A look at an effort from a conservative website (and its supporters) to try and alert their fellow-travelers to some fund-raising scams ……. and the push-back they received, after the jump …
Regular readers of mine know that I seldom wade into hard-core political junkie material in my writings here; others have far more expertise (and my strengths lie elsewhere, I believe, in popular culture essays).
But last week I was intrigued as to one story: how a conservative website waded into the subject as to how well fundraisers for the right were doing in spending the money they fundraised ….. or not-so-well, as the case may have been.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News (photo left, below) quoted Eric Hoffer’s famous adage, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” And then his group did some extensive work, publishing a 170-page report on the top 17 such groups, looking at the actual % of monies raised actually going to putative candidates and/or causes (rather than into the pockets of the fundraisers). One of the results:
The bottom 10 groups surveyed spent more than $54 million last year but contributed (only) slightly more than $3.6 million to Republican candidates.
This finding was picked-up by the syndicated columnist and National Review Online blogger Jonah Goldberg (photo right, below) who publicized this report widely.
Now, this might seem a tad strange … but Jonah, for all of his rants, will every once in a while take a hard look at his party. On the subject of religion he has some misgivings that he has shared: “I’ve attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor: and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn’t a Christian”.
By publicizing this report, Goldberg was apparently trying to make two points: one, this report came from a conservative source (not the lib-rul media) and also that this was hurting conservative candidates … as the original report asked: “How many conservative candidates lost in 2014 because of a lack of funds? How many of them came up short in primaries, lost winnable seats or desperately tried to fight off better-funded challengers? How much of a difference would another 50 million dollars have made last year?”
Jonah, though, has found that even noting this came from a friendly source was met with skepticism … saying he got a lot of grief for bringing up the issue recently while filling as host of Bill Bennett’s radio show. I suspect the blow-back may be more pointed if it pertained to specific candidates (Sarah Palin and Ben Carson) than more generic causes.
But it also bumps-up against a more specific problem: the laissez-faire aspect, where conservative consumer protection generally does not go beyond Caveat Emptor. Diaries here at DK that talked about over-priced gold have been known for years, and as Amanda Marcotte notes, Fox often hires some of worst offenders. And even when some conservatives shine a light at egregious practices: some also sell their mailing lists to these same charlatans.
Perhaps someone else can wade into this topic more in-depth than I have the time for. Either way, to me the definitive essay on this topic came three years ago from the author Rick Perlstein in a long essay he wrote for The Baffler.
I’ll summarize it to conclude tonight’s diary … but do read it (albeit a long read) as it is quite instructive at this link.
Entitled “The Long Con”, it tells how he subscribed to many conservative publications and – as a byproduct – got on many a conservative mailing list with snake-oil sales pitches “overrunning my email box” unseen to those who only read conservative pitches aimed at mainstream media. Filled with “what the media REFUSE to tell you” pitches, it takes dead-aim at non-wealthy conservatives who often fall for appeals like this.
Perlstein said this stemmed from the founding of the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom at the dawn of the 1960’s and its then-operator Marvin Liebman. He inspired a young Richard Viguerie …. who took Liebman’s fundraising ideas to such an extreme that as Perlstein wrote:
It all became too much for Marvin Liebman, the Dr. Frankenstein who had placed the business model in Viguerie’s palpitating hands. Liebman told conservative apostate Alan Crawford, author of the valuable 1980 exposé Thunder on the Right, that Viguerie and company “rape the public.” Another source familiar with the conservative direct-mail industry wondered to Crawford, “How anyone of any sensitivity can bear to read those letters scrawled by little old women on Social Security who are giving up a dollar they cannot afford to part with . . . without feeling bad is unbelievable.”
Perlstein wrote that he once gave an address at a conservative think tank to a group of name right-wingers. After listing numerous instances of brazen falsehoods told by conservatives to stir-up its base, he asked why … and cited our 37th president:
Why was it, I asked, that whenever Richard Nixon needed someone to brazen out some patently immoral, illegal, or dishonest act, he frequently and explicitly sought out a veteran of the conservative movement-the same conservatives whose ideology in policy contexts he usually derided? Because, I said, “Nixon knew that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: ‘good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.'”
After he finished his address, he thought surely someone would express contrition. Then conservative stalwart M. Stanton Evans stood up, and said this:
He said my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Richard Nixon had never been a conservative. He proceeded, though, to make a striking admission: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”-at which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them.
Even if you have already read Perlstein’s essay, have another look – it’s worth re-reading.
Good luck in trying to shame your movement’s hucksters, Messrs. Hawkins and Goldberg ……………………. you’re gonna need it.
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Let’s clear-the-air with this John Mayall piano/drums short instrumental, Marsha’s Mood – from his 1967 The Blues Alone album.
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