Beltway Party Establishments Don't Want Competition

Bachus survived; Mean Jean went down

The Campaign for Primary Accountability is a classic SuperPAC. They're financed by some "scary" right-wing super rich fellas, Leo Linbeck III and Eric O'Keefe (the Club for Growth guy; Linbeck III is a a financier of conservative causes)-- but the scary right-wing rich fellas are as sick and tired of the corruption that has defined our political system in Washington as the rest of us are. And they have the money to do something about it. Coincidentally, they're working against corrupt Blue Dog Tim Holden in PA-17, at the same time Blue America is. I'm not sure what they're doing there exactly, but I suspect it will involve several zeros more on the end of their check than what the billboards we have up cost.

They managed to defeat two fairly garden variety incumbents in Republican primaries this year, Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH, who no one gives a damn about) and Don Manzullo (R-IL, who Eric Cantor had also targeted for extinction) and they say that they're all about savaging the NRCC's and DCCC's Incumbent Protect Racket. I noticed yesterday that they are also targeting Walter Jones (R-NC), the single most bipartisan Republican in the House-- and also, interestingly enough, someone who Eric Cantor would like to see defeated. They failed in their efforts to defeat grotesquely corrupt Spencer Bachus (R-AL), their biggest target of the cycle, Jo Bonner (R-AL), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) or Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL). Let's hope they have better luck with Tim Holden, although he's actually been a lot of help to Cantor, voting far more frequently with him on key roll calls than with the Democrats.

In the past Linbeck has contributed thousands of dollars to garden variety Republican stooges and zombies, from Roy Blunt, Tom DeLay, Pete Sessions, George W. Bush and Marco Rubio to Miss McConnell, Rick Santorum, Joe Lieberman and John Cornyn. So far this year he's contributed at least $775,000 to the new PAC. The Wall Street Journal reports that the NRCC is fuming that these guys are attacking Republican incumbents and that they're taking action.

The House Republicans’ campaign arm has begun playing hardball with political consulting companies working with an anti-incumbent super PAC, the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

The super PAC, which has been trying to defeat Republican and Democratic incumbents in several primaries around the country, helped knock off Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt in Ohio and 10-term Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican who lost to first-term Rep. Adam Kinzinger after redistricting put the two in the same district.


As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is trying to maintain the GOP’s large majority in the House, has warned that companies who help campaign against incumbents might find their services are no longer needed by some parts of the Republican Party.

Yesterday the Journal reported that the PAC has put together a target list of over 30 incumbents they may go after. Aside from Tim Holden (Blue Dog) Walter Jones (R), some of the other races they're looking at are against Jim Moran (D-VA), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Oily Joe Barton (R-TX), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Tim Murphy (R-PA), Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), Adam Schiff (Blue Dog-CA), Edolphus Towns (D-NY), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), Howard Coble (R-NC), John Culberson (R-TX), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Gary Miller (R-CA), and Joe Baca (Blue Dog-CA).

The super PAC has distressed a number of GOP candidates and some national Republican Party leaders, who feel that the members of the Campaign for Primary Accountability, almost all of them conservative Republicans, should be allied with, not against, GOP incumbents. The National Republican Congressional Committee isn’t thrilled about the chaos caused by the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

The NRCC has notified a few of the Republican political consulting and media companies now working for the super PAC that those firms may not get any business with the NRCC in the future. “We will only work with firms and organizations who share our mission to strengthen our majority in the House,” the NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay said last week.

This kind of garbage doesn't only happen on the Republican side of the aisle. I've been eager to talk about how DCCC crooks like Steve Israel, Joe Crowley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Allyson Schwartz, etc manipulate the committee to build their own power bases. Let me tell a few personal stories that illustrate how these people try to keep wealthy Democratic donors in line and how loathe these guys are to see the really rich donors give any help to anyone other than themselves.

As you may have noticed, I've been trying to get people in the music business to contribute to our Fracking Holden campaign and I even sent a letter to former and current music business executives and Monday one of the industry trade magazines is running a full page for me about the campaign. We've gotten a few dozen contributions on line and a few dozen checks at the P.O. Box, almost all from people who don't usually give to political candidates or causes. (Like me, they were offended that a good-for-nothing corrupt moocher like Holden, who's never done an honest day's work in his miserable life, would send out a press release attacking me as a "Hollywood record executive" as though that's something to be ashamed of. Soon he'll be a shady Inside-the-Beltway lobbyist-- and that is something to be ashamed of.) Anyway, what I ran up against is that all the big Democratic donors have told me the same thing-- they would check with "their handlers" at the DCCC or DNC and find out if it was OK to contribute. Of course, it isn't. The DCCC is, if nothing else, as much of an incumbent protection racket as the NRCC. So they were told to not donate. OK, we're used to doing our thing with small donations. But that is hardly the first time something like that happened this month.

A very wealthy businesswoman-- and one who has givens hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats-- has been trying to get me to be on the board of a new company of hers for almost a year now. I don't want to be on any more boards. But when one of her friends dangled the possibility that she would help one of the Blue America candidates, I agreed to a meeting. She was smart as a whip and very accomplished and pleasant. And she told me that Steve Israel told her to absolutely not contribute or do anything to help the candidate, a Democrat with no primary opponent in a key race.

The week before I wound up in a discussion with a minor Florida office holder-- again, a super rich Democratic donor-- who was eager to develop a relationship with a close friend of mine. He said he'd be happy to throw a big fundraiser for a financially-strapped Blue America candidate at his mansion, where he often raises money for Democrats. When I checked his record of giving I noticed he donates to all the conservative and Blue Dog and corrupt hacks that the DCCC is always pushing on their wealthy donors-- many of whom would be aghast if they knew they were giving money to anti-Choice and anti-gay fanatics who vote frequently with the GOP. The next day he reported back that he ran the idea past Debbie Wasserman Schultz and she threw a fit and even threatened him-- no more cocktail parties for you, Mister-- if he contributed anything to our candidate.

Every now and then, a big DCCC donor looks more closely and realizes he's been led astray by these horrible people who have told him reactionary bigots are really wonderful progressives. And then they come find Blue America. I wish there were more of them... because it takes 1,000 $10 contributions from netroots progressives to add up to one $10,000 check from someone who, for example, might want to really stop Paul Ryan or really hold someone accountable for pushing murderous fracking laws... or maybe just elect a clean, progressive Congress instead of the crap we're stuck with now.