Mitt Romney’s “Cold-Blooded Brothers”: Wall Street Backs One Of Its Own
Bankers are supposed to be the personifications of economic reasoning, but anyone looking at the financial reports of the presidential candidates and super PACs that have come out this week might conclude that there’s more to their political calculations than dollars and cents. Indeed, what these reports fairly shout is that Wall Street’s political picks have been swayed by offended egos and tribalism.
Of course, there’s a straight dollars-and-cents rationale for the bankers’ flight from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney. Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich; Romney wants to lower them. But the sheer extent of Wall Street’s support for Romney suggests that there’s even more in play than that. As Sam Stein and Paul Blumenthal of the Huffington Post have documented, Goldman Sachs employees, who gave Obama more than a million bucks in his first White House run, gave Romney $106,000 in the final quarter of 2011 and Obama just $12,000. Citigroup’s bankers, who gave Obama $730,000 in 2008, gave him just $3,842 in the last three months of 2011, while lavishing $196,000 on Romney. At Blackstone Private Equity, whose chair, Steven Schwarzman, compared the administration’s (tepid) efforts to raise taxes on private-equity firms to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, employees gave Obama just $7,618 while Romney raked in $90,750.
By one measure—the current popularity of Wall Street—Romney picked a poor year to likely become the first presidential nominee to hail from finance. But precisely because Wall Street is (finally! rightly!) under attack as it has not been since the early 1930s, Wall Street is looking for its own political champion as well as economic guardian, and Romney certainly fits the bill. And because Wall Street—both its people and its companies—can donate more than ever before, thanks to Citizens United, Romney also picked a very good year to run: His brethren can give him more than they could in any previous election.
The extent of their Romney support—and, as a corollary, the narrowness of Romney’s funding base—really becomes clear in the financial reports of Romney’s super PAC, set up by his backers to fund all those negative commercials that Romney himself wouldn’t want to endorse. By the end of 2011, it had raised $30.2 million from just 265 donors. Ten million of that came from just ten donors, each contributing a million apiece. Of the eight donors who are identifiable, as a New York Times article by onetime Prospect writing fellow Nick Confessore and Michael Luo documented, six are hedge-fund or private-equity executives. With a base like that, what are the odds that a President Romney is going to scrap the carried interest tax break?
The financial sharpies aren’t just giving to Romney, of course. Texas leveraged-buyout-operator Harold Simmons, who provided most of the funding for the swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004, is back. Last year, he ponied up a cool $7 million for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC. And casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife have kept Newt Gingrich’s campaign afloat by showering $10 million on the pro-Newt super PAC.
The big money is mobilizing against Obama, and it would be a mistake to assume that Obama will be able to outspend Romney come next fall. In the final quarter of 2011, Romney and the Republican National Committee raised $93.4 million while Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised $68 million, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal.
For Mitt Romney, it is the best of times; it is the worst of times. The public really dislikes big-time bankers, big-time shadow bankers most of all. Meanwhile, big-time bankers, and big-time shadow bankers in particular, like Mitt Romney, their very own big-time shadow banker, and thanks to Citizens United are able to shovel him more money than ever before. He’s their blood and they are his—cold-blooded brothers to the end.
By: Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, February 3, 2012
Who Needs “Poor People”: Records Show How Wealthy Shape Presidential Race
Groups known as “Super PACs” raised more than $42 million to back Republican U.S. presidential contenders in 2011, according to campaign filings that show how new donation rules are allowing a relatively few wealthy Americans to shape the race.
The reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) late on Tuesday offer a vivid picture of the impact of a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows unlimited donations to political action committees (PACs), groups that are legally separate from the candidates they support.
The reports showed why the Super PAC supporting Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney, called Restore Our Future, has been such a force in the campaign – largely by running attack ads against Newt Gingrich, Romney’s top Republican rival.
Restore Our Future hauled in $30 million in 2011, and had nearly $24 million in the bank at the end of the year.
The group spent a big chunk of that during the past month in Florida, where its ad barrage against Gingrich was widely credited with helping Romney to victory in Tuesday’s primary. Florida was the latest contest in the state-by-state battle to pick a Republican nominee to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 election.
The pro-Romney group’s bankroll dwarfed the PACs supporting other Republican contenders, as well as the group that backs Obama. Priorities USA, the pro-Obama group, raised $4.2 million last year and had $1.5 million in the bank on December 31.
The funding disparity between the groups suggests the PAC supporting Romney could help the former Massachusetts governor overcome the Obama campaign’s formidable fund-raising advantage if the two meet in November’s general election. Contributions to candidates’ campaigns are limited to $2,500 per donor.
Obama’s organization continued its dominance in the race for cash among candidates’ campaigns, raising $130 million for the year. That topped the Romney campaign’s $57 million, which led the Republican presidential field.
Tuesday’s filings also revealed the growing warchests that independent Republican groups are building with the presidential and congressional races in mind.
American Crossroads and its affiliated group, Crossroads GPS, raised a total of $51 million in 2011.
“A HUGE EFFECT ON THE RACE”
Super PACs were forged from the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that erased longstanding limits on corporate and union money in federal elections as an unconstitutional restriction of free speech.
The ruling unleashed a flood of money into a political system coming off the most expensive presidential election in U.S. history in 2008, when candidates spent more than $1 billion. It also opened the door for wealthy individuals to prop up candidates by writing a check.
“Super PACs have fundamentally changed the way campaigns are run, and it’s had a huge effect on the race,” former Michigan Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis said. “If you can find one donor who is willing to play in a big way, it can have an unbelievable impact.”
For the first time, the FEC reports revealed many of the wealthy donors behind the Super PACs.
Harold Simmons, a billionaire Dallas banker and chairman of Contran Corp, gave American Crossroads $5 million and Gingrich’s group $500,000. Contran gave another $2 million to the Crossroads group.
Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of the payment service PayPal, gave the Super PAC backing Texas congressman Ron Paul $900,000. Foster Freiss, a billionaire investor from Wyoming, founded the Red, White and Blue Fund that backs former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum and donated $331,000.
The reports did not include the donations by billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who poured a combined $10 million – $5 million each – into the pro-Gingrich group in January, after the period covered in Tuesday’s reports.
One of Adelson’s step-daughters gave Gingrich’s group $500,000 in 2011, and another gave $250,000, the reports showed.
The first check from the Adelsons came as Gingrich headed into a critical showdown with Romney in South Carolina. It helped pay for a movie and ads criticizing Romney’s work as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital – an issue that helped propel Gingrich to a big South Carolina upset victory.
By last weekend, the pro-Gingrich PAC had spent a total of $8.5 million – much of it, it appears, from the Adelson family.
‘SUPER-RICH PEOPLE’
“Super PACs are allowing a relative handful of super-rich people to have a disproportionate and magnified influence on elections,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics.
Super PACs and other outside groups spent about $42 million on the presidential race through the end of January, according to independent expenditure reports filed with the FEC. Romney’s group has spend more than $17 million, compared with $8.5 million for Gingrich.
The filings also shed light on the scrambling by supporters of former House of Representatives speaker Gingrich in recent weeks.
Gingrich’s allies at Winning our Future raised just $2.1 million in 2011. But like Romney’s Super PAC, it raised and spent millions more in January. Much of that money went toward attack ads in South Carolina and Florida.
The flood of money drowned Gingrich in negative ads in Florida, where Romney’s Super PAC outspent Gingrich’s group by nearly 3-to-1 and aired ads questioning his conservative credentials, record in Congress and temperament as a leader.
Romney won Florida easily on Tuesday, beating Gingrich by about 15 percentage points to take a big step toward winning the Republican nomination.
“If you look at it in the simplest way, the role of the Super PACs has been to prop up candidates who in the past would have been forced out of the race because they ran out of resources,” said Anthony Corrado, a campaign finance specialist at Colby College in Maine.
The pro-Romney Super PAC fired back in Florida with a withering barrage of attacks on Gingrich as a Washington insider who peddled his influence to make $1.6 million from mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
Those attacks, and two strong debate performances by Romney, halted Gingrich’s momentum and fueled Romney’s runaway win in Florida on Tuesday.
SHADOWING THE CAMPAIGNS
The only restriction on Super PACs is that they are not allowed to coordinate their actions with the candidates they back. Romney has cited the restriction repeatedly when he has been asked to tell his Super PAC to pull down controversial ads.
In reality, however, most of the Super PACS are run by former staffers for the candidates who know what works for the campaigns without being told.
“I’ve known Newt for 12 years. I can dance with the campaign without coordinating with the campaign,” said Rick Tyler, a longtime Gingrich staff member who now runs the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future group.
“I’m carefully watching what he’s saying in the public record,” he said. “It’s not hard for me to follow.”
Gingrich has been the target of more than $16 million in negative ads, while $5 million has been spent to hammer Romney, the FEC reports said.
The $57 million raised by the Romney campaign led the Republican candidates in the money chase in 2011. Gingrich raised nearly $13 million and Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has dropped out of the race, raised nearly $20 million.
By: John Whitesides, Reuters, February 1, 2012
“Do You Like Me Now?”: Money Changed Everything For Mitt Romney In Florida Primary
It was money that won the primary for Mitt, but it didn’t make voters like him—and it won’t make the GOP rank and file show up to the polls in November.
Romney and the super PAC supporting him spent more than $15 million on television ads. Team Gingrich spent about $3 million. Both ran almost entirely negative campaigns. One tally estimated that 93 percent of all the ads were negative. The other 7 percent were wasted.
Victory is always sweet, but this one could leave Romney feeling a little sour. Gingrich called Romney’s strategy “carpet-bombing.” Fair enough. But what then do we call Gingrich’s strategy? Kamikaze? Gingrich strapped on his helmet, slugged down some sake, jumped in his Zero, and dive-bombed into the SS Romney. He didn’t sink Romney’s aircraft carrier, but he did some serious damage. Romney is likely to list even farther to starboard, as he is forced to pander even more to the far right.
Gingrich and his allies called Romney “despicable,” “breathlessly dishonest,” and, worst of all, “liberal.” It was not enough to win, or even to make it close, but it was enough to damage Romney in November, should he emerge as the GOP standard bearer. One in four GOP voters in Florida expressed dissatisfaction with the field; a full 53 percent of Gingrich voters said they would not be happy with a Romney-led ticket. To be sure, they’re not going to jump ship and vote for Obama. But they could stay home. They could refuse to give money or make calls or turn out their friends and neighbors. If Romney is the nominee, a lot of Republicans are going to sit on their hands.
As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled across 50 states and seven districts and territories in 2008 there was some bitterness, to be sure. But it was mostly confined to the upper echelons of Hillaryland and Barackistan. At the grassroots you heard time and again, “I’m for Barack, but I’m not against Hillary.” Florida Republicans voted against Newt Gingrich; they did not vote for Mitt Romney.
Money begets money. Romney not only has the greatest personal fortune in the GOP field, he has the most well-funded campaign. And perhaps even more important, the super PAC supporting him dwarfs those of his competitors. An analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project shows outside spending on Campaign 2012 is up 1,600 percent over 2008. Romney’s allies have mastered this new tactic. (Full disclosure: I advise the pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action.)
The campaign will now stagger through the February doldrums. Romney is very likely to win the Nevada caucuses, which he dominated in 2008. He will almost certainly continue to carpet-bomb Gingrich over the airwaves. But there’s a difference between persuading voters to hate Newt Gingrich—which, frankly, is pretty easy—and getting them to love Mitt Romney, which appears to be well-nigh impossible.
ByL Paul Begala, The Daily Beast, January 31, 2012
Has Mitt Romney’s Hit Job On Newt Gingrich Gone Too Far?
After South Carolina, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign decided it was time to change their strategy toward former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was time to take him out, similar to what they did in Iowa. Take no prisoners, forget Obama for the moment, and direct their fire at Gingrich. Smart strategy? Of course. The only strategy, really, since back-to-back victories in South Carolina and Florida would have been devastating to Romney, certainly in the short term.
But has the Romney camp gone too far?
Now, I am not going to defend Newt Gingrich in the slightest—I am talking tactics here.
Let me first make the argument for the strategy they have adopted. Gingrich is like the Jason character from the Friday the 13th horror movies. He keeps coming back!
He grabs the attention of Tea Party voters and hard-core conservatives and he has shown he can mobilize them. He is colorful and a press magnet. Left unchecked, he has shown that he can move poll numbers in his favor with his debate appearances. Also, he has raised serious money after his victories and rising poll blips, and he has the Adelsons—casino moguls from Nevada—who have put over $10 million into his campaign and can give more out of their petty cash fund. He even eclipsed Romney in national polls.
In short, you ignore Newt at your peril. A failure to engage would have been a disastrous strategy.
Nevertheless, Romney and his Super-PACs have spent $15 million and counting to tear into Gingrich like a pit bull on steroids. They have decided that they will not let up until he is crushed in Florida. This all-or-nothing strategy has a few problems. First, Romney’s negative poll numbers have skyrocketed to very damaging levels. He may take Newt out in Florida, but it is costing him big time. Only Sen. John Kerry had net negative numbers at this point in the race and it certainly affected his candidacy. Second, Gingrich is furious and is pulling out all the stops to take on Romney. He has nothing to lose. This is his last campaign and he is all in. It seems Newt wants Mitt’s hide almost as much as Obama’s.
Finally, though no debates are scheduled until late February, these are moneymakers for the networks, and my guess is someone will attempt to pull several together next month. Gingrich will go back to his plan of fighting Romney with the press and appearances. He has been enraged by Romney’s surrogates tailing him and engaging reporters, and he is very likely to adopt the same tactic(as he promised to do against Obama).
Newt sees this as a long slog and he wants to grab as many delegates as he can in these non winner-take-all states, challenge Romney everywhere he is able, and hope that he can secure the nomination in the end. Through all this, former Sen. Rick Santorum hangs in and hopes that he can somehow come up the side, as these two engage in hand-to-hand combat.
The question really is not whether Romney should have taken on Gingrich. He had to, of course. But, given Gingrich’s personality and where he is as a candidate, should he have pulled some of the ads and mixed more positive spots in this last week in Florida? Would it have made any difference? Has he bought himself a drubbing of Gingrich and will this either force Newt out or embolden him to fight on? That’s hard to know. But my guess is that the over-the-top negative strategy may well come back to haunt Romney. It certainly provides plenty of material for the Obama campaign to use leading up to November.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012
For “A Government That Represents All The People”, Overturn Citizens United
In America today, the top 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent and the wealthiest 400 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of the country–150 million Americans. We have the most unfair distribution of wealth and income of any industrialized country.
In America today, the middle class is largely disappearing while the rich and largest corporations are doing phenomenally well. Meanwhile, despite a $15 trillion national debt, the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent is the lowest in decades and many large corporations enjoy huge tax loopholes and pay little or nothing in taxes.
In America today, while insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry enjoy large profits, 50 million Americans lack health insurance, and we are the only major country on Earth that does not provide healthcare to all as a guaranteed right.
All of these disturbing American realities, and many more, are related to the sad fact that the Washington political establishment is much more interested in representing the wealthy and the powerful than the needs of ordinary Americans. Why is that? The answer is simple. We have a horrendous campaign finance system in which Big Money is able to elect the candidates of its choice and defeat those who oppose its agenda.
The absurd Citizens United Supreme Court decision makes a bad situation much worse. Now, corporations can go right into their treasuries, set up super PACs, and spend as much as they want, without disclosure, on political advertising. This gives the Big Money interests even more power over the political process. It makes it harder and harder for the voice of the average American to be heard.
If we are serious about giving ordinary Americans the power to control their political future, we must overturn the Citizens United decision, eliminate super PACSs, and move toward public funding of elections. Our goal must be a government that represents all of the people, and not just those wealthy individuals and corporations who can put millions into political campaigns.
By: Sen Bernie Saunders, Vermont; U. S. News and World Report Debate Club, January 13, 2012
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