I don’t know the precise hole into which Karl Rove will now crawl, but one candidate, at least as a sideline, is the scam in which Linda Chavez, Reagan’s (and Bush’s proposed) Hispanic conservative is currently engaged. According to the Washington Post, she and her equally loathsome husband run three PACs, which have soaked over $24 million dollars from right wing nutjobs while spending approximately 1.5% of that in what could possibly be called political activities. The rest went into salaries for family members and more fundraising. Despite all the evidence, it appears that Chavez is not intentionally working for the Democrats.
“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.
And what a business. They needed to do something different, since they couldn’t seem to make honest work pay:
The family took a break from politics when Bill Clinton was elected president, briefly operating a Mexican restaurant in Gaithersburg called the Santa Fe Express, with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night. The restaurant went broke.
At that point, Chavez’s husband told the Post, they discovered the wonderful world of scamming right wing dupes. Well, he didn’t put it quite that way, but basically that’s what happened.
Considering the small amount of money actually spent productively, you might think that Chavez would at least know where it went, but…not so much:
The Latino Alliance, for instance, “did lots of telephone calls in the 2004 elections,” she said. “I believe we did some radio ads. We did outreach into the Latino communities to try and mobilize more pro-Republican votes.” (Emphasis added)
It would be wonderful if Karl decided to spend the next few years running his very own Chavez style PAC. Given his god like status with the GOP base, he could probably siphon off 10 times what Chavez is able to raise.
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