At Time, Mark Halperin observes:Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will be joining Karl Rove this election cycle to raise funds for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the groups announced Thursday.
Barbour, rumored to be privately advising Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will be serving in a volunteer capacity, as will Rove. (RELATED: Perry says Rove has been ‘over the top for a long time’)
The groups also announced that they have exceeded their fundraising goals and will more than double their previous combined fundraising goal of $120 million for 2012.
“Both Governor Barbour and Karl Rove are prodigious fundraisers and brilliant strategists, and we are honored to have them both engaged with us,” said Steven Law, who serves as president of the two Crossroads groups
This development could have a bigger impact on the outcome of the 2012 presidential election than Obama's Thursday speech. This means Barbour won't endorse a candidate for president in the nomination fight -- but he will be powerfully positioned to help defeat the incumbent.
American Crossroads, the independent GOP group founded by Karl Rove and led by former Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, released an ominous new online video Thursday ahead of President Barack Obama’s highly anticipated jobs speech.
The video - “Job Loss Calendar” - accuses the president of implementing burdensome regulations and taxes that have hampered private sector job creation since he took office in January 2009.
“After more than 30 months of record unemployment, the question arises: How many jobs have Obama’s policies destroyed?” a gravelly-voiced narrator asks.The three-minute video claims that a series of administration efforts have stalled job creation, including health care reform, a National Labor Relations Board complaint against Boeing and a Justice Department lawsuit blocking a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.
“With nearly 14 million Americans out of work, the best jobs policy might be to start repealing his own policies,” the video concludes.
Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio called on the president “to get out of the way” and stop over-regulating private business.
