American Future Fund is hoping its supporters will donate to fight the "permanent Obama campaign."

Two years after the Federal Election Commission found that 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org broke the law during the 2004 Bush-Kerry race, donors began looking for a new way to continue giving millions to affect elections without all that pesky disclosure. Enter the political nonprofit.

Two groups in particular, the Iowa-based American Future Fund (AFF) and the Washington-based Freedom’s Watch, received the lion’s share of the attention during the 2008 elections as they spent millions in congressional and Senate races around the country supporting Republican candidates.

Now, after watching most of the candidates they supported lose on Election Night, it appears the two groups are facing hard times and heading in different directions.

American Future Fund is hoping it can manage to survive the 2008 election by emulating the political fundraising campaign of President-elect Barack Obama to mobilize conservatives.

In an e-mail to supporters of the organization’s political action committee, which it formed in May, titled “Fighting the Permanent Obama Campaign,” AFF spokesman Tim Albrecht is calling on conservatives to help establish his group as the right’s answer to Obama’s “fundraising machine.”

Want to know the stats on Barack Obama?

1. Average donation: $80
2. 3.5 million donors
3. Over half a BILLION dollars raised on line

That’s right.

American Future Fund Political Action is ready and willing to assume this role for free market conservatives. We are ready to capture the thousands of volunteers and members it’s going to take to mount an aggressive campaign against the liberal steamroller that’s commanded the battlefield for years.

Albrecht goes on to call the group “the premier grassroots conservative organization for the right.”

American Future Fund has considerable ties to well-known figures in state Republican politics, including a former executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa, Nicole Schlinger, and Bruce Rastetter, a prominent donor to state party candidates.

The group’s leadership also includes media consultants who played key roles in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads in 2004 and the Willie Horton ad in 1988, both of which helped defeat Democratic presidential candidates.

It has also faced several formal complaints, most recently by a group in Colorado claiming it violated its tax-exempt status.

Meanwhile, Freedom’s Watch is “pretty much kaput,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which cited anonymous sources inside the organization.

The source of the group’s trouble is the hard financial times befalling its main benefactor, Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman Sheldon Adelson, whose company lost roughly 95 percent of its stock market value over the past 11 months, “dropping Adelson’s rank on the Forbes list of America’s wealthiest people from third to 15th.”

The group is apparently going out with a bang, though, with one last ad attacking Democrat Jim Martin in the Georgia Senate runoff.