Are any of our surprise fundraisers among these fraudsters?

Sunday’s Boston Globe dealt with a subject near and dear to our hearts: the fundraising reports of longshot Congressional challengers.  But instead of warming said hearts by discussing the viability of some of these challengers and the potential for them to cross over into the serious races we all hope and live for, instead it exposed information more likely to drive a stake through aforementioned hearts (who can turn a bad cliche into a tortured extended metaphor?  I can!!) — many of these longshot candidates are unwitting accomplices to what amounts to massive fundraising fraud.  Fortunately for our wounded (bleeding?) hearts, the entire operation described in the Globe was built around fleecing conservative small donors, with semi-fraudulent Republican candidates.

But, it might be worthwhile to take a look under the hood of some of our own surprise fundraisers too.

More on the flip.

So the Boston Globe article is here.  In short, and reading between the lines a little bit, a direct mail company hilariously named BMW Direct would mail contracts to no-name conservative challengers to deeply entrenched Democrats: Barney Frank, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, etc.  I’m guessing the company offered to do direct mail fundraising, for no charge, for these no-name candidates, in exchange for the right to keep a vaguely defined cut.  Candidate agrees, figuring any income is better than none, and also agrees to name a figure at BMW Direct as campaign treasurer.  Candidate gets a couple tens of thousands out of the deal, and thinks nothing of it ever again.

Behind the scenes, and recorded in FEC reports that these loser (or deliberately ignorant) candidates don’t read, we see what the company is really doing — sending out massive direct mail blasts to far-right-wing small donors, vilifying the boogeyman liberal incumbent and promising a tough, principled-conservative race right in the throat (dare I say the beating heart?) of liberalism.  And they raise millions of dollars from the knuckle-dragging right-wing base, and then they keep all of it.   They don’t quite literally steal it; they just have the in-house campaign treasurer agree to pay 95+ percent of the revenue back to BMW for consulting and other fees, passing on only a few grand to the candidate the money was ostensibly raised for.

They literally raised a million each for Barney Frank’s challenger in 06, John Kerry’s challenger this very cycle, and a challenger to black incumbent David Scott last cycle.  They raised more for issue-based committees: pro-life, anti-UN, pro-gun, anti-immigration, the whole panoply of right wing base obsessions.  The Save New York PAC raised $1.1 million in 06, probably off of Hillary, and spent it all, but managed to give only $20k to actual candidates, and at least $900k to BMW Direct.  (I wish I were a funnier guy, this article is a Comstock Lode of quotes and jokes.  The Save New York jokes would write themselves if I had a better ear for humor.)

Anyway, the article is a perfect encapsulation of what many of us already think the GOP is: a bunch of rich assholes taking advantage of a bunch of reactionary rubes to gain money and power.  The BMW guys are getting obscenely rich, by stoking the hatred of a bunch of badly-connected hyperconservatives for Frank, Kennedy, Kerry (the PAC aimed at him was called Veterans for Victory, and targeted his war record… in 06) and others, and getting them to open their wallets.  Not that different from some of the televangelists, I guess.

And the candidates that weren’t actually stooges (and if you’re a stooge, you’d better be demanding more than a 3% cut) were pretty irritated too.  The guy “running against Barney Frank” got 145 votes in the GOP primary, then dropped out.  But Barney Fag (Dick Armey’s term, uttered on the floor of the House) was too lucrative a target I guess, because BMW continued raising money for the not-on-the-ballot candidate, claiming hilariously to the Globe’s reporters that “the firm’s executives believed Morse was running a write-in campaign as an independent candidate after failing to qualify for the ballot.”  They actually kept raising — and keeping — money for Mr 145 votes well into 2007.  (The quotes from donors who didn’t realize they were giving money to candidates not actually on the ballot are pretty funny too.)

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Anyway, laughing at soulless Republican operatives and brainless conservative donors is pretty funny, and a nice metaphor for the whole party, but not actually the reason I started this diary.  The fundraising fraud angle is actually a pretty serious one.  I’m quite confident that this is not the only crooked money in politics, though I also doubt that something identical in form is happening on our side.

I wrote this diary because I think it’d be worth looking at the high-raising Dem candidates in obscure races this cycle, and see if a similar pattern of high non-local income and equally high expenditures on direct mail consultants exists.  I doubt that it does, mostly because our surprise fundraisers — Mike Skelly, Bob Lord, the two South Carolina candidates are the ones I can remember offhand — are all running against obscure, average GOP incumbents.  There’s no starpower in John Culberson that could drive a crooked direct-mail fleece-the-base operation.  If we were running challengers to… gosh, there really is no one comparable on their side, because we don’t demonize the opposition in the same way I guess… Cornyn?  Dole?  McConnell?  Sensenbrenner?  Santorum?  Musgrave?  Inhofe?  then those would be the places to look.  

Of course, unlike Mr. 145 votes, Bobby Casey for instance was running a real campaign.  It would still be possible for a direct mail company to raise money off of Slippery Santorum and keep it all, but Casey would have a direct interest in preventing that since he would need the money, or at least would need to control who was getting cuts of it.  So for totally obvious fraud of this variety, you’d probably need to turn to not-seriously-challenged incumbents, with high hatred quotients in the base.  There aren’t all that many of those, partly because we don’t have the radio apparatus that trains relatively unsophisticated small donors to hate many different officeholders by name.  Sensenbrenner and Hyde could conceivably serve as the “targets”  of such an operation.

I’m a little doubtful that we’ll find anything quite so blatant and visible on our side as was just unearthed on their side.  But still, it’d be interesting to look at that handful of from-nowhere high dollar raisers, especially the South Carolina pair, and see where exactly their money is coming from, and how it’s being spent.  You never really know until you look.

So, on to the FEC reports!

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DISCLAIMER:  much of what I write below turns out to be wrong.  🙁