What is sadder is that Jim Foley, AFTER admitting to lie after lie after lie, disbarred, committed fraud about his Marine “career”, stole, and bullied people, won Derry and 27% of the vote in his race. And unless he had been “outed”, he never would have ‘fessed up either. Do Principles even matter anymore when folks reward people like that? Sure, he “lost” his race but look at all the votes he “won”. How can we have a functional Republic when the same mentality that permeates Louisiana and Illinois (and most of the MA Speakers of the House lately) now infects the public at large? When malfeasance is rewarded like that, is there any wonder why government is one of the least trusted institutions nowadays?
- Another under-the-radar-winner: Boutin spends $78K to Jane’s $9K to win by only 8%. So he spends in a PRIMARY what MOST incumbents spend in an entire race (Primary plus the General election). Eight to one, Jane Cormier was outspent and she only lost 54% to 46%? And that doesn’t even count the 10s of thousands spent by the NH Senate Republican
Insider Crony Incumbent FriendsMajority PAC on his Primary as well? Seriously? - For a job that pays only $100 / year (plus per diem)? It shows you how consequential Government on what it can do to your life as well as the vast amount of monies that can be “nudged” towards “friendlies” – money that used to be your’s, Mr & Mrs. Taxpayer.
- This too – I heard that there was another report that he, in the company of two other government officials, openly berated teenagers that were putting up political signs that he disagreed with – and without a drink in his hands too! Seriously – screaming at mere teenagers simply pounding wooden boards into the ground? Maybe what we saw in the videos that were played here was the real deal.
To the “savvy” political insiders, political corruption is still not seen as an election issue that people care about or vote over. We’ve been discussing a number of attempts to change that — such as with new anti-corruption PACs — and two of the political races we’ve discussed ended yesterday. In both cases, the candidates lost, but they way outperformed their expectations, suggesting that there’s a real possibility of a better reaction in the future. …Meanwhile, up in New Hampshire, we’d discussed the campaign of Jim Rubens for the Senate, against carpetbagging Scott Brown (who jumped states from Massachusetts after losing his Senate seat there). Early on, Rubens was basically a complete nobody. While he’d been in NH politics in the past, he hadn’t actually occupied a political office since the 1990s. He was basically roadkill for the political machine of Scott Brown. However Larry Lessig’s Mayday PAC noted that Rubens was the only Republican candidate running on an anti-corruption platform to limit the influence of money in politics. Mayday PAC spent heavily on campaign ads for Rubens, and he ended up getting around 24% of the vote, with Brown pulling in less than 50%.In the end, both of these campaigns obviously lost — but they were interesting experiments with important lessons. Two upstart campaigns from totally different sides of the traditional political spectrum (Zephyr/Wu to the “left” and Rubens to the “right”), both of which made anti-corruption efforts a key plank in their campaigns. Both were considered barely worth mentioning at the beginnings of the campaigns. Both were up against incredibly well-known, well-funded political machines with national name recognition and ambition. Neither campaign had any significant money. And both actually performed decently despite their disadvantages.
In the end, both campaigns definitely did lose, but they showed how there’s clearly a dissatisfaction with the traditional political machine. And if two such tiny, out-of-nowhere campaigns could do that, hopefully it means that future campaigns can do even more.
Corruption? I don’t think that was the driving force for the 24% that he actually got – he ran more on his accomplishments than on corruption, more on ideas than bankrolls – especially when he started to tout all the money that the SuperPACS were starting to spend on his behalf. Irony – the PAC to end Money PACs spent over $1.5 M in little ole’ NH – with 1.3 million people in the whole state. That’s rather hypocritical – doing exactly what every other special interest group does: throwing money at a candidate in the hopes of influencing future behavior.
Remember, the only folks that are screaming about money in politics is the Left. Example: the Senate Democrats that are trying to rewrite the First Amendment with a Constitutional Amendment that would have Congress limit our free speech in the political realm by what we can spend of our own money in support of candidates articulating our beliefs (and the accompanying mountains of regulations that will accompany it).
Sidenote: just like what the NH State Senate Republicans did – stood shoulder to shoulder with them ideologically when they sponsored and voted NH SB120 here in NH that does exactly the same thing.
And the Washington Free Beacon has this on the deeper purpose of the MayDay PAC (er, get “it”, May Day? The holiday of choice of the Socialist / Communist Left – remember, *I* didn’t pick the name!) that “picked” Jim Rubens to support with over $1 million in ads in the latter part of the Primary campaign. How’d that work out (reformatted, emphasis mine)
A leading campaign finance reformer admitted defeat on Wednesday after spending more than $1.6 million on a Senate candidate who garnered less than a quarter of the primary vote. Jim Rubens, a Republican Senate candidate in New Hampshire, received just 23 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s primary, losing to former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who will challenge Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D.) in November. Rubens’ poor showing was a black eye for Harvard University professor Larry Lessig and his Super PAC, called Mayday. The group backed Rubens with more than $1.6 million in independent expenditures. “We lost. Badly,” Lessig said on his blog on Wednesday morning. “In the end, the burden of this mistake rests with me, and me alone.” “Our first poll found our candidate with 9 percent of the vote,” Lessig explained. “I knew we had to take on some unwinnable races—and win them. But by failing now, we have made the others harder. I should have accepted the advice not to take on that risk.”
…The idea was to elect like-minded federal legislators, Republican and Democrat, who would vote for campaign finance reform legislation such as the radical constitutional amendment currently under consideration in the Senate….Lessig’s failure could spell trouble not just for his group’s efforts to elect those and other candidates, but also for the larger campaign finance reform movement. His effort was seen as the vanguard of an effort to limit Americans’ ability to spend freely on communications expressing their views on policy and politics.
In other words, like true Progressives, they believe that WE, Joe and Jane SixPack, haven’t the brains to either think for ourselves or understand that we can’t understand that other people are trying to convince us of something. So either we must be even further limited to only thinking “good” thought by our betters – or worse, playing a lessor role in our Republic.
Then there is this – and while donors giving to a PAC may support that mission, they also have other missions in mind as well:
While Lessig and others bill the campaign finance reform effort as nonpartisan, Mayday’s backers are anything but. They include liberal activist group MoveOn.org, which gave $142,329.63 last month, Democracy Alliance donor Steve Susman, who gave $50,000, and Amanda Hanley, co-chair of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Midwest Council, who chipped in $10,000.
Despite his bipartisan portfolio of candidates, Lessig has been explicit about the inherently ideological nature of his campaign finance reform efforts. Those efforts are necessary, he has said, to advance key liberal policy priorities.
Ah, a glimmer of light? And given Jim Rubens had supported calls for carbon taxes in the past, which he only pooh-poohed when it became clear that Republicans believed it to be a non-starter, was this a factor in MayDay PAC picking him? And do we go from the glimmer to the bright spotlight????
“If money didn’t buy results in Washington,” he said in 2012, it would be much easier for environmentalists to shepherd climate legislation through Congress. Like Lessig, backers of a constitutional amendment proposed by Democrats this week to limit First Amendment protections on political speech admit that the measure is designed to make it easier to enact key parts of the Democratic Party’s agenda.
Less money from Individuals demanded for mere political purposes – less to fight the Democrat agenda from the Right. After all, the Left is all about reaching their agenda goals regardless of the US Constitution. They need no stinkin’ Constitution, so they attack it semi-covertly.
