Joe Ricketts Rejects Plan to Finance Anti-Obama Ads Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, which is owned by the family of Joe Ricketts. Joe Ricketts, an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire whose varied holdings include a name-brand brokerage firm in Omaha, a baseball team in Chicago, herds of bison in Wyoming and a start-up news Web site in New York, wanted to be a player in the 2012 election. On Thursday he was, though not in the way he had intended. Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world. Highlighting the perils of mixing partisan politics and corporate citizenship, the reverberations also swept through the Ricketts family's business empire. Liberal groups encouraged like-minded investors to drop their accounts with TD Ameritrade, the brokerage firm Mr. Ricketts founded. His family's plan to seek public financing for improvements to Wrigley Field, home of their baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ran into new political opposition. And he was forced to write a letter to reporters at his New York news organization, DNAinfo.com, assuring them he believed that "my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work." By early afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration. The episode all but ensured that Republicans would remain under intense pressure not to invoke Mr. Wright's provocative statements so directly for the balance of the campaign. And, in a year when the loosened system of campaign finance regulations is encouraging wealthy individuals to weigh in on behalf of candidates and causes, Mr. Ricketts became a case study in the risks of political neophytes with big checkbooks seeking to play at the highest and roughest levels of politics. After a storied career, Mr. Ricketts, 70, set out to break into the exclusive but growing new fraternity of megarich, conservative "super PAC" donors, people willing - and permitted as never before - to pour millions of dollars into influencing an election. He has seemed motivated primarily by his belief that government spending is out of control and that Mr. Obama cannot be trusted to rein in the deficit and reduce the national debt. But associates acknowledged that his experience on Thursday, when a confidential proposal for the Wright campaign became public in The New York Times, helped hammer home the high stakes of his decision to initiate discussions with some of the most seasoned and aggressive strategists in Republican politics about going after Mr. Obama in a high-profile way. The proposal was drafted under the leadership of Fred Davis, a veteran political advertising strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and, most recently, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah. In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said the plan Mr. Davis's team submitted was "merely a proposal" and "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." The president and general counsel of the Ending Spending Political Action Fund, Brian Baker, said through a spokesman that the plan was submitted to a group that included him and two of Mr. Ricketts's sons at a meeting in Chicago last week. "I was surprised and troubled by what I saw," he said. It was not what we asked for. But on Wednesday, when Mr. Baker was asked in an interview whether Mr. Ricketts had rejected the advertising proposal, he said only that no decisions had been made. A page in the proposal about potential staff members for the effort says, "With your preliminary approval at the New York meeting, we have discussed this plan in highly confidential terms with the following proposed team members," who, it says, are "ready to jump into action upon plan approval." Associates of Mr. Ricketts acknowledged that upon seeing a commercial Mr. Davis produced in 2008 for Mr. McCain featuring Mr. Wright, which Mr. McCain rejected, Mr. Ricketts said. If the nation had seen that ad, they'd never have elected Barack Obama. The quote was highlighted in the proposal. Mr. Ricketts was shown the commercial at an initial meeting at Mr. Davis's offices in California, which Mr. Ricketts requested as he sought to build a team of top Republican strategists to lead his foray into the presidential campaign. Aides acknowledge that a second meeting followed in New York, where, they say, he gave Mr. Davis general directions to move ahead with a proposal that would create maximum impact for $10 million but did not specifically approve one based on Mr. Wright. After retiring from Ameritrade's board in 2011, Mr. Ricketts began putting more energy into philanthropy and politics, initially with a nonpartisan group Taxpayers Against Earmarks. After Congress banned earmarks, the group shifted into a debt-focused organization, Ending Spending. The effort Mr. Davis was working on would have been undertaken by the group's political arm, the Ending Spending Action Fund. Though newer to presidential politics, Mr. Ricketts has long been politically active in Nebraska. He was defeated in a local race for Republican Party chairman because he was seen as too moderate. He was a prolific donor to state candidates, investing money for ads that helped influence a United States Senate race this week. Mr. Ricketts is described by friends as difficult to characterize politically. Kitty Bennett and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting