Posted on 06/17/2004 4:32:00 AM PDT by SJackson
Back in 1980, the late Terry Dolan, chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), asked me to head up an independent effort supporting Ronald Reagan’s campaign against President Jimmy Carter. Dolan felt he could raise substantial funds and quickly persuaded me to sign on.
Independent expenditures of the sort we planned were perfectly legal as long as we resisted the temptation to coordinate any of our activities with the official campaign. We spent nearly $3 million (a lot of money in those days) and like to think we helped Reagan drive Carter from the White House.
At about the same time, a number of establishment Republicans led by Rod Hills, who had served as President Ford’s counsel, launched a similar effort to be financed by raising big bucks not from activists but from more traditional givers within the business community. Their effort failed for many of the same reasons this year’s effort to match the Democrats in forming and raising money for the so-called “527” independent groups is running into trouble.
It didn’t take Fred Wertheimer, who headed Common Cause at the time, long to file Federal Election Commission complaint charging that the Hills effort was, in fact, something less than independent and therefore could not legally accept contributions for an independent-expenditure campaign. The charges were essentially baseless, but they had the desired impact: The money Hills and his friends were expecting never materialized.
I ran into Wertheimer at a party just after the charges were filed and asked him why Common Cause targeted Hills and ignored us. He told me quite candidly that he believed the charges alone — provable or not — would be enough to derail the Hills effort but that the kind of people we were relying on for our money probably couldn’t be as easily “scared off.”
Wertheimer was right. The ideological contributors we were counting on may not have had the deep pockets of Hills’s big givers, but they truly believed in Ronald Reagan and were ready to put their values and their money on the line regardless of what Common Cause might say.
The problem the organizers of Republican 527 groups face today is that there aren’t many Republican or conservative givers with the deep commitment of a Jane Fonda or the resources of a George Soros. Conservative true believers tend to give what they can, but that’s usually more like a hundred dollars than a million. By way of contrast, Soros, Progressive Insurance Corp. Chairman Peter Lewis and Hollywood’s Stephen Bing has each already given more than $7 million to liberal or Democratic 527s.
A lot of rich Republican-leaning business types out there would write sizeable individual and corporate checks to the party if they could, and many, many more would be willing to contribute a couple of thousand dollars to President Bush’s re-election campaign, but very are few willing to give big bucks to a conservative independent effort, even one organized by well-known fellow establishmentarians.
There are good reasons for that. Non-ideological contributors tend to be politically risk-averse. Giving to a party (or both parties) is safe; giving to a 527 might bring scrutiny and criticism. The GOP benefits from the activities of nonparty and non-sanctioned groups, but party leaders have never really appreciated or encouraged them.
Indeed, the leaders have tended to see the groups as competitors and have actively discouraged the party’s best supporters from contributing to the groups.
And, finally, few big GOP givers are ideological, self-motivated conservatives. There is no conservative George Soros, and it is virtually impossible to imagine three people giving anything like $7 million each to independent Republican or conservative organizations. Rich Democrats are often strong liberals; rich Republicans tend to be moderates.
A former GOP national chairman predicted last year that this would be a problem once McCain/Feingold became law. “If they can’t give to the party, their money is more likely to go to the Sierra Club and Common Cause than to the American Conservative Union or the National Rifle Association,” he said.
As a result, Democratic 527s are on track this year to raise and spend as much as $300 million to take out Bush, while their Republican counterparts will be lucky to raise 10 percent of that.
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David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental affairs firm.
A democrat has to fund their groups because government is the source of all ecconomic power for them. A Republican is not dependent on government and does not fund it.
I also believe it is a faux fear of funding both sides. The uber-rich better get a clue, the democrat party is out and if it gets back in they are screwed.
The ueber-rich have been socialized into feeling guilt about owning what they do.
The real punishment will be handed to the upper middle class.
Hey, I'm making money as fast as I can without screwing third-world countries.
He should feel guilt. Evil scum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros
the Soros of the Republican Party is the Silent Majority,,,,
I remember when Richard Scaife was giving a half million or so to the one independent group that was making an issue of the numerous Clinton scandals. The libs went nuts over that. Now they've got their own sugar daddy giving them over ten times what Scaife had donated and that's just peachy keen. The Rats using double standards and being hypocritical again? Why, I never heard of such a thing...
The first question jumps right out: NOW?! You're waiting until a court tells you its ok when the legislation already did?
And, of course, at first glace, this seems to be yet another instance where the GOP has been caught flat-footed. If the GOP is as evil and rich that the dems claim, then we should be able to scurry up a BILLION dollars inside of a few days. Right? Well, the truth is that we don't have a George Soros --a corrupt, truly evil man himself with billions to burn.
And don't you love the fact that the 527s can't "coordinate" with the "official" campaign. Ok, right. Yeah. No, a dem/Kerry staffer wouldn't go out and get a Hotmail and a Soros operative at one of the 527s won't do the same, right? And, they won't "happen to" bump into each other. And, they won't "happen to" exchange emails. And they won't "happen to" coordinate every single strategy that the Kerry campaign and the DNC has formulated.
Right. That won't happen. </sarcasm>
Of course it will happen and probably will happen on both sides. And that's the really "crime" of CFR. For a bill that was supposed to get the corrupting money out of politics (did anyone really believe that?), it has spawn a bunch of wanna-be-James-Bond-like-politicos exchanging "strategies" over email. Woooo. Aren't they cool?
The whole thing is a joke.
The dems have a sizable war chest, considering Sugar Daddy Soros' funding. The GOP, on the other hand, has done the majority of its funding raising through the Bush/Cheney campaign...and, in large part, those donations have come from more active memebers of the "silent majority".
I do realize that on election day is when it counts. I just hope that the silent majority sees through the dems lies.
But we are not the filthy rich crooks like Soros.
We are the enterpreneurs from the heartland
Our national stage is small town America, not the amoral cesspools of Hollywood and New York liberal activism!
It seems to me the lack of money from Rich republicans is the result of the fear these people have they will get the public treatment that Richard Scaife, got, millions of dollars worth of press time, being labeled as an extremeist. Look at the fellow who owns "curves" he is being subjected to a public campaign to dissuade women from attending his excersize centers, just because he is a Christian and is supposedly pro-life. Any conservative that ventures forward becomes a target of the slurs and innuendos of the major media. Look at how Soros is rpeatedly referred to as a humanitarian, and how they mention that he has given away mega-millions to "promote" democracy, a fine self sacrificing phrase that is misleading and positive. That is why, the big guys don't step forward.
Baloney! The uber-rich vote democratic because they get enormous tax breaks. The evidence is two part. One is the recent release of T.Heinze's tax records. She pays way below the tax rate of her income bracket. Another, would be Dan Rather's interview of Bill Gate's father. Bill Gate's father basically said that people wouldn't even give to these liberal charities if there weren't tax breaks . Then check out how partisan the charities are towards Dems. They are basically PR firms for the Dems.
You make a good point. Remember that the Rats defended for eight long years a patently corrupt President by repeatedly trotting out the "that's just a coincidence" argument when all these (obviously coordinated) things were going on. You had Hillary! going on TV in her pink dress and her whole argument was "you can't prove that", like she was Bart Simpson's alter ego or something. It's just so easy to set up anonymous and covert communications and coordinate things in secret. Hell, the spooks and military have been doing it for years. The fact that the law says "you're not supposed to do it" means nothing to rats whose primary motivation is to win elections, not do the right thing and play by the rules.
The pols who every now and then latch onto the "campaign finance reform" bandwagon are just putting on a show. There's a million ways around those restrictions, as Soros and the Rats have shown time and time again. They're playing the American public for suckers (and they're right).
I definitely think there's something to that. Of course it's a gross exaggerration, there are corrupt RINOs, but overall it's frighteningly truthful.
Think about all the money that's being pumped into the campaign for both sides. Here's Soros, a lunatic, throwing gobs of money into a CAMPAIGN with a great possibility that it will all be for naught. He could use that money to invest in a new business which offers jobs and salaries to people in the long term. Instead, he just gives it indirectly to the DNC.
The government is this guy's God. He is apparently offering it up, burning it as a sacrifice so his version of totalitarianism can possibly be emplaced.
I actually want the Dems to give MORE of their money to this Rathole candidate. The quicker they go broke, the better.
And .. since Bush has already raised twice as much as Kerry, we don't need a Soros to bail us out.
Have been asking this for a long time.
Oh the other hand,
[you have different fingers] . . .
I suspect God Almighty is going to weigh in heavily in behalf of Bush.
Could be rather like Charleston Heston's Moses putting a brick on the scales against Yul Brenner's Pharoh's son.
Should be interesting. Let us do our part in praying and influencing our network!
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