i d like to thank eating right, whole grain, multigrain cheerios! mom, are those my jeans? [ female announcer ] people who choose more whole grain tend to weigh less than those who don t. multigrain cheerios [ male announcer ] it s red lobster s 30 shrimp! for $11.99 pair any two shrimp selections on one plate! like mango jalapeño shrimp and parmesan crunch shrimp. just $11.99. offer ends soon! i m ryon stewart, and i sea food differently. today a deep dive into the brain trust behind the obama and romney presidential campaigns. what drove their decisions and what kept them up at night. on tuesday i got to sit down with eight of the campaign s top men and women at the university of chicago s institute of politics. one of the hottest topics, the influence of big money and super
very frustrating. define mitt romney before the conventions and that, you know, it was better to it was la y larry s proposition to take money out of september and october and put it into may, june and july, and so the other big thing that happened in june is we started running ads about mitt romney. stevens also told me he hopes big money plays less of a role in future elections. these billion dollar campaigns, which will be $2 billion campaigns, are an abomination and we saw it now when you had people campaigning heavy fund-raising schedules into september instead of meeting with voters is not how the system should work. the likelihood is that won t happen and hopes that primary seasons will get shorter aren t expected to bear fruit either. one place though where you may see some changes in 2016, the party s national conventions. both teams laid out the pros and cons of when these big events are held.
down close to zero. stuart stevens said late forget primary season had been shorter he believed it could have changed the race. for the obama campaign was the biggest fear was that the republican primary would be too short. our biggest o.s. moment in the primary is we were worried they would end it after new hampshire and we wanted a long primary so once we figured out they were going to go long and we figured out what to do and when to do it. that oh. s. was our oh, good moment. instead of having unofficially wrapping up the nomination the romney team had a tough time of the bridge between the primary and convention because of the limits on the ads, limits the president didn t have. we were raising money but not all money that we could immediately send out the door. our donors would call and say why aren t you up on tv, let me explain what money we can use,
of money undisclosed i think is a very unhealth thing. it s a tragedy of, you know, candidate barack obama walking out of the federal funding system, and i hope in some way that we can change the system and try to get the genie back in the bottle. citizens united needs to be overturned, legislatively or by the states. we were able to have a grass roots internet fund-raising that no one had ever seen before and we could combat it like that and that s the grass roots way to do it, but long-term barack obama is a once in a generation politician and, you know, every person running in 2016 for president, my advice for them is go get a super pac. you would tell them to get a super pac. yeah, figure that out. secondly, both sides believe the length of the republican primary was perhaps the most important tactical asset to obama and the biggest negative drag to romney. primary calendar. you want to see it lengthened, shortened. it should be shorter. nothing to be gained by being
pacs. the president, of course, initially opposed to super pac funding but his team realized early on he would have to change his position. one day i did a round of calls to people i trusted and wrote on my white board how much i thought they were going to spend, and i called david in, and the number was $660 million from the super pacs and david look at that and said we need to have a meeting, and we and we flipped soon after. for the romney campaign, super pac support was great once it focused on him, but while he was still fighting his way through the primary season it gave his opponents an advantage they wouldn t have had in the past. campaigns never end because people want campaigns to end. they end because they run out of money, and super pacs took that quality away from a lot of these campaigns. it served to keep candidates alive that didn t have the fund-raising ability otherwise