Citizens United Anti-Obama film to air on TV

By: Maggie Haberman September 17, 2012 05:58 AM EDT

Citizens United has struck a deal with a dozen television stations to run its hour-long film featuring voters disaffected with President Barack Obama, sending the Republican critique of the incumbent into tens of millions of homes in the lead-up to Election Day, the group’s officials told POLITICO. “The Hope and the Change” directed by Stephen Bannon, who made the Sarah Palin movie “The Undefeated,” was first unveiled last month and it aired during the Republican National Convention in Tampa. (PHOTOS: Political movie cameos) The movie’s wide release — backed by a large advertising campaign behind it — was part of the goal of the Citizens United court case that was decided in 2010 by the U.S. Supreme Court and helped to dramatically alter the landscape for political donations by allowing the unfettered flow of corporate cash into campaigns. “This (the court case) is why I did ‘Citizens United,’” David Bossie, the group’s president said. “This would have been a criminal act under McCain-Feingold before my court case.” (PHOTOS: Politicians on SNL — sort of) Bossie makes filmmaker Michael Moore his template — he had attempted to follow in the footsteps of the commercial and political efforts of Farenheit 9/11, with a movie about Hillary Clinton during the 2008 cycle. But the Clinton film was blocked after it was ruled a form of electioneering. The Citizens United case was about Bossie’s efforts to get similar movies into the bloodstream. This movie — set to start airing on Tuesday and run through Nov. 6 on six cable and six broadcast networks — features forty Democratic and independent voters who backed Obama in 2008 and have since become disillusioned. Much of the film consists of the voters talking, with an overlay of world events over the last four years. (PHOTOS: Mitt Romney’s celebrity supporters) The voters talk about what they had expected Obama to accomplish once in office, and why they had supported him. Bossie says the voters, who come from swing states such as Florida, Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, were picked from focus groups that were conducted by former Jimmy Carter adviser Pat Caddell. The narrative in the piece is not uplifting, but its goal is tapping into a sentiment that exists among voters of disappointment that Obama didn’t live up to their high expectations, and which Obama’s campaign has tried to push back against. Republicans have tried to tap into that sense of disillusionment, in particular with a Republican National Committee ad that tells voters it’s okay for them to make a change. Obama has sought to acknowledge disappointment, while saying he needs more time to fix a problem of large magnitude. The movie will run in its 60-minute entirety in an agreement with six cable networks like HDNet Movies and FamilyNet, along with local stations in Louisiana, Colorado, Indiana, Hawaii and Louisiana. It will reach 130 million homes, according to Citizens United, coupled with advertising dollars about the movie on cable networks. That will come on top of a flood of Mitt Romney campaign spending, and super PAC spending, in the final seven weeks of the race. The voters “bought into that hope [Obama] would be different, he would be someone who would bring the world together and now it’s more divided today,” Bossie said. “Those types of messages are really what’s important.” He said the group has also been focus-grouping the film with pollster Frank Luntz’s dial groups, and said, “The numbers are phenomenal.” Bannon and Bossie both said the goal was to feature average people, not the pundit class — and not any of the more incendiary, base-motivating claims about the president (the recent Dinesh D’Souza movie in theaters now about Obama, which came in just under Moore’s record for box office success with a documentary so far, does explore those). “It’s just about his competence,” said Bannon. “(They) believed [Obama] connected with them…they thought it was a unique connection…they like him personally, they think he’s a great family man…it’s all about competence.” Bannon has another other movie with Bossie out this fall, about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bossie had another movie project involving Rick Santorum. Correction: An earlier version misidentified Bossie's third movie project.

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