“President Barack Obama, who has decried the influence of outside groups in politics, is now encouraging his top donors to contribute to the independent political action committee backing his re-election,” Bloomberg writes, adding, “The rising influence of the Super-PACs has been a topic of discussion with the president for some time and in the last few days Obama was consulted on the announcement the campaign was readying to make, according to a campaign official who spoke about the internal deliberations on condition of anonymity.”

Bill Burton, co-founder of Priorities USA, said: “As has become evident in the past month, the only enthusiasm in the Republican Party is among oil company billionaires and investment bankers on Wall Street looking to defeat President Obama. We’re committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort.”

The New York Times notes that Obama's "past criticism of outside groups, some Democrats said, had made it hard to persuade donors to back Priorities USA Action, contributing to its problems in keeping up with conservative groups. 'It’s hard to pass the plate for super PAC money while Democratic leaders have been preaching about the sins of it,' said Robert Zimmerman, a New York fund-raiser for Mr. Obama. 'But the reality is, it is essential in 2012.'"  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/us/politics/with-a-signal-to-donors-obama-yields-on-super-pacs.html?ref=politics

In Obama’s State of the Union, he talked about the “corrosive influence of money in politics”: “I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad -- and it seems to get worse every year. Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics.”

Republicans decried the move, noting that Obama in 2010 called outside group a “threat to our democracy.”

Campaigning in Pennsylvania in October 2010, Obama said, “Thanks to a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United, [Republicans] are being helped along this year by special interest groups that are spending unlimited amounts of money on attack ads -- attacking folks like Patrick Murphy, attacking folks like Joe Sestak -- just attacking people without ever disclosing who’s behind all these attack ads.  You don’t know.  It could be the oil industry.  It could be the insurance industry.  It could even be foreign-owned corporations.  You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose. Now, that’s not just a threat to Democrats -- that’s a threat to our democracy.” 

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Axelrod said, “The bottom line here is that the Citizens United decision was a bad decision. It did open the flood gates, and now the rules are what the rules are.” He cited the amount raised in the GOP primary for Super PACs, for Crossroads and the Koch Brothers before saying. “We were faced with a situation of whether we could play by two sets of rules. And the answer is no. … That doesn’t mean we think this is the best.” But “We have to live in a world as it is now as we want it to be.”

"The other thing that worries me are these big super PACs that we see Gov. Romney and others benefiting from right now.  I think there's going to be a ton of money aimed at the president," Axelrod said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "They're talking upwards of half a billion dollars in negative ads aimed at the president from interest groups who don't disclose and who can raise unlimited amounts of money," he said. "That is a very, very concerning thing to me."

Politico: “[T]he fundraising prowess of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future — and the effectiveness of its withering ads in degrading the popularity of rival Newt Gingrich in Iowa — turned heads in Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, prompting the campaign to take the baby step of allowing national finance committee members to solicit contributions for Priorities USA.”