Cox coordinating ‘issues ads’ with private group?

Rep. Pete Hoekstra’s gubernatorial campaign is raising the question of whether the Mike Cox campaign is coordinating their attack ads with a private group after two similar ads appeared at the same time containing the same criticisms, one produced by the Cox campaign and one produced by a group called Americans for Job Security. The Grand Rapids Press reports:

On Monday, fellow Republican opponent Attorney General Mike Cox’s campaign issued a television ad criticizing Hoekstra for supporting Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere,” the 2008 bank bailout and increased spending.

Around the same time, Americans for Job Security issued a similar ad, also criticizing Hoekstra for voting for “the Wall Street bailout and the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska,” and supporting tax hikes…

Hoekstra spokesman John Truscott said he thinks the two anti-Hoekstra ads were connected.

“That’s a little more than coincidence,” he said. “We hope that voters say, ‘Enough is enough.’”

But as the article notes, it’s not actually illegal for the Cox campaign to coordinate their response with that of an interest group taking out “issues ads” — campaign commercials that do not explicitly say you should vote for or against a candidate but are still obviously intended to influence you to do so.

And as Rich Robinson of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network notes in the article, the real problem is that any organization taking out such ads does not have to disclose who financed the ad. This allows corporations and other moneyed interests to endorse or attack a candidate without disclosing who is doing so. That needs to be fixed.