Co-founded by the former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton and with seed money from the Service Employees International Union and the film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the group’s entrée into the early 2012 contest all but ensures that the presidential race will be awash in cash from undisclosed corporate and labor sources with huge stakes in Washington policy making.  At the heart of the effort, introduced Friday morning, are two groups: Priorities USA Action, which will engage directly in electioneering backed by donors who will have to be identified but can give unlimited amounts, and Priorities USA, which will advertise about related campaign issues using money from undisclosed sources.  The effort is modeled on the one Republicans started last year — with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove — that attacked Democrats with a barrage of advertisements, mailings and phone calls. It was widely credited with helping the party to take control of the House and diminish the Democrats’ edge in the Senate last fall. One of those groups, Crossroads GPS, was set up under a section of the tax code that allowed its donors to remain anonymous, leading Mr. Obama to refer to such groups collectively as “a threat to democracy” for the way they had shielded corporate interests from view as they sought to sway elections.  Democrats had eschewed the formation of such groups last year at Mr. Obama’s public urging, but after the elections in November prominent liberals vowed to form with outside groups of their own to combat the likes of Crossroads.  Speaking aboard Air Force One on Friday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said that the president’s views had not changed and that the administration had nothing to do with the new groups.  “We don’t control outside groups,” Mr. Carney said. “These are not people working for the administration.”  The Priorities USA organizers said they hoped to raise enough money to keep pace with the Crossroads groups, which have set a goal of raising $120 million for the 2012 election cycle.  The organizers said they would coordinate their efforts with a series of other liberal groups that have formed in recent months to bolster Democrats and Mr. Obama and attack Republicans and conservatives, much the way the Crossroads groups have coordinated with like-minded organizations against Democrats.  The announcement brought immediate criticism from groups calling for tighter campaign finance restrictions, and broader adherence to existing law, that Democrats were now getting into the act themselves.  Former Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and a co-sponsor of the landmark legislation of 2002 that had placed tight restrictions on corporate giving but has since been chipped away by court rulings, said in a statement that efforts to imitate the “right-wing tactics” of Mr. Rove and others “do our nation no favors.”  Fred Wertheimer, president of the group Democracy 21, said his group was looking into filing a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service questioning the tax status of Priorities USA, saying that he was skeptical that it was serving anything other than a political purpose intended to influence the upcoming election. (The section of the tax code it was formed under — 501(c) (4) — is for groups that are not seeking to directly affect elections). He has registered a similar complaint against Crossroads GPS.  Mr. Wertheimer predicted that the 2012 campaign would have more anonymously donated money working for or against the election of federal candidates than any other has since the Watergate scandal kicked off the decades-long effort to reform the system — unless, he said, new legislative steps are taken to force greater transparency (an unlikely seeming eventuality for now given that both parties are getting so deeply involved in soliciting secret money).  Republicans seized on the formation of the group and its connections to the White House via Mr. Burton and the other co-founder of the groups, Sean Sweeney, a onetime deputy to the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as an example of hypocrisy.  Crossroads GPS publicized Mr. Obama’s remarks in Philadelphia in October questioning anonymous donations that were spent in the service of Republicans. “The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people,” Mr. Obama said then.  An aide to the Senate minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sent an e-mail quoting Mr. Burton as saying last year, “The president thinks that if you’re going to participate in politics, you ought to be transparent about it.”  Coordination between outside groups and federal candidates is strictly prohibited, if hard to prove and harder still to enforce.  Asked if he had any contact with the White House on the formation of the groups, Mr. Burton said in an e-mail, “We will be clear that we cannot coordinate with anyone at the White House or on the campaign.”  Asked if the issue had come up during his time at the White House, Mr. Burton said, “Outside groups were obviously a topic of conversation” there, but “We decided to do this on our own, after we left the White House and spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it.”  He said the groups were planned strictly as a reaction to the formation of groups by Mr. Rove and the Koch family, among others, adding, “We don’t think progressives should live by a different set of rules than conservatives.”  Advisers to the groups include Harold Ickes, a former Clinton White House deputy chief of staff; Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily’s List, which supports candidates favoring abortion rights; and Robert McKay, chairman of Democracy Alliance, which took a leading role in organizing liberal groups.
An outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats will use the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations that the president has so deplored.