In an office building nearly a dozen blocks from the White House, bluejeans-clad 20-somethings sit before flat screen computer monitors, scrolling through newspaper stories, reading Twitter feeds and studying videotaped footage.

They have one goal: uncovering an unguarded moment, a controversial position, a gaffe or flip-flop, anything that can be used to torpedo a political foe's campaign.

Welcome to the "war room" of American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that its founders tout as a key part of Democrats' arsenal in this year's presidential and congressional elections. Unlike other super PACs using most of their millions for attack ads, American Bridge is an opposition research hub for liberal groups determined to keep Mitt Romney out of the White House and the Senate in Democrat hands.

Opposition research is not new, nor unique to this group. The Republican National Committee has developed an opposition research handbook of more than 1,000 pages on President Obama, documenting campaign pledges that it intends to juxtapose with news clips and other evidence to argue he has failed to deliver. Presidential candidates typically invest millions of dollars on their in-house research.

But none of American Bridge's rivals has assembled the same kind of model -- one that uses the unlimited stream of money that can flow to super PACs to build a research operation that runs independently of the candidates they support.

The group has deployed 17 trackers, armed with high-definition cameras, to Senate and presidential battleground states to capture candidates' every utterance and interaction with voters. Those trackers have compiled 1,300 hours of video, along with time-coded reports, to help researchers quickly locate potentially incriminating material to post on Twitter and YouTube or feed to other Democrat operatives for attack ads.

Back in the war room, 25 researchers have compiled dossiers, hundreds of pages long, on the Republican congressional candidates they are targeting. The Romney "book" spans 2,500 pages.

"Republican candidates will say and do one thing during a primary and then try to cynically change course," said Rodell Mollineau, former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and the group's president. "We will let voters know when their words and actions don't match up"...

Democrat operative David Brock launched American Bridge 21st Century in November 2010 -- one of a crop of so-called super PACs created in the months after the Supreme Court ended the long-standing ban on the use of corporate and union money to elect or defeat federal candidates.

Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts but are barred from coordinating their activity with the candidates they support or with the national political parties.

They can work with other outside groups. That's what American Bridge does each day, fact-checking commercials and sharing its research with other liberal groups, including Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC.

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Editor's Note: Chicago-style politics...it's not about finding middle ground so that the nation can serve all the people, it's about tearing opposition down to dirt, so the power-hungry can champion an agenda crafted by the very few. Progressives...that's what they do.


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