Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, is still making $7,000 per month from Obama’s 2012 campaign, Politico reports.
While the campaign ended nearly a year-and-a-half ago, Messina has not entirely finished "winding it down."
The lengthy Politico article reports on how Messina is attempting to become a Karl Rove-like figure for the Democratic Party.
Messina—like Rove before him—has gravitated away from the party and campaign system in which he cut his teeth toward the unlimited-money outside infrastructure that reshaped politics after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision. It’s a notable shift, given that Democrats up to and including Obama had assailed Rove and the big money he was raising as everything that’s wrong with modern politics, before finally coming to embrace the new reality in which money and power have migrated to the outside groups and away from the party and campaign system.
Recently, Messina began quietly backing away from the inside system, last month ending a $15,000-a-month consulting agreement with the Democratic National Committee. The move came as he assumed leadership of the pro-Clinton Priorities USA outside spending outfit, prompting legal and practical questions about the many hats he was wearing. "Obviously, respecting both the letter and the spirit of the law, he just couldn’t have done both," said a source close to Messina. The source added that Messina was also preparing to end a $7,000-a-month contract with Obama’s still-idling presidential campaign because he had mostly finished the work of winding it down.