New Jersey Political Bosses-- Very Bipartisan: Norcross Is The Glue That Binds Christie And Trumpf

During Christie's term, Democratic boss George Norcross has become more powerful than ever

So far this weekend, crackpot right-wing governor Paul LePage (R-ME) and crackpot ex-Governor Jan Brewer (AZ) endorsed Herr Trumpf in the wake of Chris Christie joining Team Trumpf. Herr was also endorsed by French Nazi Jean-Marie Le Pen. But the big story is still the bully bromance between Herr and Christie and how a combination of pure opportunism and Christie's psychotic hatred for Rubio drove the train.



Pro-Publica star investigative journalist Alec MacGillis, writing for the New Republic took Chris Christie apart two years before he infuriated the Republican establishment by endorsing Herr Trumpf for president. It's worth revisiting today because, where the Republican establishment hasn't had much coherent to say beyond catty remarks about Christie's penchant for overeating and blowing up like a balloon, MacGillis started off by pointing out that the once popular governor "has been so singularly successful at constructing his own mythology-- as a reformer, a crusader, a bipartisan problem-solver--that people have never really seen him clearly" as the criminally minded corrupt stinking pile of garbage he has always been. His investigation leads him to conclude what many sensed all along, namely that "the problem with Christie isn’t merely that he is a bully. It’s that his political career is built on a rotten foundation. Christie owes his rise to some of the most toxic forces in his state-- powerful bosses who ensure that his vow to clean up New Jersey will never come to pass. He has allowed them to escape scrutiny, rewarded them for their support, and punished their enemies. All along, even as it looked like Christie was attacking the machine, he was really just mastering it."

Christie's big claim to fame-- being appointed a U.S. Attorney by Bush was a simple business transaction. Christie raised $350,000 for Bush's campaign, enough for Christie to qualify as a Bush "Pioneer" and contributed nearly 30 grand of his own money to GOP candidates and bought himself an appointment despite having no experience whatsoever in criminal law. Christie won the approval of New Jersey's senior senator, Robert Torricelli, a criminal himself looking for an ally for the scandal cases under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office. Soon after taking over, Christie got rid of the chief investigator, Michael Guadagno, which is credited for keeping Torricelli, a Democrat, out of prison.

To say that corruption was a problem in the Garden State was an epic understatement—its political system might as well have been expressly designed to facilitate public fraud. The state’s official history is one of legendary self-dealers: Enoch “Nucky” Johnson built and ruled Prohibition-era Atlantic City from the ninth floor of the Ritz-Carlton. The midcentury mayor of Jersey City, Frank Hague, earned a salary of $8,500 a year and yet left office with a fortune of $2 million. His signature accoutrement, according to Jersey lore, was a desk with an outward-facing drawer in which visitors would deposit their bribes. As one mayor of Newark memorably put it, “There’s no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor.”

In most of the United States, the big political machines have been broken, or reduced to wheezing versions of their former selves. In New Jersey, though, they’ve endured like nowhere else. The state has retained its excessively local distribution of power-- 566 municipalities, 21 counties, and innumerable commissions and authorities, all of them generous repositories of contracts and jobs. The place still has bona fide bosses-- perhaps not as colorful as the old ones, but about as powerful. The bosses drum up campaign cash from people and firms seeking public jobs and contracts, and direct it to candidates, who take care of the bosses and the contributors-- a self-perpetuating cycle as reliable as photosynthesis.

...Fighting public fraud, [Christie] announced, would be his office’s top priority after terrorism. “Corrupt politicians will steal your trust, your taxes, and your hope,” he told a New Jersey crowd in 2007. The problem was not, he noted, “an insufficient number of targets.”

Soon after Christie took office, Essex County’s Republican executive, Jim Treffinger, was out walking his dog when seven police cruisers surrounded him. Treffinger knew he was under investigation for awarding no-show jobs to friends and extorting campaign donations in exchange for contracts. He had repeatedly offered to surrender to authorities when the time came. Instead, his wife and daughter watched from the house as he was thrown up against a car and frisked, an image that appeared in the next day’s Star-Ledger, which had been tipped off to the arrest.

At first, Christie said the arrest had been left to the marshals. But later, he cast Treffinger’s treatment in moral terms. Corrupt officials, he said, shouldn’t be coddled-- they were “worse than the street criminal because the street criminal never pretends to be anything but what he or she is.” (Local lawyers wondered whether the public shaming might be linked to Treffinger’s observation, caught on a wiretap, that Christie was a “fat fuck” who “wouldn’t know a law book from a cookbook.”) “The perception was that the U.S. attorney was sending a message,” one lawyer told me.

The next seven years unfolded like a never-ending perp walk, as Christie racked up more than 130 convictions and guilty pleas for elected and appointed officials. He had a knack for extracting the maximum p.r. from every arrest or indictment. “The office leaked like a sieve,” one Democratic operative recalls. “I had reporters calling me at four in morning and saying, [so and so] is going to get pinched.”

Democrats howled that Christie was on a partisan witch-hunt, since he targeted so many more Ds than Rs. But it was hard to take such accusations very seriously. After all, New Jersey’s power structure was dominated by Democrats, and Christie was uncovering undeniable cases of abuse. One state senator pleaded guilty for accepting a low-show job at a medical school in exchange for state grants, another to accepting a $25,000 “success fee” for helping a mining company obtain permit approvals. Longtime Newark Mayor Sharpe James got 27 months on charges stemming from the sale of steeply discounted city properties to an ex-girlfriend. (James’s successor, Cory Booker, is the first mayor of Newark not to be indicted since 1962.)

Besides, to accuse Christie of protecting Republicans over Democrats was missing the point. True, his office had knocked out a swath of New Jersey’s biggest Democratic power brokers and weakened their organizations in crucial parts of the state. But that meant the bosses left standing had only grown stronger.

In 2002, an insurance firm in Mt. Laurel received an unexpected e-mail from a man named George Norcross. Congratulations, Norcross told the firm: It had won a big contract for the Delaware River Port Authority, which oversees four bridges in the Philadelphia area. The e-mail was unexpected because the firm hadn’t bid for the job. But there was no need for thanks. The company was simply expected to send Norcross’s insurance company $410,000 over the next few years, as a “finder’s fee.”

This is how things work in the world of George Norcross III. Officially, he is the supremely wealthy chairman of Conner Strong & Buckelew, one of the largest insurance firms in the nation; the chairman of Cooper University Hospital in Camden; and, as of last year, the majority owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Unofficially, he is the most powerful man in New Jersey never to have held elected office. Close observers of state politics have estimated that more than 50 elected officials in South Jersey owe their positions to Norcross (including his brother, a state senator [Donald Norcrosss, more recently one of the more conservative Democratic members of the U.S. House]). Much of the money he raises for candidates comes from people and companies eager to secure government work or development deals, as documented over the years by his local paper, the Courier-Post, among others. Norcross’s own firm holds sway over New Jersey’s large municipal insurance market. (He declined to comment for this article.) “George is probably the smartest politician we have now in the state of New Jersey,” says former Republican State Senator John Bennett. “He knows where the power is and goes to the power. Whether that power is a Republican or Democrat.” ...Norcross is silver-haired and impeccably dressed and runs his operation out of well-appointed boardrooms. He is only foul-mouthed in private.

On numerous occasions, Norcross’s operation has come under legal scrutiny-- from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), state investigators, and the FBI. The cases are labyrinthine, but they all involve some dubious overlap of his many public and private interests. One case in particular threatened to get real traction. In the early 2000s, several New Jersey attorneys general investigated whether he had pressured a Palmyra councilman to fire a city solicitor, Ted Rosenberg, who wasn’t cooperating with the machine. Wiretaps offered a rare glimpse of a man completely convinced of his power. “[Rosenberg] is history and he is done, and anything I can do to crush his ass, I wanna do cause I think he’s just a, just an evil fuck,” Norcross said. In another conversation, referring to then-top Jersey Democrats, he declared, “I’m not going to tell you this to insult you, but in the end, the McGreeveys, the Corzines, they’re all going to be with me. Not because they like me, but because they have no choice.” While discussing plans to remove a rival, he exclaimed: “Make him a fucking judge, and get rid of him!”

In February 2003, Norcross met Christie for a steak dinner at Panico’s in New Brunswick. It was, to put it mildly, highly unorthodox for a U.S. attorney to sit down with a political boss who was the subject of state and SEC attention. But Christie brushed off the criticisms. “I’m very careful with who I would go out with,” he said. “If I’m looking at somebody, I’d try to stay away from them.”

That, to the skeptics, was just the issue. His corruption squad was scrutinizing dozens of lower-profile figures, all the way down to an Asbury Park councilman charged for getting his driveway paved for free. Why wasn’t he looking at Norcross? And didn’t he realize that he might have to in future? Sure enough, the following year the state attorney general referred the Palmyra case to Christie’s office.

Two years later, Christie issued a scathing six-page letter announcing that he would not bring any charges against Norcross. It was a remarkable document. Not only did Christie openly declare a controversial figure to be home free, but he accused the state prosecutors of bungling the case so badly that they may have been shielding Norcross. “The allegation of some bad motive on the part of the state prosecutors is very unusual,” says Andrew Lourie, a former chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice.

High-ranking legal sources in the state view the letter as the ultimate Machiavellian maneuver. They agree that there may not have been a strong case to bring against Norcross in the Palmyra case after so much time had lapsed. But by publicly accusing his state counterparts of protecting Norcross, Christie was inoculating himself against accusations of favoritism. One of the former attorneys general who’d handled the case, John Farmer, who went on to become senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and is now dean of Rutgers Law School, told me: “The statements and insinuations contained in that letter were, as I said at the time, utter nonsense. The passage of time has only magnified their essential absurdity.”

Norcross may have been the most formidable player to escape Christie’s net, but he wasn’t the only one. Another was Brian Stack, a state legislator and Union City mayor who exemplifies a Jersey tradition Christie had long railed against: holding paid elected office at both the state and local levels. Stack maintains his constituents’ loyalty with acts of largesse such as doling out 15,000 free turkeys at Thanksgiving. He is rewarded with Soviet-style vote totals. (His slate won 92 percent in 2010.) In 2007, Christie conducted a massive investigation into legislative earmarks. It found that Stack had secured $200,000 in state grants that benefited a day-care center run by his then-wife. Charges were brought against other legislators for directing money to entities in which they held a personal interest, but not Stack.

There was also Joe DiVincenzo Jr., lumbering and gregarious, the protégé of legendary Newark community leader Steve Adubato Sr. In 2002, “Joe D.” ran to replace Treffinger as executive of Essex County, the largest source of Democratic votes in the state. Rumors raged that he, too, was under investigation, for conflicts between his freeholder duties and his job (one of four he held at the time) at a produce company with a county contract. Then, right in the heat of the primary, Christie released a statement denying that Joe D. was under investigation. “It was totally unprecedented. I’ve never seen that done by a sitting U.S. attorney,” said DiVincenzo’s opponent, now-Assemblyman Tom Giblin. “Trying to get a letter out of the U.S. attorney’s office is usually like pulling a wisdom tooth.” After Joe D. took office, he invited Christie to give county workers a symposium on ethics.

Finally, there was Glenn Paulsen of Burlington County, who had become the most powerful Republican power broker in the state in part because of his symbiotic détente with Norcross. Norcross got a lot of business for his insurance firm in Burlington County, while Paulsen’s law firm got plenty of municipal work in Norcross territory. In 2006, Christie’s office secured a guilty plea from a Republican operative, Robert Stears, for hugely overbilling several million dollars of lobbying work for the Burlington County Bridge Commission. According to one person with knowledge of the matter, it seemed likely that more revelations would follow and that an investigation of the commission’s spending could draw in Paulsen, and perhaps even Norcross. Stears, according to Christie’s announcement, was cooperating with an “ongoing criminal investigation.” In court, he explained that he had been “sucked into a corrupt group of people” and that he had been directed how much to bill the commission and how much to donate to the county Republican Party, which had been led by Paulsen. “Everyone was waiting for the second shoe to drop,” David Von Savage, the former GOP chairman in Cape May County, told me. It never did. “Chris essentially dumped that investigation-- he absolutely dumped it,” says one lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “As a favor to these guys, he tanked the investigation completely.”

By taking down some of the state’s bosses while leaving others off-limits, Christie had effectively turned the supposedly apolitical role of prosecutor into that of kingmaker. It was a brilliant strategy. New Jersey offered such a target-rich environment that Christie was able to get credit for taking down a slew of crooked officials and build alliances with some of the most powerful bosses in the state at the same time. Christie’s allies insist that he wasn’t playing favorites. “I can’t imagine Christie would suggest in any way, ‘I want you to lay off of this guy or go after this guy.’ It’s inconceivable to me,” says Ed Stier, a former federal and state prosecutor. Still, by the end of his tenure, Christie began showing up to administer the swearing-in ceremonies of town officials who were replacing the ones he’d pursued. No one could recall a prosecutor doing so, says one longtime Jersey hand: “It was like he was giving them his blessing.”

...[R]ight from the outset, Christie was working as closely with the machine as any recent governor. Well before his election, the Democratic bosses had met at the U.S. Open in Queens to divvy up the leadership spoils. Sheila Oliver, who worked under Joe D. in Essex County, would become the speaker of the Assembly. Sweeney would get the Senate presidency. Sweeney was a union man-- an ironworker-- but he was a Norcross man first and foremost. When it came time for the vote on Christie’s proposal to cut public-employee pensions and health benefits, Sweeney delivered the numbers. It was a coup for Christie-- national pundits hailed him as a politician more interested in getting results than scoring partisan points.

In hindsight, what is notable is how openly Christie embraced the bosses. He sent massive resources in their direction; when they came under fire, he vouched for them. In early 2011, it emerged that Stack’s wife, now estranged, had been allowed to use city SUVs for personal use and fill up for free at the city’s natural gas pumps. Christie defended him: “I have no reason to question Brian Stack’s integrity.” (Stack returned the compliment, calling Christie “the greatest governor the state has ever had.”) On paper, Union City embodies the kind of waste that Christie has vowed to eliminate-- it paid its police chief a handsome $248,000 in 2011 and provides health benefits to part-time elected officials. And yet it has been showered with cash from Trenton-- about $12 million per year in discretionary “transitional aid.”

Christie’s bond with DiVincenzo was just as overt. Corzine’s attorney general had led an investigation into voter fraud by election workers in Essex County, after reams of absentee ballots were filled out to benefit Joe D.-approved candidates. Following Christie’s election, the case was quickly wrapped up with a handful of light sentences for low-level workers. During his term, Essex County has been deluged with millions for big capital projects. The relationship has thrived despite 2012 revelations by the Star-Ledger that Joe D., who makes $153,000 per year on top of a $68,000 pension for the same job (via a legal loophole), has claimed an astonishing list of reimbursements from his campaign funds for personal expenses, such as a trip to Puerto Rico and more than 100 meals over the course of three months. In 2011, Christie observed that Joe D. had been with him “right from day one.”

As for George Norcross, he is more powerful than ever. “It’s not just South Jersey anymore. Now it’s way beyond that,” says the longtime Jersey hand. Christie consented to Norcross’s pick to lead the patronage goldmine that is the Delaware River Port Authority.* The following year, the authority gave a $6 million grant to a cancer center at Norcross’s Cooper University Hospital. Next, Christie pushed through a controversial measure that granted Norcross his desired merger between Rutgers-Camden and nearby Rowan University.2 The result was a well-funded university that will further expand the Norcross empire—boosting beleaguered Camden, yes, but also putting even more jobs, money, and development projects at his disposal. (A former Navy SEAL attending Rutgers-Camden challenged the merger at a town-hall meeting. As he was escorted out by police, Christie hollered after him: “After you graduate from law school, you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end is going to be thrown in jail, idiot!”)

...In early 2013, as Christie’s reelection neared, the operation kicked into overdrive. Christie was fixated on securing Democratic endorsements to bolster his image as a Republican with crossover appeal. It didn’t matter that he was expected to waltz back into office—people needed to get on the list. The administration’s intergovernmental-affairs staff, who knew which mayor or county official had gotten which grant, was moved almost wholesale to the campaign. Christie himself made repeated calls to mere county-level officers: clerks, sheriffs, registers of deeds.

For those who got behind the governor, there were incentives. To give but one example: The close-knit Orthodox community in Lakewood had endorsed Corzine in 2009. In March, a coalition of the town’s rabbis and businessmen announced it would be backing Christie this time around. Two months later, the state granted $10.6 million in building funds to an Orthodox rabbinical school in Lakewood, one of the largest expenditures for any private college in the state. (The yeshiva was not exactly cash-strapped: A copy of its application I obtained noted that its endowment “far exceeded” the $1.84 million it was expected to contribute to the project.)

As Election Day neared, you could be forgiven for mistaking Christie for a Democrat. State Republicans were frozen out; candidates were told not to include his name or picture on their literature. “We didn’t get the support,” says George Wagoner, a losing Assembly candidate. Meanwhile, the weight of the Democratic machine swung behind the Republican governor. More than 50 Democratic elected officials endorsed Christie, including Brian Stack (who was hit with a $68,725 fine in July for failing to properly disclose campaign spending) and Joe D. (who also has a large fine looming). In photos and media appearances, Christie kept showing up smiling alongside Sweeney and other prominent Democrats. Norcross didn’t formally endorse Christie, but he made his approval clear. At one event, Norcross said he’d recently seen a man in a “Chris Christie: too big to fail” t-shirt. He told Christie: “You’re not too big to fail-- you’re too good and too important to fail us.”

Meanwhile, Barbara Buono, the state senator who had volunteered to challenge Christie when more prominent Democrats, such as Cory Booker, declined, was unable to raise anywhere near enough money for a credible campaign. Numerous Democratic donors refused to give above the $300 threshold where their names would be disclosed, fearing Christie’s retribution. “I’d say to people, ‘What is going on?’” Buono recalls. “This is an election, not a military junta.” She attended one campaign rally in a North Jersey church, at which Sheila Oliver, once a reliable ally of the bosses, railed against unnamed powerful people who were supporting Christie only because he had a “dossier” on them. A month before the election, a picture surfaced on Twitter of Christie and Norcross, arm in arm at a Cowboys-Eagles game in Philadelphia. “I didn’t think [Norcross] would embrace me,” says Buono. “But I didn’t think he’d work directly against me.” In the end, Christie won by 22 points and Republicans gained not a single seat in the state Senate.

And now we come to the national uproar over the mother of all traffic jams in Fort Lee. Christie has denied any knowledge of the ruse. But it has become increasingly hard to credit his ignorance, given how deeply involved he had been in his team’s political outreach to local officials, not to mention that the names of many of his closest aides were surfacing in communications about the closures. Among national Republicans, even some of Christie’s most vocal backers have started to waver. One Republican strategist told me: “No one’s rushing out there to defend him, because they don’t know where this could go next.”

The Democratic bosses, though, are standing by their man. Norcross declared that, instead of obsessing over the bridge, national Democrats should be “pretty concerned about circumstances involving the implementation of Obamacare right now.” Joe D. struck a blasé tone: “Every place I go, people say, ‘What do I care? Why are we talking about it?’ ” And Brian Stack blasted the claim that Christie had threatened to withhold Sandy aid from Hoboken as “far-fetched.” “My relationship with the governor and his staff and this administration has been one of the best,” Stack said-- as if that wasn’t part of the problem.

What Bridgegate has laid bare is the skill and audacity with which Christie constructed his public image. “It’s almost like people were in a trance,” Buono told me. Christie may have been misunderstood for so long because his transactionalism diverted from the standard New Jersey model. He wasn’t out to line his own pockets, or build a business empire. He wasn’t even seeking to advance a partisan agenda. And yet it was transactionalism all the same. Christie used a corrupt system to expand his own power and burnish his own image, and he did it so artfully that he nearly came within striking distance of the White House. When he got cozy with Democratic bosses, people only saw a man willing to work across the aisle. When he bullied his opponents, they only saw a truth-teller. It was one of the most effective optical illusions in American politics-- until it wasn’t.

Good thing Christie has all those friends inside the corrupt Democratic establishment and the criminal machines that are so intent on making sure Hillary can count on New Jersey to keep Bernie at bay. After all, after Christie's endorsement of Trump, his ties inside the GOP establishment are... very frayed. Yesterday the New York Times heavy-duty reporting trio of Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin explained the fumbling efforts of the GOP establishment to stop Herr Trumpf. On Feb. 19 Rove was insisting to GOP fatcats that a Trumpf nomination "would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November" and that it is not inevitable and can be stopped. The next day Maine's Paul Le Pen "erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter 'to the people,' disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics. [A week later he endorsed Trump.]

Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears. At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.

The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite-- he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association-- landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.

Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.

...While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

Oddly-- hypocritically-- Republicans can't bring guns into the July convention, but I'm hearing more and more about people looking into nitroglycerine. This year there's a better way to strike at The Machine than at a GOP convention. Help Alex Law defeat Norcross' corrupt little brother Donald in South Jersey. You can do it here.




UPDATE: More Christie Baggage

The defunct Christie campaign's Finance Chair, Meg Whitman called Christie's endorsement of Herr Trumpf "an astonishing display of political opportunism." Her full statement:

Chris Christie's endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism. Donald Trump is unfit to be President. He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The Governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie's donors and supporters to reject the Governor and Donald Trump outright. I believe they will. For some of us, principle and country still matter.

Buying Elections... Like Shopping At Saks

Matt Miller's just filled with sober infatuation for New York Republican/billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg, who's taken to masquerading as an "indie." Miller, an archetypal and unabashed toadie, worships wealthy people and people in power. I believe he works for Bloomberg TV as well. He's been telling people that what this country needs now is a rich person to run the show-- not some piddling multimillionaire but someone who is really rich. Funny, my own instinct is that those people should be rounded up and shot before they can do any more damage to society. To each his own. Miller would like to see Bloomberg run for president for a bunch of childish, fatuous reasons not worth repeating.

Most of the biggest self-funders in the latest election cycle-- Florida gangster Rick Scott excluded-- lost their races. Voters are more discerning about the super-wealthy and their self-proclaimed worthiness than Miller (except in Florida). Yesterday's post dealt with the rich bitches-- NutMeg, Carly and Linda McMahon, the wrestler lady from Connecticut-- apparently so that Scott wouldn't muck up the narrative with his win. They all made bundles in business and tried buying their way into the U.S. Senate, a tradition for the stinking rich that goes back to the beginning of time.

Meg Whitman was hardly a household name when she commenced her run. Now she is-- and one that is really disliked. The more TV and radio and internet ads she ran, the more people started detesting her. By the end of the campaign they hated her so much that it was hard to believe that people started saying how they disliked Carly Fiorina even more. Imagine what Whitman could have done to win widespread social approval and admiration with even half of the $143 million she spent on the failed campaign! (She lost by almost a million votes out of seven million cast.) Perhaps if she had deployed $70 million helping the needy, she could have used the other half to win in the following cycle. I guess she was in a rush.

McMahon only spent $50 million of her own and, a real cheapskate, Fiorina only put up $7 million of the money she looted from Hewlett-Packard before she was unceremoniously fired as the worst chief executive of any major company in recent memory. Although the Post insists these three are "savvy," "sharp" and "successful," people who have dealt with them haven't been so kind. But the Post wants to know why each failed so spectacularly despite how absolutely fabulous they insist each is.

"It's in some ways like a highly underdeveloped country that suddenly strikes oil and they don't know what to do with the money and start spending it unwisely," said Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Baker said that money is a threshold requirement in politics, "but above a certain amount you don't get a dividend for every extra dollar."

"And when it's your own money, you cast aside some of the restraints and keep spending, to the point where you cast aside certain other aspects of the campaign that might be deficient."

Whitman was the shakiest campaign presence of the three, and a colossal ad campaign could not correct that. Awkward on the trail and hounded by embarrassing reports that she had failed to vote most of her adult life and that her housekeeper was an illegal immigrant, she hired expensive media consultants, including chief strategist Mike Murphy, who made hundreds of thousands of dollars of Whitman's money and financed an onslaught of on-air ads that targeted women, Latinos and other traditionally Democratic constituencies. But the millions she spent to boost her appeal seemed to have the opposite result, as her likeability dropped below where it had been when she started.

...[T]here was plenty to second-guess in Fiorina's inability to drift back to the center after her sharp tack right in the primary. In contrast to most centrist California candidates, Fiorina stuck to her opposition to abortion except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother's life; touted the benefits of offshore drilling; and championed gun rights.

Boxer pounced on Fiorina's positions on social issues and constantly linked the Republican to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who endorsed the GOP challenger.

And in a brutal economy, Boxer incessantly excoriated Fiorina's record at Hewlett-Packard of sending jobs overseas. Democrats sought to cast Whitman and Fiorina as one in the same: Silicon Valley executives who were trying to buy the election. Boxer, who had raised plenty of money in her own right, made sure California's television viewers got the message, and it clearly resonated.

"These women are trying to buy the election as if it's their birthright," chef Mark Peel, 55, said as he sat in the Tar Pit, an elegant Art Deco cocktail bar in West Hollywood.

Doug Kottler, a 45-year-old lawyer walking through The Grove in Los Angeles, agreed: "What's refreshing is that the election couldn't be bought."

Kottler said he did distinguish between the two California businesswomen, although that hardly helped them. "I just looked at them and said 'Ugh' and 'Ugh,' " said Kottler, who added that he planned to vote the Democratic line the next day. "They didn't need to bring each other down. They were both in their own freefalls."

On the other side of the country, McMahon seemed to have an even stronger chance of filling Sen. Christopher J. Dodd's seat. "I am an outsider-- I am not a career politician," she said in February. "What I hear over and over and over again is, 'We want somebody with real-life business experience.' "

Ultimately though, Connecticut voters rejected the notion that her business experience had much to do with real life. She emphasized the "corporate skills" and not the "soap opera" quality of wrestling, but exit polls by Edison Research showed that the unsavory wrestling aura stuck. Half of voters polled said that the wrestling association weighed on their vote, and almost all of them-- four out of five-- said it made them unlikely to send her to Washington.

For all the obvious attention to the onstage antics, it was, to a certain extent, the real-world business experience that brought McMahon down. Just as attacks of heartless labor cuts hurt Fiorina and Whitman in California, Blumenthal pointed to her decision to send pink slips to 10 percent of World Wrestling Entertainment's workers.

I think I would have found the Post's story more compelling if it had dealt with all the multimillionaires who ran and how their wealth impacted their races, not just the three sadsack ladies. For although McMahon holds the record for dollars spent per vote ($95-- a bargain compared to her $454 spent per primary vote) and NutMeg was #2 with $57 spent per vote, #3 was Rick Scott, who spent $29 of the money he ripped off from Medicare scams per vote he received from Florida voters who didn't seem to care where he stole his money). #4 was that Ganley guy-- who spent $29 per vote, losing badly to Betty Sutton, after it was revealed that he had tried to rape several female campaign volunteers.Like Ganley, Scott Rigel is also a used car salesman and like Ganley he spent lavishly on his campaign, coming in at #5-- $28 per vote, and beating Blue Dog Glenn Nye in Virginia's second CD. None of this answers the question how, for example, did a bona fide nitwit, Ron Johnson, who actually makes the three female kooks look good, manage to use his money to defeat one of the most admired political figures in America, Senate icon Russ Feingold? And Rick Scott? Like I said, a notorious-- if unindicted-- criminal? Why did those two make it and the three free-spending gals fail? Is sexism part of the picture here?

Random Notes Du Noir: NutMeg, Vitter, Alaska, Heath Shuler, Bachmann v Boehner

We tried buying cable TV spots in Alaska but there's nothing available in the whole state, not one 30-second spot, until next Wednesday. We're looking into dirigible and light planes with trailing banners. But with McAdams nosing into a winnable position, we really should try to... hmmmm... maybe we should just leave him alone. Whatever he's doing seems to be working. Unlike Meg Whitman. The more ads she floods the airwaves with, the lower she sinks in the polls. And she's spent over $140 million from her own bloated, under-taxed bank account so far.

She has pummeled California airwaves for months with ads painting Brown’s 40-year career in California politics as a failure. But the ads appear not to have had the desired effect.

When Whitman began her first major advertising blitz in March, 40 percent of state voters had a favorable view of her and 27 percent viewed her negatively. Now, her unfavorable ratings have nearly doubled to 51 percent, the Field poll found.

“Her negatives continued to grow as people were reminded day after day that Whitman was spending more time trashing Jerry Brown than laying out her own plans for the state’s future,” says Ms. O’Connor. “This state is really hurting, and people wanted to know what her specific vision was.... They feel she never told them.”

So what's her solution? She'll be releasing a new TV or radio ad every 6 hours from now until election day. Here's a letter in today's Palm Springs Desert Sun that everyone I know in California would agree with: "Where does one go to get away from Meg Whitman? I turn on the TV and regardless of the channel I'm bombarded by her ads. Then I go online to check e-mail and what pops up but another of her ads! Don't you have better things to do with all your billions than trying to buy votes in a governor's race?"

More of right-wing violence tomorrow, but it's worth noting that the right-wing fanatic who was sentenced to prison last week for repeatedly threatening to kill Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) after she voted in favor of health care reform legislation was afflicted with paranoia "grown and fostered by [Glenn] Beck's persuasive personality."

We knew it was a terrible idea in 2006 when Rahm Emanuel persuaded a religious conservative freak who was getting ready to run for Congress as a Tennessee Republican to move to North Carolina and run as a quasi-Democrat. Heath Shuler has been a hideous disappointment ever since, not just as one of the most reactionary and aggressive Blue Dogs, but also as a key C Street cult member. He's voted against women's Choice, against gay equality, against healthcare reform... against just about everything the GOP has voted against. The Democrats just rewarded him for this pattern of behavior with a $231,112.63 Independent Expenditure in his district this week, over ten times what they've spent on loyal progressive Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy (for example). And buoyed by their approval, he announced today that he's considering running against Nancy Pelosi for the Speakership. He joins 5 other Blue Dog scum in pledging not to vote for Pelosi-- Bobby Bright (AL), Jim Marshall (GA), Gene Taylor (MS), Mike McIntyre (NC) and Jason Altmire (PA). I wonder if Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will vote for Shuler now that she's declared it's beneath her dignity, as self-professed queen of the teabaggers, to vote for Boehner as Speaker.

And today's ad of the day, although just late enough to look positively desperate:



Let's try to keep Russ Feingold in office. Or do you agree with Ron Johnson that the U.S. should be more like China? Please help Russ here at the C&L Fundaiser For Russ Feingold.


UPDATE: Krugman Says There's Something To Fear... A Lot

Yep, Krugman thinks it'll be as bad as I do-- "future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness." Which, of course, is exactly why China is pouring money into GOP coffers through their pals at the Chamber of Commerce. Economic weakness? Years of political turmoil? Speaker Boehner? Miss McConnell fighting with DeMint over who's in charge? Clowns like Pence, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan looking like the relative adults next to surging sociopaths like Virginia Foxx, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Louie Gohmert, Darrell Issa...? China's dream come true.

The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts-- cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Tonight's Random Notes... And Al Franken Contest

Eric Cantor moved rapidly to expel Boehner's wealthy Ohio buddy Rich Iott from the Young Guns program once it came out that Iott likes dressing up as an SS trooper and reenacting the Nazis' most glorious moments. Boehner responded by reassuring Iott that he wouldn't ask him to return his campaign contributions. (Other than what Iott gave his own campaign, he got more money from Boehner than any other donor.) Then Iott went on TV and defended the Nazi thing by claiming that the SS volunteers were just "defending freedom." That "defending freedom" thing is a little misleading when you hear a rightist talking about it. It means, very specifically, defending the freedom of the rich and powerful to exploit the vulnerable and society at large. And now John Boehner is camapigning with Iott against Marcy Kaptur in Lucas County.

Elan Steinberg, the Vice-President of American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants had a message for Boehner. "We ask Congressman Boehner to understand our pain and reconsider his appearance at the side of an unrepentant Nazi re-enactor. Congressman Boehner, your place is at the side of the victims of the SS-- civilian adults and children, Allied and American POW's-- not with someone who dresses up in the garb of mass murderers."

Tomorrow afternoon we'll be discussing the current campaign in Arkansas in greater depth. Meanwhile, though, I want to make sure that if there's anyone reading this blog in that state, there is an alternative to the two repulsive corporate whores, Blanche Lincoln and John Boozman. And that would be Green Party candidate John Gray, around whom progressives are rallying. Gray was the hands-down winner of the Senate debate.

Gray said, among other things, that:

—There is no reason for a private health insurance industry even to exist. No health insurance company ever stitched a wound or tended to a broken bone. We could save money by expanding our nonprofit and low-overhead Medicare to be the single-payer to doctors for everyone, not just the elderly. Doctors make plenty of money and they would continue to make plenty in such a system, Gray said. We’d have less need for torts, and thus for tort reform, he argued, if the single-paying government had the right to kick out of its reimbursement pool any physician who mangled patients.

—If you rely on cheap labor alone for jobs, you are doomed because there always will be somebody who will come along and work people or children for less.

—This idea that corporations and people have the same free-speech rights is “nonsense” because his 91-year-old mother is ailing and hearing-impaired and there is no way in the world her speech rights are as accessible and powerful of those of, say, Wal-Mart.

—There is no remotely sane reason to deny a gay person the right to serve openly in our military. Our military needs competent people and we behave as some kind of “American Taliban” if we worry about what people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

—Any graph will plainly show that Republicans run up deficits and Democrats bring them down, which is one reason that he, in the miraculous event he got elected, would caucus with the Democrats.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Gold's Gym franchise owner was more than a little embarrassed when it came out that the owner of Gold's Gym International Inc. (rabid right-wing nutcase Robert Rowling, who also owns the Omni Hotels) has been helping to finance Karl Rove's execrable anti-gay jihad (AKA, the Republican election campaign) to the tune of $2,000,000. That's a big donation which basically comes right from the pockets of a lot of gay muscle boys.

"Our member base made us aware of this, and we decided on a course of action," Don Dickerson, the franchise's director of operations, said in an interview. After 22 years, he said, it's walking away from a storied brand whose name is affixed to gyms in more than 40 states and 30 countries, and has a claimed 3 million members worldwide."

Do you think voters enjoy negative ads? Meg Whitman was vociferously booed at a non-partisan woman's conference when she decided to stick with the negative ads even after Jerry Brown proposed ending them on the spot. He's now turned her gibberish into the ultimate negative political commercial-- her talking:



And... tonight's contest: autographed copies of Al Franken's book The Truth and Al Franken's DVD God Spoke. How do you get 'em? Well, just pick one Democratic candidate running for Congress and donate to his or her campaign at the Blue America '10 page. Any candidate you like, any amount you can afford. Tomorrow I'll pick one winner randomly to get the Al Franken signed book and DVD. Easy, huh?

Xenophobic Maniacs, John & Ken, California's 2 Top Blow Hard Radio Hosts, On The Warpath Against "Nutmeg" Whitman

I guess no one told her what these two did to David Dreier or how the NRCC's lawsuit against them was tossed out by the FEC. She seemed unprepared for the buzzsaw treatment (click on "check out the video here" and watch the interview) they had prepared for her. Their only interest was to castigate her for talking out of both sides of her mouth-- in English from one side and en español from the other side-- in terms of Hispanic immigrants. Their point for the thirty minute interview was that she's a hypocrite and just another political hack. And they're mean... really mean, and sharp. They cut her to ribbons. She was insane to go on the air with these clowns.

And they've been on the warpath ever since. Keep in mind this is the biggest radio show in Los Angeles and it now gets rebroadcast on KNEW in the Bay Area as well. They get about a million listeners at any one time and are generally acknowledged to be the most listened to local talk show anywhere in America. They keep hammering her on their show and their website is abuzz with anti-Nutmegmania re-posted from other sources:

KQED: The issue of illegal immigration doesn't seem to be getting any easier for Meg Whitman.
 
In a bruising half hour interview with Los Angeles talk show hosts John Kobylt & Ken Chiampou this afternoon, the Republican gubernatorial nominee said she's against any path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally, even though she seemed to be for such a path 10 months ago.

The KFI-AM talk show hosts were riled up about what they see as inconsistencies between Whitman's primary campaign rhetoric, her rhetoric now that she faces Jerry Brown, and her own statements compared to those made by her campaign ads. And they insisted that a "path to citizenship" is synonymous with "amnesty" for those here illegally…

San Francisco Chronicle: The California Republican Party, already challenged to win key races this year in a blue-leaning state, has a new problem to deal with: The two GOP gubernatorial primary candidates are still tangling two months later.
 
Meg Whitman's recent attacks on Steve Poizner, who lost the primary, could cost her the support of his backers, some GOP officials say, when she needs every Republican vote and many of the state's independent voters to beat Democrat Jerry Brown in November.
 
On Wednesday, former eBay CEO Whitman took to the airwaves in Southern California and again jabbed at Poizner, suggesting the state insurance commissioner refused Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request last year that state officers put their employees on unpaid leave as part of a plan to cut expenses during the budget crisis.
 
In her interview with KFI radio station hosts John and Ken, Whitman also said Poizner spent more than $30 million to attack her during the primary campaign…

This is post they did all on their own:

Meg Whitman’s senior political adviser Rob Stutzman is calling John and Ken “shock jocks” and says immigration is their schtick! 

Call Stutzman and tell him you don’t think the immigration problem is schtick!  This hack thinks this is just a comedy act!  Tell him what illegal immigration has done to your state! 
916.930.0100
rob@stutzmanpa.com 

Contact the campaign!
 
Meg Whitman for Governor
20813 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 150
Cupertino, CA 95104
Phone: (408) 400-3887

Better off to not engage in a dialogue with these folks, no? They can't lose; you can't win. Meg Whitman proves once again she may be rich, but she's politically clueless.

Is This Going To Be The Year Wealthy Executives Dominate The Political System Even More Than Usual?

It doesn't seem very remarkable that the American political elite is filled with multimillionaires and that they have a distinct tendency to represent the point of view of their own class. It should be remarkable-- I mean we're kinda/sorta a democracy with a system of universal education-- but it's not. The political elite did its best to make sure the public education system would shy away from the whole critical thinking thing and concentrate on turning out minimally educated worker drones/consumers who could partially read the fine print.

Last week Michael Luo and Damien Cave presented a little report in the NY Times on how even the wealthiest and most selfish among us can-- and do-- run as populist outsiders. And this isn't just an essay about Republicans or just about egregiously deceitful crooks like Darrell Issa, the richest man in the House, a crazy demagogue and teabagger, or the only California congressman to join Michele Bachmann's demented Tea Party Caucus, real estate swindler Gary Miller (with a net worth of at least $14 million at last count). Ostensibly, Jeff Greene is a billionaire and a Democrat... kinda/sorta.

When Jeff Greene, a k a the Meltdown Mogul, recently brought his Democratic campaign for the United States Senate to a poor Miami neighborhood rife with the kinds of subprime mortgages that he became a billionaire betting against, did he:

A) Arrive in a Cadillac Escalade S.U.V., before stumping for energy conservation;

B) Tell the crowd that he was “fed up and frustrated” with Washington while suggesting job-creation ideas previously proposed by Washington politicians;

C) Receive a raucous welcome as an outsider who could turn Florida around.
The answer? All of the above, of course.

Call it the Great Recession paradox. Even as voters express outrage at the insider culture of big bailouts and bonuses, their search for political saviors has led them to this: a growing crowd of über-rich candidates, comfortable in boardrooms and country clubs, spending a fortune to remake themselves into populist insurgents.

The number of self-financed candidates has crept up the last few election cycles, and this year seems to be on pace for another uptick.

Through just the second quarter of the year, at least 42 House and Senate candidates-- 7 Democrats and 35 Republicans-- in 23 states had already donated $500,000 or more of their own money to their campaigns, according to the most recent data available from the Center for Responsive Politics. That list does not even include governors’ races, and the roster promises to grow as the campaign season progresses and spending escalates.

...Having gobs of personal cash to toss into a race seems to be especially potent in California and Florida, with their expensive media markets. The governors’ races are a prime example. In California, Meg Whitman, a Republican and former chief executive of eBay, has swamped all other self-financed candidates across the country, using $90 million of her own money to trounce Steve Poizner, who contributed $24 million from his own pocket, in the Republican primary.

And in Florida, Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA Healthcare-- a large hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines for fraudulently billing government programs like Medicare-- has become so visible on television that his latest ads start with him saying “Me again.” Mr. Scott has shocked the Republican establishment by becoming the clear front-runner after spending more than $20 million on advertisements.

Mr. Greene, though, is the biggest surprise so far. A Democrat who had been a Republican; a brash, gold-watch-and-Prada-sunglasses-wearing investor with friends like Mike Tyson and Heidi Fleiss, even he admits he has been surprised by how quickly his campaign has picked up support. He entered just before the filing deadline in April. Democratic officials laughed him off initially. But not anymore.

Recent polls show that Mr. Greene, 55, has pulled roughly even in the primary with Representative Kendrick B. Meek, the Miami Democrat who had been the party favorite, though Gov. Charlie Crist still leads as an independent in a three-way general election.

Mr. Greene’s campaign finance report filed last week starkly illustrates the impact of his wealth. He took in just $3,036 in outside contributions, while lending himself-- and spending-- $5.9 million in the second quarter, not far off from what Mr. Meek has raised in 18 months.

Mr. Greene insists that for self-financed candidates, now is the moment. “If 2008 was the year of change, 2010 is the year of frustration,” he said in an interview.

His approach, like that of many other rich candidates, is simple: tap into voter anger (“I’m fed up,” Mr. Greene tells crowds) then argue that only those who have succeeded in business can drive economic recovery, without kowtowing to special interests.

Multimillionaire crooked businessmen and women from Linda McMahon in Connecticut to Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman in California are counting on the same thing-- suckering voters justifiably angry at professional politicians that autocratic and pampered business executives aren't as bad. Even though they're worse-- much, much, much worse. Fernando Espuelas grappled with the notion at HuffPo last week in a look at the California governor's race which pits billionaire Meg Whitman against career-long politician Jerry Brown. "Questions about Whitman," he writes, "persist. Beyond her Goldman Sachs connection (strangely under played by the Brown campaign), allegations that she was physically abusive to an E-Bay employee, and serious doubts about her real position on immigration (a keystone issue for the king or queen-making Latino electorate)-- there is the CEO question."

Whitman has told the electorate that she is the person to fix California. And boy, does California need fixing. The litany of problems sounds like a Biblical list of divine plagues and punishments-- the yawning budget deficit, the uber-powerful public employee unions and the equally influential business special interest that run through Sacramento like ants at a picnic, the massively under-invested state infrastructure, and, of course, an education system that has deteriorated to the point where only 50% of the students actually graduate from the state's largest public school district (Los Angeles).

To these and many other problems, Whitman has prescribed a simple solution: run the state government like a good business. Cut costs, invest in opportunities, fix the state like you would restructure an ailing corporation.

And who better than a successful, big company CEO to do it?

But as Jerry Brown is fond of pointing out, a state government is not at all like a corporation.

The CEO of a company is a kind of beneficent dictator. She wakes up in the morning with an idea (build a product, acquire a company, restructure the business) and faster than you can say "Let's get it done!" well trained executives are implementing actions.

Vision becomes mission through the exercise of executive power.

But California, and specifically the institutional power of the Governor of the state, are far from that corporate construct.

The division of powers, not just between the executive, legislative, and judicial, but also among the competing elected state-wide officers (the state comptroller, the treasurer, the insurance commissioner, et al), plus the muti-layered municipal and county centers of power, combine to make the governing of California an exercise in constant compromise if not outright frustration. (Just ask Arnold.)

...[C]an a common sense, business approach to governing the state actually work? Is the projection of vision into the marketplace (a talent clearly demonstrated by Whitman's success at E-Bay) analogous to actually governing a massive state, with colossal problems and a diffused power structure that has stymied governors for decades?

Of course, Jerry Brown, a former governor and perpetual fixture in state politics says no. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Brown blasted the notion that running a corporation would prepare one to run California:

He is quick to contrast himself with Whitman, pointing out every instance where her theories crumble against the realities of actually governing. "I've done this," he explains. "I've been in government and overseen thousands of businesses. I've run charter schools. Those are businesses. She ran her ... her website. She can say whatever she wants. But if you have never worked in government...It's a different world. That's like someone who's never dove in a river and says, I know what swimming in a river is like."

Of course, this is the crux of the election. Will Whitman's government-as-business approach trump Jerry Brown's deep experience in state governing? Will voters, sick and tired of the deeply corrupt California political scene, flee from Brown's experience because it may mean business as usual? Will they buy Whitman's technocratic proposals?

And in many of these cases it isn't just a professional politician vs a flashy businessman. Some of these business leaders have failed spectacularly-- like Carly Fiorina, a bad joke in the business world-- or have been convicted of criminal behavior, Rick Scott being only the worst of many, or are both corrupt wealthy businessmen and corrupt wealthy career politicians like Issa and Miller. And in the end, ill-educated-- purposely ill-educated-- voters decide. Are they also masochists? Jason Linkins put up an excellent HuffPo rundown of the big self-funders Friday-- a motley array of crooks and thieves eager to get their hands on the levers of power-- and focussed on sociopaths like Tim D'Annunzio (R-NC), Steve Poizner (R-CA) and Terrence Wall (R-WI) who have already been eliminated by the voters. We'll find out in November how many more creepy business types trying to buy political seats will be rejected-- and, meanwhile, I get to play my favorite video of the year, one voters in the U.K. seem to have ignored:

Gail Collins says this election will be about "gobs of cash falling on campaigns like tar balls on a beach"

The mind boggles at how many zillions of $$$$ Meg Whitman's going to spend battling sad old Jerry Brown for the California governorship. Of course it's not likely to get her elected, but Gail Collins wants Californians to keep in mind that she wasn't going to pay off the state's debts anyway.

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

-- Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Criticism"

"The rich rush in and keep right on rushing."

-- anonymous

by Ken

Gail Collins has a swell column today ("Rise of the Richies"), suggesting that newly designated California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman may have been right but for the wrong reasons when she declared in her victory speech Tuesday night: "Career politicians in Sacaramento and Washington, D.C., be warned; you now face your worst nightmare."

The people of California may be hoping that if she wins, she’ll just pay off their deficit. As a resident of New York City, which has had a billionaire chief executive for some time, I would like to say: Don’t hold your breath.

[Of course, as Harold Meyerson pointed out in his Washington Post column this morning: "Calif. GOP primary winners look headed for defeat," because their campaigns were of the far-right variety that's fine for GOP primaries but not, at least in a state like California, for a general election.]

Which leads Gail to a different take on pol-ish nightmares:

[T]he gubernatorial nominee explained that the worst nightmare for status quo lawmakers was of “two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balance budgets and get things done.”

This is not actually the case. For career politicians, the worst nightmare would be a businessperson from the real world with a billion dollars and an open checkbook. Freddy Krueger is Michael Bloomberg.

We have been entertaining ourselves with theories about how this election year is going to be all about voter anger. Or Washington insiders. Or health care. Or TARP. But, really, it’s going to be about money. Gobs of cash falling on campaigns like tar balls on a beach.

As Gail points out, fear of a Bloomberg of their own drives already cash-crazed incumbents even crazier in building up that all-important reelection war chest.

This seems to me just another way in which the lovable schmucks of the Teabaggers' movement miss the mark. Even if they've actually located a few of the correct targets for their wrath, not only do they have no constructive clue what to do about them, but they've missed most of the really important targets. And what we're seeing now could have been easily enough foretold: the rich rushing into the political void to make hay while the sun shines, as it were.

Oh sure, the Teabaggers hate "bailouts." As usual, though, when it comes to reality, they have no idea what they're talking about. There's no way that the government was going to simply allow the financial-serivces firms -- notably the ones providing banking-equivalent services without being banks, thereby freeing themselves from even the light oversight of federal banking regulators -- to disappear. Of course the option that was minimally explored was liquidating the damned firms and paying off the depositors rather than letting managements and shareholders off the hook. Nevertheless, something was going to be done.

And now, of course, with the banksters having been made relatively whole thanks to the bailouts that the Teabaggers decry, they're acting as the banksters' foot soldiers, making sure that nothing is done to force the banksters to share the loot they've squirreled away instead of using it to restart the country's credit markets. And thanks to the Wall Street insiders who make economic policy for the Obama administration, who managed to screw up the stimulus package so it provided bulging deficits with precious little economic stimulus, not to mention the administration's failure to even try to educate the public as to what exactly economic stimulus is about (this is perhaps understandable, since the administration's cocked-up stimulus never stood a chance of accomplishing it), the entire "discussion" of depression-easing economics is left to the liars and economic neanderthals of the Right.

So we keep hearing about Greece, even though our economic situation bears hardly any resemblance to Greece's, while we never hear about Japan, whose "lost" decade we show every sign of emulating. In addition, the corporate Right has accustomed Americans so to downward expectations that with each economic downturn since the Clinton years, we're led to expect less in the form of "recovery" -- more and more Americans are shut out of such recovery as does occur, and it's come to seem normal.

As we've seen in the battle over financial-regulation reform, the business community is prepared to dump staggering sums into fighting for its prerogatives, even after the spectacular demonstration we've just had of what happens when their limitless greed is left unchecked. Sure enough, there's the Chamber of Commerce dutifully selling its horror stories of what will happen if its clients' prerogatives are impinged on even slightly, the same pack of fantasies and lies they trot out every time meaningful regulation is on the table. And Americans swallow it every time, just as they will swallow any appeal to military necessities, no matter how far-fetched or unfounded. As our friend Me has been arguing recently in the comments section, it really does appear that you can't win an election in this country taking a stand against war. (That toxic twerp Jeffie Sessions is trying to see if you can prevent the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice by branding her as "against the military," a charge even he, stupid as he is, can't be stupid enough to believe is true.)

There might be something amusing about seeing those people squawking about the economic injustice they've suffered at the hands of Big Government used as unwitting stooges of Big Money -- if it weren't so sad, and serious.

#

With California Republican Party Clown Prince Mike Carona Headed For Prison, Meg Whitman Wants The Governor's Chair He Was Slated To Run For

The California GOP: Mike Carona and Meg Whitman

Mike Carona, "America's Sheriff," was long the crown prince of California, the Orange County wingnut they planned to stick us with after Schwarzenegger. But you can't be governor from a prison cell, which will be Carona's home for the next decade or so, so the GOP had to scurry to find someone else. He didn't testify on his own behalf and the jury has been off for the holidays. Closing arguments, for the highest ranking Orange County law enforcement official ever to stand trial, start today.

The California Republican Party, broke, shrinking and riven with infighting, appears to be settling on former eBay head Meg Whitman to lead them to their next electoral disaster. She was a big Romney supporter, having worked with him in the vulture capital firm Bain Capital, destroying American businesses and shipping jobs overseas. After Romney withdrew she served as a McCain co-chair.

Two other Republicans, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Congressman Tom Campbell, are also sniffing around the race. Ex-Governor/current Attorney General Jerry Brown is the probable Democratic nominee, although L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and S.F. Mayor Gavin Newsom also want to run. Although Whitman is best known as an ex-CEO of online auctioneers eBay, she cut her teeth on her work at Hasbro, where she ran the Mr. Potato Head department. Although beloved of Wall Street types, eBay users hated her high-handed, authoritarian policies, which turned eBay into a nightmarish hell for users. After running eBay's own payment system into the ground and making it the most hated place on the Internet, she bought much-loved PayPal, and promptly ruined that as well. Another high profile right-wing woman-- also a corporate hack-- who has been eyeing the governor's chair is Carly Fiorina, widely thought to have brought Hewlett Packard to its knees before the company finally fired her for gross incompetence.

eBay Must Have Donated Too Much To McCain-- Announces Layoffs Of 10% Of Its Workforce

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang: The rich get rich and the poor...

I did pretty well on eBay. I raised several million dollars for a charity that cares for handicapped children and for a nonpartisan public service organization that fights for equality under the law for all Americans. I raised the money with several high profile auctions with the help of musicians and movie stars and other celebrities, from collectibles donated by Madonna, Joni Mitchell and Green Day to a ride in Krist Novoselic's self-piloted airplane. Over the years I got to know eBay pretty well and, like many major eBay sellers I grew to detest their arbitrary and idiotic regulations. Theirs weren't regulations that protected buyers or sellers. They were regulations that benefited eBay at the expense of buyers and sellers. When eBay's fascist, much-loathed payment system, Billpoint, went belly-up I hoped it would serve as a signal to eBay executives that they were jeopardizing a great business model put together by true modern day entrepreneurial visionaries, Pierre Omidyar (a French-born Iranian) and Jeffrey Skoll. Instead the visionless bureaucrats who took over eBay-- think Republican corporate hack Meg Whitman-- just bought the well-run rival that had put Billpoint out of business, PayPal, and eventually screwed that up too.

If eBay was dynamic and innovative when it began, it has stagnated and calcified of late and is now a typically Republican-run corporate giant hated by everyone who deasl with it. Except Sarah Palin... who failed to sell the governor's private jet on it but has repeatedly lied about that and made the sale that never took place part of her mythology. Oh-- and McCain. I doubt he really knows what eBay was-- or even is-- except a source of campaign contributions for George Macacawitz Allen, Mitt Romney, George Bush and, of course, himself. eBay's PAC has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly to Republicans and to reactionary Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party like Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, and Ben Nelson.

It didn't surprise me late this afternoon when the NY Times reported that eBay, which has generated billions-- many billions-- for its corporate managers and the politicians they favor-- is firing 10% of its workers as part of a strategy of "both tightening its belt and expanding its reach in preparation for the coming economic storm."

On Monday, eBay announced it would lay off 10 percent of its 16,000 workers, including 1,000 permanent employees, and pay $1.35 billion to acquire the Web payment firm Bill Me Later and the Danish classified advertising companies Den Bla Avis and BilBasen.

EBay, based in San Jose, Calif., said most of the layoffs would be in its core marketplace division, which has suffered from declining single-digit growth rates while online commerce has been growing at a double-digit clip.

The overpaid corporate hacks who conceived of the bad decisions that have caused the declining single-digit growth rates will now get bonuses for firing the workers, something the world of corporate managers considers very stressful (to the managers). What's worse is that one of the managers explained that “We are treating the affected people with the kinds of values you would expect out of eBay.” Fortunately murdering workers and turning them into dog food is still illegal in the United States... right?