Though Rove Is Washed Up, Campaign Finance Will Do Far More Harm To Your Family Than ISIS Will

Do they look kind of normal? They're not. It's Robert Mercer and a Texas senator he purchased

The whole country watched Karl Rove make a fool of himself on election night, 2012, as he insisted that, despite massive Democratic turnout for Obama in the Ohio's most populous counties-- Cuyahoga (69%), Franklin (60%), Summit (57%), Lucas (64%) and Hamilton (52%)-- and a 2,697,260 (50.1%)- 2,593,779 (48.2%) statewide edge, Romney had won Ohio's 18 electoral votes. Many people wondered if he had lost his mind. But it was desperation we were watching. Rove had nearly as much riding on that election as Romney and Ryan did. His entire business was on the line. In 2012, Rove's various Crossroads PACs and SuperPACs, spent $170 million attacking Obama and trying to bolster Romney. Fascist-front organizations like Harold Simmons' Contrain Corp ($23,500,000), various Adelson entities ($23,000,000), Bob Perry's Perry Homes ($8,500,000) and Robert Rowling's Gold's Gym and Omni Hotels ($6,000,000), to name a few, contributed enormous amounts of money to Rove's operations-- which raked millions of dollars off the top in commissions of various sorts-- after being assured by Rove that Romney could beat Obama, despite the all reputable polling, if they would just continue writing massive checks to Rove for his negative campaign ads. Some of these right-wing billionaires are still smarting. One idiot even tried suing Rove (and Fox News!).

Over the weekend, Gabriel Sherman, writing for New York Magazine explored, among other things, why Rove can't raise the kind of money this cycle that he's raised before and why so many right-wing billionaires and more reticent about spending big money so far when they hear Rove's siren song. Right-winger Kenneth Langone, for example, isn't a genius; far from it. He's a ruthless dullard who had a good idea and a lot of luck-- Home Depot. He wasted half a million dollars of Romney last cycle. "I had every expectation we would be the victors," he whined to Sherman, and he had that expectation because he was taken in by Rove's sweet talk and "top secret" baloney memos. When Romney didn't even come close-- remember, Rove promised a "mandate"-- gullible billionaires like Langone started to realize they had been duped. "It felt like a mugging," wrote Sherman.

Dan Loeb is another naive billionaire-- a vulture capitalist/hedge fund predator-- who has wasted millions of dollars on crackpot right-wing PACs and campaigns (including not just to the corrupt conservative NRSC and NRCC but also to the corrupt conservative DSCC and DCCC). Last cycle he gave Rove well over $100,000.

A few days after the election... Loeb, who’d helped finance Rove’s surge, tried to sue Crossroads and Fox News for misrepresenting the facts. “Loeb felt this was like an investment bank committing fraud on a road show,” a friend of his told me. After conferring with a securities lawyer, Loeb discovered that there are no investor protections in politics. He never filed a suit. (And Loeb declined to comment.)

Rove’s 2012 crash is having profound effects on the 2016 Republican primary. To begin with, George W. Bush’s Brain is no longer considered much of a brain. "I gave Rove $500,000. What did I get for it? Nothing!" Langone told me. Two of Rove’s most generous 2012 funders, Texas billionaires Bob Perry and Harold Simmons, have since passed away, and their heirs have turned off the cash spigot. "Everyone is still shocked Romney lost," says Simmons’s widow, Annette. "I haven’t committed at all." So far this year, Crossroads has raised just $784,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rove insists he’s still a player. "We’ll be involved in the Senate races," he told me. "Depending on who the presidential nominee is, we may be involved in that, but that’s a long way off." What Rove is not is anywhere near the center of the Republican Party. "But for his perch on Fox News, Karl would be in political Siberia," says a top Republican strategist. "The going joke is that he must have a picture of Roger Ailes in his underwear to keep his contract."

It’s not just that Rove is personally marginalized. Donors have awakened to the realization that topflight consultants can earn millions from campaigns regardless of whether they win. "It bothers a lot of people that politics has become a cottage industry. Everyone is taking a piece of this and a slice of that," says California winemaker John Jordan, a former Rove donor. "Crossroads treated me like a child with these investor conference calls where they wouldn’t tell you what was really going on. They offered platitudes and a newsletter."

Many feel as much antipathy towards these GOP middlemen as progressives donors feel towards shysters and crooks like the Chuck Schumer-- blockbuster on that walking disaster coming very soon-- Steve Israel, Chris Van Hollen, Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other unsavory bad operations who have been bilking Democratic donors and delivering less than zero. Unlike the GOP, though, Democrats have a piece of campaign infrastructure that the Republicans have tried and failed to mimic, Act Blue, which has helped raise over $873 million for Democratic candidates directly (no middlemen-- no Roves, no Schumers, no skimmers). Sometime this cycle grassroots donors will have given candidates a trillion dollars directly. Blue America uses ActBlue to raise money for our candidates. (Don't be shy.) We don't have a handful billionaires trading campaign cash for business opportunities. We have lots and lots of patriotic Americans who love the country and love humanity. And there are a lot more of us than there are of them. (One virulent anti-democracy fanatic and hedge fund predator, Robert Mercer, has already invested over $30 million in Ted Cruz's campaign so far. And he's only one of a handful of billionaires who want to enfeeble democracy itself be electing far right puppets, like Cruz or Rubio, or-- if that can't work-- an establishment Democrat who knows how to play ball the way her husband did. Don't, for example, let Schumer get away with forcing an "ex"-Republican, Patrick Murphy, into the Senate, just another tawdry, corrupt Wall Street Democrat, while forcing a stalwart progressive, Alan Grayson, out of politics. (You can help Grayson here.)


UPDATE: Tonight's Kiddie Table Debate

If you didn't watch it, you made a good decision. This 24 records shows you why you made a really good decision: