Josh Marshall points out that a lot of Romney contributors have maxed out, while Obama donors generally have a lot more room to give, and says:
So one could imagine getting into late summer and Romney would be having a hard time finding new people to give while the Obama campaign would be able to keep harvesting money from his small donor base. (Things were never quite this restrictive; there are various party committees where candidates can direct money. Still, it could be a real problem.)
But under the Citizens United rules, Romney probably just sends those folks to Crossroad and Crossroads GPS. Not sure he’d ever really run into a problem.
I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. I’ll grant that third parties like Crossroads GPS probably do some kind of in-the-background coordination with campaigns, but it’s not like they’re working under the same roof as the Romney campaign. That matters, because it’s hard to see how Karl Rove’s message is going to be exactly the same as Romney’s on any given day in whatever state Mitt is visiting. And is Crossroads going to pay for staffers on the ground for months prior to the campaign, as the Obama campaign has been doing even in Kay’s red county?
Don’t get me wrong — if Crossroads GPS spends $100 million, that’s significant. But it’s not as effective as the Romney campaign spending $100 million, and if Romney can’t tap some more donors, it’s going to hurt him even if Rove and the Kochs step in.
Jim Pharo
Why? Why is $100mm from Crossroads less impactful than $100mm from R-Money’s campaign itself? Surely not the lack of coordination…the strategy of the campaign will be plenty easy to discern without any risky “closed door” meetings. Plus it’s Rove and R-Money — do we really think they won’t just get on the phone and arrange to swap Excel spreadsheets if need be?
I think this one falls into the category of ‘wishful thinking.’ Romney will not lack for funds in any meaningful respect…
Nemesis
mittbot may have 99 problems, but coin aint one.
Money and the gop go hand in hand. The only way money dries up from mittbots steely robotic fingers is if his campaign faulters dramatically and well, the writing is on the wall, so donors accept the coming 4 years of hell including reeducation camps and gun consfication, while some corporate donors who are currently hedging throw in the towel and get 100% behind the soshulist usurper.
El Tiburon
Is Crossroads only goal the defeat of Obama? I would argue Crossroads could be more effective in that they can play dirtier than the Romney campaign?
Although I could see a lot of donors not wanting to give money to Rove for a lot of reasons as well.
amk
@Jim Pharo: While money may not be the issue for mittbot (heck the rich fuck alone could throw in his own 100 million and still have spare change left), ground game like GOTV is something else, isn’t it ? Or does the CU ratfuck enable these fuckers to rig that also ?
mistermix
@Jim Pharo: So you think GPS is going to run a GOTV effort, or staff offices?
Schlemizel
I see your point about coordination and ground game but think you are wrong anyway. Our masters will see to it that not just CrossToads has a hundred million but that 3 or 4 other similar front groups will also. Despite the limits Obama will be outspent & probably by a significant number.
This will be particularly bad if it appears to be close. What we need is for Willard to be weak early so our master think it is smarter to keep their cash on hand for next time.
Either way the tsunami of tshit coming our way this fall will be quite impressive
Schlemizel
@mistermix:
No but they don’t have to. GPS real job is to suppress the vote – increase voter apathy in the low information sector, weaken support among the not fully committed and enrage their base. All the things negative TV ads are known to do.
I don’t need to get out my vote nearly as much as I need to suppress your turn out & GPS types are ideally suited for that ratfuck
Linda Featheringill
@amk: #4
I think that is THE QUESTION of this election. Small donors are probably more willing to participate in the ground game [as you call it].
Will the contest be decided by person-to-person influence or by purchasing big blocks of advertising time?
JPL
If Romney wins, some will question the Citizen’s United ruling, but with repubs in charge, new campaign finance laws won’t be passed. If Obama wins, some will assume Citizen’s United does no damage and the law won’t be changed. See how that works.
bob h
George W. got his sorry ass re-elected with $375 million taken in, with Kerry not far behind. Should we get panicky because Obama looks set to have “only” twice that? Particularly since there are a limited number of states where it has to be spent?
c u n d gulag
Election 2012:
GOTV v. STV (Suppress the Vote).
We’d better get to work, and hope that GOTV wins.
Valdivia
I hate that Josh frames Romney as the candidate of success. WTF? He is the candidate of the moneyed people but not success. Why use the Republican frame?
Also, too: Crossroads cannot by law do door to door GOTV efforts. Or run offices for RMoney. That will kill them in the end thinking they can just buy the election with ads.
JPL
OT..Sorry to change the topic but I wanted to update yesterday’s topic about the Newton County couple who were arrested for changing the locks on their new home. The neighbors who assaulted them have been arrested and charged with aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal trespass. GA has a stand your ground law so the trial will be interesting. The neighbor who was arrested feels violated for standing up for his rights.
Yeah, second amendment right..link
amk
@JPL: If Obama wins, hopefully one of the ‘premes is breitbarted by god and the sc is swung back to sanity.
amk
@Valdivia: josh has gone bw for me long time back. like nate.
Shari
Crossroads is spending money at the Congressional level also. That’s where they will have more leverage. I’m more concerned about the Senate than I am about the Presidency.
Schlemizel
@c u n d gulag:
DING! DING! DING!
exactly
Suffern ACE
@bob h: I think the fact that it now takes a almost $2 billion to decide who the leader is (and that is just the direct cost. The cost of making certain the large donors are kept happy is even larger) is foolish. Don’t know if public financing is the answer, but maybe public distribution of the funds.
Shrillhouse
Well, perhaps you have a point there. However, I’m not sure that there really is a “message” other than “Obama is a Muslim Kenyan Socialist, so vote for the guy who is a job creator and not a wealth re-distributor” etc etc. I think you are kind of imagining a nuance that really isn’t there.
Since 9/11, the GOP sales pitch has basically been “vote for us, or everyone dies.” After the Great Recession, this has been sort of modified to “vote for us, or everyone will have to appear before a death panel.” I’m really not sure how much it matters whether this comes from GPS, or Romney’s campaign…
joes527
I’m not buying it.
The goal of campaigning isn’t to put out a coherent message that will be the basis for governing when you are elected.
It is to get elected.
As long as uncle Karl’s message ends up: “Vote for the guy with the R next to his name.” then coordination be damned.
It will accrue.
Valdivia
@amk:
he can be good, still, some times. Only him because the rest of the site if terrible. Lots of trolling. But the end of the article linked where he calls Romney the candidate of success. Just wow!
jeffreyw
The fat cats have more than just money.
Palli
@Schlemizel:
If the election is close republicans will win. They own the electronic voting tabulation.
amk
@Valdivia: Sargent was the only redeeming factor of tpm. When he left, it became just a shrill site.
Xenos
@Valdivia:
If Romney wins, there is no way outright, blatant illegality will be prosecuted. If Obama wins, he will face a shitstorm of massive proportions if Holder tries to enforce the law, and the Supreme Court will make new law to get the employees of the oligarchy out of legal peril.
And if Holder somehow succeeds in putting criminals behind bars, we will face a coup d’etat as surely as if we prosecuted the war crimes of the Bush administration.
Valdivia
@Xenos:
The one limit of CU is this coordination thing. And if Rove is seen to be doing door to door it will be noticed. Not by the govt but by the media. It will be a shitstorm. ETA: in the sense that CU has been controversial and the media has been doing tons of reports on it. the meme that they are buying the election will make it hard for them.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@c u n d gulag: That’s all the message the left should need to get to work.
Steve in DC
There message will be really simple. The economy sucks and would have gotten better faster if we went with free market principles. Spending is out of control and driving us into debt and will destroy this country for our children.
blah blah blah blah
Xenos
@Valdivia: But why would the media stir things up? Because they are counting on the CU money to be spent only on advertising, and they will jealously protect their income stream?
amk
@Xenos: Because any money spent on gotv is lost to them forever ?
bemused
@JPL:
Canoles says the responding police praised him and his son, that they did a good job. Incredible.
If, instead, the Canole’s were the new owners and the Kolanji’s were the neighbors aiming guns at them, I wonder if Canole would be defending the Kolanji’s 2nd Amendment rights? I doubt it.
Linda Featheringill
@JPL:
The Newton County couple:
Good news! I am so happy to hear that.
That is what Florida should have done when Trayvon was killed. Arrest them, charge them, and let the courts duke it out.
Good for Georgia!
Valdivia
@Xenos:
they have been doing stories. if you see the evening news, which I do, for torture purposes, you would have seen that they have been talking about this for a while now. the expansion of that money into other areas will not go unnoticed or unremarked.
kay
@Valdivia:
It is a really sour note. “Middle class versus…success!” Like those two things are opposites. Ugh. I think this stuff is so prevalent and so often-repeated that it creeps in everywhere. I think people have to really examine what they believe. Mitt Romney made money off parting out companies, loading them up with debt, and collecting fees. Is that success? For whom? Mitt Romney, obviously, but who else?
lol
Ask Kerry how having multiple outside groups each conducting their own GOTV field efforts worked out for him in 2004. It was a clusterfuck.
Suffern ACE
@bemused: The couple was well within their rights to shoot someone in their house aiming a gun at them. There was no reason for The gunman to enter the house. That is why there are police. Of course the police praised him…they’d just arrested the homeowners by mistake.
Villago Delenda Est
But…but…UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH! And…VICTORY!
kay
@lol:
It was. They were paying all these different orgs but no one was supervised or accountable and no one was working. It was all managers and no workers. Our (actual) Kerry campaign person was from Tennessee and a nice guy and I felt sorry for him. Pity isn’t a good thing in that situation.
We couldn’t even keep their acronyms straight. Absolute disaster :)
Villago Delenda Est
@Suffern ACE:
The root problem is political advertising on television. It seems to be the only way to reach the voting public now.
TV stations and networks charge their top rates for political advertisements.
Unless something is done about this, there will be no change.
rikyrah
I know that we’re supposed to be afraid of all the SuperPac money, but….eh.
What are they gonna say that we haven’t already heard about POTUS.
Outside of outright calling him a NI-Clang…we’ve heard and seen everything else that you can call him.
Valdivia
@kay:
Exactly Kay. How about internalizing that message where Romney is the candidate of success (really? whose exactly as you say. more like predatory exploitation to me) and Obama as the candidate of the middle class (losers is what is implied in this formulation of his) it just made me want to kick someone’s ass.
kay
@Valdivia:
Well, to be fair, I think he is running as the candidate of success. He says “success” constantly, anyway. I just maintain they are going to have trouble getting past his basic personality, which is (actually) incredibly arrogant.
We all made fun of that clip where he called that poor women on the carpet about the cookies, but Jesus, that’s his personality. That’s him. He has to establish his Master status at the outset of any conversation. I watched a C-Span clip where the same thing came out. He was “talking” to a group of Iowa factory workers and he started off bragging about how he’s usually in Palm Springs, or he wanted to be in Palm Springs. He was putting them in their place. They looked baffled.
Valdivia
@kay:
I totally agree Kay, the problem is that the success line is now repeated by Josh without batting an eye, totally propagating that awful frame. Instead he should be saying what it really is: the candidate of finance or the 1% or capital or whatever.
And yes, he really is that guy. The Galtian Lord Master. Ugh.
Villago Delenda Est
@kay:
This will kill him, eventually. He can’t stop himself from his intense need to establish dominance, as you’ve noted, and he’s not subtle about it, he’s in people’s faces with it.
They will not listen to whatever policy positions he goes on to discuss (to be erased before he heads off to the next campaign stop) because they’re too busy thinking “this guy is such an asshole.”
chopper
@JPL:
silly, of course the 2nd amendment guarantees my right to carry a gun onto someone else’s private property.
kay
@Valdivia:
I like Talking Points memo because they pushed the voter impersonation fraud scam before anyone else. They talk about voting process in a way that is accesible and practical and not dead-boring.
My fear is that he repeats the line unthinkingly because it’s real to him. Success= millions of dollars. That’s the measure. It’s BEEN the measure so long I think it’s tough to dislodge. It’s knee-jerk.
moonbat
@kay: Exactly. And this is why they can throw however much money wherever they want. They still have a shit candidate who is going to have to talk to real people from now until November and every time this jerk opens his mouth he offends half the room. It has been shown in state after state in the primaries. The more voters get to know Romney the less they like him. He’s a jerk! He can’t help it. He thinks it’s beneath him to ask the citizens of this country to vote for him so he walks into the room and says, “I’m rich! And white! And so OBVIOUSLY better than ‘That One'” The 27 percenters will buy that because they would vote for Satan over Obama, but I am not sure about the rest of us.
bemused
@kay:
He really said that?
kay
@bemused:
He did, and first I thought it was an awkward attempt to be funny that fell flat (“we’ll get this incredibly wealthy thing out of the way”), but I think it’s more than that, because it’s mean. It has a nasty, competitive edge.
I think he actually has to show anyone he meets who is on top here. I think it’s bizarre. Talk about punching down. Relax, buddy. We all know you’re a Master of the Universe.
bemused
@kay:
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. He is mean by default of utter indifference.
I am surprised that I missed this one and wish I could find a clip or even a transcript of it to send around to pals. No luck so far.
Villago Delenda Est
Its interesting that Rmoney is expected to sweep today’s five primaries, but he’s not going to be in any of those states, he’s going to be in New Hampshire.
He’s busy talking about the general election now, when he’s not putting those fucking serf voters in their fucking place.
Valdivia
@Villago Delenda Est:
note that the latest polling from NH puts him behind Obama by 9. In the state he fucking lived in and lead for all of 2011.
Schlemizel
@kay:
I expect they will pretty much try to keep him away from people most of the summer & fall. They will try to keep him on script as much as possible just to avoid these dead fish moments he drops without so much of a glimmer of realization. He will have to be handled even more than Boy Blunder was. But they did manage to keep that loser moron dipshit under wraps from the voting public for 6 years. But then he was not as clunky as Willard.
It might be fun to see him on stage with the President. I hope they put together so more free-form types of debates (more like the Bush/Clinton/Perot format). Imagine that tub of bleached mashed potatoes trying to be personable.
El Cid
@JPL: The 2nd Amendment clearly provides for all Americans the inalienable right to keep, bear, present, lock and load, and fire their firearms, at whatever target they choose. (You know, if, you know, they’re the right types of people.)
God and the Founding Fathers wrote that into the Constushun.
Culture of Truth
It’s funny, but I was going to defend Mittens this one time, on the cookies. I thought it was some offhand remark about the cookies came from and it was being all blown up.
Then I saw the tape. What politician goes out of his way to insult potential voters?? cripes.
Culture of Truth
I don’t know if this is noted, but Romney’s donors may have maxed out in the primary, but they can turn around and max out again during the general election.
Mnemosyne
I’m not that worried about Crossroads and other big donors giving to the Romney campaign because I live in California and we had TWO examples in the last election showing that money by itself can’t win you the campaign. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina poured tens of millions of dollars into their campaigns and they both lost by embarrassing margins.
What I am worried about is the stealth campaigns that Rove runs under the radar that pop out and surprise Democrats at the ballot box, like the anti-gay marriage initiatives that boosted Bush in 2004 or the “Obama is taking away your Medicare!” message that got elderly voters to turn out in droves for Republicans in 2010.
That’s the kind of shit we should be keeping a wary eye out for. Any Rove money that specifically supports Romney is a feint. The real money is going into a direct mail campaign designed to scare the shit out of a specific group of people and convince them to vote Republican.
El Cid
@Culture of Truth: Look at the way he’s looking at the woman who gave him the cookies so disgustedly and accusingly: “I’m not sure about these cookies,” grimacing. Turning to the invited lady beside him, “They don’t look like you made them. You didn’t, did you? No, no…”
On the plus side, he managed to piss off 7/11 just like he did the locals.
kay
@Schlemizel:
I disagree with this. Former President Bush was a very good politician. Much, much better than Mitt Romney.
I think a lot of liberals give Karl Rove waaaay too much credit because they won’t give Bush his due. He was incredibly appealing to his voters. They absolutely loved him here, and it’s white, median income 32k, rural and conservative. I know it’s hard to accept because Bush was, in fact, third generation political and DC royalty, and rich, but that’s what makes him a good politician. He pulled that off.
bemused
@kay:
I have to agree. Bush had street political smarts even if he was an ignorant clod about most everything else.
Mitt can’t stay on script because the script is incomprehensible to him.
Roger Moore
@Valdivia:
Not surprising. Romney is like an annoying house guest; the more you’re exposed to him, the less you like him. It’s just too bad there aren’t 50 of him, so he could piss people off in every state simultaneously and express 50 different opinions on the same issue every day.
Mnemosyne
@kay:
@bemused:
Yep. As I keep saying, George W Bush had one talent, and it was running for office. Unfortunately, he really sucked at actually running a government, but he was really, really good at running for office. People underestimate the extent to which Rove took orders from Bush during those campaigns.
W has one weird thing in common with Obama — like Obama, he lost his very first political campaign but won every one after that. (Well, 2000 was a “win” with an asterisk, but a huge part of that “win” was Bush’s post-election campaign.)
TenguPhule
Yeah, its not like The Rs would break the law by using simple cell phones to talk to each other despite being banned from doing so…yeah right, of course they will.
CU was a figleaf for unlimited illegal spending for Rs.
Catsy
@TenguPhule:
This.
The notion that operatives of a party whose electoral survival revolves around voter suppression and routine violations of campaign finance law would shy from having a conversation they’re not supposed to is horrifyingly naive.
Mnemosyne
@Catsy:
They may have the conversation, but they can’t pay the rent on the field office or the salaries for the field workers needed to run the office and supervise the volunteers. They can’t pay for Romney’s plane to take him from place to place, or for his staff, or for the venues where he makes his speeches. Etc.
The Republicans seem convinced that they will be able to run their campaign completely in the national media by making media buys and they won’t need all of those silly “campaign offices” and “employees,” much less get out the vote efforts. I’ll be curious to see if that is in fact the case.
Catsy
@Mnemosyne: I doubt it. As I said in the other thread, turnout and GOTV are what wins elections, and the Romney camp seems to have an appallingly nonexistent ground game from everything I’ve read.