial resources early on to defending the president on the airwaves. That’s in part because Democratic-allied outside groups have not been able to muster the kinds of sums their Republican counterparts have to campaign on his behalf.

So in May, the Obama campaign launched a series of spots that included positive accounts of his record, Spanish-language ads and pointed attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

By contrast, Romney – who aired his first general election ad in May – put $4.5 million into paid media last month, one-sixth of the price tag of the president’s on-air spending.