“If the president and the people who support him were to sit back and say, you know what, with these big things that are coming down the line between gun control, immigration, climate, even on the economy and what’s happening with sequestration and fiscal cliff,” Burton said, when pressed by Alex Wagner on access to the White House for big donors. “For them to sit by and say we’re going to let the forces of the right gather up their armies, raise hundreds of millions of dollars–the Koch brothers can cut checks for that amount–and just stand by and do nothing, that would be inexplicable.”

OFA went into action for the first time last week on the issue of gun control, a stance that Michael Bloomberg has also poured millions into recently.

The original question stems from reports that donors who give $500,000 to OFA will enjoy quarterly meetings with President Obama, as well as other White House meetings.

Liberal watchdog Common Cause said Tuesday OFA should be shuttered in response to the news.

“If President Obama is serious about his often-expressed desire to rein in big money in politics, he should shut down Organizing for Action and disavow any plan to schedule regular meetings with its major donors,” Bob Edgar, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Access to the president should never be for sale.”

OFA is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) and therefore not required to disclose its donors nor the amount of their donations. In addition to major individual donors, the organization’s leadership has been courting corporate donors.

Burton co-founded the Obama-affiliated Super PAC Priorities USA, best known for producing a campaign ad that suggested Mitt Romney may have been responsible for a woman’s death from cancer.

Ripplewood Holdings is most infamous for killing Twinkies and all the other delicious Hostess products.

Ripplewood, which was founded by Timothy C. Collins, a major Democratic donor, is expected to lose most, if not all, of the $130 million or so it invested in Hostess. …

Having said all that, Ripplewood’s management was far from a model for the industry. For at least the first year of the new ownership, Ripplewood charged Hostess management and consulting fees, according to people briefed on the payments, which were “in the millions of dollars.”

Hostess shut down in November 2012. Collins also contributed at least $200,000 to Obama’s Super PAC in October 2012, the month before the Twinkie died.

The group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, has tapped Texas trial lawyer Steve Mostyn as its treasurer, Reuters reports. Mostyn, who made his fortune from a series of lawsuits against the state of Texas and its response to Hurricane Ike, donated $4.2 million to Democratic Super PACs in the 2012 cycle.

The group is looking to raise $20 million for the 2014 mid-term elections, Reuters reports:

A new gun control group led by Gabrielle Giffords, the former U.S. congresswoman wounded in a Tucson shooting rampage, wants to raise $20 million for the 2014 congressional elections, matching the National Rifle Association’s spending in last November’s elections, the group’s treasurer said on Wednesday.

Giffords and her husband, former U.S. astronaut Mark Kelly, have turned to Houston trial lawyer and Democratic donor Steve Mostyn to act as treasurer. He gave $1 million of his own money to help kick start a campaign launched on Tuesday calling for what Giffords and Kelly describe as common-sense measures to curb gun violence. [...]

“We’re just getting things started, but I’ve had conversations with a dozen other large political donors who have worked with me on other issues in the past, and I’ve had a good response,” Mostyn told Reuters.

He has been less forthcoming about the fact that he is making a tidy living “consulting” the largest pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, as well as the 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Priorities USA.

Open Secrets reports:

FEC filings show that Begala received well over $400,000 from Priorities USA Action, the super PAC, in return for his consulting services between April 2011 and November 2012.

But the recently filed Form 990 of Priorities USA, the nonprofit, shows that it, too, has been paying Begala handsomely. In the first eight months of the 501(c)(4)’s existence, Begala received more than $184,000 for “communications consulting,” making him Priorities’ top independent contractor.

The 501(c)(4) Priorities USA recently filed its first 990 form, which showed that it had received $2.3 million in donations from five donors during the first eight months of its existence. Given the nature of the disclosure forms, it is difficult to tell where this “dark money”—a term frequently used by liberals to describe secret donations to groups they do not care for—comes from:

One donor alone gave more than 80 percent of Priorities’ total revenue in 2011, or $1.9 million of about $2.3 million. The next largest contributions were much lower, $250,000 and $50,000.

Whether the donors were corporations, individuals, unions or other nonprofits that also don’t have to disclose their donors is impossible to know from the form.

The network’s Herb Greenberg noted many thought Pincus should top the rankings, calling the year for the online gaming company “nothing short of a disaster” with “no strong strategy” apparent and defections of key personnel.

Pincus notably donated $1 million this fall to the Obama-affiliated Super PAC Priorities USA — best known for suggesting Mitt Romney may have been responsible for a woman’s death.

Zynga also announced 160 layoffs this fall.

Zynga, the company behind Farmville and Words with Friends, saw its shares slide nearly 5 percent Monday to $2.42. In December 2011, the stock opened at $11.

Obama’s largest donor, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, sits on Zynga’s board.

Consider the reaction to Kenneth Vogel’s important report on the winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance, the secretive organization of progressive millionaires and billionaires who finance an extraordinarily byzantine network of liberal foundations and Super PACs that operate with undisclosed “dark money.”

What reaction? Exactly. There wasn’t any.

The left-wing VIPs assembled at the luxury W Hotel across the street from the White House, but only Vogel reported on the story. The gathering did not merit inclusion in either the Washington Post or the New York Times, both of which have offices within blocks of the W, and both of which have devoted reams of newsprint to Mitt Romney’s donor retreats and various Koch-affiliated fundraising summits. Was New York Times campaign finance reporter Nicholas Confessore too busy appearing on NOW with Alex Wagner to cover the event?

More likely the media simply ignore data that complicate their preferred narrative. When it comes to the fraught relationship between money and politics, that narrative is as follows: Money in politics is corrupting only because rich businessmen trade campaign donations to Republicans for low taxes and fewer environmental regulations.

The 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, the narrative continues, assisted such transactions by treating corporate and union PAC donations as protected speech. Republicans are better at fundraising because they are selfish, whereas Democrats are more concerned with the common good. And when Democrats abandon the principles of campaign finance reform, they do so with heavy hearts and the tragic sense that they could not compete otherwise.

The end.

Not only is this fairy tale nonsense, it is the biggest myth in American politics. Liberals use this just-so story to salve their consciences and reinforce their collective prejudices against conservatives. They cannot conceive that progressive donors engage in the exact sort of influence peddling they so lustily condemn.

This willful refusal to face facts leads to repression and confusion. A liberal whose understanding of the 2012 election derived from mainstream media and Team Obama emails would not know that the president’s campaign outraised and outspent Mitt Romney’s campaign by hundreds of millions of dollars. She would be unaware that three of the top five Super PACs were aligned with Democrats. Indeed the overall Republican financial advantage was minimal, a little more than 10 percent. That figure does not include the indirect spending by labor unions that is hard to track. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has outraised the Republican Party in each of the last three election cycles. Remind me where the GOP’s huge money advantage lies?

The liberal handwringing over Citizens United is all for show. Obama reversed himself on Super PACs in 2012 just as he reversed himself on public financing in 2008.

Earlier this year the Democracy Alliance scraped away groups that were not affixed like barnacles to the hull of the Democratic Party and left alone the groups that were. One of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, the hedge fund investor George Soros, announced at an Alliance luncheon in New York City in late September that he would donate $1 million to Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama Super PAC that accused Mitt Romney of killing a woman with cancer. Progressives bemoan the influence of big money even as they write seven-figure checks.

Did Obama campaign on removing money from politics or on altering our ridiculous and clearly ineffective campaign finance laws? Has he put such reform at the top of his agenda? Do pigs fly?

The president understands the importance of dark money to the Democratic machine. So do his fellow partisans. We learn from Vogel that the speakers at the three-day Democracy Alliance conference this month included Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, Sens.-elect Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, representatives from Priorities USA, opposition research outfit American Bridge 21st Century, and pro-abortion rights lobby EMILY’s List.

So the upper echelon of the political party that controls the White House, the Senate, the executive bureaucracy, and is 17 seats away from a House majority is committed to a group of insanely wealthy people who avoid disclosure and accountability by indirectly funding nonprofits. Yet this same party howls that Republicans are in the pocket of wealthy individuals. If only George Soros could buy the Democrats a sense of irony.

Elizabeth Warren is a special case. She and her opponent famously signed a “People’s Pledge” to limit outside spending in the Massachusetts Senate election. But so much depends on the meanings of “spending” and “outside.” Not only is Warren linked to the Soros-affiliated think tank Demos through her daughter, who runs it, her campaign was launched with donations from the Soros family and received $2 million in assistance in the final weeks of the contest from the Harry Reid-affiliated Majority PAC. She outraised and out-spent Scott Brown. The Center for Responsive Politics found that she disclosed far less of the sources of her funding than Brown did. Yet no one can doubt she told her secret donors at the Democracy Alliance meeting that as a United States senator she would fight against the influence of the rich.

“Ah,” liberals will say, “you haven’t mentioned that these rich liberal donors have no economic interest to pursue.” I haven’t because that idea is self-serving baloney. These men and women who have inherited or made their fortunes already may not care whether taxes rise on households making more than $250,000 a year. They can afford it. Yet to assume that tax rates are the only economic interest at work is to hold a crimped and facile view of politics. Taxes on income, capital gains, and dividends are just the beginning.

The individuals and foundations that comprise the Democratic fundraising base in general and the Democracy Alliance in particular benefit from tax subsidies and mandates for non-carbon energy; from government-funded research and development; from trade and tax policies that favor Hollywood and Silicon Valley; from measures that increase union membership and therefore dues to union bosses; from infrastructure spending that directs funds to construction unions; and from housing and development projects that provide well compensated livelihoods to social workers, foundation executives, and—dare one say it—community organizers.

Money buys access and patronage. A New York Times review “showed that those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others.” The Huffington Post “found 28 individuals of ambassadorial rank who had raised a total of more than $14 million for the president.” One such ambassador, Matthew Barzun, grandson of the recently deceased historian Jacques Barzun, quit his post to raise money for Obama’s reelection and was a speaker at the Democracy Alliance’s winter meeting.

Another Times review of the administration’s relationship with utility giant Exelon “shows how familiarity has helped foster access at the upper reaches of government and how, in some cases, the outcome has been favorable for Exelon.” The administration assisted DreamWorks Animation CEO and Priorities USA donor Jeffrey Katzenberg in negotiating a deal with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Performance artist Will Smith felt his donations to Obama earned him the privilege to lobby the administration for rapper T.I.’s release from jail.

It is easy to lose track of these stories since they are buried by a press that focuses myopically and quizzically on the hapless Republicans, on who gives conservatives donations and why, on the minutest hypocrisy in which those conservatives indulge, on the tiniest divisions between the traditionalists and the neocons and the libertarians, on the endless and navel-gazing “soul searching” in which the party of Lincoln and TR and Reagan seems endlessly to engage, on whether or not Obama “likes” McCain and Romney, and on who is preparing to run in a presidential election that is four, yes four, years away. A press interested in equal treatment of the two parties would have noted for example that one of the first meetings Obama held after his reelection was with “labor and civic leaders” (his words) many of whom are tied to the Democracy Alliance. Among the messages conveyed at the discussion was the president’s avowal to keep the money flowing. The left’s investment would continue to earn a dividend.

“We’re not going away,” Priorities USA adviser Paul Begala told Politico. Nor would one expect the outside groups and networks to vanish after their remarkable success. Left-wing institutions and pressure groups have recovered after years of retreat from a unified and energetic right. They have resumed construction of the intricate, inefficient, and over-budget public works project known as the American welfare state. The liberal donors want in on the action. There are stories to be told. But is the mainstream media even awake?

We were wrong. Not only did Obama’s voters re-appear, but there also were more Hispanics and young people than four years before. The extraordinary advertising and get out the vote operation of Obama for America identified and turned out every Obama supporter they could find. Even though Obama won fewer votes than in 2008, and became the first president since 1892 to be elected to a second term with a smaller share of the vote than in his first, he won a decisive victory, and his party gained seats in the House and Senate, because his voters were motivated and the Republicans were not. Election analyst Sean Trende estimates that 7 million fewer whites voted in 2012 than in 2008. Whites are the foundation of the Republican Party. They voted 59-39 for Romney. If Trende’s 7 million missing voters had appeared, Romney would have had a much better chance at winning.

Why did they stay home? The biggest clue can be found in the returns not from 2012 but from 2011. A year ago, Ohio called a referendum to decide whether or not the state legislature’s repeal of public sector collective bargaining would stand. Buckeye voters rejected that repeal decisively, 61 percent to 39 percent. At the time, Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute saw a foreboding trend: “The differences between white-working class independents and the GOP’s conservative base are becoming too substantial to ignore.” The white working class, which had voted for Republicans in droves in 2010, was falling away from Republicans a year later. They did not care so much about the deficit or debt. They opposed Obamacare but supported a safety net. They were less concerned with or supportive of overseas interventions. The idea of economic fairness mattered to them.

The Obama campaign and its outside affiliates such as the Priorities USA Action Super PAC exploited this fissure between the GOP and the whites without college degrees who are essential to its political success. Obama’s side spent $396 million on ads, 85 percent of which were negative. Those ads relentlessly painted a picture of Mitt Romney as a heartless corporate raider who shipped American jobs overseas, closed factories without regard to the human consequences, and cared far more about profits and rich people than about the rank and file of America. The most famous of those advertisements ridiculously implied that Romney was somehow responsible for the death of a factory worker’s wife by cancer. The ad was false and insulting and offensive. But, like negative advertising in general, it worked.

Obama’s lieutenants ran a broad-based campaign that gave potential supporters a variety of reasons to vote. The economic message was that the economy was slowly improving and Obama was doing his best to fix a problem Bush had created. The social message was that Republicans wanted to roll back the rights of women and gays. For blacks, the Democrats said Republicans wanted to restrict and even overturn their ability to vote. For Hispanics, the Democrats said Republicans would undo Obama’s executive youth amnesty. On foreign policy, Obama had left Iraq, was winding down American involvement in Afghanistan, and had given the order to kill Osama bin Laden.

Romney’s campaign, on the other hand, was remarkably one-dimensional. He bet everything on dissatisfaction with the president’s economic record. He did not touch the social issues. He minimized the differences between his foreign policy approach and Obama’s. He campaigned on the idea that Obama had broken promises and failed to restore prosperity and strength to America. This message was aimed at suburban white women who had voted for Obama in 2008 but might be turned toward the GOP in 2012. It was not aimed at the white working class who had given the GOP its margin of victory in 2010.

The exit polls showed that Romney won on the economy, but by nowhere near the margin he needed to beat Obama. Indeed, when voters were asked which economic problem they faced the most, Romney lost to Obama on unemployment and housing, and only fought him to a draw on rising prices. The economic issue on which Romney won decisively was taxes—but hardly anyone said taxes were a problem!

Romney’s economic message was aimed at voters who had already achieved success and were worried that it might be taken away. The mantra of his convention was “we built that,” a call to battle for small businessmen and prosperous whites who took offense at Obama’s belittling of individual achievement during his July 13 remarks in Roanoke, Va. Romney’s message of tax reform, budget cuts, carbon energy exploitation, and championing of small business was catnip to conservative enterprisers such as myself, but as of 2005 we made up only 11 percent of registered voters and our ranks have probably diminished since.

Romney was good at telling voters who had already achieved in life how he would support and expand that achievement. He was not very good at telling voters who had not yet achieved success how he would expand opportunity and improve their condition. At times he seemed outright dismissive of these voters, such as when he wrote off Obama’s floor of 47 percent of the vote. His campaign gave Paul Ryan just one opportunity to talk about poverty, civil society, and social mobility, and even that opportunity came only after an internal fight.

Since 1994, religious conservatives such as Rick Santorum, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and President George W. Bush have addressed social and cultural insecurity through faith-based appeals to charity, outreach, compassion, and volunteerism. Romney, who by all accounts is a devoted, virtuous, faithful man, would have been well positioned to make similar arguments. But he was uncomfortable with such rhetoric, either because he did not want to draw attention to his religion or because he thought that it would alienate affluent whites. That left him exposed.

And Team Obama pounced. They used Romney’s opposition to Obama’s auto bailout as a metaphor for his concern for the rich over the poor and middle class. They ran ad after ad saying the Ryan plan would cut nursing home care. They portrayed Romney’s tax reform proposal as a giveaway to the wealthy and a tax increase on the middle-class. The accuracy of these charges simply does not matter. What matters is that they were effective. They suppressed turnout and support for Romney among the white working class and preserved Obama’s “Midwest Firewall” of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

Obama won overwhelmingly the fifth of voters who said the most important quality in picking a president is that he “cares about people like me.” The majority of voters who thought the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy broke 71 percent to 26 percent for Obama.  A majority of voters said Romney’s policies would generally favor the rich, while a plurality of voters said Obama’s policies generally favor the middle class. A majority of voters said George W. Bush was more to blame for our current economic problems.

Obama pollster Joel Benenson is right when he says, “The contours of the 2012 presidential race were shaped less by the country’s changing demographics than by the underlying attitudes and values of American voters.” The attitudes and values of the Obama coalition, including Hispanics, are much more favorable to a robust and active federal government and safety net. These voters see government support for the poor, middle class, and elderly not as a matter of accounting but of morality. The Romney campaign failed to convey an economic message responsive to these attitudes and values while ceding the ground of social and cultural debate to the left. The result was a drubbing for the GOP and a reality check for conservative pundits (like me).

Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” may have appeared for a second time, but that does not mean Republicans are doomed to defeat. Republicans and conservatives today are in a similar position to Democrats and liberals after 2004. The aftermath of that election was filled with conservative proclamations of a lasting majority. The issue matrix, including the social piece, was said to favor Republicans. Conservative states and families were said to be growing, while liberal states and families were said to be in decline or shrinking. Democrats retreated to their hideouts to ponder and debate their future.

Within two years, they had retaken the Congress. Within four years, they retook the presidency. Their economic message was aimed at the middle class. Their opposition to unpopular wars was also in their favor. The Democrats appealed to the center and relied on the incompetence and corruption of incumbents, which is always a safe bet. They ran candidates who appealed to moderates, independents, and even conservatives in Republican bastions in the South and Midwest.

If the Republican Party cannot find appealing and attractive spokesmen and women for a conservative economic message that champions the working and middle class, a cultural message that speaks to the anxieties of the white working class, and a rhetoric that avoids fodder for the comedy “news” shows and blogs that shape the mindset of young people, it will have to wait for the Democrats to screw up royally, and for the Obama coalition to rip itself apart. Both things will happen. But they may not happen for some time.

Priorities USA Action alone spent more than $67 million. Super PACs overseen by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Majority PAC) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (House Majority PAC) spent a combined $68 million.

Priorities USA’s attacks included one ad suggesting Romney was responsible for a woman’s death from cancer. The group was funded with the help of 25 individual donors who contributed $1 million or more. Those major donors include:

—Jeffrey Katzenberg ($2 million), the DreamWorks Animation CEO and major Democratic fundraiser whose company is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly bribing Chinese officials to secure film distribution rights in the communist country. That deal may have been facilitated by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

—Steve Mostyn ($2 million), a Texas trial lawyer who made millions suing state agencies over hurricane-related insurance claims. Mostyn donated a combined $4.2 million to Super PACs supporting Democrats this cycle and told Politico that he and other wealthy Democrats “will be more willing to participate in Super PACs early and more than they did this time” in future election cycles.

—George Soros ($1 million), the billionaire financier and founder of the shadowy network of wealthy leftwing donors known as the Democracy Alliance.

—Bill Maher ($1 million), a misogynistic comedian.

—Steven Spielberg ($1 million), the director of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Amistad.

—Morgan Freeman ($1 million), narrator.

—The National Air Traffic Controllers Association ($1 million).

Super PACs run by major unions spent more than $20 million this cycle supporting Democrats. Their contribution is being celebrated by major labor leaders.

Planned Parenthood’s Super PAC spent more than $5 million.

Obama and other Democrats have long bemoaned the political influence of such groups. The president once described Super PACs as “shadowy groups” that pose “a threat to our democracy” following their increased prominence after the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling.

Democrats repeatedly expressed concern that Republican-allied Super PACs would successfully “buy” this year’s election.

Despite Obama’s professed disdain for the Citizens United ruling, for which he publicly chastised the Supreme Court justices during his 2010 State of the Union address, he ultimately embraced Super PACs in a stunning reversal.

Days before the president began encouraging donors to contribute to third-party groups, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), the chief political strategist for Senate Democrats, pledged to hold congressional hearings on the activities of Super PACs. He described them as “evil” and “corrosive to democracy.”

Campaign finance reform advocate and former Senator Russ Feingold (D., Wis.) accused the president of “dancing with the devil.”

President Obama boldly pledged to end the reign of “special interests” in Washington during his first term. However, prominent campaign bundlers and other major Democratic donors have fared extraordinarily well over the past four years in terms of White House access and federal funding for their business interests.

Collins is the founder and CEO of Ripplewood Holdings, a “private equity and venture capital firm,” according to Bloomberg.

Collins and his family have donated heavily to Priorities USA, the Obama-affiliated Super PAC. His family gave a combined half a million dollars to Priorities USA earlier this month, according to records. He and his wife gave a combined $300,000, while his sons Dane Andrew (listed as Dana A) and Matthew each gave $100,000.

Collins’s donations to liberal causes are not limited to this pro-Obama group, however. He donated $35,000 to ProPublica, according to online documents, as well as $90,800 to Democratic campaigns and committees during the 2012 election cycle, records show.

The latter include $25,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee.

Collins’s support has earned him access to the highest levels of the White House. White House visitor records show that Collins met with Valerie Jarrett four times between August 2010 and July 2011. He also was a guest of the President five times, including a meeting at the end of June 2011 when he was the President’s sole guest.

However, Collins’s connections to the Washington liberal establishment extend far beyond personal visits to the White House.

Collins sits on the advisory board of The Hamilton Project, which “Robert Rubin and his allies” launched in 2006 “to think about what a future Democratic administration would do,” according to the Huffington Post.

One senator addressed the group at the launch of the Hamilton Project, according to Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists: Barack Obama.

To speak at the event, Obama missed at least part of a Senate Foreign Relations meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, where they were discussing a nuclear deal between the United States and India, according to a transcript of the Project’s launch.

The Hamilton Project has deep ties to Obama’s White House. Almost the entirety of the Project’s past leadership has served in some capacity in the Obama’s administration.

Peter Orszag, the Hamilton Project’s founding director, was Obama’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Jason Furman, Orszag’s successor at the project, currently serves as principal deputy director of the national economic council and assistant to the president.

The Project’s founder, Robert Rubin, is a consummate Washington insider and Obama adviser. He was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, and while he does not hold an official economic post in Obama’s administration, he “wields enormous influence in Barack Obama’s Washington,” according to Politico.

The New York Times called Obama’s nascent economic team in 2008 a “virtual Rubin constellation.”

While Rubin came under fire for his leadership at Citigroup before the financial meltdown, Obama turned to him for advice in September 2008 as the crisis worsened.

Rubin and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner consulted regularly early in Geithner’s term, Politico observed.

Rubin now sits on the Hamilton Project’s advisory council with Collins.

Numerous other liberal government insiders are connected to the Hamilton Project. Obama’s Chief of Staff and former Clinton staffer Jack Lew has sat on its board. Mark T. Gallogly currently sits on the Project’s advisory board and is a member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Penny Pritzker sits on the board as well; she was Obama’s chief fundraiser for his 2008 campaign and was mentioned as a candidate for Secretary of Commerce, according to CNN. Jason Bordoff is associate director for energy and climate change at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and was the Hamilton Project’s policy director from 2006-2009.

The connections run all the way to the top of the Hamilton Project. While many people jumped from the Hamilton Project to the White House, current Project director Michael Greenstone moved in the other direction: From 2009 to 2010, he was Chief Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, before taking his post as director of the Hamilton Project in 2010.

The depth of Collins’s connections to these various individuals is unclear, but his place on the Hamilton Project’s advisory board with many past and present Obama advisers and staffers places him in the middle of the liberal Washington coterie.

Collins could not be reached for comment.

Soros, who organized the Democracy Alliance, revealed his intention to contribute to Priorities USA at a luncheon hosted by Democracy Alliance last month. Soros’ right-hand man and personal political director, Michael Vachon, serves on the board of the Democracy Alliance.

Findlater is a member of the Democracy Alliance. Since the 2008 cycle, Findlater has contributed more than $430,000 to Democratic candidates, committees, and groups. He also appears on the White House visitor log at least three times.

Ryan is the founder of Schooner Capital, an investment firm based in Boston. Ryan’s daughter, Cynthia, is a member of Democracy Alliance. Cynthia Ryan is also an Obama bundler committed to raise more than $50,000 for the campaign.

During the 2012 cycle, Priorities USA has also received dark money donations from Jon Stryker, brother of Democracy Alliance bigwig Pat Stryker, and Ellen Susman, a board member of Democracy Alliance and Obama bundler. Kelly Craighead, president and managing director of the Democracy Alliance, is one of Obama’s biggest bundlers.