“Only A Suggestion”: Joe Ricketts Demands Massive Taxpayer Subsidies For Baseball Stadium
This week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending for Good.” The proposal, which center on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to break down Obama’s image as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”
Ricketts moved quickly to publicly reject the plan after it leaked. His spokesman said it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion.” (The statement seems somewhat disingenuous as the Ricketts had already given “preliminary approval” for the $10 million concept after seeing a separate ad about Jeremiah Wright.) Nevertheless, Ricketts’ spokesman confirmed his intention spend money attacking Obama through an organization he controls called “Ending Spending Political Action Fund.”
There is one area, however, where Ricketts is much more open to government spending. He’s seeking a massive government subsidy for the Chicago Cubs, which he owns with his family, to renovate Wrigley Field. Here is the deal the Ricketts family is seeking, via Crain’s Chicago Business:
That means $300 million is needed for the ballpark proper.
Half would come from the team, presumably in increased revenue from more signage inside Wrigley and retail and other entertainment in what amounts to a game-day carnival on Waveland Avenue on Wrigley’s north side and Sheffield Avenue to the east.
And half would come from $150 million or so in bonds to be retired with increased revenue from the existing city and Cook County amusement taxes on ticket sales. Specifically, debt service would get the first 6 percent in growth above a base level of around $15 million a year now.
But it’s a little more complicated than that.
The team also wants a 50 percent cut of any increase in amusement tax revenue growth above 6 percent. And unlike the bonds, which would be retired in 30 or 35 years, that would be forever.
So Joe Ricketts and his family not only want a $150 million subsidy directly from taxpayers but also a large chunk of tax revenue from the city in perpetuity. In other words, taxes from the City of Chicago would no longer go to roads, schools and police officers but also into Joe Ricketts pocket. Without this taxpayer welfare, the family will presumably let Cubs, which they acquired in a highly competitive bidding process in 2009, play in a stadium that is falling into disrepair.
Ricketts negotiating position seems completely at odds with his public stated political views. In a video posted by another organization he controls, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Ricketts says “I think it’s a crime for our elected officials to borrow money today, to spend money today and push the repayment of that loan out into the future on people who are not even born yet.” Of course, that’s what he is attempting force the taxpayers of Chicago to do for the benefit of his team and his family.
At the same time, Joe Ricketts has plenty of disposable income available to attack Obama. A Ricketts spokesperson said future attacks on Obama would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy.” Joe Ricketts, however, may want to focus on the fiscal policy of his baseball team. In 2011, the Cubs were “one of nine franchises in violation of MLB’s debt service rules.”
By: Judd Legum and Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 19, 2012
“Hiding In The Shadows”: A New False Equivalency About That So-Called Obama “Enemies List”
TNR’s Alec MacGillis comments on Kimberly Strassel’s silly Wall St. Journal article, “The President Has a List,” which likens one of the Obama campaign’s websites posting of “A brief history of Romney’s donors” to Nixon’s ‘White House Enemies List.” According to Strassel,
In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.
In other words, “Gasp….How dare they rat out our rich donors!”
MacGillis has a little fun with Strassel’s warped reasoning, and notes,
Got that? Identifying on a campaign Web site the people who are giving to the opponent’s super PAC in six and seven-figure increments is the equivalent of Nixon’s enemies list, which, as John Dean explained it at the time, was designed to “screw” targeted individuals via “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.”
Nixon’s white house enemies list was about harassing citizens who dared to publicly criticize the President. Outing fat cat donors who hide in the shadows is not quite the same thing. MacGillis explains it well, along with citing the hypocritical double standard of the GOP and their media defenders:
When you are giving at levels hundreds of times larger than the $2,500 maximum for a regular donation to a campaign, or thousands of times larger than the size checks regular people send to candidates, then you are setting yourself apart. And the only thing that the rest of the citizenry has left to right the balance even slightly is to give you some added scrutiny–to see what personal interests, biases, you name it, might be prompting you to influence the political system in such an outsized way. It’s all we’ve got, really–the Internet, the phone call, the visit to the courthouse. And yes, this applies to everyone. Why does everyone on the right know so much about George Soros? Because they were outraged at the scale of his giving in 2004 and 2006 and dug up everything they could on him. As is only right and proper. And now people are going to look into Frank VanderSloot, Harold Simmons and Paul Singer and the rest of Romney’s million-dollar club.
Fair enough. If rich donors want to use their wealth to influence elections, the notion that they should have their anonymity in doing so protected is not likely to win much sympathy outside their ranks.
By: The Democratic Strategist, Staff, May 17, 2012
“Truth Be Told”: How John Roberts Started This Spending Madness
Related to Joe Ricketts and SuperPACs and all this is of course the Supreme Court decision that made it all possible, Citizens United. It’s worth remembering how we got here.
Jeff Toobin’s piece in this week’s New Yorker is a total revelation. The CU decision, it turns out, didn’t just happen. You know–a case goes through the appellate layers, the Supremes decide there’s an interesting question in it, they grant certiorari, and they hear the case. That’s our assumption, and it’s what usually happens.
Well, it’s not what happened here. It’s technically a bit complicated, but what happened is that the Court heard the case a first time, when the petitioner (Citizens United, represented by Ted Olson) was seeking only a very narrow decision saying that McCain-Feingold spending and disclosure limits should not apply to a political ad/movie that was being offered on a pay-per-view basis. They planned on showing an anti-Hillary ad on that basis, so that’s all they were interested in.
That’s what CU wanted. But through the course of the questioning and the opinion-writing, which Toobin explains in lucid detail (see especially page 5 of his article), it became clear to all involved that the conservative faction–led in this case by Anthony Kennedy–could use the case as a wedge to make a much more sweeping decision. And in stepped John Roberts.
To make a long story short, Roberts held back the decision and rescheduled the case for the next year, This enabled the conservative majority to expand dramatically the scope of the majority opinion. And he sped it up, put it on the calendar for September, not the usual first week of October, in order (Toobin suggests) that the decision would be more likely to have an impact on the 2010 elections.
The important thing to remember here: Roberts is the guy who said at his confirmation hearings that he’d go slow and be highly respectful of precedent. But here, he engineered the Court’s calendar and procedure specifically to turn a narrow case that few people would even have paid attention to into a sweeping decision that changes American politics and undoes a century of jurisprudence.
And that is how we got these SuperPACs. Really an amazing and important story.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 18, 2012
“Fighting The Last War”: The Right’s Peculiar Obsession With Jeremiah Wright
It’s often said that generals have an unfortunate tendency to fight the last war. Judging by a leaked “super PAC” ad campaign apparently being contemplated against President Obama, some Republican political strategists have the same problem. After nearly four years of an Obama presidency, they’re still fixated on Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
According to a report in Thursday morning’s New York Times, a super PAC called the Ending Spending Action Fund was contemplating a proposal for an ad campaign timed to hit during the Democratic National Convention which would focus on Wright. (In light of the publicity around the proposal, the group has reportedly decided against the ad campaign.)
According to the Times‘s Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg:
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.
Even if the ads will never run, the proposal reflects a fantasy that has been nurtured in some more fervent conservative circles—that Wright was the ace never played against Obama, that if only Sen. John McCain had run a Wright-centric campaign four years ago, we’d be enduring, err, enjoying a McCain-Palin administration right now. Given both the broader 2008 context (a crashing economy) and the nature of Obama’s appeal (post-partisan and optimistic), it’s dubious whether a fear-mongering, arguably race-baiting ad campaign that painted issue No. 1 as something other than the economy would have gotten any traction.
This is reinforced by the fact that Wright was not the invisible man that rabid conservatives seem to think he was. Neither his rhetoric nor his relationship with Obama was a particular secret. He got wall-to-wall media coverage to the point where Obama gave a high profile speech addressing his inflammatory, unacceptable rhetoric. Within two days the speech had been clicked on 1.6 million times on YouTube, making it the most popular video on the site. And in late October an independent GOP group spent millions running Wright-centric ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, all states which Obama ended up winning. To suggest that the American people didn’t know about Wright is to suggest that the American people are fools.
But really that’s what the really obsessive Obama-haters seem to think: The American people aren’t smart enough to see Obama for what he is. They seem to view Wright as the magical prism which will finally allow the main stream of American voters to see Obama the same way they do—as, in the words of Colorado GOP Rep. Mike Coffman, “in his heart … not an American.” (Coffman, who made the comment in the context of avowing ignorance of whether the president was actually born here, was later forced to retract his statement.)
Of course we’re not discussing whether the McCain campaign should have focused on Wright four years ago. The question today is whether the running of a flight of Wright-focused ads would help Mitt Romney in November or merely scratch an itch peculiar to an especially obsessive subsection of the conservative coalition.
The Romney campaign came up with their answer to that question, issuing a statement today saying that they “repudiate any efforts” at character assassination. Team Romney understands something that Wright-aholics seem blinded to: If there was ever a time to play the Jeremiah Wright card it was in 2008. Obama’s no longer an ill-defined figure in the eyes of the American public—we’ve lived with the man for four years now. People will vote for him based on his policies and how he’s handled the office, not on some wild-eyed conspiracy theory about his secret un-American-ness.
And to the extent the proposed ad tries to connect the dots that the histrionic reverend is responsible for a radical president with a fundamentally different view of America, it stretches credulity. As MSNBC’s “First Read” noted this morning, “While we know that there are conservatives who want to portray Obama as a socialist tied to people who hate America, his actual record over the past four years—championing legislation that once had GOP support (stimulus, health-care reform, even cap-and-trade) and killing Osama bin Laden—doesn’t back-up the conspiratorial narrative portrayed in this plan.” (Indeed the surest way to bring an end to the free market system as America knows it would have been to let matters run their course: No TARP so the financial system would collapse; no bailout for the auto industry; no oversight of Wall Street, ensuring that self-absorbed barons of finance would rinse and repeat.)
The proposed ads will not air, cooler heads apparently having prevailed. If Ricketts had pulled the trigger on this plan, he would ironically be playing out one conservative talking point scenario: What is bad for America (specifically in regard to degradation of political discourse) would have proved to be good for Obama (as swing voters roll their eyes at the GOP’s apparent over-the-top obsession with irrelevancies).
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 17, 2012
“Exhibit A For What’s Wrong In America”: Race-Baiting Campaign Proposed Against Obama
The good news about the proposed Joe Ricketts race-baiting campaign targeting Barack Obama is that it got flushed out before it had a chance to become a reality. And now it never will.
This is exhibit A of all that is wrong with politics.
When the Supreme Court rules that anyone can say anything—often anonymously—with unlimited money, then they will.
There was once a time in our politics when candidates and parties could be held responsible for what they did and said. Because they were the ones doing and saying it. And you’d generally have adults somewhere around the table who, if presented with a plan like the one given to Ricketts, would have said: “Not just no, but hell no. Burn every copy of this document.”
God bless whoever leaked the document to The New York Times. I’ve never met Ricketts, and for all I know, he may ultimately have had the sense to kill the plan. But the fact that he was even considering it tells me all I need to know about the guy.
This is madness. Of course it’s too early to know, but if things keep going the way are, Mitt Romney has a very good chance to win the election in November. And can you imagine the distraction this campaign would have been if launched in the fall?
It’s not hard to figure out the winning strategy for Romney.
It’s the economy, not Jeremiah Wright, stupid.
Whether you like or agree with Barack Obama, or voted for or against him, the one thing I presumed most of us agree on is that with the 2008 election, we thought we had put the issue of race in American campaigns behind us.
Campaign watchdog Fred Wertheimer sums it up pretty well: “In the case of tax-exempt groups, citizens have absolutely no idea what’s going on here. They have no way of knowing how groups are trying to influence their votes.”
Thanks to a leaked report to The New York Times, we know about this one. But just think about all the other plans out there that won’t be leaked.
BY: Mark McKinnon, The Daily Beast, May 17, 2012
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