ON THE RUN: Obama video to air tonight

Barack Obama will focus on the economy and how his tax plans would help the middle class in a half-hour political infomercial on television networks tonight.

The program “will share the specifics of Obama’s plans to turn the economy around and get the country back on track,” campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday.

A brief trailer for the video is heavy on strings, flags and presidential imagery and shows Obama seated at a kitchen table with a group of white, apparently working-class voters.

The program will air at 8 p.m. on NBC, CBS, Fox, Univision, BET, MSNBC and TV One. ABC will show it on a different night to be announced.

Campaign donors difficult to trace

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

The Obama organization said its extensive review has ensured that the campaign has refunded any improper contributions, and noted that Federal Election Commission rules do not require front-end screening of donations.

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama’s accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names.

Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama’s finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.

Adviser defends insurance views

Barack Obama claimed Tuesday that comments by a top adviser to John McCain reinforced Obama’s contention that millions would be worse off if they lose employer-sponsored health coverage and end up buying it themselves.

McCain wants to change the current income tax rules on health insurance, treating payments toward health insurance as taxable wages. In exchange, individuals would get a $2,500 tax credit and families would get a $5,000 credit when buying health coverage —- a scenario that raises concern among some analysts that younger, healthier workers would abandon employer-paid insurance to shop for better deals.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a domestic policy adviser for McCain, attempted to assure in a story published by CNNMoney.com that such a scenario would not occur.

“Why would they leave?” he said. “What they are getting from their employer is way better than what they could get with the credit.”

Obama described Holtz-Eakin’s comments as a “stunning bit of straight talk, an October surprise from his top economic adviser.”

Holtz-Eakin said Obama took his quote out of context.

GOP bolsters Senate campaigns

The Republican National Committee tapped a $5 million line of credit Tuesday as part of a renewed effort to help GOP senators facing re-election difficulties, the party’s chairman said Tuesday.

Robert M. “Mike” Duncan said the RNC was especially watching contests in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon and North Carolina, where Democrats are pushing for upsets.