It recently occured to me that I’m not aware of a single race in which big money appears poised to buy or defeat a politician that would not otherwise have been elected. There’s probably an election somewhere in which the forces of evil will tip the election, but the impact so far looks to be relatively minimal.
Paul Krugman notes that this may be because there are Republican grifters between the billionaires with the money and the propaganda they want to spew, including the biggest grifter of them all, Karl Rove:
Remember how Rove and others were supposed to raise vast sums from billionaires and corporations, then totally saturate the country with GOP messaging, drowning out Obama’s message? Well, they certainly raised a lot of money, and ran a lot of ads. But in terms of actual number of ads the battle has been, if anything, an Obama advantage. And while we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday, state-level polls suggest both that Obama is a strong favorite and, much more surprising, that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to hold the Senate in a year when the number of seats at risk was supposed to spell doom.
Some of this reflects the simple fact that money can’t help all that much when you have a lousy message. But it also looks as if the money was surprisingly badly spent. What happened?
Well, what if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing.
(via NYTimes.com)
There’s really nothing new about this, as Krugman points out. Apparently Richard Viguerie made piles of money on direct mail, only a fraction of which went to the non-productive use for which it was solicited. Four years ago I wrote about another group of right wing scammers that specialized in raising money on behalf of sure losers, which losers got only the crumbs off the fundraiser’s table or ended up owing them money.
The difference between what Rove is doing now and what Viguerie and organizations like BMW Direct did then, is that the marks are orders of magnitude richer, but apparently no smarter. The Vigueries of the world went after the same sort of folks who tithe themselves so the fundamentalist preacher of their choice can live the good life, but you’d think that when you’re collecting money from billionaires they’d take care to make sure their investment is well spent. It pains me to think of Rove getting rich, but if he must get rich it’s heartwarming to know that he’s doing it by diverting money that would otherwise go toward lying about Democrats.
Post a Comment