By Shannon Brown / current.com UPDATE: The Super PAC considering a plan to link President Obama to his former pastor Jeremiah Wright now says Joe Ricketts, founder of the Ending Spending Action Fund, has rejected the proposal. “It reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take,” said Brian Baker, president of the fund. Mitt Romney has also repudiated the plan. * * * ORIGINAL POST: Since finally emerging as the uncontested GOP candidate, Mitt Romney and his campaign have reached out to the more-conservative corners of the party, but have kept their attacks on President Barack Obama focused mostly on his policies and the still-fragile U.S. economy. However, some behind-the-scenes big-money donors are wary of this middle-of-the-road strategy, and are gearing up to hit the president where they think it might hurt the most — his seeming “otherness” from some of the GOP’s most-conservative voters. Joe Ricketts, founder of TDAmeritrade and patriarch of the family which own the Chicago Cubs baseball team, has put together a strategy that calls Obama “a metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln,” among other things, and plans to resurrect the president’s association with controversial preacher Jeremiah Wright as a keystone of its attacks. While it is usually too late to re-define a president after he’s served the majority of his first time, says The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, in this case the strategy may be more successful because Barack Obama is not just any president: [T]hrow in race, and stuff can get weird. Buttons that sit way down deep in people’s psyches, buttons that are usually dormant, can be activated. And it can’t be good for Obama to have to walk over those coals again. The question remains, not quite conclusively answered last time, as to how much anti-American stuff Obama actually heard while sitting in Wright’s pews. The fact is that racial fear-mongering has, alas, a pretty impressive record in presidential politics. The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel points out that raising the specter of the Rev. Wright was not entirely effective for the GOP challenger to Obama, Sen. John McCain, but also notes that Ricketts’ plan tries to compensate for that fact: As for how the strategists plan to get around the problem Mr. McCain’s campaign faced — it’s an unpopular, race-baiting position — the proposal suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American”as spokesperson. Mr. Ricketts hasn’t addressed the proposal, but it seems written to reflect his beliefs. He is quoted in the report, called “The Ricketts Plan,”saying that if voters had seen a scrapped McCain ad linking President Obama to Rev. Dr. Wright, “they’d never have elected Barack Obama.” At Slate, Matthew Yglesias says that the political effectiveness and even the tastefulness of the proposal isn’t really the issue: It’s psychologically comforting to many conservatives to believe that Obama won in 2008 not because of the extremely unpopularity of the GOP, but because the media failed to “vet the prez” and expose his links to black radicalism. If you’re Fred Davis or any other consultant eager to help himself to a slice of Ricketts’ $10 million investment, coming up with a cost-effective plan for damaging Obama’s re-election campaign is pointless. What you want to do is come up with a plan that appeals to Ricketts’ sensibilities and makes him want to spend the money. Politico’s Alexander Burns thinks the proposed ads may be less about Mitt Romney’s campaign and more about announcing the arrival of an evolving GOP donor in a big way: The Ricketts super PAC is a new arrival on the outside spending scene — it gave Republican Deb Fischer an essential boost ahead of this week’s Nebraska Senate primary — and is evidently looking to get a lot of attention in short order. An incendiary anti-Obama ad from Fred Davis (the man behind, among many other spots, McCain’s “celebrity” ad, Pete Hoekstra’s “Debbie Spend-It-Now” and Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch”) would be one way to do that. (Photo: Getty Images)