Sunday, July 15, 2012 8:47:24 AM
Karl Rove Gave Secret Speech Outside Romney Donor Retreat
Peter H. Stone
Posted: 07/09/2012 2:18 pm Updated: 07/09/2012 3:20 pm
WASHINGTON -- Karl Rove was the featured speaker at a previously unreported luncheon held just outside the Mitt Romney campaign's recent retreat for high-dollar donors, according to three Republican fundraisers who attended the event.
Rove's luncheon speech did not appear on the retreat's official agenda because Romney's campaign didn't host it. Instead, the event was hosted by Solamere Capital, a private equity firm founded by Tagg Romney, the candidate's eldest son, and Spencer Zwick, the Romney campaign's chief fundraiser who is often described as Romney's "sixth son."
Rove's speech was delivered on June 22, the Friday of the retreat weekend, to about 200 wealthy guests, including quite a few money harvesters for the Romney campaign, according to GOP sources who attended but requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
In a half-hour talk followed by questions from the audience, Rove covered congressional races and the presidential contest, with some brief remarks about what the super PAC American Crossroads and an affiliated group are doing with tens of millions he helped raise to boost GOP fortunes in November, according to two GOP fundraisers who heard Rove speak.
Tagg Romney and Zwick founded Solamere in 2008, and it has enjoyed a flurry of financial successes in part because of investments by [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/us/politics/ties-to-romney-08-helped-fuel-equity-firm.html?pagewanted=all ] some longtime Romney backers like ex-eBay chieftain Meg Whitman, as well as Mitt and Ann Romney themselves, who put $10 million into the fledgling venture. Zwick referred questions about the event to a Solamere spokesperson.
Rove also made news on the Saturday morning of the gathering at a posh Utah resort, the Chateaux at Silver Lake, when he sat on a panel with Mary Matalin and Bill Kristol to discuss the media. However, his other appearance in town -- at the Solamere luncheon -- so far has made no news at all.
Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, acknowledged to The Huffington Post that "Rove gave a speech at a separate event that was unconnected to the campaign and was similar to speeches he gives across the country ... Rove made a point of not attending any of the campaign presentations."
Collegio declined to explain the timing of Rove's speech to the Solamere gathering or whether Rove was paid for it. Collegio also declined to respond to questions about whether Rove was hitting up donors at the retreat for Crossroads.
A spokesman for Solamere confirmed that Rove was the featured speaker at its separate investor conference luncheon, which was held just prior to the retreat at an adjacent hotel.
"It was not a coincidence that the Solamere conference took place in the same city just before the retreat began," said one fundraiser who went to the retreat and requested anonymity to preserve his relationship with the Romney campaign.
Rove's links to independent political groups make it illegal for him to coordinate certain activities with campaigns.
The luncheon speech on political strategy differed markedly from the publicized panel on the media the second day. And two attendees at the Romney retreat told The Huffington Post that Rove promoted his super PAC and an affiliated nonprofit, Crossroads GPS, to campaign donors during private meetings during the retreat. About 800 of the campaign's biggest fundraisers and donors were invited to the retreat in total, while a smaller, select group of donors were pitched privately by Rove, the two attendees said.
To snag retreat invitations, donors had to give a total of at least $50,000 to the campaign, the Republican National Committee and some state party committees; fundraisers had to rope in at least $100,000.
"Karl was very self-promoting the whole time he was there," said one of the three GOP fundraisers interviewed for this story. "He was pushing for Crossroads the whole time."
Rove's luncheon speech and his presence at the retreat are noteworthy because the two Crossroads groups plan to spend about $300 million this year on television ads and "get out the vote" efforts to help elect Romney and put the GOP in control of Congress.
The Rove groups were created in 2010 in the wake of high court rulings that permit corporations, individuals and unions to write unlimited checks to groups that expressly advocate for the election of candidates. By contrast, candidate campaign committees can only accept individual contributions up to $2,500 per election.
But Rove's groups and similar super PACs are legally barred from coordinating certain activities, such as advertising strategies, with campaign committees. There is nothing illegal about super PACs, or Rove personally, soliciting funds from campaign donors, as long as campaign officials are not the ones asking for unlimited donations to such PACs.
Two campaign finance lawyers and reform advocates told The Huffington Post that Rove's activities at the retreat test the legal definition of what, exactly, "coordination" is.
"The commonsense and the dictionary definition of coordination is very different from the narrow Federal Election Commission regulations defining impermissible coordination," said former Republican FEC chairman Trevor Potter in an interview. "Lots of things are coordination in fact, but are not in law."
"The fact that Rove was at the gathering presents an obvious opportunity for coordination," added Potter, who is president of the Campaign Legal Center and a strong advocate for tougher campaign finance rules. "Just being there in the middle of the campaign, surrounded by Romney strategists and campaign aides for several days, has the potential for tainting the independence of American Crossroads' advertising, depending on what conversations, if any, Rove had with campaign officials."
Other campaign finance reform advocates went further, suggesting that Rove's activities at the retreat were improper.
"This kind of activity [by Rove] is the last thing the Supreme Court had in mind when it ruled that spending by an outside group had to be 'totally independent' and 'wholly independent' from a candidate the group is supporting with expenditures," Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, said in an interview. "The FEC lives in a pure fantasy world in the way it attempts to define coordinated activities as not being coordinated activities."
A Romney campaign spokesman referred The Huffington Post to a previous statement that addressed Rove's participation on the media panel at the retreat, which has been widely reported. The statement from Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said that the campaign "is fully aware of what the law requires, and we follow both its letter and its spirit."
In remarks to MSNBC during the primaries, Romney said that he is not "allowed to communicate with super PACs in any way, shape or form."
Those comments are not quite correct. Romney attended -- and spoke at -- more than one fundraiser in 2011 for a super PAC called Restore Our Future, which was set up by three close allies who worked on his 2008 campaign and has raised over $50 million to help back his new run for the White House. Election law permits candidates to go to fundraisers for outside groups that are supporting them, but bars the candidates from personally soliciting unlimited contributions on groups' behalf.
The Romney campaign released few details about the retreat at the Chateaux at Silver Lake. Reporters who flew out to Utah mostly scrambled for details and anecdotes as scores of wealthy donors and politicos came and went, according to press accounts. Among the big-name attendees were two former secretaries of state, James Baker III and Condoleezza Rice, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
As for Rove's presence at the retreat, press accounts so far have focused on the media panel in which he participated, along with Matalin and Kristol.
American Crossroads has long downplayed the extent of Rove's involvement with the group, while acknowledging he raises money. But this year Rove attended at least two of the group's monthly strategy meetings to discuss congressional and presidential battleground states and political advertising. The meetings, according to GOP operatives who were in attendance, typically draw about a dozen high-powered GOP operatives from other conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, and Americans for Tax Reform, which is run by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.
Rove has been instrumental in helping the two Crossroads groups land some of their largest multimillion-dollar donations. Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has been close to Rove since he worked in the Bush White House, has given at least $10 million this election cycle to the nonprofit Crossroads GPS and has recently pledged a similar sum, according to two GOP fundraisers familiar with the billionaire's political donations. Other multimillionaires and billionaires who hail from Texas and have long ties to Rove, like homebuilder Bob Perry and investor Harold Simmons, have ponied up millions more to American Crossroads.
Unlike American Crossroads, which has to publicly disclose its donors, Crossroads GPS isn't required to reveal its contributors' names.
This year, that money helped pay for tens of millions of Crossroads' attack ad spots focused heavily on the Obama administration's health care reforms, economic policies and other issues in an effort to help Romney win the White House and put the GOP in control of Congress.
It was fitting that Rove -- whose fundraising success for the two groups is heavily based on tapping networks of wealthy donors with whom he is familiar -- was given the featured speaking role at the Solamere investor conference. The firm's own website boasts [ http://www.solameregroup.com/page/1/strategy.html ] that its partners succeed in investing by "leveraging their unparalleled networks."
Rove wasn't the only politico at the retreat with strong ties to super PACs or nonprofit groups that have raised tens of millions of dollars to help Romney and Republican candidates win this fall. According to news reports, and confirmed by the GOP fundraisers, Charlie Spies, one of the three founders of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, was also at the retreat, as were former Sen. Norm Coleman and venture capitalist Fred Malek, who are, respectively, the chairman and founder of the American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on helping the GOP keep a majority in the House.
Malek, a veteran GOP fundraiser, said that he's raising money not only for the AAN but also for the Romney campaign and for the Republican Governors Association. "I've never seen donors and potential donors more unified and energized as they are this year," Malek told HuffPost.
That's what both Rove and the Romney campaign are banking on.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/karl-rove-speech_n_1656013.html [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76925118 and preceding and following
===
Sherrod Brown Target Of $1 Million Ad Campaign By Crossroads GPS
Sen. Sherrod Brown is facing the greatest cash flood by outside conservative groups in a Senate race.
07/10/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/sherrod-brown-crossroads-gps-1-million-ad-campaign_n_1660470.html [with comments]
===
Tax-Exempt Groups Shield Political Gifts of Businesses
By MIKE McINTIRE and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: July 7, 2012
American Electric Power, one of the country’s largest utilities, gave $1 million last November to the Founding Fund, a new tax-exempt group that intends to raise most of its money from corporations and push for limited government.
The giant insurer Aetna directed more than $3 million last year to the American Action Network [ http://americanactionnetwork.org/ ], a Republican-leaning nonprofit organization that has spent millions of dollars attacking lawmakers who voted for President Obama’s health care bill — even as Aetna’s president publicly voiced support for the legislation.
Other corporations, including Prudential Financial, Dow Chemical and the drugmaker Merck, have poured millions of dollars more into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a tax-exempt trade group that has pledged to spend at least $50 million on political advertising this election cycle.
Two years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door for corporate spending on elections, relatively little money has flowed from company treasuries into “super PACs [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ],” which can accept unlimited contributions but must also disclose donors. Instead, there is growing evidence that large corporations are trying to influence campaigns by donating money to tax-exempt organizations that can spend millions of dollars without being subject to the disclosure requirements that apply to candidates, parties and PACs.
The secrecy shrouding these groups makes a full accounting of corporate influence on the electoral process impossible. But glimpses of their donors emerged in a New York Times review of corporate governance reports, tax returns of nonprofit organizations and regulatory filings by insurers and labor unions.
The review found that corporate donations — many of them previously unreported — went to groups large and small, dedicated to shaping public policy on the state and national levels. From a redistricting fight in Minnesota to the sprawling battleground of the 2012 presidential and Congressional elections, corporations are opening their wallets and altering the political world.
Some of the biggest recipients of corporate money are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, the federal designation for “social welfare” groups dedicated to advancing broad community interests. Because they are not technically political organizations, they do not have to register with or disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, potentially shielding corporate contributors from shareholders or others unhappy with their political positions.
“Companies want to be able to quietly push for their political agendas without being held accountable for it by their customers,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [ http://www.citizensforethics.org/ ], which has filed complaints against issue groups. “I think the 501(c)(4)’s are likely to outweigh super PAC spending, because so many donors want to remain anonymous.”
Because social welfare groups are prohibited from devoting themselves primarily to political activity, many spend the bulk of their money on issue advertisements that purport to be educational, not political, in nature. In May, for example, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies ["Crossroads GPS" http://www.crossroadsgps.org/ ], a group co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, began a $25 million advertising campaign, carefully shaped with focus groups of undecided voters, that attacks Mr. Obama for increasing the federal deficit and urges him to cut spending.
The Internal Revenue Service has no clear test for determining what constitutes excessive political activity by a social welfare group. And tax-exempt groups are permitted to begin raising and spending money even before the I.R.S. formally recognizes them. Two years after helping Republicans win control of the House with millions of dollars in issue advertising, Crossroads GPS’s application for tax-exempt status is still pending.
During the 2010 midterm elections, tax-exempt groups outspent super PACs by a 3-to-2 margin, according to a recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics [ http://www.opensecrets.org/ ] and the Center for Public Integrity [ http://www.iwatchnews.org/ ], with most of that money devoted to attacking Democrats or defending Republicans. And such groups have accounted for two-thirds of the political advertising bought by the biggest outside spenders so far in the 2012 election cycle, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group [ http://kantarmediana.com/cmag ], with close to $100 million in issue ads.
The growing role of issue groups has prompted a rash of complaints and lawsuits from watchdog organizations accusing groups like the American Action Network, Crossroads and the pro-Obama Priorities USA [ http://www.prioritiesusa.org/ ] of operating as sham charities whose primary purpose is not the promotion of social welfare, but winning elections. Efforts in Congress to force more disclosure for politically active nonprofit organizations have been repeatedly stymied by Republicans, who have described the push as an assault on free speech.
“These groups are being used as a conduit to hide from voters the identity of people and corporations who are bankrolling these television ads, which are designed to influence the outcome of elections,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.
But Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads, said, “Individuals and organizations have a First Amendment right to promote their beliefs through advertising, be that advertising against the Iraq war, against climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ] or, in the case of Crossroads, advocating for free markets and limited government.”
Labor unions — themselves among the beneficiaries of Citizens United — have also donated millions of dollars to national super PACs and state-level nonprofit groups involved in battles over government spending, collective bargaining and health care.
Donations from corporations and unions alike must be disclosed if they go to expressly political groups like super PACs.
In April, for example, the air traffic controllers’ union contributed $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC. But other contributions are harder to trace. Last year, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees gave $100,000 to Advancing Wisconsin, a tax-exempt group that supported labor’s fight with Republicans in that state; the donation was reported nowhere in Wisconsin, but it emerged in an annual financial report that unions must file with the federal Department of Labor.
Among the largest beneficiaries of corporate donations in recent years have been trade organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which largely backs Republican candidates. As a nonprofit “business league” under the tax code, the chamber does not have to disclose its supporters, who helped finance its $33 million in political ads in the 2010 midterm elections.
But voluntary disclosures by corporations — usually at the prodding of shareholder advocacy groups — shed some light on the use of trade groups for lobbying or as pass-throughs for political spending. A search of voluntary disclosures, some collected by the Center for Political Accountability [ http://www.politicalaccountability.net/ ], which advocates for transparency in corporate political spending, found more than $6 million in chamber donations by 10 companies last year.
Two of the largest came from Prudential Financial and Dow Chemical, which each gave $1.6 million, while Chevron, MetLife and Merck each gave at least $500,000. Some of the donations were directed to the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, which lobbies for limits on liability suits.
Some contributions are disclosed by accident. Aetna’s check to the American Action Network, along with a $4.5 million contribution last year to the chamber, was mistakenly included in a filing with insurance regulators. The disclosure was first reported by SNL Financial, a trade publication. Even where companies pledge voluntary disclosure of political contributions, they often make an exception for donations to tax-exempt groups.
In 2007, Aetna signed an agreement with the Mercy Investment Program, a shareholders group, to disclose trade associations to which it made large contributions. On regulatory filings, the company initially described its $3 million contribution to the Chamber of Commerce as a lobbying expense, but the company now says it was intended to finance “educational activities.”
An Aetna spokesman would not say whether the chamber donation would appear on the company’s 2011 voluntary disclosure. Sister Valerie Heinonen, the director of shareholder advocacy for Mercy Investment Services, said that a failure to do so would violate the company’s pledge.
Beyond the contributions to large, established nonprofits like the chamber and American Action Network, corporate money is also quietly shaping the political discourse through more obscure groups, none of which are required to disclose their donors.
In Minnesota last year, Express Scripts, a major drug benefit manager, gave $10,000 to a Republican-linked group, Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting, involved in a partisan fight over redrawing legislative boundaries. Express Scripts made the donation, previously unreported, because the “electoral maps in Minnesota were in doubt and we supported efforts to bring certainty to Minnesota voters,” said Brian Henry, a spokesman for the company, which is based in St. Louis. He added that the firm has a facility in Bloomington, Minn.
The reasons behind American Electric Power’s $1 million contribution to the little-known Founding Fund are less clear. The company characterized it as “lobbying” in a corporate governance disclosure last year, but the fund says it does no lobbying. The fund, whose address is a mail drop in Alexandria, Va., would not make any of its directors available for an interview.
The fund’s treasurer, Frank Sadler, is a lobbyist who previously worked for Koch Industries advising nonprofit groups that support free market causes, although he said the Kochs, major Republican donors, were not involved in the group. In its public filings, the fund said it expected to raise about $10 million this election cycle, primarily from corporations, and use it to promote free markets and “the narrowing of the scope and reach of the federal government.”
A spokesman for American Electric Power, Pat D. Hemlepp, said the company supports organizations “with positions on issues that align with AEP’s positions” and strives to be transparent on political giving. “We also respect the positions of others, including some of the organizations that receive funding from AEP, to not publicly disclose funding or activities. That’s their right under the law.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76512619 and preceding and following
===
Rove hits big: The birth of a mega-donor
The Billion-Dollar Buy: About this series
Like never before, big dollars are having a big impact on politics and governance. This series examines how the new wide-open fundraising landscape will affect the 2012 campaigns.
See also:
Inside Koch world
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77453.html
GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and STEVE FRIESS | 7/13/12 4:36 AM EDT
In the new Wild West of giving and getting campaign money, the marriage of casino mogul Steve Wynn and political guru Karl Rove was an exceptionally powerful — and secretive — one.
Wynn, the flamboyant Las Vegas billionaire who claims to have voted for [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/An_unlikely_Obama_voter.html ] President Barack Obama in 2008, was the perfect get for Rove. Wynn was loaded, had soured on Obama and was just the kind of wealthy businessman who could help underwrite a plan hatched by Rove and other influential conservatives to spend close to $1 billion [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ] total to win the White House, Senate and House in 2012. Wynn, a registered Democrat until recently, was reluctant to attach his name to any high-dollar gambles on the GOP, worried that Obama’s allies would make him a bogeyman [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76899.html ]. So Rove — who helped develop Crossroads GPS [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39998.html ] in 2010, one of a growing roster of non-profit groups [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36841.html ] that can now accept unlimited contributions for hard-hitting political ads — was a perfect get for Wynn, too. Rove knows all the players — and the groups he works with are skilled at minimizing media attention to their financial whales.
The courting, which took place in direct conversations and through friends and allies of both men, produced big results. Wynn has kicked in millions to Crossroads GPS, according to multiple sources.
And Rove, who attended Wynn’s gala wedding [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/norm-121074349.html ] last year in Vegas, recently got something of a personal bonus out of the relationship. After Wynn attended the veteran operative’s wedding last month in Austin — an intimate and until-now unreported affair also attended by former President George W. Bush — Rove and his new wife Karen Johnson [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2011/03/love_etc_karl_rove_and_laura_j.html ] flew to Naples, Italy, aboard Wynn’s Boeing 737 [ http://www.planepictures.net/netshow.php?id=1022737 ] — a nearly 11-hour, 6,000-mile trip [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120711_wynnrove.html ] that could cost tens of thousands [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120711_wynnrove2.html ] of dollars from a charter jet carrier. Wynn joined Rove in Italy [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/wynn_rove.html ].
This story, stitched together by talking to numerous people familiar with the Rove-Wynn courtship, as well as a review of federal records, illustrates how one of the biggest changes to politics in a generation — the explosion of unlimited secret money [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60731.html ] — really works.
(PHOTOS: Republican money men [ http://www.politico.com/gallery/2012/05/republican-money-men/000178-002033.html ] )
Simply put: any person, corporation or union can spend as much as they want to directly influence elections through hard-hitting television ads without anyone else knowing. Republicans and their allies have had exceptional success exploiting this dynamic, which really took off after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31786.html ].
Think of the conservatives as matchmakers of sorts: Avenues for secret political spending would be meaningless if it weren’t for rich folks like Wynn with the means and desire to write huge checks to influence politics and governance. But they also need operatives like Rove and his interwoven group of allies [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74506.html ] to guide the mega-donors through the clubby and byzantine world of big-money politics.
The political team Wynn assembled in the last few years to facilitate his political escalation is a case in point. His lobbyist Charlie Spies [ http://www.politico.com/gallery/2012/05/republican-money-men/000178-002148.html ] co-founded the Restore Our Future [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57705.html ] super PAC to boost Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential campaign. Another co-founder was Carl Forti [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43731.html ], the political director of Crossroads GPS.
Spies and Forti worked together on Romney’s 2008 campaign — along with Wynn’s corporate government affairs director Mike Britt, who worked in George W. Bush’s political shop under Rove.
While Restore Our Future, Crossroads GPS and an affiliated super PAC called American Crossroads have already spent tens of millions [ http://www.politico.com/morningscore/0712/morningscore631.html ] of dollars boosting Romney’s presidential bid and assailing [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/crossroads-gps-unleashes-new-million-blitz-128163.html ] Obama’s [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/crossroads-gps-unleashes-new-million-blitz-128163.html ], they’re legally prohibited from coordinating [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55911.html ] with Romney’s campaign. Still, Spies and Britt – who joined Wynn’s team in 2009 and 2010, respectively – were photographed together [ https://twitter.com/RomneyRetreat/status/216714694021480448/photo/1/large ] with Restore Our Future adviser Don Stirling at a retreat Romney hosted for his top donors [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77757.html ] last month in Park City, Utah, though when the photo was posted to Twitter, Britt was mistakenly identified [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-campaign-denies-twitter-rumors-of-illegal-c ] as Romney campaign finance director Spencer Zwick.
Spies and Britt wouldn’t comment on what they discussed or their roles in Wynn’s operation. But lobbying filings show [ http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=bf918d75-ff0b-4cb5-88f6-7b029730b8b0 ] Spies’s firms — first McKenna Long & Aldridge [ http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=289679cf-b8f8-42f8-8ae1-30e582f53065 ] and then Clark Hill — have been paid $375,000 [ http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000022328&year=2010 ] by the publicly traded casino-developing and management company Wynn runs, Wynn Resorts, to lobby Congress on a range of internet gambling issues and international taxation, while Britt has been involved in state government lobbying [ http://www.sec.state.ma.us/LobbyistPublicSearch/CompleteDisclosure.aspx?PeriodId=20111&RefId=753 ] for Wynn.
Rove provides political advice in private [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303812904577291450562940874.html ] to a number of donors, and several of them have written big checks to American Crossroads [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72272.html ] or Crossroads GPS. But a source familiar with GPS said Wynn was its biggest donor, at least through the end of last year. At that point, the largest check the group had reported [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroadsgps_990_2011.html ] on its tax filings [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroadsgps_990_2011.html ] was $10.1 million given between the beginning of June 2010 and the end of May 2011 [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroads2010.html ].
Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio told POLITICO “Crossroads does not comment on anonymous speculation concerning who might or might not give to the group,” and would not comment on Rove’s relationship with Wynn.
Unlike super PACs, Crossroads GPS is registered under a section of the tax code for so-called “social welfare” groups — 501(c)4 — that does not require groups to reveal their donors’ names, only donation amounts. The promise of anonymity [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44104.html ] is one of the main reasons GPS was established [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46355.html ] – it allows Wynn and like-minded contributors to avoid the controversy that has dogged [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76899.html ] top political donors like competing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77139.html ], as well as the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48464.html ] or the liberal financier George Soros [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53902.html ].
Sources tell POLITICO that Wynn’s giving to Crossroads GPS dwarfs all the publicly reported federal donations he’s ever made combined. Wynn, his company, his ex-wife and his current wife have given a total of more than $1.6 million over the years to a mix of Republicans and Democrats, according to FEC and Internal Revenue Service records. They show $654,000 in disclosed donations since 2008 going almost entirely to GOP candidates and groups — with $406,000 donated from his company to the Republican Governors Association — a change from his pre-2010 giving, which included plenty of cash to Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and their party committees.
Wynn considers Reid a friend, and his family gave $9,000 to Joe Biden’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In a statement, Wynn Resorts said, “We do not comment on specific donations; however, historically we have supported Democratic and Republican candidates for office based upon our consideration of the welfare of our employees, their families and our shareholders.”
Though Wynn has yet to donate to Restore Our Future, and bucked entreaties [ http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/romney_bets_on_saban_wynn_kiqr0OAgJpd9xZQfeRdO8K ] to publicly endorse Romney, he did attend a $50,000-a-head Romney fundraiser [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/gaming-leaders-boost-romney-155894115.html ] held in May in the Las Vegas penthouse apartment of Tim Poster, a top executive at Wynn Las Vegas. And sources tell POLITICO that Wynn and wife Andrea Wynn each donated to Romney’s campaign last month, which likely will be disclosed in FEC reports due next week.
Wynn isn’t the type to hide his political opinions, said Irwin Molasky, a Las Vegas developer who also attended the May fundraiser. Wynn “speaks his mind, he tells the truth — the way he feels.”
In fact, Wynn’s anti-Obama rants on television and his company’s earnings calls have made him something of a GOP rock star, starting with an October 2009 appearance [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/10/11/govs_granholm_daniels__wynn_zandi_on_effect_of_stimulus.html ] on Fox News Sunday in which he declared “Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history.”
Predicting that the middle- and working-classes would be hurt by the stimulus package and the proposed Democratic healthcare overhaul, Wynn jabbed Obama, asserting “soaring rhetoric and great speeches, with or without a Teleprompter, aren’t going to change the truth.”
Video of the appearance went viral and, a couple days later, Fox’s Neil Cavuto, hosting Wynn on the right-leaning network’s airwaves again, gushed to him “man, oh man, the reaction was over the top.” Wynn doubled down, telling Cavuto the Obama administration “is doing more damage than is easy to assess at the moment. But I tell you that I am sure that we’re moving in the wrong direction and I say that as half-a-Democrat and half-a-Republican. What we’re seeing now just doesn’t make sense. The priorities have all been inverted.”
He raised eyebrows when he admitted in a Fox News appearance [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy3Gk0BSkDc ] last year that he voted for Obama [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/An_unlikely_Obama_voter.html ] — an especially surprising revelation given that he and Adelson co-chaired [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/18252469.html ] the Republican National Committee’s effort to boost the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
But Molasky rejected the suggestion that Wynn had become more politically active or more Republican over the years, telling POLITICO “you’re reading much too much into this Republican thing. He votes for the person.” And he sighed when asked if Wynn was concerned that his political involvement could bring controversy that might hurt business.
“I’m sure he feels that, for business purposes, he would like to see a change and that’s not any different than a lot of business people in this country who are not afraid to give their opinion,” Molasky said. “I don’t think Steve is any different than anybody else. He is just more vocal, probably, about it — more of a public personae.”
A source with knowledge of Wynn’s political dealing had a different read. “There’s a difference between criticizing the president — lots of people do that — and becoming one of a small group of big donors whose face gets plastered on cable news [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/koch-spox-msnbc-reports-lead-to-death-threats-123817.html ] like Sheldon or the Kochs,” said the source, who did not want to be identified discussing Wynn’s motivations for keeping his biggest donations private.
“It’s a whole different level of attention,” said the source. “It’s not what Wynn wants to be known for, but he does want to make sure Obama goes down.”
In a particularly memorable conference call [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59333.html ] last year to discuss his company’s earnings with Wall Street analysts, Wynn compared Obama’s rhetoric to that of “pure socialists,” and asserted “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the president of the United States.” Calling himself a “Democratic businessman,” though he had switched his registration to Republican [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120712_wynn.html ] more than a year earlier, Wynn called the Obama administration “the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”
The line echoed a Republican talking point in Washington. And the Senate Republican conference began including clips of Wynn’s criticisms of Obama in some of its weekly video montages highlighting effective conservative messaging for senators, a senior GOP Senate aide said.
But one top Wall Street gambling industry analyst suggested Wynn’s politicking is wearing on some in the finance sector. “At some point, it’s like, ‘Give it a rest, Steve,’” said the analyst, who did not want to be named. “Earnings calls are meant to give status about the company and discuss data. But for the past year or so, it’s one anti-Obama diatribe after another. And yet look at his stock under Obama. It’s tripled since the worst of the recession.”
Wynn’s outspokenness also has caused tension in his relationship with Reid, whose political committees have reported receiving $64,000 over the years from Wynn and his ex-wife Elaine Wynn.
Wynn called Reid to express frustrations [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/10/13/nevadas-close-election-harry-reids-last-stand.html ] with the Democratic health care overhaul before Reid’s 2010 reelection. Afterwards, the casino mogul teamed with his once-bitter rival Adelson to oppose an effort by Reid to slip language into a tax bill to legalize online [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46095.html ] gambling [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46095.html ]. “Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn called members personally to tell them that the bill wasn’t sufficient,” said a senior congressional aide.
Reid ultimately decided not to move ahead [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46221.html ] with the plan. And Wynn’s aggressiveness on the Hill, as well as his de facto alliance with Adelson, were noted by GOP insiders, who interpreted the moves as signaling a bigger footprint in Republican politics.
Both Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands corporation and Wynn Resorts have gambling operations in Macao. And the pair lately have collaborated more on political efforts, such as a 2012 fundraiser [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75220_Page2.html ] at Adelson’s Venetian hotel for a joint fundraising committee linked to House Speaker John Boehner, and a 2011 fundraiser for Rep. Dave Camp [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/adelson.html ] (R-Mich. [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/adelson.html ]) at the Wynn.
That’s a far cry from their very first meeting, which involved a disagreement over a ballroom rental. It ended with Wynn chasing Adelson out of his office, according to a 2005 Forbes story [ http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/0328/032.html ] in which Wynn said Adelson “has an inferiority complex” and “animosity toward a lot of people.” Adelson is also quoted calling Wynn “a liar” and “an egomaniac.”
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78466.html [with comments]
===
GOP winning race for funds
Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff
July 05, 2012
The top “super PACs’’ supporting Republicans in the fall elections have raised more than three times as much money as super PACs aligned with Democrats, $158 million to $47 million, a Globe analysis shows.
The imbalance comes as well-to-do Republicans have been far more generous than their Democratic counterparts, more frequently tossing as much as $1 million or more into the GOP cause.
Unless things change in the next four months, the gap could cost the Democrats the White House and both houses of Congress, no less an authority than President Obama said in a conference call to major Democratic donors late last week.
The president urged his top funders to step up their efforts in a system of campaign finance that permits corporations, labor unions, and individuals to give unlimited amounts to super PACs, which spend independently of candidates and parties.
Thus far, big Republican funders have dominated the show. At the end of May, Casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, had already contributed $20 million to super PACs supporting a Republican Congress and failed GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.Published reports have said Adelson gave a super PAC supporting presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney another $10 million, an amount not included in the Globe’s overall totals because it has not yet been officially reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Another Republican billionaire, Harold Simmons, his Texas-based chemicals and metals conglomerate Contran Corp., and his wife, Annette, have given a combined $18.3 million to a total of nine GOP-allied super PACs, Federal Election Commission records show.
By contrast, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg is the leading individual Democratic donor, having given $2.1 million to two pro-Democrat super PACs.
Beyond the sheer volume from some donors, the imbalance also is reflected in the number of individual entities making jumbo donations. At least 35 individuals and corporations had donated $1 million or more to Republican super PACs, compared with 16 (including seven labor unions) to Democratic groups.
The lopsided pattern also appears in the marquee presidential contest. Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, had taken in $61.5 million, more than four times the $14.6 million raised by Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting Obama, through the end of last month.
The race to tap wealthy contributors went into overdrive after 2010 federal court rulings that dramatically loosened campaign finance regulations. Individuals are still limited in how much they can give to candidates’ committees and party committees. But now super PACs are running parallel operations, collecting whatever sums people want to give; they are not supposed to coordinate their spending with candidates.
In his call last week, which the online news site Daily Beast reported after obtaining a recording, Obama told major funders: “We are going to see more money spent on negative ads through these super PACs and anonymous outside groups than ever before. And if things continue as they have so far, I’ll be the first sitting president in modern history to be outspent in his reelection campaign.”
The “anonymous outside” groups Obama referred to are politically active nonprofit organizations, the most active of which are on the Republican side, set up under the tax code to promote “social welfare” and not required to disclose their donors. Super PACs must disclose their contributors.
Republicans say their supporters are kicking in millions in direct response to Obama’s presidency.
“There are conservative donors who are dramatically motivated by the explosion of spending, regulations, and debt under this president, and there is a great desire to put the brakes on his agenda,” said Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for American Crossroads, a muscular GOP super PAC that has attacked Obama and Democrats running for Congress and had raised $34.3 million through the end of May.
Democrats, including the president on his conference call, have said Democrats may be contributing less because they are overconfident the president can beat Romney or they are disillusioned by the slow pace of promised change in Washington. But there also is a deep philosophical objection to the system of unlimited spending that has blossomed since the January 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which said corporations and unions could spend as much as they pleased to influence elections. Others don’t want their money to be spent on negative advertising, said Democratic fund-raisers and spokesmen for wealthy donors.
For instance, the only super PAC donation this cycle by Peter Lewis, who made his fortune as head of Progressive Insurance, was $200,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, which specializes in research it shares with Democratic-leaning groups.
“He finds the corrupting power of money offensive with its negativity and denigration of opponents,” Jennifer Frutchy, his spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. He has no other plans to give to super PACs this year, she said, preferring instead “to build progressive infrastructure.”
In the 2004 cycle, Lewis gave $23.2 million to independent groups that supported Democrats, the second most of any individual, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
In some respects, the 2012 money race is a reverse image of 2004, when big Democratic donors, animated by intense opposition to Republican incumbent George W. Bush, heavily outspent rival GOP givers to underwrite expensive field operations and advertising paid for by independent groups. The effort failed to capture the presidency, however, and some Democratic activists believe that failure has dampened enthusiasm this year.
In 2004, of the 24 individuals who gave $2 million or more to independent groups, 14 were Democrats. They donated a combined $109 million compared with $39 million donated by 10 Republicans, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Billionaire financier George Soros, who led all donors with $23.7 million to independent Democratic groups, in this cycle so far has targeted only about $2.2 million to independent groups, with the lion’s share going to organizations that engage in research or grass-roots liberal advocacy.
“He’s given $1 million each to [America Votes] and [American Bridge 21st Century],” his spokesman, Michael Vachon, said in an e-mail. “As to what he will do in the future, I don’t know.”
Similarly, FEC records show that film producer Stephen Bing, who gave $13.9 million to independent groups supporting Democrats in 2004, has donated $425,000 to super PACs this cycle — $250,000 to Majority PAC, which is trying to elect Democrats to the Senate, $150,000 to American Bridge, and $25,000 to the League of Conservation Voters.
Bing “does not comment on these matters,” Paul Bloch, a spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.
© 2012 NY Times Co.
http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-05/news/32553762_1_pacs-federal-election-commission-priorities-usa-action
===
Can the Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC Game?
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Video [embedded]
Democrats’ Super-PAC Operatives
More in the Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Bill Burton (second from right), aboard Marine One on Aug. 9, 2010, is now a principal of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that is trying to get his former boss (center) re-elected.
Pete Souza/The White House
By ROBERT DRAPER
Published: July 5, 2012
One day in April, Paul Begala, a former Bill Clinton political strategist and CNN analyst, placed a phone call to a wealthy and left-leaning 41-year-old Houston lawyer named Steve Mostyn. Begala is himself a Texan, albeit one who gives off the jittery vibe of a Catskills comedian, and the two men have a few friends in common. But Mostyn, a frequent giver to Democratic causes, quickly intuited that this wasn’t a social call. Begala reminded Mostyn that he was now working as a consultant for Priorities USA Action, a so-called super PAC [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ] run by Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, former White House senior staff members, that was committed to Barack Obama’s re-election. He and Burton would be coming to Houston on Friday, April 13, Begala said. Could they arrange for a meeting?
“I’ll be in Fort Lauderdale that day on my boat,” Mostyn replied. “You’re welcome to join me there.”
The invitation was not thoroughly sincere, evidenced by the fact that Mostyn did not inform Begala where his boat would be docked. Nonetheless, at noon sharp on Friday the 13th, Begala (who is prone to seasickness) and Burton (who had taken a red-eye flight from San Francisco, where he spent the previous afternoon giving his pitch to wealthy progressives at the Telegraph Hill home of the Taco Bell heir Rob McKay), materialized at the correct Fort Lauderdale marina, each wearing jeans and bearing iPads.
For the uninitiated, “boat” is Texan for “yacht.” Burton and Begala climbed aboard the outsize Mostyn vessel, All or Nothing, and the attractive first mate handed them cans of Michelob Ultra. A four-hour conversation ensued. Mostyn and his wife, Amber (who is also an attorney), were congenial but blunt. They were not fans of super PACs — political action committees that can receive unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions, usually for the purpose of saturating the airwaves with attack ads — and were appalled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which made such entities possible. For that matter, the Mostyns weren’t entirely happy with Obama. The president had been far too accommodating to Republicans — “naïve,” as Amber Mostyn expressed it.
“We hear that a lot,” Burton conceded. Burton was a White House deputy press secretary under Obama, and at age 34, he has spent his career as a happy warrior spewing Democratic messages from behind a lectern or on cable TV. But a big part of his new role involves shutting up and listening to rich Democrats vent about his former boss’s deficiencies. Gently he reminded his hosts, “But things will only be worse if he’s not re-elected.”
The Mostyns acknowledged not wanting to see Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. Still, they wondered how any donation could possibly make a difference. “They’re spending ridiculous amounts of money on the other side,” Amber Mostyn said. “All the crazy commercials they’re going to put up — how do you combat that?”
Burton was ready for this question. “You don’t do it dollar for dollar,” he said. He whipped out his iPad and showed the Mostyns a few slides from his PowerPoint presentation. The slides included polling data indicating voters’ lack of familiarity with Romney’s business record at the private-equity firm Bain Capital, as well as financial figures from the 2010 midterm election showing how well-spent donations could help a Democrat prevail over a better-financed Republican opponent.
Then Burton pulled up something else on his screen: raw video footage that Priorities intended to use for attack ads against Romney. Appearing were the somber images of several men and women who were laid off by Bain. The individuals were tracked down by Brennan Bilberry, the super PAC’s 26-year-old research director, and persuaded to tell their stories on camera. One of these was a middle-aged paper-mill worker named Mike Earnest, who had been asked to help build a 30-foot stage that Bain officials would later stand upon while announcing to Earnest and other millworkers that they were being laid off. “Turns out that when we built that stage,” Earnest said in a flat Midwestern cadence, “it was like building my own coffin.”
Steve Mostyn was impressed by their research. He asked them what sort of donation they were talking about.
“One million dollars,” was the reply. The Mostyns had never given anywhere near that kind of money to a candidate in the past.
“And we’d like it right away,” Burton said. He explained that TV ad rates were cheaper to buy far in advance.
Defining the opponent early was crucial, Begala pointed out. “That’s what we did to Bob Dole in 1996,” he said. “It’s what the Bush campaign did to John Kerry in 2004.”
Burton added, “Because voters at this point don’t know much about Romney, every dollar we spend now is worth more, exponentially.”
Amber Mostyn wanted to know how they were going to re-energize a Democratic base that has been disillusioned.
That’s not our role, Burton explained. Though presidential campaigns and their supporting super PACs are forbidden to communicate with one another, a division of labor was mutually understood. It was up to the Obama campaign to be the keeper of the president’s story, Burton said. Priorities would focus on “defining” Romney, and in the process, destroying him. And to do that, it needed the Mostyns and many people like them to get over their distaste for the Citizens United decision and their frustration with the president and write a very large check, because that’s what was happening every day on the other side.
Burton and his best friend, Sean Sweeney, are knockaround political operatives from working-class backgrounds who had never spent a day in the genteel stratum of fund-raising before they started their super PAC 16 months ago. Their chief qualification for the job, beyond the fact that no one else wanted it, was their shared appreciation for the devastating work that well-financed outside groups can do.
Burton and Sweeney both worked for Rahm Emanuel during the 2006 midterm elections, when Emanuel was directing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s successful drive to win back the House. Unions and other outside groups played a huge role during that cycle by tarring-and-feathering Republicans as corrupt and wedded to the increasingly unpopular policies of President George W. Bush. In the spring of 2008, a Democratic PAC calling itself Progressive Media USA, whose advisers included Begala, began to raise tens of millions of dollars from big-name donors to pay for attack ads against John McCain. The intent was to keep Progressive Media in place well after the election as a magnet for deep-pocketed progressives; as one of its organizers wistfully told me, “Imagine where we’d be if we had that in place four years later.” But the Obama campaign — which was building its own fund-raising behemoth, even at the expense of the candidate’s earlier pledge to accept public financing and the spending cap that came with it — didn’t want outside interference. The campaign sent out a 30-year-old spokesman named Bill Burton to shut Progressive Media down by telling the press, “From the beginning of this race, Obama has told supporters that if they want to help his effort, they should do so through his campaign.”
Two years later, President Obama repeatedly denounced the conservative super PACs that had cropped up in the wake of the Citizens United decision. In so doing, Obama ended up unilaterally disarming Democrats while animating Republicans. “When Obama attacked us by name in the fall of 2010, accusing us of taking money from the Chinese, it was basically the best fund-raising pitch we could’ve made,” says Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC conceived by Karl Rove and the Republican consultant Ed Gillespie. “We raised $13 million the week after they attacked us.” Burton and Sweeney watched from the White House — more with rueful admiration than moral outrage — as the Republicans turned the tables, outspending Democratic groups by $100 million and taking back the House.
Three months after the midterms, Burton learned that he was not chosen to succeed Robert Gibbs as White House press secretary. Gibbs had not recommended his deputy for the job (which went to Vice President Joseph Biden’s spokesman, Jay Carney) — perhaps, as some have suggested, because of Burton’s youth, or because the deputy had openly campaigned for the job after having been requested not to do so. Several in the White House, including the president, urged Burton to stay on. Whatever Gibbs and others might have found lacking in him, he had proved himself to be an agile stand-in for the press secretary, one who seemed to relish trading punches with Fox News hosts.
Burton is one of those ever-ascending Washingtonians whose brazen optimism seems not to have been dampened in the slightest by the cynical world he inhabits. When asked how he’s doing, he routinely, and often defiantly, replies, “Best day of my life.” He has been a political spokesman his entire adult life and is married to a former Clinton White House aide, Laura Burton Capps, herself the daughter of Congresswoman Lois Capps and Congressman Walter Capps.
The son of a metal-foundry worker in Buffalo who, Burton says, “was on his feet on concrete floors all day, carrying 50-pound bags of different chemical alloys and inhaling the world’s worst pollutants,” Burton learned two things by the time he was 11. The first — which arrived as an epiphany while watching the 1988 vice-presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle on the family’s black-and-white TV — was that “I wanted to be in politics, and I wanted to be at the highest level.”
The second revelation was that he was black. Burton’s father was African-American and his mother was Polish. One day in elementary school he identified himself as “other” on a standardized test. “My fifth-grade teacher said, ‘No, you’re black — mark that you’re black,’ ” he told me. “I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m black.’ Just another piece of information.” With little effort, he navigated both sides of the racial divide, reserving his energies for political climbing. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1999, he made repeated visits to the campus office of Al Gore’s presidential campaign, wearing them down until they gave him the title of deputy press secretary. At age 22, he took a job on the Hill as a Congressional aide.
But presidential politics was Burton’s goal. Leveraging every Washington contact he had, Burton persuaded Senator Tom Harkin (who campaigned for the presidency in 1992) to hire him as his press secretary. When Harkin elected to stay out of the 2004 race, Burton jumped ship and became Dick Gephardt’s communications director in Iowa. When Gephardt faltered, the gabby and incessant Burton joined the Kerry campaign.
In late 2006, Burton managed to network his way into a job interview with Senator Barack Obama, whose famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention Burton watched “over and over, the way some kids have seen ‘Star Wars’ a hundred times,” he told me. The two men spoke only briefly of their shared biracial experience. Instead, the Iowa caucuses were on the senator’s mind. Burton had experience there. He recalls suggesting that Obama shoot for “a respectable third place, maybe an unlikely second.” Obama disagreed. He assured Burton that he would win Iowa. Soon after, Burton became one of the earliest senior staff members to join Obama’s underdog campaign.
Though his ambitions eventually met a brick wall with the news that he would not be the White House’s top spokesman, Burton was not going to let a bruised ego befoul relationships that he spent years cultivating. As the deputy press secretary was leaving the building in February of last year, it happened that his pal Sean Sweeney — who had been the top aide to Rahm Emanuel, until Emanuel decided to run for mayor of Chicago — was also in search of a new career. Sweeney is 40, dry-witted and a career backstage political technician, more than content to cede the limelight to the Burtons and Emanuels while immersing himself in the minutiae of precinct voting data and efficient ad markets. The two ex-Obamaites spent the month of February at Tunnicliff’s Tavern on Capitol Hill and halfheartedly mulled over opening a consulting shop together. But Burton had not lost his appetite for presidential politics.
Sweeney and Burton kicked around the idea of starting a pro-Obama super PAC with fellow Democrats. None of them fretted aloud that going toe to toe with Karl Rove and the Koch brothers would amount to fighting above their weight — that, as one conservative super PAC affiliate would say to me, “the more appropriate analog to Rove and Gillespie would be James Carville and Ed Rendell,” the former Pennsylvania governor. But if the chief function of a super PAC is to kneecap an opponent, the two campaign veterans seemed to have ample experience. That their profiles were relatively obscure, their financial resources meager and their fund-raising experience nonexistent did not apparently deter them.
Because they lacked the money for an office (and because, as Burton told me, “it’s a little too obvious to meet at Starbucks”), Burton and Sweeney took all of their early meetings in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. Begala was the first to sign on as a paid consultant; Terry McAuliffe, the former D.N.C. chairman, was the first to say no, citing other commitments. Teddy Johnston, the Obama campaign’s Florida finance director, became their chief fund-raiser. Sweeney knew Geoff Garin, a Democratic consultant, from when they worked together for Senator Charles E. Schumer and persuaded him to handle their polling. Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List and the America Coming Together PAC agreed to provide regular consultation. Harold Ickes, the former Clinton White House deputy chief of staff and Media Fund PAC president, became president of Priorities USA Action. He recalls warning them: “It’s hard, fund-raising. You have to raise it in big chunks. Of the $200 million we raised, $95 million of that came from five sources. And you don’t just walk in and ask for that.”
It took several weeks for Burton and Sweeney to come up with a name for their start-up. To their irritation, every slogan they considered had already been trademarked by Republicans. “We gave our lawyer 10 more names,” Burton recalls. “Then like 50. We’re literally trying every combination of whatever. You can’t come up with a name that has the word ‘future’ in it that the Republicans don’t control. Romney’s Restore Our Future — that doesn’t even make sense, and that’s probably why they were able to get it.”
Eventually they settled on Priorities USA Action. As a backhanded homage to Karl Rove, Burton and Sweeney explicitly modeled the two-headed corpus of their brainchild after American Crossroads. One side would consist of a tax-exempt political action committee covered by section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, to which named individuals and groups could donate in unlimited amounts. Its companion entity, Priorities USA, permissible under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, could, like its counterpart Crossroads GPS, receive unlimited funds by undisclosed donors, provided that the “social welfare” organization did not pursue political activities as its “primary purpose.” (The two phrases in quotation marks are, needless to say, hazily defined. “Priorities USA, like Crossroads GPS, has one purpose, and that’s to elect and defeat candidates,” says Fred Wertheimer of the campaign watchdog group Democracy 21. “They’re blowing smoke when they claim they’re a ‘social welfare’ organization in the business of discussing issues.”)
There was, however, one fundamental difference between Priorities and its conservative counterparts. According to Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ], Rove’s organization had vowed to raise $300 million for the 2012 election — which, when coupled with Restore Our Future ($100 million) and the outside groups of oil and chemical billionaires Charles and David Koch ($400 million), would amount to an $800 million war chest. Burton and Sweeney’s stated goal was $100 million.
Having conceded the arms race before it even began, the Priorities team recognized that its only hope lay in asymmetrical warfare. Making a virtue of their relative puniness, Begala told me: “Karl’s trying to be too comprehensive, playing in too many places on too many levels. He believes in throw-weight, the way the Soviet space program worked: they believed in brute force, while we believed in precision and perfection.” Priorities would be selective in its ad buys. Knowing that Obama had to keep Pennsylvania in the win column, it would reach for undecided voters in the Pittsburgh exurbs instead of playing in the expensive Philadelphia market. Similarly, Priorities would not bother trying to persuade the elderly (a group whose low support for the president has seemed immovable) but would instead pursue more promising demographic targets (non-college-educated young women in the suburbs, working-class Hispanics in Florida and the West). The pro-Obama super PAC would take dead aim at these very specific pockets of swing voters. Their weapon would be, in Begala’s words, “ruthless, relentless storytelling.”
Last December — specifically, on Pearl Harbor Day — Burton and Sweeney met with a few other Priorities advisers in the Dupont Circle office of the pollster Geoff Garin to decide just what their Romney story would be. They quickly discarded the Romney-as-flip-flopper leitmotif. To say that the Republican lacked a firm set of positions was to concede that he couldn’t be defined. Better, they concluded, to assert that Romney in fact possessed beliefs — very extreme ones.
Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing. What became clear was that voters had almost no sense of Obama’s opponent. While conducting a different focus group — this one with non-college-educated Milwaukee voters on the eve of Wisconsin’s April 3 primary — Burton and Sweeney were surprised to learn that even after Romney had spent months campaigning, many in the group could not recognize his face, much less characterize his positions. Compounding the Republican nominee’s strangely persistent obscurity is that, as Garin told me, “Romney is not a natural politician in the sense of embracing opportunities to talk about himself.”
That left an opening for the Democrats to tell Romney’s story, and over the spring they figured out how to do so. Obama’s opponent was not an ideologue per se, the Priorities team decided, but instead someone who knows and cares only about wealthy Americans. Burton describes the distinction as “a top/bottom rather than left/right approach” — also known in Republican circles as class warfare.
The best explanatory tool for this narrative would prove to be Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. In this recasting of Romney’s self-described chief qualification to be president, the candidate may well be someone who understands how the economy works but cares only about making it work for rich guys like himself. As one participant in the Priorities focus groups told me, “Businessmen are often highly admired, but there’s no real template for somebody with Mitt Romney’s type of business experience getting embraced.”
Bain-bashing is not exactly a novel gambit. Ted Kennedy employed it during Romney’s first campaign, the 1994 U.S. Senate race, and succeeded wildly. Newt Gingrich also tried it during this year’s Republican primaries, and the tactic blew up in his face, when a pro-Gingrich super PAC released an anti-Bain video full of inaccuracies, which Gingrich then disavowed. To the Beltway press, and perhaps to others as well, what Romney’s business did or didn’t do two decades ago is old news. Burton and Sweeney acknowledged this problem to me and postulated — sounding somewhat like Karl Rove as they did so — that the threat of having one’s steel mill shut down doesn’t resonate with the elite media.
But, they insisted, the message would penetrate the membrane of their target audience. More than one member of the Priorities team told me that Romney reminded them of another wooden and reserved Massachusetts politician, Burton’s former candidate in 2004, John Kerry — who, history shows, was defined and thereafter demolished by a masterful if venal tag-team consisting of the Bush campaign and the proto-super PAC Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And, as the Priorities team well knew, the Swift Boat assault on Kerry’s war record was waged with one-twentieth of the backing that the Democrats raised for their anti-Bush PACs. In other words: ruthless, relentless storytelling could be done on the cheap.
During the first 10 months of its existence, Priorities USA Action managed to raise only $7 million. (Of this, $2 million was seed money from Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation; another $1 million came from the comedian Bill Maher.) Their travails to some degree reflect the Democratic Party’s greater struggle with its prim self-perception. From the perspective of many Democrats, this year’s foray into post-Citizens United campaigning calls to mind an “Apocalypse Now”-like journey into the maw of something darker than death itself — namely, a morality-free zone in which Republicans alone can thrive. “I think that many Democrats feel that participating in the system would be validating Citizens United, which was a bad and destructive decision,” Geoff Garin says.
A sentiment commonly held by Democrats — so much so that it’s part of the standard Priorities pitch to donors — is that their only motivation to contribute is a moral one, while Republicans like the Koch brothers donate because they stand to make gobs of money if their pro-business candidate is elected. One of Priorities’ big donors told me another reason that conservatives are more suited to a post-Citizens United climate than progressives. “To me, a lot of the super-PAC money on the Republican side comes from hatred,” he said. “We Democrats just don’t hate like that.”
The idea that Democrats abhor big money and scorched-earth campaigning requires more than a touch of amnesia. “In 2004, we had all this energy coming from the horror at what Bush was doing — we were furious,” recalls the liberal activist Ellen Malcolm, whose America Coming Together PAC benefited from millions in donations from wealthy Democrats like George Soros. “George came out of Nazi Europe and looked at this so-called war on terrorism as an all-too-familiar dynamic of governments taking control. Fear and anger are the great motivators in fund-raising. And right now Karl Rove has the fear and anger on his side.”
Lacking this sort of emotional edge, Priorities struggled against a confluence of inhospitable factors. First among those is that, as Jonathan Collegio of American Crossroads observes, “Outside money tends to flow toward the party out of power, and to causes to stop things rather than to promote things.” Burton and Sweeney had to contend with the widely held assumption that the Obama campaign was raising enough money on its own anyway. “These big donors are smart — they look at the numbers,” a prominent Democratic fund-raiser told me. “They say, ‘How’s this money they want from me going to have any impact, compared to the $750 million Obama says he’s raising?’ ” It also did not help that for most of its young life, Priorities operated not only without Obama’s endorsement but also in the face of his implicit disapproval — at least until late last December, when Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, showed his fellow adviser David Axelrod the gross disparity in fund-raising between conservative and liberal groups, prompting an alarmed Axelrod to murmur, “We’ve got to show this to the president.”
Over and over, Burton and Sweeney heard Democrats express distaste for super PACs, disillusionment with Obama and — during the primary season, anyway — disbelief that the president was in any danger of losing. (“It’s been difficult,” Sweeney told me in early spring, “to make the case that Romney’s a juggernaut when he’s within 2,000 votes of losing Ohio to Rick Santorum.”) As one lackluster monthly F.E.C. disclosure followed another, a new narrative rippled through Washington, and it wasn’t about Bain Capital: the Priorities team, it was suggested, was not ready for prime time.
“It’s a personal process, asking for checks of this size,” says Susan McCue, one leader of the Democratic Senate super PAC. “You need to take the time to talk about the stakes and how their support will make a difference. And you need to assure them that their money will be used efficiently.” Arguably, the skill sets of driving home a rapid-response message to a roomful of deadline-crazed journalists and charming a tycoon into parting with a million dollars could not be more different. Burton and Sweeney were novices at asking for money, and apparently it showed. Upper-tier Obama associates told me that in the eyes of donors, Burton and Sweeney lacked Rove’s stature and Begala’s natural salesman’s touch. In April, after an attack ad by American Crossroads compelled the Obama campaign to respond by spending its own money for additional TV time — knowing that Priorities lacked the money to do so — a clearly annoyed official told me, “If we had a Karl Rove of our own out there, we wouldn’t have had to do this.”
As the super PAC’s public face — a ubiquitous MSNBC talking head, blogger and cajoler of the Washington news media — Burton bore the brunt of the criticism. The ongoing insinuation that he was out of his depth did not outwardly jostle the spokesman’s best-day-of-my-life unsinkability. (“If you didn’t read the story and just looked at the pictures . . . I feel like I came out pretty good,” he wrote me after one particularly withering article.) Burton and Sweeney repeatedly insisted to me that what they termed the “education process” was mainly about converting super-PAC-averse Democrats rather than learning on the fly themselves.
Still, they knew they needed help. By the end of the spring, Priorities had beefed up its fund-raising team to include Diana Rogalle (from the ACT PAC), Susan Holloway Torricelli (former Senator Robert Torricelli’s ex- wife and longtime fund-raiser) and Kathleen Daughety (who was previously Senator Michael Bennet’s finance director). Mary Beth Cahill, who was Burton’s boss on the Kerry campaign, also signed on as a strategic adviser.
“Look, Sean and Bill make no bones about it: they’d been on the spending” — meaning messaging — “side, not the fund-raising side,” Harold Ickes told me. “I think they decided to do it because no one else was doing it. It was clearly necessary, and I encouraged them to do it. That said, there are techniques, and it’s an art form . . . there’s a minuet, almost. And it takes a lot of time, you bet.”
On April 14, the day after their get-together aboard the boat, Steve Mostyn called Begala to say that he would soon be wiring Priorities a million dollars. A month later — 25 weeks before the general election — Mostyn’s donation would help finance a $10 million TV blitz in the swing states of Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Each week featured a somber new anti-Romney testimonial. On May 22, it was that of Loris Huffman, who worked at the Ampad paper mill [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=414qXn66t3I ( http://youtu.be/414qXn66t3I )]
Three days later, The Wall Street Journal reported [ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/06/13/adelson-gives-10-million-to-pro-romney-super-pac/ ] that the conservative casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson had just pledged money to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. The amount Adelson was donating was $10 million — 10 times that of the Mostyns’ hard-won contribution, and the sum total of Priorities USA’s entire ad buy. A couple of days later, The Huffington Post reported that Adelson might also be cutting $10 million checks to American Crossroads and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. All told, the casino magnate was telling friends, his contributions to right-leaning candidates and causes might well reach $100 million — a figure by a single Republican donor that matches the amount Priorities has set as its financial goal for the entire 2012 cycle.
After Burton read the story about Adelson’s contribution to the Romney super PAC, he could think of only one thing to do. “I sent that article out to every single Democratic donor that I know,” he would later recall. The subject heading of Burton’s e-mail — minus a profane verb — was: “So apparently they’re not messing around.”
But in late May and early June, it wasn’t Sheldon Adelson who was drowning out the Priorities ads. Rather, the Obama campaign was inadvertently doing so. Apparently the campaign did not know or did not care about Priorities USA Action’s planned mini-blitz, for it released its own two-minute attack video focusing on Bain’s closure of GST Steel, which concluded with, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”
Reaction to the ad was swift and overwhelmingly negative. A procession of Democrats — starting with the Newark mayor and Obama surrogate Cory Booker, followed by former Congressman Harold Ford Jr., the former U.S. Treasury adviser Steven Rattner and former Governor Ed Rendell — publicly criticized the president for speaking so harshly of private-equity firms.
Burton and Sweeney waited out the chatter. They knew that Booker and the rest had deep associations with the financial sector. They also believed in their polling data — which would be validated in early June by focus groups of suburban mothers conducted in Richmond, Va., and Las Vegas, and also by an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showing that voters were twice as likely to have a negative opinion of Bain’s practices. Besides, beneath all the bluster coming from Obama’s fellow Democrats lurked a basic political verity: the leader of the free world is widely seen as having better things to do with his time than trash Mitt Romney’s past business life. It was beneath him. But it was hardly beneath Obama’s friends residing in the shadows of super PAC world. Quite the opposite: this was exactly what Priorities was set up to do.
Burton and Sweeney’s creation now appears to be on relatively solid footing. As of late June, the super PAC has amassed a total of $40 million, with almost $20 million in the bank and about a dozen million-dollar donors onboard. Among the most recent is Qualcomm’s co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs and his wife, Joan, newcomers to the world of political mega-giving, whom Burton and other Priorities surrogates spent a year courting in person, on the phone and by e-mail before the couple relented and gave $2 million. Priorities’ $100 million goal is within reach but by no means assured. “In order to do that,” Ickes says, “we’re going to have go get some $5 million and $10 million donors.” Another Priorities representative says wistfully: “Maybe there’s someone we never heard of. Is there a Charles Koch out there on our side?”
On June 21, Burton returned to Buffalo to deliver the commencement address at City Honors School, from which he graduated in 1995. “While men and women are remembered for how they succeed,” the former White House spokesman told his young audience, “they are defined by how they fail. And by how they come back.” Late that evening, while Burton was dining out with old high-school buddies and faculty members, a Washington Post article about Romney and Bain Capital [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html ] appeared on the paper’s Web site. The story analyzed filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that showed Bain to have “owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories.”
From the restaurant, Burton e-mailed Sweeney and their team. By 10:45 p.m., they had drafted a memo that would be sent to the e-mail addresses of several hundred political reporters by 7 the next morning: “Despite his phony rhetoric on standing up for American workers, today’s Washington Post details how Mitt Romney directly profited from the outsourcing of American jobs overseas.” Soon they would be adding more Bain-related questions to their polls, seeking to add depth to their narrative, the one best shot their modestly financed super PAC had at persuading swing voters and thereby making a difference in a closely contested presidential election. Burton and Sweeney were doing what they do best, telling the story — though when it came down to it, getting enough people to listen would still be the hardest part.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Do-Not-Ask-What-Good-We-Do/Robert-Draper/9781451642087 ].”
Editor: Ilena Silverman
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
===
GOP fundraising could tilt Congress rightward
President Barack Obama wipes sweat from his eye after a speech at Washington Park in Sandusky, Ohio, Thursday, July 5, 2012. Obama is on a two-day bus trip through Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(AP Photo/David Richard)(Credit: AP)
The real impact of super PAC money this fall could be in delivering President Obama a Pyrrhic victory
By Steve Kornacki
Jul 6, 2012
Mitt Romney has apparently posted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/mitt-romney-raised-more-than-100-million-in-june/2012/07/05/gJQAZnT9PW_blog.html ] his second consecutive month of stellar fun-raising. His campaign hasn’t officially released any figures yet, but it has sent word that the Romney team and the Republican National Committee’s Romney Victory Fund jointly raked in at least $100 million in June – $23 million better than Romney’s May haul, which also raised eyebrows, and the highest single-month total ever [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78155.html ] for a GOP candidate.
It may be a few days before numbers for Barack Obama’s campaign are available, but the assumption is that the president was again outraised by his opponent in June. In May, Obama took in $16 million less than Romney.
As word of Romney’s big month spread late Thursday, Obama’s team sought to downplay the news. “It seems to me that they were looking for some good news today, and this is the best they had,” David Axelrod said [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/axelrod-downplays-romneys-100-million-haul ].
At the outset of the campaign, it was assumed that Obama, who took in $750 million during his 2008 campaign, would raise more money than his GOP opponent. There was even talk that the president might cross the $1 billion mark this time around. The hope for Republicans was that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would help them make up the difference with super PAC money.
But with the election now four months away, it’s possible Romney will end up enjoying a clear advantage on both fronts. Since locking up the GOP nomination, the pace of his own fund-raising has exceeded expectations, while Obama hasn’t been reaping the same monthly windfalls he benefited from four years ago. This stands to reason; in ’08, Obama’s fund-raising was boosted by an epic, months-long primary battle with Hillary Clinton, and his status as a non-incumbent made it easier to build grassroots energy.
At the same time, elite Republican donors are engaged in the super PAC game with far more intensity [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all (above)] than their Democratic counterparts, creating an even bigger outside money disparity than many expected a year ago. A Boston Glove review this week found [ http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-05/news/32553762_1_pacs-federal-election-commission-priorities-usa-action (second above)] that top Republican super PACs have taken in $158 million so far this year, compared to $47 million for Democratic super PACs. Theories abound as to why this is – rich Democrats have a moral aversion to super PACs? It’s easier to build excitement for the opposition party candidate? Rich Republicans see presidential politics as a business investment in a way that Democrats don’t? – but Obama may end up being significantly outraised this fall.
And yet, as I wrote last month [ http://www.salon.com/2012/06/07/don%E2%80%99t_be_scared_of_mitt%E2%80%99s_money/ ], it probably won’t end up having much effect on the White House race. General election presidential campaigns are the rare high-visibility political race in which voters tend to form their opinions independent of television advertising. As long as both campaigns have sufficient resources to execute their basic ground and air-war plans, a financial disparity probably doesn’t matter. In Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all (above)] feature exploring the Democrats’ super PAC struggles, Bill Burton – who is running the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA – makes this case to a potential donor, easing her fears about massive GOP spending by telling her “you don’t do it dollar for dollar.”
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing for Democrats to worry about when it comes to money, though. For one thing, this is the first-ever super PAC presidential election; we’ve never seen spending levels like this before, so no one can say for sure what the effect will be. A bigger concern, though, are the other key races on this fall’s ballot, for the U.S. Senate and the House. This is where a gross fund-raising disparity really could cost Democrats, because these races – especially at the House level – don’t feature the kind of widespread voter awareness that exists at the presidential level.
For now, Democrats are holding their own [ http://nationaljournal.com/tv-ad-buys-20120703 ] on the congressional front, but it’s still early and Republican super PACs have made it clear they plan to target congressional races in addition to the Obama-Romney contest. Democrats may do the same, but if they lag far behind in resources, it could conceivably cost them control of the Senate and whatever chance they have of winning back the House. This could be the recipe for a Pyrrhic November victory for Democrats – a reelected president who finds himself facing even stronger Republican opposition on Capitol Hill.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/where_the_money_really_matters/ [with comments]
===
Mitt Swears He Doesn’t Have a Koch Problem
Protesters flew over the Hamptons this weekend, where David Koch was hosting a $50,000-a-head Romney fundraiser, with a banner trailing their plane that read: “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem.” But like many an addict before him, Romney doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. He laughed at the accusation and said of his relationship with the conservative billionaire, “I don’t look at it as a problem; I look at it as an asset.”
Read it at New York Post
July 10, 2012 12:23 PM
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/mitt_what_koch_problem_6f4DGUSyl55cSBIuG74yDL
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2012/07/10/romney-i-don-t-have-a-koch-problem.html [with comments]
*
A peek inside Romney's Hamptons huddle
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS |
7/10/12 10:57 AM EDT
Via the New York Post's Page Six, Mitt Romney embraced [ http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/mitt_what_koch_problem_6f4DGUSyl55cSBIuG74yDL#ixzz20EDPXQ6L ] the Koch brothers' fundraising help as an "asset," not a problem:
Mitt Romney declared he was proud to have “a Koch problem,” as he attended a $50,000-a-head fund-raiser hosted by conservative billionaire David Koch.
A plane flew over the Hamptons with a banner from protestors reading, “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem,” as he stopped for three major fund-raisers Sunday — first at the East Hampton home of billionaire Ronald Perelman, followed by events at the home of Clifford Sobel, the former US ambassador to Brazil, then for dinner at David and Julia Koch’s home on Meadow Lane in Southampton.
Romney quipped to the crowd at Koch’s event, “I understand there is a plane out there saying Mitt Romney has ‘a Koch problem.’ I don’t look at it as a problem; I look at it as an asset.”
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/a-peek-inside-romneys-hamptons-huddle-128515.html [with comments]
===
“Tiananmen Sid” shakes up a small town
Former Paonia councilman Sid Lewis holds a protest sign in front of a tank owned by billionaire energy magnate and Paonia-area ranch owner Bill Koch.
Photo courtesy of Jim Brett (HANDOUT)
By Michelle Nijhuis
Writers on the Range
Thursday, July 12, 2012
My rural western Colorado town of Paonia, population 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the USA. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence from the federal government. We're gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a boil at Cherry Days, the annual Fourth of July celebration, and this year's version — heated by wildfires and record summer temperatures — was extra hot and spicy.
The Cherry Days parade was notable for its lead vehicle, a well-preserved Korean-War-era tank complete with a pair of anti-aircraft guns. Even more notable was the tank's owner: billionaire Bill Koch, brother to the liberal bêtes noires Charles and David Koch. Bill Koch, whose interests in sailing, fine wines and antiques are less political than his brothers' though probably just as expensive, is the founder and CEO of Oxbow Group, whose holdings include a local coal mine. Its affiliate Gunnison Energy Corp. is active in local natural-gas development.
In recent years, Bill Koch has also become a part-time neighbor, acquiring a couple of ranches in the mountains and a long list of Paonia-area properties. He's commissioned the construction of a private “Western town,” furnished with his collection of frontier memorabilia. He's aroused local suspicion and resentment by pushing for Congressional approval of a public-private land swap that would benefit his ranch and close off access to 40 square miles of wilderness. And for the community activists fighting fast-moving natural-gas development, Bill Koch and Gunnison Energy have become symbols of unwelcome change.
So when Koch's collectible tank creaked down Grand Avenue last week, Sid Lewis — hairdresser, cycling enthusiast and former town councilman — stepped in front of it holding a handwritten cardboard sign about money and democracy and the corruption of the latter by the former. Lewis and his sign were soon escorted off the street, but the story of “Tiananmen Sid” quickly landed on Facebook. By Friday morning, news of the encounter was in The Denver Post, and that night the tale of the hairdresser versus the tank was told on The Rachel Maddow Show. By the time you read this, local online arguments about the incident will probably have invoked the First Amendment at least 1,098 times (and, if Godwin's Law holds, mentioned Nazis at least once).
To some in town, it turns out, Bill Koch is the benevolent rich guy who buys the groceries, and Sid Lewis is the outsider poking his disrespectful outsider-y nose into a pretty good deal. To others, Koch is the dastardly outsider trying to buy the town and invaluable public land for cheap, and Sid represents the community standing heroically against him. These stories, with different characters in the lead roles and varying degrees of truth, have been told and retold here for generations. Neither is likely to change anyone's mind.
But I was happy that Tiananmen Sid shook up the town's 66th annual Cherry Days celebration, and not only because I happen to prefer beauticians to billionaires. Sid Lewis made the parade a more accurate reflection of my small complicated town and big complicated nation. Most of us, after all, are in a testy, confrontational mood these days.
I was even happier, though, when the parade continued its march, unrolling its humble column of Constitutionalists and conservationists, Republicans and Democrats, Shriners and dancing librarians, organic farmers and volunteer ambulance drivers and the Class of 1982. They straggled slowly along the long, crowded route in pickups and flatbeds and sometimes under their own steam, waving and grinning, separate but more or less on the same path. That's the part of the procession where most of us live our daily lives. When we're lucky, its story is the truest one of all.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org [ https://www.hcn.org/ ]). She is a contributing editor of the magazine and lives in Paonia, Colorado.
© 2012 Swift Communications, Inc.
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20120712/COLUMNS/120719980/1078&ParentProfile=1055
===
Mitt Romney’s Hamptons Weekend
Protestors walked toward the home of David Koch, where Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney was holding a fundraiser in Southampton, NY on July 8, 2012.
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
July 9, 2012, 5:19 pm
While Americans so unlucky as to lack second homes sweated under fans, dealt with power outages and drenched themselves before fire hydrants amid the sweltering heat this past weekend, one of the men who wants to be their leader had a much more exciting adventure. Mitt Romney headed to the sprawling estates of the Hamptons, where he held a whirlwind series of fundraisers, charging up to $50,000 a head and infusing his campaign with an expected $4 million.
He was met by about 200 protesters, who flew a banner over the fundraiser at the home of the billionaire industrialist David Koch’s reading “Romney has a Koch [rhymes with Coke] problem” and brought in the “Romney Mobile,” a black Cadillac with corporate logos and a hapless dog strapped to the roof.
The jabs from the lower 99% didn’t seem to bother Mr. Romney though. He assured his audience that even if the common man were largely gone from Hamptons (unless he was passing the champagne flutes or parking the Bentleys, of course) he was not forgotten.
“If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” Mr. Romney said, according to The Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/politics/romney-mines-the-hamptons-for-campaign-cash.html ], in one of the great understatements of this election season. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.”
We can take heart, at least, in knowing Mr. Romney remembers that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages that he’s had – like a net worth upward of $250 million (sitting in locales as far-flung as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Bermuda), multiple homes and a “couple of Cadillacs.”
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Mr. Romney’s policy ideas would do little to help those poor and working-class people who seem to cause him so much worry. Some would actually harm them.
Mr. Romney, who has been on vacation, was headed to Aspen, Colorado, today to scoop up some more money. He raised more than $100 million in last month, far more than President Obama’s puny $71 million.
The very rich certainly are very different.
*
Related Posts
From Taking Note
Another Dismal Jobs Report, Another Misguided Attack from the Right
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/another-dismal-jobs-report-another-misguided-attack-from-the-right/
When the Truth is Not Enough
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/when-the-truth-is-not-enough/
Mitt Romney and the Strange G.O.P. View of Government
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/mitt-romney-and-the-strange-gop-view-of-government/
Painting Romney With the Bush Brush
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/painting-romney-with-the-bush-brush/
We Don’t Need No Teachers!
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/we-dont-need-no-teachers/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/mitt-romneys-hamptons-weekend/ [with comments]
===
Meet the Koch Brothers — Again
By Matt Negrin
Jul 9, 2012 11:28am
Routine fundraisers don’t usually trigger attack ads and headlines, but when the man raising a boatload of cash is billionaire conservative David Koch, the spotlight shines brighter.
That was the case on Sunday as Mitt Romney trotted around the Hamptons raising millions of dollars, stopping at Koch’s shorefront estate for a party that cost $50,000 per person (or a deal: $75,000 for a couple).
The event, of course, was closed to reporters, so few people know what Romney or Koch said. Democrats have already made an ad charging that if Romney becomes president, he would give oil men like David Koch and brother Charles tax cuts and subsidies. Liberal protesters gathered at Koch’s home to deride [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/protest-greets-mitt-romney-at-hamptons-fundraiser/ ] the affair.
The left has long hated the Koch brothers, Kansas billionaires whose outside-spending group Americans for Prosperity is tied to the tea party and has tried to tear down Democratic candidates through advertising. The group is a 501(c)4, which means it doesn’t have to reveal from whom it gets money. David and Charles are said to be worth about $25 billion each, and according to reports [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election ], have said they plan to spend more than $200 million in the 2012 election cycle.
Lately ads have mocked President Obama for his comment that “the private sector is doing fine.” “How can he fix the economy if he doesn’t know what’s wrong?” the ad says [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/ad-nauseam-here-come-the-tv-spots/ ].
While the Koch brothers are exceptionally private, they took a rare step onto the public stage [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/power-grab-kochs-struggles-revealed/story?id=15931688 ] in March when they sued the Cato Institute, a libertarian refuge in Washington that they helped create, for more control. The result was a public debate over Cato’s role, and even as the brothers denied that they wanted to turn the think tank into an arm of the Republican Party, libertarians quickly sided with the group over the brothers. One senior policy fellow at Cato predicted that if the Kochs were to take control, the group’s chairman and half the staff would eventually leave.
Obama, too, has tried to inspire his supporters by deriding the Kochs. In February, Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, sent a fundraising note [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/obama-campaign-billionaire-koch-brothers-spar-publicly/ ] to supporters accusing the Kochs of “jacking up prices at the pump.” In a letter from a spokesman, the Kochs denied both the charge and a claim that they were pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars targeting Obama.
Critics of the Kochs’ business, Koch Industries, also point to a revelation that a subsidiary of the company traded with Iran, and that another paid bribes [ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/koch-industries-report-reveals-secret-sins/story?id=14676652 ] around the world. The Kochs’ company said it follows the law and called the claims, in a Bloomberg Markets report, a result of “substandard reporting.”
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/meet-the-koch-brothers-again/ [with comments]
===
The Best Quotes From Guests at Romney's Hamptons Fundraisers
People who pay the equivalent of a salary for a meal are different from you and me.
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Jul 9 2012, 9:15 AM ET
Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney held three posh fundraisers in the posher precincts of the New York resort community of the Hamptons on Sunday as part of the massive ongoing fundraising push that helped him pull in $106 million in June [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/romney-raised-106-million-in-june/ ], with hopes to raise another $100 million each month from now until the election.
But when you're charging people $50,000 for lunch or dinner (or $75,000 per couple), you can't always expect them to sound in tune with the downtrodden American workers whose plight Romney has made a focal point of his campaign. Indeed, it's extraordinary that the displays of ostentatious wealth at political fundraisers come in for as little notice as they do, and to what an extent political donations are considered socially akin to charitable giving when they do not have any direct charitable impact.
Two stories that came out of the Romney fundraisers in fact suggest that that in a post-Citizens United world of largely unfettered campaign giving, the only brake on the power of the wealthy within the political system may turn out to be social. What if it were considered déclassé to give large sums to candidates or committees within a democracy, and especially in a nation where so many have other needs? Further close observation of the people who attend major-dollar fundraisers could begin to bring about such a possible future.
From the Los Angeles Times [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-hamptons-fundraiser-20120708,0,4909639.story ]:
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman's estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman's property -- the Creeks -- checked off names under tight security.
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."
And from The New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/politics/romney-mines-the-hamptons-for-campaign-cash.html ]:
A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney. "Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P." ....
A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, long a favorite of the Hamptons' well-off and well-known, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. "He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn't exist and get government to intervene," Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold Mercedes, as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.
Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband's generous spirit. "Tell them who's on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!"
Over Mr. Conklin's objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax was on Mr. Conklin's 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.
Update 12:51 p.m.: Of course Obama also holds high-dollar fundraisers, such as a $40,000-per plate one at George Clooney's residence [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obamas-new-courting-of-hollywood-pays-off.html?pagewanted=all ] in the spring, though notably the president draws considerably more [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-fundraising-powered-by-small-donors-new-study-shows/2012/02/08/gIQANfKIzQ_story.html ] small donors than does Romney (more than half of his donors vs. 9 percent of Romney's, according to a study early this year [id.]). But the main difference between Romney in the Hamptons and Obama in Hollywood is that the rich people who back Obama have yet to be quoted talking about how their servants are too ignorant to know how the economy works. Rather, they tend to be quoted being critical of the president himself. Also, everyone expects Hollywood fundraisers to be over the top; Hollywood's lavish lifestyles and movie stars' sense of entitlement have been amply documented through a wide array of popular magazines for nigh on eight decades. That's why some said it was a risk [ http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21035605/romney-holding-private-fundraisers-aspen ] for Obama to reach out to that community this year. Romney's showing us such values are not just to be found in Hollywood: they are in the Hamptons, and Park City [ http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/54351060-90/bush-campaign-candidate-donors.html.csp ], and Aspen [ http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21035605/romney-holding-private-fundraisers-aspen ], too.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-best-quotes-from-guests-at-romneys-hamptons-fundraisers/259554/ [with comments]
===
Degree of obnoxious wealth at Romney fundraiser tests credulity
July 9, 2012
Rachel Maddow reviews the media coverage of a Mitt Romney fundraiser by super-rich supporters in East Hampton, NY, and wonders if the quotes are from planted activists trying to make Romney look bad.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/48128657#48128657 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzEBRxu9JoM ]
===
Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016": Feature-length Obama hate
Arriving this summer in a theater near you: Dinesh D'Souza's anti-Obama documentary, funded by rich conservatives
By Mariah Blake
Friday, Jul 6, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
Dinesh D’Souza knows the value of a good controversy. After all, he has made a career of lobbing ideological hand grenades. In 2010, for instance, he published a book and an article in Forbes arguing that Barack Obama had embraced his father’s anticolonial fervor and was intentionally squandering America’s influence to put it on equal footing with the developing world. Critics were aghast. The Columbia Journalism Review called the Forbes piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work,” while the conservative Weekly Standard assailed D’Souza’s “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” Former Bush speechwriter David Frum weighed in, too, branding D’Souza’s book a “brazen outburst of race-baiting.”
Nevertheless, that book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596982764 ],” was wildly popular: it debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for more than a month.
With the campaign season kicking into high gear, D’Souza is hoping to see the pattern repeated. The flame-throwing pundit has just finished a feature-length documentary, called “2016: Obama’s America,” which will debut in Houston next week and open in roughly 300 theaters across the country later this month. The film — the most recent in a string of mud-slinging election-year releases — revisits the arguments in “Roots,” namely that America is being governed according to a vision dreamed up by Obama’s father, a “philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions.”
But the film doesn’t just rehash old ideas. D’Souza says it also works in new revelations about Obama’s politics and history, and takes aim at his own critics. More importantly, it rounds out D’Souza’s theory with a raft of grim predictions about what will happen if Obama is re-elected. “If we understand Obama’s compass, we can project what a second Obama term might look like,” D’Souza explains. “Every president is a little different in the second term — they’re less tethered to public opinion and more concerned with what they actually want to do.” In Obama’s case, this means more freedom to pursue his anticolonial goals.
While the film itself was not yet available when this story went to press, the trailer resembles a cross between a high-budget feature and standard Tea Party agitprop. Grainy images of Obama are interspersed with fading “Hope” posters and shots of rioters and garbage-strewn third-world villages. At one point, a young black man in jeans and tennis shoes is shown crouched over Barack Obama Sr.’s grave. ”Obama has a dream, a dream from his father,” the narrator intones, “that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized.”
The idea for the film came early last year. D’Souza was casting about for ways to reach a wider audience, and started thinking about the splash Michael Moore had made by releasing “Fahrenheit 9/11” in the run up to the 2004 election. “Moore is one of the last people I wanted to actually emulate,” D’Souza says. “But his film was very successful. And I sensed the 2012 election would be eerily similar to 2004 — a controversial president and a deeply divided country, with one half of the population doggedly hanging with him and the other half believing that he’s terrible.”
At the time, D’Souza didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking, so he started looking around for an insider to guide him. As luck would have it, he happened to bump into Cecilia Presley, the granddaughter of the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, at a Washington, DC soirée. She recommended he approach Gerald Molen, an Oscar-award-winning producer, who’s work includes “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” (Or at least that’s how Molen remembers their meeting.) It turned out to be a good suggestion. Molen — a devoted Mormon, who grew up on a Montana farm and began his film career by greasing trucks on a studio lot — is one of a handful of outspoken Hollywood conservatives. And he’s only grown more vocal since Obama took office. After speaking with D’Souza by phone and reading “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” Molen signed on to produce the documentary.
D’Souza later recruited a man named John Sullivan to handle marketing and help manage and day-to-day production. Sullivan is best known for producing the controversial 2008 documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The film — a hymnal to intelligent design — argues that “big science” tries to muzzle academics who challenge Darwin’s theories. Like D’Souza’s work, it was bashed by critics — the New York Times called it “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time” — but proved wildly popular. In fact, it ranks among the highest-grossing documentaries of all time, according to Box Office Mojo.
D’Souza hopes “2016” will make a similarly big splash. Already, the project has gotten the attention of some deep-pocket conservatives; D’Souza says some 25 individuals chipped in the $2.5 million he needed to make the film. While he declined to name names, he confirmed previous reports that TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts was among them.
“2016” is not Ricketts’ first foray into Obama-bashing. In May, the New York Times revealed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html?pagewanted=all ] that the billionaire businessman was considering shelling out more than $10 million for a racially tinged smear campaign — among other things, the plan called for playing up the president’s links to the firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright and enlisting “an extremely literate conservative African-American” to argue that the president misled the public by selling himself as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” Mitt Romney, the intended beneficiary, quickly denounced the proposal, and Ricketts followed suit, amid boycott threats on TD Ameritrade.
“2016” is also creating some buzz among rank-and-file conservatives. A trailer and speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6QOscKvUjU (next below; trailer alone, as embedded at the end of this piece, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtv6XUT-hno )].
The principal later apologized, saying the cancellation was the result of a mix-up between him and the teacher. Nevertheless, according to a local paper, he was inundated with “vile, vicious and racist hate mail,” including “a caricature of President Barack Obama with a target on his forehead” and multiple death threats. The man was rattled enough that he moved his wife and children out of their family home.
Molen says he’s sorry about the outpouring of bile. But he’s happy to see the film getting attention and hopes it will rally conservative voters. “People have to understand that if they decide to stay home and not vote, that’s a vote for President Obama,” he explains. “The way I see it, this is a dangerous time in America. We’re either going to work to go back to a country where the American dream is alive and well, or we’re going to turn into a welfare state for everyone. And I’ll take the former.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/dinesh_dsouzas_2016_feature_length_obama_hate/ [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 and preceding and following
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77294487 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77339553 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77384440 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77515219 and preceding and following
Peter H. Stone
Posted: 07/09/2012 2:18 pm Updated: 07/09/2012 3:20 pm
WASHINGTON -- Karl Rove was the featured speaker at a previously unreported luncheon held just outside the Mitt Romney campaign's recent retreat for high-dollar donors, according to three Republican fundraisers who attended the event.
Rove's luncheon speech did not appear on the retreat's official agenda because Romney's campaign didn't host it. Instead, the event was hosted by Solamere Capital, a private equity firm founded by Tagg Romney, the candidate's eldest son, and Spencer Zwick, the Romney campaign's chief fundraiser who is often described as Romney's "sixth son."
Rove's speech was delivered on June 22, the Friday of the retreat weekend, to about 200 wealthy guests, including quite a few money harvesters for the Romney campaign, according to GOP sources who attended but requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
In a half-hour talk followed by questions from the audience, Rove covered congressional races and the presidential contest, with some brief remarks about what the super PAC American Crossroads and an affiliated group are doing with tens of millions he helped raise to boost GOP fortunes in November, according to two GOP fundraisers who heard Rove speak.
Tagg Romney and Zwick founded Solamere in 2008, and it has enjoyed a flurry of financial successes in part because of investments by [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/us/politics/ties-to-romney-08-helped-fuel-equity-firm.html?pagewanted=all ] some longtime Romney backers like ex-eBay chieftain Meg Whitman, as well as Mitt and Ann Romney themselves, who put $10 million into the fledgling venture. Zwick referred questions about the event to a Solamere spokesperson.
Rove also made news on the Saturday morning of the gathering at a posh Utah resort, the Chateaux at Silver Lake, when he sat on a panel with Mary Matalin and Bill Kristol to discuss the media. However, his other appearance in town -- at the Solamere luncheon -- so far has made no news at all.
Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, acknowledged to The Huffington Post that "Rove gave a speech at a separate event that was unconnected to the campaign and was similar to speeches he gives across the country ... Rove made a point of not attending any of the campaign presentations."
Collegio declined to explain the timing of Rove's speech to the Solamere gathering or whether Rove was paid for it. Collegio also declined to respond to questions about whether Rove was hitting up donors at the retreat for Crossroads.
A spokesman for Solamere confirmed that Rove was the featured speaker at its separate investor conference luncheon, which was held just prior to the retreat at an adjacent hotel.
"It was not a coincidence that the Solamere conference took place in the same city just before the retreat began," said one fundraiser who went to the retreat and requested anonymity to preserve his relationship with the Romney campaign.
Rove's links to independent political groups make it illegal for him to coordinate certain activities with campaigns.
The luncheon speech on political strategy differed markedly from the publicized panel on the media the second day. And two attendees at the Romney retreat told The Huffington Post that Rove promoted his super PAC and an affiliated nonprofit, Crossroads GPS, to campaign donors during private meetings during the retreat. About 800 of the campaign's biggest fundraisers and donors were invited to the retreat in total, while a smaller, select group of donors were pitched privately by Rove, the two attendees said.
To snag retreat invitations, donors had to give a total of at least $50,000 to the campaign, the Republican National Committee and some state party committees; fundraisers had to rope in at least $100,000.
"Karl was very self-promoting the whole time he was there," said one of the three GOP fundraisers interviewed for this story. "He was pushing for Crossroads the whole time."
Rove's luncheon speech and his presence at the retreat are noteworthy because the two Crossroads groups plan to spend about $300 million this year on television ads and "get out the vote" efforts to help elect Romney and put the GOP in control of Congress.
The Rove groups were created in 2010 in the wake of high court rulings that permit corporations, individuals and unions to write unlimited checks to groups that expressly advocate for the election of candidates. By contrast, candidate campaign committees can only accept individual contributions up to $2,500 per election.
But Rove's groups and similar super PACs are legally barred from coordinating certain activities, such as advertising strategies, with campaign committees. There is nothing illegal about super PACs, or Rove personally, soliciting funds from campaign donors, as long as campaign officials are not the ones asking for unlimited donations to such PACs.
Two campaign finance lawyers and reform advocates told The Huffington Post that Rove's activities at the retreat test the legal definition of what, exactly, "coordination" is.
"The commonsense and the dictionary definition of coordination is very different from the narrow Federal Election Commission regulations defining impermissible coordination," said former Republican FEC chairman Trevor Potter in an interview. "Lots of things are coordination in fact, but are not in law."
"The fact that Rove was at the gathering presents an obvious opportunity for coordination," added Potter, who is president of the Campaign Legal Center and a strong advocate for tougher campaign finance rules. "Just being there in the middle of the campaign, surrounded by Romney strategists and campaign aides for several days, has the potential for tainting the independence of American Crossroads' advertising, depending on what conversations, if any, Rove had with campaign officials."
Other campaign finance reform advocates went further, suggesting that Rove's activities at the retreat were improper.
"This kind of activity [by Rove] is the last thing the Supreme Court had in mind when it ruled that spending by an outside group had to be 'totally independent' and 'wholly independent' from a candidate the group is supporting with expenditures," Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, said in an interview. "The FEC lives in a pure fantasy world in the way it attempts to define coordinated activities as not being coordinated activities."
A Romney campaign spokesman referred The Huffington Post to a previous statement that addressed Rove's participation on the media panel at the retreat, which has been widely reported. The statement from Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said that the campaign "is fully aware of what the law requires, and we follow both its letter and its spirit."
In remarks to MSNBC during the primaries, Romney said that he is not "allowed to communicate with super PACs in any way, shape or form."
Those comments are not quite correct. Romney attended -- and spoke at -- more than one fundraiser in 2011 for a super PAC called Restore Our Future, which was set up by three close allies who worked on his 2008 campaign and has raised over $50 million to help back his new run for the White House. Election law permits candidates to go to fundraisers for outside groups that are supporting them, but bars the candidates from personally soliciting unlimited contributions on groups' behalf.
The Romney campaign released few details about the retreat at the Chateaux at Silver Lake. Reporters who flew out to Utah mostly scrambled for details and anecdotes as scores of wealthy donors and politicos came and went, according to press accounts. Among the big-name attendees were two former secretaries of state, James Baker III and Condoleezza Rice, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
As for Rove's presence at the retreat, press accounts so far have focused on the media panel in which he participated, along with Matalin and Kristol.
American Crossroads has long downplayed the extent of Rove's involvement with the group, while acknowledging he raises money. But this year Rove attended at least two of the group's monthly strategy meetings to discuss congressional and presidential battleground states and political advertising. The meetings, according to GOP operatives who were in attendance, typically draw about a dozen high-powered GOP operatives from other conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, and Americans for Tax Reform, which is run by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.
Rove has been instrumental in helping the two Crossroads groups land some of their largest multimillion-dollar donations. Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has been close to Rove since he worked in the Bush White House, has given at least $10 million this election cycle to the nonprofit Crossroads GPS and has recently pledged a similar sum, according to two GOP fundraisers familiar with the billionaire's political donations. Other multimillionaires and billionaires who hail from Texas and have long ties to Rove, like homebuilder Bob Perry and investor Harold Simmons, have ponied up millions more to American Crossroads.
Unlike American Crossroads, which has to publicly disclose its donors, Crossroads GPS isn't required to reveal its contributors' names.
This year, that money helped pay for tens of millions of Crossroads' attack ad spots focused heavily on the Obama administration's health care reforms, economic policies and other issues in an effort to help Romney win the White House and put the GOP in control of Congress.
It was fitting that Rove -- whose fundraising success for the two groups is heavily based on tapping networks of wealthy donors with whom he is familiar -- was given the featured speaking role at the Solamere investor conference. The firm's own website boasts [ http://www.solameregroup.com/page/1/strategy.html ] that its partners succeed in investing by "leveraging their unparalleled networks."
Rove wasn't the only politico at the retreat with strong ties to super PACs or nonprofit groups that have raised tens of millions of dollars to help Romney and Republican candidates win this fall. According to news reports, and confirmed by the GOP fundraisers, Charlie Spies, one of the three founders of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, was also at the retreat, as were former Sen. Norm Coleman and venture capitalist Fred Malek, who are, respectively, the chairman and founder of the American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on helping the GOP keep a majority in the House.
Malek, a veteran GOP fundraiser, said that he's raising money not only for the AAN but also for the Romney campaign and for the Republican Governors Association. "I've never seen donors and potential donors more unified and energized as they are this year," Malek told HuffPost.
That's what both Rove and the Romney campaign are banking on.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/karl-rove-speech_n_1656013.html [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76925118 and preceding and following
===
Sherrod Brown Target Of $1 Million Ad Campaign By Crossroads GPS
Sen. Sherrod Brown is facing the greatest cash flood by outside conservative groups in a Senate race.
07/10/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/sherrod-brown-crossroads-gps-1-million-ad-campaign_n_1660470.html [with comments]
===
Tax-Exempt Groups Shield Political Gifts of Businesses
By MIKE McINTIRE and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: July 7, 2012
American Electric Power, one of the country’s largest utilities, gave $1 million last November to the Founding Fund, a new tax-exempt group that intends to raise most of its money from corporations and push for limited government.
The giant insurer Aetna directed more than $3 million last year to the American Action Network [ http://americanactionnetwork.org/ ], a Republican-leaning nonprofit organization that has spent millions of dollars attacking lawmakers who voted for President Obama’s health care bill — even as Aetna’s president publicly voiced support for the legislation.
Other corporations, including Prudential Financial, Dow Chemical and the drugmaker Merck, have poured millions of dollars more into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a tax-exempt trade group that has pledged to spend at least $50 million on political advertising this election cycle.
Two years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door for corporate spending on elections, relatively little money has flowed from company treasuries into “super PACs [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ],” which can accept unlimited contributions but must also disclose donors. Instead, there is growing evidence that large corporations are trying to influence campaigns by donating money to tax-exempt organizations that can spend millions of dollars without being subject to the disclosure requirements that apply to candidates, parties and PACs.
The secrecy shrouding these groups makes a full accounting of corporate influence on the electoral process impossible. But glimpses of their donors emerged in a New York Times review of corporate governance reports, tax returns of nonprofit organizations and regulatory filings by insurers and labor unions.
The review found that corporate donations — many of them previously unreported — went to groups large and small, dedicated to shaping public policy on the state and national levels. From a redistricting fight in Minnesota to the sprawling battleground of the 2012 presidential and Congressional elections, corporations are opening their wallets and altering the political world.
Some of the biggest recipients of corporate money are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, the federal designation for “social welfare” groups dedicated to advancing broad community interests. Because they are not technically political organizations, they do not have to register with or disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, potentially shielding corporate contributors from shareholders or others unhappy with their political positions.
“Companies want to be able to quietly push for their political agendas without being held accountable for it by their customers,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [ http://www.citizensforethics.org/ ], which has filed complaints against issue groups. “I think the 501(c)(4)’s are likely to outweigh super PAC spending, because so many donors want to remain anonymous.”
Because social welfare groups are prohibited from devoting themselves primarily to political activity, many spend the bulk of their money on issue advertisements that purport to be educational, not political, in nature. In May, for example, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies ["Crossroads GPS" http://www.crossroadsgps.org/ ], a group co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, began a $25 million advertising campaign, carefully shaped with focus groups of undecided voters, that attacks Mr. Obama for increasing the federal deficit and urges him to cut spending.
The Internal Revenue Service has no clear test for determining what constitutes excessive political activity by a social welfare group. And tax-exempt groups are permitted to begin raising and spending money even before the I.R.S. formally recognizes them. Two years after helping Republicans win control of the House with millions of dollars in issue advertising, Crossroads GPS’s application for tax-exempt status is still pending.
During the 2010 midterm elections, tax-exempt groups outspent super PACs by a 3-to-2 margin, according to a recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics [ http://www.opensecrets.org/ ] and the Center for Public Integrity [ http://www.iwatchnews.org/ ], with most of that money devoted to attacking Democrats or defending Republicans. And such groups have accounted for two-thirds of the political advertising bought by the biggest outside spenders so far in the 2012 election cycle, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group [ http://kantarmediana.com/cmag ], with close to $100 million in issue ads.
The growing role of issue groups has prompted a rash of complaints and lawsuits from watchdog organizations accusing groups like the American Action Network, Crossroads and the pro-Obama Priorities USA [ http://www.prioritiesusa.org/ ] of operating as sham charities whose primary purpose is not the promotion of social welfare, but winning elections. Efforts in Congress to force more disclosure for politically active nonprofit organizations have been repeatedly stymied by Republicans, who have described the push as an assault on free speech.
“These groups are being used as a conduit to hide from voters the identity of people and corporations who are bankrolling these television ads, which are designed to influence the outcome of elections,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.
But Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads, said, “Individuals and organizations have a First Amendment right to promote their beliefs through advertising, be that advertising against the Iraq war, against climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ] or, in the case of Crossroads, advocating for free markets and limited government.”
Labor unions — themselves among the beneficiaries of Citizens United — have also donated millions of dollars to national super PACs and state-level nonprofit groups involved in battles over government spending, collective bargaining and health care.
Donations from corporations and unions alike must be disclosed if they go to expressly political groups like super PACs.
In April, for example, the air traffic controllers’ union contributed $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC. But other contributions are harder to trace. Last year, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees gave $100,000 to Advancing Wisconsin, a tax-exempt group that supported labor’s fight with Republicans in that state; the donation was reported nowhere in Wisconsin, but it emerged in an annual financial report that unions must file with the federal Department of Labor.
Among the largest beneficiaries of corporate donations in recent years have been trade organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which largely backs Republican candidates. As a nonprofit “business league” under the tax code, the chamber does not have to disclose its supporters, who helped finance its $33 million in political ads in the 2010 midterm elections.
But voluntary disclosures by corporations — usually at the prodding of shareholder advocacy groups — shed some light on the use of trade groups for lobbying or as pass-throughs for political spending. A search of voluntary disclosures, some collected by the Center for Political Accountability [ http://www.politicalaccountability.net/ ], which advocates for transparency in corporate political spending, found more than $6 million in chamber donations by 10 companies last year.
Two of the largest came from Prudential Financial and Dow Chemical, which each gave $1.6 million, while Chevron, MetLife and Merck each gave at least $500,000. Some of the donations were directed to the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, which lobbies for limits on liability suits.
Some contributions are disclosed by accident. Aetna’s check to the American Action Network, along with a $4.5 million contribution last year to the chamber, was mistakenly included in a filing with insurance regulators. The disclosure was first reported by SNL Financial, a trade publication. Even where companies pledge voluntary disclosure of political contributions, they often make an exception for donations to tax-exempt groups.
In 2007, Aetna signed an agreement with the Mercy Investment Program, a shareholders group, to disclose trade associations to which it made large contributions. On regulatory filings, the company initially described its $3 million contribution to the Chamber of Commerce as a lobbying expense, but the company now says it was intended to finance “educational activities.”
An Aetna spokesman would not say whether the chamber donation would appear on the company’s 2011 voluntary disclosure. Sister Valerie Heinonen, the director of shareholder advocacy for Mercy Investment Services, said that a failure to do so would violate the company’s pledge.
Beyond the contributions to large, established nonprofits like the chamber and American Action Network, corporate money is also quietly shaping the political discourse through more obscure groups, none of which are required to disclose their donors.
In Minnesota last year, Express Scripts, a major drug benefit manager, gave $10,000 to a Republican-linked group, Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting, involved in a partisan fight over redrawing legislative boundaries. Express Scripts made the donation, previously unreported, because the “electoral maps in Minnesota were in doubt and we supported efforts to bring certainty to Minnesota voters,” said Brian Henry, a spokesman for the company, which is based in St. Louis. He added that the firm has a facility in Bloomington, Minn.
The reasons behind American Electric Power’s $1 million contribution to the little-known Founding Fund are less clear. The company characterized it as “lobbying” in a corporate governance disclosure last year, but the fund says it does no lobbying. The fund, whose address is a mail drop in Alexandria, Va., would not make any of its directors available for an interview.
The fund’s treasurer, Frank Sadler, is a lobbyist who previously worked for Koch Industries advising nonprofit groups that support free market causes, although he said the Kochs, major Republican donors, were not involved in the group. In its public filings, the fund said it expected to raise about $10 million this election cycle, primarily from corporations, and use it to promote free markets and “the narrowing of the scope and reach of the federal government.”
A spokesman for American Electric Power, Pat D. Hemlepp, said the company supports organizations “with positions on issues that align with AEP’s positions” and strives to be transparent on political giving. “We also respect the positions of others, including some of the organizations that receive funding from AEP, to not publicly disclose funding or activities. That’s their right under the law.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76512619 and preceding and following
===
Rove hits big: The birth of a mega-donor
The Billion-Dollar Buy: About this series
Like never before, big dollars are having a big impact on politics and governance. This series examines how the new wide-open fundraising landscape will affect the 2012 campaigns.
See also:
Inside Koch world
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77453.html
GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and STEVE FRIESS | 7/13/12 4:36 AM EDT
In the new Wild West of giving and getting campaign money, the marriage of casino mogul Steve Wynn and political guru Karl Rove was an exceptionally powerful — and secretive — one.
Wynn, the flamboyant Las Vegas billionaire who claims to have voted for [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/An_unlikely_Obama_voter.html ] President Barack Obama in 2008, was the perfect get for Rove. Wynn was loaded, had soured on Obama and was just the kind of wealthy businessman who could help underwrite a plan hatched by Rove and other influential conservatives to spend close to $1 billion [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ] total to win the White House, Senate and House in 2012. Wynn, a registered Democrat until recently, was reluctant to attach his name to any high-dollar gambles on the GOP, worried that Obama’s allies would make him a bogeyman [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76899.html ]. So Rove — who helped develop Crossroads GPS [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39998.html ] in 2010, one of a growing roster of non-profit groups [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36841.html ] that can now accept unlimited contributions for hard-hitting political ads — was a perfect get for Wynn, too. Rove knows all the players — and the groups he works with are skilled at minimizing media attention to their financial whales.
The courting, which took place in direct conversations and through friends and allies of both men, produced big results. Wynn has kicked in millions to Crossroads GPS, according to multiple sources.
And Rove, who attended Wynn’s gala wedding [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/norm-121074349.html ] last year in Vegas, recently got something of a personal bonus out of the relationship. After Wynn attended the veteran operative’s wedding last month in Austin — an intimate and until-now unreported affair also attended by former President George W. Bush — Rove and his new wife Karen Johnson [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2011/03/love_etc_karl_rove_and_laura_j.html ] flew to Naples, Italy, aboard Wynn’s Boeing 737 [ http://www.planepictures.net/netshow.php?id=1022737 ] — a nearly 11-hour, 6,000-mile trip [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120711_wynnrove.html ] that could cost tens of thousands [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120711_wynnrove2.html ] of dollars from a charter jet carrier. Wynn joined Rove in Italy [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/wynn_rove.html ].
This story, stitched together by talking to numerous people familiar with the Rove-Wynn courtship, as well as a review of federal records, illustrates how one of the biggest changes to politics in a generation — the explosion of unlimited secret money [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60731.html ] — really works.
(PHOTOS: Republican money men [ http://www.politico.com/gallery/2012/05/republican-money-men/000178-002033.html ] )
Simply put: any person, corporation or union can spend as much as they want to directly influence elections through hard-hitting television ads without anyone else knowing. Republicans and their allies have had exceptional success exploiting this dynamic, which really took off after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31786.html ].
Think of the conservatives as matchmakers of sorts: Avenues for secret political spending would be meaningless if it weren’t for rich folks like Wynn with the means and desire to write huge checks to influence politics and governance. But they also need operatives like Rove and his interwoven group of allies [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74506.html ] to guide the mega-donors through the clubby and byzantine world of big-money politics.
The political team Wynn assembled in the last few years to facilitate his political escalation is a case in point. His lobbyist Charlie Spies [ http://www.politico.com/gallery/2012/05/republican-money-men/000178-002148.html ] co-founded the Restore Our Future [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57705.html ] super PAC to boost Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential campaign. Another co-founder was Carl Forti [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43731.html ], the political director of Crossroads GPS.
Spies and Forti worked together on Romney’s 2008 campaign — along with Wynn’s corporate government affairs director Mike Britt, who worked in George W. Bush’s political shop under Rove.
While Restore Our Future, Crossroads GPS and an affiliated super PAC called American Crossroads have already spent tens of millions [ http://www.politico.com/morningscore/0712/morningscore631.html ] of dollars boosting Romney’s presidential bid and assailing [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/crossroads-gps-unleashes-new-million-blitz-128163.html ] Obama’s [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/crossroads-gps-unleashes-new-million-blitz-128163.html ], they’re legally prohibited from coordinating [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55911.html ] with Romney’s campaign. Still, Spies and Britt – who joined Wynn’s team in 2009 and 2010, respectively – were photographed together [ https://twitter.com/RomneyRetreat/status/216714694021480448/photo/1/large ] with Restore Our Future adviser Don Stirling at a retreat Romney hosted for his top donors [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77757.html ] last month in Park City, Utah, though when the photo was posted to Twitter, Britt was mistakenly identified [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-campaign-denies-twitter-rumors-of-illegal-c ] as Romney campaign finance director Spencer Zwick.
Spies and Britt wouldn’t comment on what they discussed or their roles in Wynn’s operation. But lobbying filings show [ http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=bf918d75-ff0b-4cb5-88f6-7b029730b8b0 ] Spies’s firms — first McKenna Long & Aldridge [ http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=289679cf-b8f8-42f8-8ae1-30e582f53065 ] and then Clark Hill — have been paid $375,000 [ http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000022328&year=2010 ] by the publicly traded casino-developing and management company Wynn runs, Wynn Resorts, to lobby Congress on a range of internet gambling issues and international taxation, while Britt has been involved in state government lobbying [ http://www.sec.state.ma.us/LobbyistPublicSearch/CompleteDisclosure.aspx?PeriodId=20111&RefId=753 ] for Wynn.
Rove provides political advice in private [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303812904577291450562940874.html ] to a number of donors, and several of them have written big checks to American Crossroads [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72272.html ] or Crossroads GPS. But a source familiar with GPS said Wynn was its biggest donor, at least through the end of last year. At that point, the largest check the group had reported [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroadsgps_990_2011.html ] on its tax filings [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroadsgps_990_2011.html ] was $10.1 million given between the beginning of June 2010 and the end of May 2011 [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/04/crossroads2010.html ].
Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio told POLITICO “Crossroads does not comment on anonymous speculation concerning who might or might not give to the group,” and would not comment on Rove’s relationship with Wynn.
Unlike super PACs, Crossroads GPS is registered under a section of the tax code for so-called “social welfare” groups — 501(c)4 — that does not require groups to reveal their donors’ names, only donation amounts. The promise of anonymity [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44104.html ] is one of the main reasons GPS was established [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46355.html ] – it allows Wynn and like-minded contributors to avoid the controversy that has dogged [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76899.html ] top political donors like competing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77139.html ], as well as the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48464.html ] or the liberal financier George Soros [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53902.html ].
Sources tell POLITICO that Wynn’s giving to Crossroads GPS dwarfs all the publicly reported federal donations he’s ever made combined. Wynn, his company, his ex-wife and his current wife have given a total of more than $1.6 million over the years to a mix of Republicans and Democrats, according to FEC and Internal Revenue Service records. They show $654,000 in disclosed donations since 2008 going almost entirely to GOP candidates and groups — with $406,000 donated from his company to the Republican Governors Association — a change from his pre-2010 giving, which included plenty of cash to Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and their party committees.
Wynn considers Reid a friend, and his family gave $9,000 to Joe Biden’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In a statement, Wynn Resorts said, “We do not comment on specific donations; however, historically we have supported Democratic and Republican candidates for office based upon our consideration of the welfare of our employees, their families and our shareholders.”
Though Wynn has yet to donate to Restore Our Future, and bucked entreaties [ http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/romney_bets_on_saban_wynn_kiqr0OAgJpd9xZQfeRdO8K ] to publicly endorse Romney, he did attend a $50,000-a-head Romney fundraiser [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/gaming-leaders-boost-romney-155894115.html ] held in May in the Las Vegas penthouse apartment of Tim Poster, a top executive at Wynn Las Vegas. And sources tell POLITICO that Wynn and wife Andrea Wynn each donated to Romney’s campaign last month, which likely will be disclosed in FEC reports due next week.
Wynn isn’t the type to hide his political opinions, said Irwin Molasky, a Las Vegas developer who also attended the May fundraiser. Wynn “speaks his mind, he tells the truth — the way he feels.”
In fact, Wynn’s anti-Obama rants on television and his company’s earnings calls have made him something of a GOP rock star, starting with an October 2009 appearance [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/10/11/govs_granholm_daniels__wynn_zandi_on_effect_of_stimulus.html ] on Fox News Sunday in which he declared “Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history.”
Predicting that the middle- and working-classes would be hurt by the stimulus package and the proposed Democratic healthcare overhaul, Wynn jabbed Obama, asserting “soaring rhetoric and great speeches, with or without a Teleprompter, aren’t going to change the truth.”
Video of the appearance went viral and, a couple days later, Fox’s Neil Cavuto, hosting Wynn on the right-leaning network’s airwaves again, gushed to him “man, oh man, the reaction was over the top.” Wynn doubled down, telling Cavuto the Obama administration “is doing more damage than is easy to assess at the moment. But I tell you that I am sure that we’re moving in the wrong direction and I say that as half-a-Democrat and half-a-Republican. What we’re seeing now just doesn’t make sense. The priorities have all been inverted.”
He raised eyebrows when he admitted in a Fox News appearance [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy3Gk0BSkDc ] last year that he voted for Obama [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/An_unlikely_Obama_voter.html ] — an especially surprising revelation given that he and Adelson co-chaired [ http://www.lvrj.com/news/18252469.html ] the Republican National Committee’s effort to boost the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
But Molasky rejected the suggestion that Wynn had become more politically active or more Republican over the years, telling POLITICO “you’re reading much too much into this Republican thing. He votes for the person.” And he sighed when asked if Wynn was concerned that his political involvement could bring controversy that might hurt business.
“I’m sure he feels that, for business purposes, he would like to see a change and that’s not any different than a lot of business people in this country who are not afraid to give their opinion,” Molasky said. “I don’t think Steve is any different than anybody else. He is just more vocal, probably, about it — more of a public personae.”
A source with knowledge of Wynn’s political dealing had a different read. “There’s a difference between criticizing the president — lots of people do that — and becoming one of a small group of big donors whose face gets plastered on cable news [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/koch-spox-msnbc-reports-lead-to-death-threats-123817.html ] like Sheldon or the Kochs,” said the source, who did not want to be identified discussing Wynn’s motivations for keeping his biggest donations private.
“It’s a whole different level of attention,” said the source. “It’s not what Wynn wants to be known for, but he does want to make sure Obama goes down.”
In a particularly memorable conference call [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59333.html ] last year to discuss his company’s earnings with Wall Street analysts, Wynn compared Obama’s rhetoric to that of “pure socialists,” and asserted “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the president of the United States.” Calling himself a “Democratic businessman,” though he had switched his registration to Republican [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120712_wynn.html ] more than a year earlier, Wynn called the Obama administration “the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”
The line echoed a Republican talking point in Washington. And the Senate Republican conference began including clips of Wynn’s criticisms of Obama in some of its weekly video montages highlighting effective conservative messaging for senators, a senior GOP Senate aide said.
But one top Wall Street gambling industry analyst suggested Wynn’s politicking is wearing on some in the finance sector. “At some point, it’s like, ‘Give it a rest, Steve,’” said the analyst, who did not want to be named. “Earnings calls are meant to give status about the company and discuss data. But for the past year or so, it’s one anti-Obama diatribe after another. And yet look at his stock under Obama. It’s tripled since the worst of the recession.”
Wynn’s outspokenness also has caused tension in his relationship with Reid, whose political committees have reported receiving $64,000 over the years from Wynn and his ex-wife Elaine Wynn.
Wynn called Reid to express frustrations [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/10/13/nevadas-close-election-harry-reids-last-stand.html ] with the Democratic health care overhaul before Reid’s 2010 reelection. Afterwards, the casino mogul teamed with his once-bitter rival Adelson to oppose an effort by Reid to slip language into a tax bill to legalize online [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46095.html ] gambling [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46095.html ]. “Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn called members personally to tell them that the bill wasn’t sufficient,” said a senior congressional aide.
Reid ultimately decided not to move ahead [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46221.html ] with the plan. And Wynn’s aggressiveness on the Hill, as well as his de facto alliance with Adelson, were noted by GOP insiders, who interpreted the moves as signaling a bigger footprint in Republican politics.
Both Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands corporation and Wynn Resorts have gambling operations in Macao. And the pair lately have collaborated more on political efforts, such as a 2012 fundraiser [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75220_Page2.html ] at Adelson’s Venetian hotel for a joint fundraising committee linked to House Speaker John Boehner, and a 2011 fundraiser for Rep. Dave Camp [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/adelson.html ] (R-Mich. [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/adelson.html ]) at the Wynn.
That’s a far cry from their very first meeting, which involved a disagreement over a ballroom rental. It ended with Wynn chasing Adelson out of his office, according to a 2005 Forbes story [ http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/0328/032.html ] in which Wynn said Adelson “has an inferiority complex” and “animosity toward a lot of people.” Adelson is also quoted calling Wynn “a liar” and “an egomaniac.”
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78466.html [with comments]
===
GOP winning race for funds
Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff
July 05, 2012
The top “super PACs’’ supporting Republicans in the fall elections have raised more than three times as much money as super PACs aligned with Democrats, $158 million to $47 million, a Globe analysis shows.
The imbalance comes as well-to-do Republicans have been far more generous than their Democratic counterparts, more frequently tossing as much as $1 million or more into the GOP cause.
Unless things change in the next four months, the gap could cost the Democrats the White House and both houses of Congress, no less an authority than President Obama said in a conference call to major Democratic donors late last week.
The president urged his top funders to step up their efforts in a system of campaign finance that permits corporations, labor unions, and individuals to give unlimited amounts to super PACs, which spend independently of candidates and parties.
Thus far, big Republican funders have dominated the show. At the end of May, Casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, had already contributed $20 million to super PACs supporting a Republican Congress and failed GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.Published reports have said Adelson gave a super PAC supporting presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney another $10 million, an amount not included in the Globe’s overall totals because it has not yet been officially reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Another Republican billionaire, Harold Simmons, his Texas-based chemicals and metals conglomerate Contran Corp., and his wife, Annette, have given a combined $18.3 million to a total of nine GOP-allied super PACs, Federal Election Commission records show.
By contrast, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg is the leading individual Democratic donor, having given $2.1 million to two pro-Democrat super PACs.
Beyond the sheer volume from some donors, the imbalance also is reflected in the number of individual entities making jumbo donations. At least 35 individuals and corporations had donated $1 million or more to Republican super PACs, compared with 16 (including seven labor unions) to Democratic groups.
The lopsided pattern also appears in the marquee presidential contest. Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, had taken in $61.5 million, more than four times the $14.6 million raised by Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting Obama, through the end of last month.
The race to tap wealthy contributors went into overdrive after 2010 federal court rulings that dramatically loosened campaign finance regulations. Individuals are still limited in how much they can give to candidates’ committees and party committees. But now super PACs are running parallel operations, collecting whatever sums people want to give; they are not supposed to coordinate their spending with candidates.
In his call last week, which the online news site Daily Beast reported after obtaining a recording, Obama told major funders: “We are going to see more money spent on negative ads through these super PACs and anonymous outside groups than ever before. And if things continue as they have so far, I’ll be the first sitting president in modern history to be outspent in his reelection campaign.”
The “anonymous outside” groups Obama referred to are politically active nonprofit organizations, the most active of which are on the Republican side, set up under the tax code to promote “social welfare” and not required to disclose their donors. Super PACs must disclose their contributors.
Republicans say their supporters are kicking in millions in direct response to Obama’s presidency.
“There are conservative donors who are dramatically motivated by the explosion of spending, regulations, and debt under this president, and there is a great desire to put the brakes on his agenda,” said Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for American Crossroads, a muscular GOP super PAC that has attacked Obama and Democrats running for Congress and had raised $34.3 million through the end of May.
Democrats, including the president on his conference call, have said Democrats may be contributing less because they are overconfident the president can beat Romney or they are disillusioned by the slow pace of promised change in Washington. But there also is a deep philosophical objection to the system of unlimited spending that has blossomed since the January 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which said corporations and unions could spend as much as they pleased to influence elections. Others don’t want their money to be spent on negative advertising, said Democratic fund-raisers and spokesmen for wealthy donors.
For instance, the only super PAC donation this cycle by Peter Lewis, who made his fortune as head of Progressive Insurance, was $200,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, which specializes in research it shares with Democratic-leaning groups.
“He finds the corrupting power of money offensive with its negativity and denigration of opponents,” Jennifer Frutchy, his spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. He has no other plans to give to super PACs this year, she said, preferring instead “to build progressive infrastructure.”
In the 2004 cycle, Lewis gave $23.2 million to independent groups that supported Democrats, the second most of any individual, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
In some respects, the 2012 money race is a reverse image of 2004, when big Democratic donors, animated by intense opposition to Republican incumbent George W. Bush, heavily outspent rival GOP givers to underwrite expensive field operations and advertising paid for by independent groups. The effort failed to capture the presidency, however, and some Democratic activists believe that failure has dampened enthusiasm this year.
In 2004, of the 24 individuals who gave $2 million or more to independent groups, 14 were Democrats. They donated a combined $109 million compared with $39 million donated by 10 Republicans, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Billionaire financier George Soros, who led all donors with $23.7 million to independent Democratic groups, in this cycle so far has targeted only about $2.2 million to independent groups, with the lion’s share going to organizations that engage in research or grass-roots liberal advocacy.
“He’s given $1 million each to [America Votes] and [American Bridge 21st Century],” his spokesman, Michael Vachon, said in an e-mail. “As to what he will do in the future, I don’t know.”
Similarly, FEC records show that film producer Stephen Bing, who gave $13.9 million to independent groups supporting Democrats in 2004, has donated $425,000 to super PACs this cycle — $250,000 to Majority PAC, which is trying to elect Democrats to the Senate, $150,000 to American Bridge, and $25,000 to the League of Conservation Voters.
Bing “does not comment on these matters,” Paul Bloch, a spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.
© 2012 NY Times Co.
http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-05/news/32553762_1_pacs-federal-election-commission-priorities-usa-action
===
Can the Democrats Catch Up in the Super-PAC Game?
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Video [embedded]
Democrats’ Super-PAC Operatives
More in the Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Reinhard Hunger for The New York Times. Model by Katrin Rodegast.
Bill Burton (second from right), aboard Marine One on Aug. 9, 2010, is now a principal of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that is trying to get his former boss (center) re-elected.
Pete Souza/The White House
By ROBERT DRAPER
Published: July 5, 2012
One day in April, Paul Begala, a former Bill Clinton political strategist and CNN analyst, placed a phone call to a wealthy and left-leaning 41-year-old Houston lawyer named Steve Mostyn. Begala is himself a Texan, albeit one who gives off the jittery vibe of a Catskills comedian, and the two men have a few friends in common. But Mostyn, a frequent giver to Democratic causes, quickly intuited that this wasn’t a social call. Begala reminded Mostyn that he was now working as a consultant for Priorities USA Action, a so-called super PAC [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ] run by Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, former White House senior staff members, that was committed to Barack Obama’s re-election. He and Burton would be coming to Houston on Friday, April 13, Begala said. Could they arrange for a meeting?
“I’ll be in Fort Lauderdale that day on my boat,” Mostyn replied. “You’re welcome to join me there.”
The invitation was not thoroughly sincere, evidenced by the fact that Mostyn did not inform Begala where his boat would be docked. Nonetheless, at noon sharp on Friday the 13th, Begala (who is prone to seasickness) and Burton (who had taken a red-eye flight from San Francisco, where he spent the previous afternoon giving his pitch to wealthy progressives at the Telegraph Hill home of the Taco Bell heir Rob McKay), materialized at the correct Fort Lauderdale marina, each wearing jeans and bearing iPads.
For the uninitiated, “boat” is Texan for “yacht.” Burton and Begala climbed aboard the outsize Mostyn vessel, All or Nothing, and the attractive first mate handed them cans of Michelob Ultra. A four-hour conversation ensued. Mostyn and his wife, Amber (who is also an attorney), were congenial but blunt. They were not fans of super PACs — political action committees that can receive unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions, usually for the purpose of saturating the airwaves with attack ads — and were appalled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which made such entities possible. For that matter, the Mostyns weren’t entirely happy with Obama. The president had been far too accommodating to Republicans — “naïve,” as Amber Mostyn expressed it.
“We hear that a lot,” Burton conceded. Burton was a White House deputy press secretary under Obama, and at age 34, he has spent his career as a happy warrior spewing Democratic messages from behind a lectern or on cable TV. But a big part of his new role involves shutting up and listening to rich Democrats vent about his former boss’s deficiencies. Gently he reminded his hosts, “But things will only be worse if he’s not re-elected.”
The Mostyns acknowledged not wanting to see Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. Still, they wondered how any donation could possibly make a difference. “They’re spending ridiculous amounts of money on the other side,” Amber Mostyn said. “All the crazy commercials they’re going to put up — how do you combat that?”
Burton was ready for this question. “You don’t do it dollar for dollar,” he said. He whipped out his iPad and showed the Mostyns a few slides from his PowerPoint presentation. The slides included polling data indicating voters’ lack of familiarity with Romney’s business record at the private-equity firm Bain Capital, as well as financial figures from the 2010 midterm election showing how well-spent donations could help a Democrat prevail over a better-financed Republican opponent.
Then Burton pulled up something else on his screen: raw video footage that Priorities intended to use for attack ads against Romney. Appearing were the somber images of several men and women who were laid off by Bain. The individuals were tracked down by Brennan Bilberry, the super PAC’s 26-year-old research director, and persuaded to tell their stories on camera. One of these was a middle-aged paper-mill worker named Mike Earnest, who had been asked to help build a 30-foot stage that Bain officials would later stand upon while announcing to Earnest and other millworkers that they were being laid off. “Turns out that when we built that stage,” Earnest said in a flat Midwestern cadence, “it was like building my own coffin.”
Steve Mostyn was impressed by their research. He asked them what sort of donation they were talking about.
“One million dollars,” was the reply. The Mostyns had never given anywhere near that kind of money to a candidate in the past.
“And we’d like it right away,” Burton said. He explained that TV ad rates were cheaper to buy far in advance.
Defining the opponent early was crucial, Begala pointed out. “That’s what we did to Bob Dole in 1996,” he said. “It’s what the Bush campaign did to John Kerry in 2004.”
Burton added, “Because voters at this point don’t know much about Romney, every dollar we spend now is worth more, exponentially.”
Amber Mostyn wanted to know how they were going to re-energize a Democratic base that has been disillusioned.
That’s not our role, Burton explained. Though presidential campaigns and their supporting super PACs are forbidden to communicate with one another, a division of labor was mutually understood. It was up to the Obama campaign to be the keeper of the president’s story, Burton said. Priorities would focus on “defining” Romney, and in the process, destroying him. And to do that, it needed the Mostyns and many people like them to get over their distaste for the Citizens United decision and their frustration with the president and write a very large check, because that’s what was happening every day on the other side.
Burton and his best friend, Sean Sweeney, are knockaround political operatives from working-class backgrounds who had never spent a day in the genteel stratum of fund-raising before they started their super PAC 16 months ago. Their chief qualification for the job, beyond the fact that no one else wanted it, was their shared appreciation for the devastating work that well-financed outside groups can do.
Burton and Sweeney both worked for Rahm Emanuel during the 2006 midterm elections, when Emanuel was directing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s successful drive to win back the House. Unions and other outside groups played a huge role during that cycle by tarring-and-feathering Republicans as corrupt and wedded to the increasingly unpopular policies of President George W. Bush. In the spring of 2008, a Democratic PAC calling itself Progressive Media USA, whose advisers included Begala, began to raise tens of millions of dollars from big-name donors to pay for attack ads against John McCain. The intent was to keep Progressive Media in place well after the election as a magnet for deep-pocketed progressives; as one of its organizers wistfully told me, “Imagine where we’d be if we had that in place four years later.” But the Obama campaign — which was building its own fund-raising behemoth, even at the expense of the candidate’s earlier pledge to accept public financing and the spending cap that came with it — didn’t want outside interference. The campaign sent out a 30-year-old spokesman named Bill Burton to shut Progressive Media down by telling the press, “From the beginning of this race, Obama has told supporters that if they want to help his effort, they should do so through his campaign.”
Two years later, President Obama repeatedly denounced the conservative super PACs that had cropped up in the wake of the Citizens United decision. In so doing, Obama ended up unilaterally disarming Democrats while animating Republicans. “When Obama attacked us by name in the fall of 2010, accusing us of taking money from the Chinese, it was basically the best fund-raising pitch we could’ve made,” says Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC conceived by Karl Rove and the Republican consultant Ed Gillespie. “We raised $13 million the week after they attacked us.” Burton and Sweeney watched from the White House — more with rueful admiration than moral outrage — as the Republicans turned the tables, outspending Democratic groups by $100 million and taking back the House.
Three months after the midterms, Burton learned that he was not chosen to succeed Robert Gibbs as White House press secretary. Gibbs had not recommended his deputy for the job (which went to Vice President Joseph Biden’s spokesman, Jay Carney) — perhaps, as some have suggested, because of Burton’s youth, or because the deputy had openly campaigned for the job after having been requested not to do so. Several in the White House, including the president, urged Burton to stay on. Whatever Gibbs and others might have found lacking in him, he had proved himself to be an agile stand-in for the press secretary, one who seemed to relish trading punches with Fox News hosts.
Burton is one of those ever-ascending Washingtonians whose brazen optimism seems not to have been dampened in the slightest by the cynical world he inhabits. When asked how he’s doing, he routinely, and often defiantly, replies, “Best day of my life.” He has been a political spokesman his entire adult life and is married to a former Clinton White House aide, Laura Burton Capps, herself the daughter of Congresswoman Lois Capps and Congressman Walter Capps.
The son of a metal-foundry worker in Buffalo who, Burton says, “was on his feet on concrete floors all day, carrying 50-pound bags of different chemical alloys and inhaling the world’s worst pollutants,” Burton learned two things by the time he was 11. The first — which arrived as an epiphany while watching the 1988 vice-presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle on the family’s black-and-white TV — was that “I wanted to be in politics, and I wanted to be at the highest level.”
The second revelation was that he was black. Burton’s father was African-American and his mother was Polish. One day in elementary school he identified himself as “other” on a standardized test. “My fifth-grade teacher said, ‘No, you’re black — mark that you’re black,’ ” he told me. “I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m black.’ Just another piece of information.” With little effort, he navigated both sides of the racial divide, reserving his energies for political climbing. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1999, he made repeated visits to the campus office of Al Gore’s presidential campaign, wearing them down until they gave him the title of deputy press secretary. At age 22, he took a job on the Hill as a Congressional aide.
But presidential politics was Burton’s goal. Leveraging every Washington contact he had, Burton persuaded Senator Tom Harkin (who campaigned for the presidency in 1992) to hire him as his press secretary. When Harkin elected to stay out of the 2004 race, Burton jumped ship and became Dick Gephardt’s communications director in Iowa. When Gephardt faltered, the gabby and incessant Burton joined the Kerry campaign.
In late 2006, Burton managed to network his way into a job interview with Senator Barack Obama, whose famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention Burton watched “over and over, the way some kids have seen ‘Star Wars’ a hundred times,” he told me. The two men spoke only briefly of their shared biracial experience. Instead, the Iowa caucuses were on the senator’s mind. Burton had experience there. He recalls suggesting that Obama shoot for “a respectable third place, maybe an unlikely second.” Obama disagreed. He assured Burton that he would win Iowa. Soon after, Burton became one of the earliest senior staff members to join Obama’s underdog campaign.
Though his ambitions eventually met a brick wall with the news that he would not be the White House’s top spokesman, Burton was not going to let a bruised ego befoul relationships that he spent years cultivating. As the deputy press secretary was leaving the building in February of last year, it happened that his pal Sean Sweeney — who had been the top aide to Rahm Emanuel, until Emanuel decided to run for mayor of Chicago — was also in search of a new career. Sweeney is 40, dry-witted and a career backstage political technician, more than content to cede the limelight to the Burtons and Emanuels while immersing himself in the minutiae of precinct voting data and efficient ad markets. The two ex-Obamaites spent the month of February at Tunnicliff’s Tavern on Capitol Hill and halfheartedly mulled over opening a consulting shop together. But Burton had not lost his appetite for presidential politics.
Sweeney and Burton kicked around the idea of starting a pro-Obama super PAC with fellow Democrats. None of them fretted aloud that going toe to toe with Karl Rove and the Koch brothers would amount to fighting above their weight — that, as one conservative super PAC affiliate would say to me, “the more appropriate analog to Rove and Gillespie would be James Carville and Ed Rendell,” the former Pennsylvania governor. But if the chief function of a super PAC is to kneecap an opponent, the two campaign veterans seemed to have ample experience. That their profiles were relatively obscure, their financial resources meager and their fund-raising experience nonexistent did not apparently deter them.
Because they lacked the money for an office (and because, as Burton told me, “it’s a little too obvious to meet at Starbucks”), Burton and Sweeney took all of their early meetings in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. Begala was the first to sign on as a paid consultant; Terry McAuliffe, the former D.N.C. chairman, was the first to say no, citing other commitments. Teddy Johnston, the Obama campaign’s Florida finance director, became their chief fund-raiser. Sweeney knew Geoff Garin, a Democratic consultant, from when they worked together for Senator Charles E. Schumer and persuaded him to handle their polling. Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List and the America Coming Together PAC agreed to provide regular consultation. Harold Ickes, the former Clinton White House deputy chief of staff and Media Fund PAC president, became president of Priorities USA Action. He recalls warning them: “It’s hard, fund-raising. You have to raise it in big chunks. Of the $200 million we raised, $95 million of that came from five sources. And you don’t just walk in and ask for that.”
It took several weeks for Burton and Sweeney to come up with a name for their start-up. To their irritation, every slogan they considered had already been trademarked by Republicans. “We gave our lawyer 10 more names,” Burton recalls. “Then like 50. We’re literally trying every combination of whatever. You can’t come up with a name that has the word ‘future’ in it that the Republicans don’t control. Romney’s Restore Our Future — that doesn’t even make sense, and that’s probably why they were able to get it.”
Eventually they settled on Priorities USA Action. As a backhanded homage to Karl Rove, Burton and Sweeney explicitly modeled the two-headed corpus of their brainchild after American Crossroads. One side would consist of a tax-exempt political action committee covered by section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, to which named individuals and groups could donate in unlimited amounts. Its companion entity, Priorities USA, permissible under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, could, like its counterpart Crossroads GPS, receive unlimited funds by undisclosed donors, provided that the “social welfare” organization did not pursue political activities as its “primary purpose.” (The two phrases in quotation marks are, needless to say, hazily defined. “Priorities USA, like Crossroads GPS, has one purpose, and that’s to elect and defeat candidates,” says Fred Wertheimer of the campaign watchdog group Democracy 21. “They’re blowing smoke when they claim they’re a ‘social welfare’ organization in the business of discussing issues.”)
There was, however, one fundamental difference between Priorities and its conservative counterparts. According to Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ], Rove’s organization had vowed to raise $300 million for the 2012 election — which, when coupled with Restore Our Future ($100 million) and the outside groups of oil and chemical billionaires Charles and David Koch ($400 million), would amount to an $800 million war chest. Burton and Sweeney’s stated goal was $100 million.
Having conceded the arms race before it even began, the Priorities team recognized that its only hope lay in asymmetrical warfare. Making a virtue of their relative puniness, Begala told me: “Karl’s trying to be too comprehensive, playing in too many places on too many levels. He believes in throw-weight, the way the Soviet space program worked: they believed in brute force, while we believed in precision and perfection.” Priorities would be selective in its ad buys. Knowing that Obama had to keep Pennsylvania in the win column, it would reach for undecided voters in the Pittsburgh exurbs instead of playing in the expensive Philadelphia market. Similarly, Priorities would not bother trying to persuade the elderly (a group whose low support for the president has seemed immovable) but would instead pursue more promising demographic targets (non-college-educated young women in the suburbs, working-class Hispanics in Florida and the West). The pro-Obama super PAC would take dead aim at these very specific pockets of swing voters. Their weapon would be, in Begala’s words, “ruthless, relentless storytelling.”
Last December — specifically, on Pearl Harbor Day — Burton and Sweeney met with a few other Priorities advisers in the Dupont Circle office of the pollster Geoff Garin to decide just what their Romney story would be. They quickly discarded the Romney-as-flip-flopper leitmotif. To say that the Republican lacked a firm set of positions was to concede that he couldn’t be defined. Better, they concluded, to assert that Romney in fact possessed beliefs — very extreme ones.
Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing. What became clear was that voters had almost no sense of Obama’s opponent. While conducting a different focus group — this one with non-college-educated Milwaukee voters on the eve of Wisconsin’s April 3 primary — Burton and Sweeney were surprised to learn that even after Romney had spent months campaigning, many in the group could not recognize his face, much less characterize his positions. Compounding the Republican nominee’s strangely persistent obscurity is that, as Garin told me, “Romney is not a natural politician in the sense of embracing opportunities to talk about himself.”
That left an opening for the Democrats to tell Romney’s story, and over the spring they figured out how to do so. Obama’s opponent was not an ideologue per se, the Priorities team decided, but instead someone who knows and cares only about wealthy Americans. Burton describes the distinction as “a top/bottom rather than left/right approach” — also known in Republican circles as class warfare.
The best explanatory tool for this narrative would prove to be Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. In this recasting of Romney’s self-described chief qualification to be president, the candidate may well be someone who understands how the economy works but cares only about making it work for rich guys like himself. As one participant in the Priorities focus groups told me, “Businessmen are often highly admired, but there’s no real template for somebody with Mitt Romney’s type of business experience getting embraced.”
Bain-bashing is not exactly a novel gambit. Ted Kennedy employed it during Romney’s first campaign, the 1994 U.S. Senate race, and succeeded wildly. Newt Gingrich also tried it during this year’s Republican primaries, and the tactic blew up in his face, when a pro-Gingrich super PAC released an anti-Bain video full of inaccuracies, which Gingrich then disavowed. To the Beltway press, and perhaps to others as well, what Romney’s business did or didn’t do two decades ago is old news. Burton and Sweeney acknowledged this problem to me and postulated — sounding somewhat like Karl Rove as they did so — that the threat of having one’s steel mill shut down doesn’t resonate with the elite media.
But, they insisted, the message would penetrate the membrane of their target audience. More than one member of the Priorities team told me that Romney reminded them of another wooden and reserved Massachusetts politician, Burton’s former candidate in 2004, John Kerry — who, history shows, was defined and thereafter demolished by a masterful if venal tag-team consisting of the Bush campaign and the proto-super PAC Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And, as the Priorities team well knew, the Swift Boat assault on Kerry’s war record was waged with one-twentieth of the backing that the Democrats raised for their anti-Bush PACs. In other words: ruthless, relentless storytelling could be done on the cheap.
During the first 10 months of its existence, Priorities USA Action managed to raise only $7 million. (Of this, $2 million was seed money from Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation; another $1 million came from the comedian Bill Maher.) Their travails to some degree reflect the Democratic Party’s greater struggle with its prim self-perception. From the perspective of many Democrats, this year’s foray into post-Citizens United campaigning calls to mind an “Apocalypse Now”-like journey into the maw of something darker than death itself — namely, a morality-free zone in which Republicans alone can thrive. “I think that many Democrats feel that participating in the system would be validating Citizens United, which was a bad and destructive decision,” Geoff Garin says.
A sentiment commonly held by Democrats — so much so that it’s part of the standard Priorities pitch to donors — is that their only motivation to contribute is a moral one, while Republicans like the Koch brothers donate because they stand to make gobs of money if their pro-business candidate is elected. One of Priorities’ big donors told me another reason that conservatives are more suited to a post-Citizens United climate than progressives. “To me, a lot of the super-PAC money on the Republican side comes from hatred,” he said. “We Democrats just don’t hate like that.”
The idea that Democrats abhor big money and scorched-earth campaigning requires more than a touch of amnesia. “In 2004, we had all this energy coming from the horror at what Bush was doing — we were furious,” recalls the liberal activist Ellen Malcolm, whose America Coming Together PAC benefited from millions in donations from wealthy Democrats like George Soros. “George came out of Nazi Europe and looked at this so-called war on terrorism as an all-too-familiar dynamic of governments taking control. Fear and anger are the great motivators in fund-raising. And right now Karl Rove has the fear and anger on his side.”
Lacking this sort of emotional edge, Priorities struggled against a confluence of inhospitable factors. First among those is that, as Jonathan Collegio of American Crossroads observes, “Outside money tends to flow toward the party out of power, and to causes to stop things rather than to promote things.” Burton and Sweeney had to contend with the widely held assumption that the Obama campaign was raising enough money on its own anyway. “These big donors are smart — they look at the numbers,” a prominent Democratic fund-raiser told me. “They say, ‘How’s this money they want from me going to have any impact, compared to the $750 million Obama says he’s raising?’ ” It also did not help that for most of its young life, Priorities operated not only without Obama’s endorsement but also in the face of his implicit disapproval — at least until late last December, when Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, showed his fellow adviser David Axelrod the gross disparity in fund-raising between conservative and liberal groups, prompting an alarmed Axelrod to murmur, “We’ve got to show this to the president.”
Over and over, Burton and Sweeney heard Democrats express distaste for super PACs, disillusionment with Obama and — during the primary season, anyway — disbelief that the president was in any danger of losing. (“It’s been difficult,” Sweeney told me in early spring, “to make the case that Romney’s a juggernaut when he’s within 2,000 votes of losing Ohio to Rick Santorum.”) As one lackluster monthly F.E.C. disclosure followed another, a new narrative rippled through Washington, and it wasn’t about Bain Capital: the Priorities team, it was suggested, was not ready for prime time.
“It’s a personal process, asking for checks of this size,” says Susan McCue, one leader of the Democratic Senate super PAC. “You need to take the time to talk about the stakes and how their support will make a difference. And you need to assure them that their money will be used efficiently.” Arguably, the skill sets of driving home a rapid-response message to a roomful of deadline-crazed journalists and charming a tycoon into parting with a million dollars could not be more different. Burton and Sweeney were novices at asking for money, and apparently it showed. Upper-tier Obama associates told me that in the eyes of donors, Burton and Sweeney lacked Rove’s stature and Begala’s natural salesman’s touch. In April, after an attack ad by American Crossroads compelled the Obama campaign to respond by spending its own money for additional TV time — knowing that Priorities lacked the money to do so — a clearly annoyed official told me, “If we had a Karl Rove of our own out there, we wouldn’t have had to do this.”
As the super PAC’s public face — a ubiquitous MSNBC talking head, blogger and cajoler of the Washington news media — Burton bore the brunt of the criticism. The ongoing insinuation that he was out of his depth did not outwardly jostle the spokesman’s best-day-of-my-life unsinkability. (“If you didn’t read the story and just looked at the pictures . . . I feel like I came out pretty good,” he wrote me after one particularly withering article.) Burton and Sweeney repeatedly insisted to me that what they termed the “education process” was mainly about converting super-PAC-averse Democrats rather than learning on the fly themselves.
Still, they knew they needed help. By the end of the spring, Priorities had beefed up its fund-raising team to include Diana Rogalle (from the ACT PAC), Susan Holloway Torricelli (former Senator Robert Torricelli’s ex- wife and longtime fund-raiser) and Kathleen Daughety (who was previously Senator Michael Bennet’s finance director). Mary Beth Cahill, who was Burton’s boss on the Kerry campaign, also signed on as a strategic adviser.
“Look, Sean and Bill make no bones about it: they’d been on the spending” — meaning messaging — “side, not the fund-raising side,” Harold Ickes told me. “I think they decided to do it because no one else was doing it. It was clearly necessary, and I encouraged them to do it. That said, there are techniques, and it’s an art form . . . there’s a minuet, almost. And it takes a lot of time, you bet.”
On April 14, the day after their get-together aboard the boat, Steve Mostyn called Begala to say that he would soon be wiring Priorities a million dollars. A month later — 25 weeks before the general election — Mostyn’s donation would help finance a $10 million TV blitz in the swing states of Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Each week featured a somber new anti-Romney testimonial. On May 22, it was that of Loris Huffman, who worked at the Ampad paper mill [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=414qXn66t3I ( http://youtu.be/414qXn66t3I )]
for 34 years before being laid off by Bain. On June 10, a former steel-mill employee, Donnie Box [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0FW8N_8_Y ( http://youtu.be/Fg0FW8N_8_Y )],
appeared in ads.
Three days later, The Wall Street Journal reported [ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/06/13/adelson-gives-10-million-to-pro-romney-super-pac/ ] that the conservative casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson had just pledged money to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. The amount Adelson was donating was $10 million — 10 times that of the Mostyns’ hard-won contribution, and the sum total of Priorities USA’s entire ad buy. A couple of days later, The Huffington Post reported that Adelson might also be cutting $10 million checks to American Crossroads and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. All told, the casino magnate was telling friends, his contributions to right-leaning candidates and causes might well reach $100 million — a figure by a single Republican donor that matches the amount Priorities has set as its financial goal for the entire 2012 cycle.
After Burton read the story about Adelson’s contribution to the Romney super PAC, he could think of only one thing to do. “I sent that article out to every single Democratic donor that I know,” he would later recall. The subject heading of Burton’s e-mail — minus a profane verb — was: “So apparently they’re not messing around.”
But in late May and early June, it wasn’t Sheldon Adelson who was drowning out the Priorities ads. Rather, the Obama campaign was inadvertently doing so. Apparently the campaign did not know or did not care about Priorities USA Action’s planned mini-blitz, for it released its own two-minute attack video focusing on Bain’s closure of GST Steel, which concluded with, “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”
Reaction to the ad was swift and overwhelmingly negative. A procession of Democrats — starting with the Newark mayor and Obama surrogate Cory Booker, followed by former Congressman Harold Ford Jr., the former U.S. Treasury adviser Steven Rattner and former Governor Ed Rendell — publicly criticized the president for speaking so harshly of private-equity firms.
Burton and Sweeney waited out the chatter. They knew that Booker and the rest had deep associations with the financial sector. They also believed in their polling data — which would be validated in early June by focus groups of suburban mothers conducted in Richmond, Va., and Las Vegas, and also by an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showing that voters were twice as likely to have a negative opinion of Bain’s practices. Besides, beneath all the bluster coming from Obama’s fellow Democrats lurked a basic political verity: the leader of the free world is widely seen as having better things to do with his time than trash Mitt Romney’s past business life. It was beneath him. But it was hardly beneath Obama’s friends residing in the shadows of super PAC world. Quite the opposite: this was exactly what Priorities was set up to do.
Burton and Sweeney’s creation now appears to be on relatively solid footing. As of late June, the super PAC has amassed a total of $40 million, with almost $20 million in the bank and about a dozen million-dollar donors onboard. Among the most recent is Qualcomm’s co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs and his wife, Joan, newcomers to the world of political mega-giving, whom Burton and other Priorities surrogates spent a year courting in person, on the phone and by e-mail before the couple relented and gave $2 million. Priorities’ $100 million goal is within reach but by no means assured. “In order to do that,” Ickes says, “we’re going to have go get some $5 million and $10 million donors.” Another Priorities representative says wistfully: “Maybe there’s someone we never heard of. Is there a Charles Koch out there on our side?”
On June 21, Burton returned to Buffalo to deliver the commencement address at City Honors School, from which he graduated in 1995. “While men and women are remembered for how they succeed,” the former White House spokesman told his young audience, “they are defined by how they fail. And by how they come back.” Late that evening, while Burton was dining out with old high-school buddies and faculty members, a Washington Post article about Romney and Bain Capital [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html ] appeared on the paper’s Web site. The story analyzed filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that showed Bain to have “owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories.”
From the restaurant, Burton e-mailed Sweeney and their team. By 10:45 p.m., they had drafted a memo that would be sent to the e-mail addresses of several hundred political reporters by 7 the next morning: “Despite his phony rhetoric on standing up for American workers, today’s Washington Post details how Mitt Romney directly profited from the outsourcing of American jobs overseas.” Soon they would be adding more Bain-related questions to their polls, seeking to add depth to their narrative, the one best shot their modestly financed super PAC had at persuading swing voters and thereby making a difference in a closely contested presidential election. Burton and Sweeney were doing what they do best, telling the story — though when it came down to it, getting enough people to listen would still be the hardest part.
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives [ http://books.simonandschuster.com/Do-Not-Ask-What-Good-We-Do/Robert-Draper/9781451642087 ].”
Editor: Ilena Silverman
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
===
GOP fundraising could tilt Congress rightward
President Barack Obama wipes sweat from his eye after a speech at Washington Park in Sandusky, Ohio, Thursday, July 5, 2012. Obama is on a two-day bus trip through Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(AP Photo/David Richard)(Credit: AP)
The real impact of super PAC money this fall could be in delivering President Obama a Pyrrhic victory
By Steve Kornacki
Jul 6, 2012
Mitt Romney has apparently posted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/mitt-romney-raised-more-than-100-million-in-june/2012/07/05/gJQAZnT9PW_blog.html ] his second consecutive month of stellar fun-raising. His campaign hasn’t officially released any figures yet, but it has sent word that the Romney team and the Republican National Committee’s Romney Victory Fund jointly raked in at least $100 million in June – $23 million better than Romney’s May haul, which also raised eyebrows, and the highest single-month total ever [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78155.html ] for a GOP candidate.
It may be a few days before numbers for Barack Obama’s campaign are available, but the assumption is that the president was again outraised by his opponent in June. In May, Obama took in $16 million less than Romney.
As word of Romney’s big month spread late Thursday, Obama’s team sought to downplay the news. “It seems to me that they were looking for some good news today, and this is the best they had,” David Axelrod said [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/axelrod-downplays-romneys-100-million-haul ].
At the outset of the campaign, it was assumed that Obama, who took in $750 million during his 2008 campaign, would raise more money than his GOP opponent. There was even talk that the president might cross the $1 billion mark this time around. The hope for Republicans was that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would help them make up the difference with super PAC money.
But with the election now four months away, it’s possible Romney will end up enjoying a clear advantage on both fronts. Since locking up the GOP nomination, the pace of his own fund-raising has exceeded expectations, while Obama hasn’t been reaping the same monthly windfalls he benefited from four years ago. This stands to reason; in ’08, Obama’s fund-raising was boosted by an epic, months-long primary battle with Hillary Clinton, and his status as a non-incumbent made it easier to build grassroots energy.
At the same time, elite Republican donors are engaged in the super PAC game with far more intensity [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all (above)] than their Democratic counterparts, creating an even bigger outside money disparity than many expected a year ago. A Boston Glove review this week found [ http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-05/news/32553762_1_pacs-federal-election-commission-priorities-usa-action (second above)] that top Republican super PACs have taken in $158 million so far this year, compared to $47 million for Democratic super PACs. Theories abound as to why this is – rich Democrats have a moral aversion to super PACs? It’s easier to build excitement for the opposition party candidate? Rich Republicans see presidential politics as a business investment in a way that Democrats don’t? – but Obama may end up being significantly outraised this fall.
And yet, as I wrote last month [ http://www.salon.com/2012/06/07/don%E2%80%99t_be_scared_of_mitt%E2%80%99s_money/ ], it probably won’t end up having much effect on the White House race. General election presidential campaigns are the rare high-visibility political race in which voters tend to form their opinions independent of television advertising. As long as both campaigns have sufficient resources to execute their basic ground and air-war plans, a financial disparity probably doesn’t matter. In Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=all (above)] feature exploring the Democrats’ super PAC struggles, Bill Burton – who is running the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA – makes this case to a potential donor, easing her fears about massive GOP spending by telling her “you don’t do it dollar for dollar.”
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing for Democrats to worry about when it comes to money, though. For one thing, this is the first-ever super PAC presidential election; we’ve never seen spending levels like this before, so no one can say for sure what the effect will be. A bigger concern, though, are the other key races on this fall’s ballot, for the U.S. Senate and the House. This is where a gross fund-raising disparity really could cost Democrats, because these races – especially at the House level – don’t feature the kind of widespread voter awareness that exists at the presidential level.
For now, Democrats are holding their own [ http://nationaljournal.com/tv-ad-buys-20120703 ] on the congressional front, but it’s still early and Republican super PACs have made it clear they plan to target congressional races in addition to the Obama-Romney contest. Democrats may do the same, but if they lag far behind in resources, it could conceivably cost them control of the Senate and whatever chance they have of winning back the House. This could be the recipe for a Pyrrhic November victory for Democrats – a reelected president who finds himself facing even stronger Republican opposition on Capitol Hill.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/where_the_money_really_matters/ [with comments]
===
Mitt Swears He Doesn’t Have a Koch Problem
Protesters flew over the Hamptons this weekend, where David Koch was hosting a $50,000-a-head Romney fundraiser, with a banner trailing their plane that read: “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem.” But like many an addict before him, Romney doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. He laughed at the accusation and said of his relationship with the conservative billionaire, “I don’t look at it as a problem; I look at it as an asset.”
Read it at New York Post
July 10, 2012 12:23 PM
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/mitt_what_koch_problem_6f4DGUSyl55cSBIuG74yDL
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2012/07/10/romney-i-don-t-have-a-koch-problem.html [with comments]
*
A peek inside Romney's Hamptons huddle
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS |
7/10/12 10:57 AM EDT
Via the New York Post's Page Six, Mitt Romney embraced [ http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/mitt_what_koch_problem_6f4DGUSyl55cSBIuG74yDL#ixzz20EDPXQ6L ] the Koch brothers' fundraising help as an "asset," not a problem:
Mitt Romney declared he was proud to have “a Koch problem,” as he attended a $50,000-a-head fund-raiser hosted by conservative billionaire David Koch.
A plane flew over the Hamptons with a banner from protestors reading, “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem,” as he stopped for three major fund-raisers Sunday — first at the East Hampton home of billionaire Ronald Perelman, followed by events at the home of Clifford Sobel, the former US ambassador to Brazil, then for dinner at David and Julia Koch’s home on Meadow Lane in Southampton.
Romney quipped to the crowd at Koch’s event, “I understand there is a plane out there saying Mitt Romney has ‘a Koch problem.’ I don’t look at it as a problem; I look at it as an asset.”
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/a-peek-inside-romneys-hamptons-huddle-128515.html [with comments]
===
“Tiananmen Sid” shakes up a small town
Former Paonia councilman Sid Lewis holds a protest sign in front of a tank owned by billionaire energy magnate and Paonia-area ranch owner Bill Koch.
Photo courtesy of Jim Brett (HANDOUT)
By Michelle Nijhuis
Writers on the Range
Thursday, July 12, 2012
My rural western Colorado town of Paonia, population 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the USA. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence from the federal government. We're gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a boil at Cherry Days, the annual Fourth of July celebration, and this year's version — heated by wildfires and record summer temperatures — was extra hot and spicy.
The Cherry Days parade was notable for its lead vehicle, a well-preserved Korean-War-era tank complete with a pair of anti-aircraft guns. Even more notable was the tank's owner: billionaire Bill Koch, brother to the liberal bêtes noires Charles and David Koch. Bill Koch, whose interests in sailing, fine wines and antiques are less political than his brothers' though probably just as expensive, is the founder and CEO of Oxbow Group, whose holdings include a local coal mine. Its affiliate Gunnison Energy Corp. is active in local natural-gas development.
In recent years, Bill Koch has also become a part-time neighbor, acquiring a couple of ranches in the mountains and a long list of Paonia-area properties. He's commissioned the construction of a private “Western town,” furnished with his collection of frontier memorabilia. He's aroused local suspicion and resentment by pushing for Congressional approval of a public-private land swap that would benefit his ranch and close off access to 40 square miles of wilderness. And for the community activists fighting fast-moving natural-gas development, Bill Koch and Gunnison Energy have become symbols of unwelcome change.
So when Koch's collectible tank creaked down Grand Avenue last week, Sid Lewis — hairdresser, cycling enthusiast and former town councilman — stepped in front of it holding a handwritten cardboard sign about money and democracy and the corruption of the latter by the former. Lewis and his sign were soon escorted off the street, but the story of “Tiananmen Sid” quickly landed on Facebook. By Friday morning, news of the encounter was in The Denver Post, and that night the tale of the hairdresser versus the tank was told on The Rachel Maddow Show. By the time you read this, local online arguments about the incident will probably have invoked the First Amendment at least 1,098 times (and, if Godwin's Law holds, mentioned Nazis at least once).
To some in town, it turns out, Bill Koch is the benevolent rich guy who buys the groceries, and Sid Lewis is the outsider poking his disrespectful outsider-y nose into a pretty good deal. To others, Koch is the dastardly outsider trying to buy the town and invaluable public land for cheap, and Sid represents the community standing heroically against him. These stories, with different characters in the lead roles and varying degrees of truth, have been told and retold here for generations. Neither is likely to change anyone's mind.
But I was happy that Tiananmen Sid shook up the town's 66th annual Cherry Days celebration, and not only because I happen to prefer beauticians to billionaires. Sid Lewis made the parade a more accurate reflection of my small complicated town and big complicated nation. Most of us, after all, are in a testy, confrontational mood these days.
I was even happier, though, when the parade continued its march, unrolling its humble column of Constitutionalists and conservationists, Republicans and Democrats, Shriners and dancing librarians, organic farmers and volunteer ambulance drivers and the Class of 1982. They straggled slowly along the long, crowded route in pickups and flatbeds and sometimes under their own steam, waving and grinning, separate but more or less on the same path. That's the part of the procession where most of us live our daily lives. When we're lucky, its story is the truest one of all.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org [ https://www.hcn.org/ ]). She is a contributing editor of the magazine and lives in Paonia, Colorado.
© 2012 Swift Communications, Inc.
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20120712/COLUMNS/120719980/1078&ParentProfile=1055
===
Mitt Romney’s Hamptons Weekend
Protestors walked toward the home of David Koch, where Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney was holding a fundraiser in Southampton, NY on July 8, 2012.
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
July 9, 2012, 5:19 pm
While Americans so unlucky as to lack second homes sweated under fans, dealt with power outages and drenched themselves before fire hydrants amid the sweltering heat this past weekend, one of the men who wants to be their leader had a much more exciting adventure. Mitt Romney headed to the sprawling estates of the Hamptons, where he held a whirlwind series of fundraisers, charging up to $50,000 a head and infusing his campaign with an expected $4 million.
He was met by about 200 protesters, who flew a banner over the fundraiser at the home of the billionaire industrialist David Koch’s reading “Romney has a Koch [rhymes with Coke] problem” and brought in the “Romney Mobile,” a black Cadillac with corporate logos and a hapless dog strapped to the roof.
The jabs from the lower 99% didn’t seem to bother Mr. Romney though. He assured his audience that even if the common man were largely gone from Hamptons (unless he was passing the champagne flutes or parking the Bentleys, of course) he was not forgotten.
“If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” Mr. Romney said, according to The Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/politics/romney-mines-the-hamptons-for-campaign-cash.html ], in one of the great understatements of this election season. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.”
We can take heart, at least, in knowing Mr. Romney remembers that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages that he’s had – like a net worth upward of $250 million (sitting in locales as far-flung as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Bermuda), multiple homes and a “couple of Cadillacs.”
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Mr. Romney’s policy ideas would do little to help those poor and working-class people who seem to cause him so much worry. Some would actually harm them.
Mr. Romney, who has been on vacation, was headed to Aspen, Colorado, today to scoop up some more money. He raised more than $100 million in last month, far more than President Obama’s puny $71 million.
The very rich certainly are very different.
*
Related Posts
From Taking Note
Another Dismal Jobs Report, Another Misguided Attack from the Right
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/another-dismal-jobs-report-another-misguided-attack-from-the-right/
When the Truth is Not Enough
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/when-the-truth-is-not-enough/
Mitt Romney and the Strange G.O.P. View of Government
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/mitt-romney-and-the-strange-gop-view-of-government/
Painting Romney With the Bush Brush
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/painting-romney-with-the-bush-brush/
We Don’t Need No Teachers!
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/we-dont-need-no-teachers/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/mitt-romneys-hamptons-weekend/ [with comments]
===
Meet the Koch Brothers — Again
By Matt Negrin
Jul 9, 2012 11:28am
Routine fundraisers don’t usually trigger attack ads and headlines, but when the man raising a boatload of cash is billionaire conservative David Koch, the spotlight shines brighter.
That was the case on Sunday as Mitt Romney trotted around the Hamptons raising millions of dollars, stopping at Koch’s shorefront estate for a party that cost $50,000 per person (or a deal: $75,000 for a couple).
The event, of course, was closed to reporters, so few people know what Romney or Koch said. Democrats have already made an ad charging that if Romney becomes president, he would give oil men like David Koch and brother Charles tax cuts and subsidies. Liberal protesters gathered at Koch’s home to deride [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/protest-greets-mitt-romney-at-hamptons-fundraiser/ ] the affair.
The left has long hated the Koch brothers, Kansas billionaires whose outside-spending group Americans for Prosperity is tied to the tea party and has tried to tear down Democratic candidates through advertising. The group is a 501(c)4, which means it doesn’t have to reveal from whom it gets money. David and Charles are said to be worth about $25 billion each, and according to reports [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election ], have said they plan to spend more than $200 million in the 2012 election cycle.
Lately ads have mocked President Obama for his comment that “the private sector is doing fine.” “How can he fix the economy if he doesn’t know what’s wrong?” the ad says [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/ad-nauseam-here-come-the-tv-spots/ ].
While the Koch brothers are exceptionally private, they took a rare step onto the public stage [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/power-grab-kochs-struggles-revealed/story?id=15931688 ] in March when they sued the Cato Institute, a libertarian refuge in Washington that they helped create, for more control. The result was a public debate over Cato’s role, and even as the brothers denied that they wanted to turn the think tank into an arm of the Republican Party, libertarians quickly sided with the group over the brothers. One senior policy fellow at Cato predicted that if the Kochs were to take control, the group’s chairman and half the staff would eventually leave.
Obama, too, has tried to inspire his supporters by deriding the Kochs. In February, Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, sent a fundraising note [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/obama-campaign-billionaire-koch-brothers-spar-publicly/ ] to supporters accusing the Kochs of “jacking up prices at the pump.” In a letter from a spokesman, the Kochs denied both the charge and a claim that they were pledging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars targeting Obama.
Critics of the Kochs’ business, Koch Industries, also point to a revelation that a subsidiary of the company traded with Iran, and that another paid bribes [ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/koch-industries-report-reveals-secret-sins/story?id=14676652 ] around the world. The Kochs’ company said it follows the law and called the claims, in a Bloomberg Markets report, a result of “substandard reporting.”
Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/meet-the-koch-brothers-again/ [with comments]
===
The Best Quotes From Guests at Romney's Hamptons Fundraisers
People who pay the equivalent of a salary for a meal are different from you and me.
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Jul 9 2012, 9:15 AM ET
Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney held three posh fundraisers in the posher precincts of the New York resort community of the Hamptons on Sunday as part of the massive ongoing fundraising push that helped him pull in $106 million in June [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/romney-raised-106-million-in-june/ ], with hopes to raise another $100 million each month from now until the election.
But when you're charging people $50,000 for lunch or dinner (or $75,000 per couple), you can't always expect them to sound in tune with the downtrodden American workers whose plight Romney has made a focal point of his campaign. Indeed, it's extraordinary that the displays of ostentatious wealth at political fundraisers come in for as little notice as they do, and to what an extent political donations are considered socially akin to charitable giving when they do not have any direct charitable impact.
Two stories that came out of the Romney fundraisers in fact suggest that that in a post-Citizens United world of largely unfettered campaign giving, the only brake on the power of the wealthy within the political system may turn out to be social. What if it were considered déclassé to give large sums to candidates or committees within a democracy, and especially in a nation where so many have other needs? Further close observation of the people who attend major-dollar fundraisers could begin to bring about such a possible future.
From the Los Angeles Times [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-hamptons-fundraiser-20120708,0,4909639.story ]:
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman's estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman's property -- the Creeks -- checked off names under tight security.
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."
And from The New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/politics/romney-mines-the-hamptons-for-campaign-cash.html ]:
A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney. "Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P." ....
A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, long a favorite of the Hamptons' well-off and well-known, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. "He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn't exist and get government to intervene," Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold Mercedes, as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.
Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband's generous spirit. "Tell them who's on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!"
Over Mr. Conklin's objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax was on Mr. Conklin's 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.
Update 12:51 p.m.: Of course Obama also holds high-dollar fundraisers, such as a $40,000-per plate one at George Clooney's residence [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obamas-new-courting-of-hollywood-pays-off.html?pagewanted=all ] in the spring, though notably the president draws considerably more [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-fundraising-powered-by-small-donors-new-study-shows/2012/02/08/gIQANfKIzQ_story.html ] small donors than does Romney (more than half of his donors vs. 9 percent of Romney's, according to a study early this year [id.]). But the main difference between Romney in the Hamptons and Obama in Hollywood is that the rich people who back Obama have yet to be quoted talking about how their servants are too ignorant to know how the economy works. Rather, they tend to be quoted being critical of the president himself. Also, everyone expects Hollywood fundraisers to be over the top; Hollywood's lavish lifestyles and movie stars' sense of entitlement have been amply documented through a wide array of popular magazines for nigh on eight decades. That's why some said it was a risk [ http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21035605/romney-holding-private-fundraisers-aspen ] for Obama to reach out to that community this year. Romney's showing us such values are not just to be found in Hollywood: they are in the Hamptons, and Park City [ http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/54351060-90/bush-campaign-candidate-donors.html.csp ], and Aspen [ http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21035605/romney-holding-private-fundraisers-aspen ], too.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-best-quotes-from-guests-at-romneys-hamptons-fundraisers/259554/ [with comments]
===
Degree of obnoxious wealth at Romney fundraiser tests credulity
The Rachel Maddow Show
July 9, 2012
Rachel Maddow reviews the media coverage of a Mitt Romney fundraiser by super-rich supporters in East Hampton, NY, and wonders if the quotes are from planted activists trying to make Romney look bad.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/48128657#48128657 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzEBRxu9JoM ]
===
Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016": Feature-length Obama hate
Arriving this summer in a theater near you: Dinesh D'Souza's anti-Obama documentary, funded by rich conservatives
By Mariah Blake
Friday, Jul 6, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
Dinesh D’Souza knows the value of a good controversy. After all, he has made a career of lobbing ideological hand grenades. In 2010, for instance, he published a book and an article in Forbes arguing that Barack Obama had embraced his father’s anticolonial fervor and was intentionally squandering America’s influence to put it on equal footing with the developing world. Critics were aghast. The Columbia Journalism Review called the Forbes piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work,” while the conservative Weekly Standard assailed D’Souza’s “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” Former Bush speechwriter David Frum weighed in, too, branding D’Souza’s book a “brazen outburst of race-baiting.”
Nevertheless, that book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596982764 ],” was wildly popular: it debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for more than a month.
With the campaign season kicking into high gear, D’Souza is hoping to see the pattern repeated. The flame-throwing pundit has just finished a feature-length documentary, called “2016: Obama’s America,” which will debut in Houston next week and open in roughly 300 theaters across the country later this month. The film — the most recent in a string of mud-slinging election-year releases — revisits the arguments in “Roots,” namely that America is being governed according to a vision dreamed up by Obama’s father, a “philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions.”
But the film doesn’t just rehash old ideas. D’Souza says it also works in new revelations about Obama’s politics and history, and takes aim at his own critics. More importantly, it rounds out D’Souza’s theory with a raft of grim predictions about what will happen if Obama is re-elected. “If we understand Obama’s compass, we can project what a second Obama term might look like,” D’Souza explains. “Every president is a little different in the second term — they’re less tethered to public opinion and more concerned with what they actually want to do.” In Obama’s case, this means more freedom to pursue his anticolonial goals.
While the film itself was not yet available when this story went to press, the trailer resembles a cross between a high-budget feature and standard Tea Party agitprop. Grainy images of Obama are interspersed with fading “Hope” posters and shots of rioters and garbage-strewn third-world villages. At one point, a young black man in jeans and tennis shoes is shown crouched over Barack Obama Sr.’s grave. ”Obama has a dream, a dream from his father,” the narrator intones, “that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized.”
The idea for the film came early last year. D’Souza was casting about for ways to reach a wider audience, and started thinking about the splash Michael Moore had made by releasing “Fahrenheit 9/11” in the run up to the 2004 election. “Moore is one of the last people I wanted to actually emulate,” D’Souza says. “But his film was very successful. And I sensed the 2012 election would be eerily similar to 2004 — a controversial president and a deeply divided country, with one half of the population doggedly hanging with him and the other half believing that he’s terrible.”
At the time, D’Souza didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking, so he started looking around for an insider to guide him. As luck would have it, he happened to bump into Cecilia Presley, the granddaughter of the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, at a Washington, DC soirée. She recommended he approach Gerald Molen, an Oscar-award-winning producer, who’s work includes “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” (Or at least that’s how Molen remembers their meeting.) It turned out to be a good suggestion. Molen — a devoted Mormon, who grew up on a Montana farm and began his film career by greasing trucks on a studio lot — is one of a handful of outspoken Hollywood conservatives. And he’s only grown more vocal since Obama took office. After speaking with D’Souza by phone and reading “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” Molen signed on to produce the documentary.
D’Souza later recruited a man named John Sullivan to handle marketing and help manage and day-to-day production. Sullivan is best known for producing the controversial 2008 documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The film — a hymnal to intelligent design — argues that “big science” tries to muzzle academics who challenge Darwin’s theories. Like D’Souza’s work, it was bashed by critics — the New York Times called it “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time” — but proved wildly popular. In fact, it ranks among the highest-grossing documentaries of all time, according to Box Office Mojo.
D’Souza hopes “2016” will make a similarly big splash. Already, the project has gotten the attention of some deep-pocket conservatives; D’Souza says some 25 individuals chipped in the $2.5 million he needed to make the film. While he declined to name names, he confirmed previous reports that TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts was among them.
“2016” is not Ricketts’ first foray into Obama-bashing. In May, the New York Times revealed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html?pagewanted=all ] that the billionaire businessman was considering shelling out more than $10 million for a racially tinged smear campaign — among other things, the plan called for playing up the president’s links to the firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright and enlisting “an extremely literate conservative African-American” to argue that the president misled the public by selling himself as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” Mitt Romney, the intended beneficiary, quickly denounced the proposal, and Ricketts followed suit, amid boycott threats on TD Ameritrade.
“2016” is also creating some buzz among rank-and-file conservatives. A trailer and speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6QOscKvUjU (next below; trailer alone, as embedded at the end of this piece, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtv6XUT-hno )].
promoting the film, which D’Souza gave at the CPAC earlier this year, has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube To up the ante, the “2016” marketing team is apparently trying to drum up some pre-release controversy. Recently, an individual identified only as “Bethany at 2016 The Movie” circulated a press release highlighting an incident earlier this year: Molen, the film’s producer, had been invited to speak to a high school class in tiny Ronan, Montana. But the principal turned him away in the parking lot. The release speculated that the Oscar-award-winning producer was sent packing because of his conservative activism and his role in “2016.” (Molen says the principal cited his conservative views, but didn’t specifically mention the film.) Predictably, this caused a stir in the conservative press. “I’ve been on the radio more times than I’ve been on my whole life before,” Molen marvels. “The school incident is what started it, but it has catapulted into a lot of wonderful publicity for ‘2016.’”
The principal later apologized, saying the cancellation was the result of a mix-up between him and the teacher. Nevertheless, according to a local paper, he was inundated with “vile, vicious and racist hate mail,” including “a caricature of President Barack Obama with a target on his forehead” and multiple death threats. The man was rattled enough that he moved his wife and children out of their family home.
Molen says he’s sorry about the outpouring of bile. But he’s happy to see the film getting attention and hopes it will rally conservative voters. “People have to understand that if they decide to stay home and not vote, that’s a vote for President Obama,” he explains. “The way I see it, this is a dangerous time in America. We’re either going to work to go back to a country where the American dream is alive and well, or we’re going to turn into a welfare state for everyone. And I’ll take the former.”
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/dinesh_dsouzas_2016_feature_length_obama_hate/ [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75672695 and preceding and following
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77294487 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77339553 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77384440 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77515219 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
