Open Threads

Recruiting Bill Halter to run against Blanche Lincoln — by outlining for him his path to electoral success and persuading him that the coalition we assembled would enable a real challenge to be mounted — was our top priority for the last six months and was a major success.

For the last year, we also physically visited many other districts around the country, conducted in-district polling, launched campaigns against bad incumbents to weaken them for a challenge, prepared lengthy reports for our coalition partners analyzing possible races, held regular conference calls with them to discuss who should be targeted, and met with numerous other potential primary recruits. The perception that this is a truly hideous political climate for Democrats made it difficult to convince people — beyond Halter — to endure the huge costs and risks to challenging a incumbent, but the network we created will endure.

We did all of that: (a) with only three people working regularly on all of this — me, Jane and an Executive Director, as well as a few per-project contractors (such as for communications and PR); (b) on a shoestring budget; and most of all (c) without ever once having to go back to our donors to raise funds after our initial mid-2008 fundraiser. That was possible because of how frugal we were with the hiring and spending.

An organization that functions for almost two full years based on one initial fund-raising event, that never has to go back to raise further funds, and that has accomplished what we have, is a huge financial success.

(4) All PACs — large and small — are subject to extremely rigorous legal, accounting and filing requirements. It’s impossible to comply without having lawyers and accountants who are familiar with these requirements do that work. That means that a PAC with a small budget, like ours, is going to spend a large amount of money on legal, accounting and administrative expenses. There’s no way around that. It’s true for every PAC that complies with these laws, as we did.

(5) Because all of the PAC’s work was done by 3 people, the work I did on Accountability Now was more time-consuming and demanding that anything else I did with the exception of my blog. Some months, it competed with my blogging work in terms of the time required. Had we hired someone to manage the PAC, we would have had to spend a lot more than $48,000/year (it was impossible to find a competent Executive Director anywhere near that amount, and the EDs we hired — none of whom we had any prior personal relationship with — were paid almost double that). Several months after the PAC was formed, we decided that, rather than hiring a full-time PAC Manager, Jane and I would split the responsibility of managing and overseeing the PAC and the minimal compensation for it because (a) we didn’t want to spend the far greater amounts of money to hire a PAC Manager full-time and (b) we knew best why our donors supported the PAC and how it should be run to fulfill that mission.

If someone is independently wealthy, I suppose they can work at what amounts to a demanding part-time job without pay, but that’s not my situation. For the work we had to do and still do managing it, $2,000/month is a significant under-payment. Go look at what people who run political PACs are paid – it’s usually 5 times that, at least.

In any event, all of this — payments to every last person — is and was fully disclosed for all the world to see. That’s the only reason you know about it.

(6) This smear comes from one place: blogs that are devoted to revering Barack Obama and despising anyone who speaks ill of him. Just like Bush followers invariably tried to slime the personal credibility of anyone who dissented from their movement (Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Paul O’Neill, David Frum), the real purpose of this is to try to smear Jane Hamsher (and, much more distantly, me) for the Crime of Speaking Ill of the Leader. If enough money signs are thrown around enough times with her name, Obama cultists who view her as a Traitor will declare that some great impropriety has taken place. But the smear lacks even a single concrete accusation, let alone a true one.

That’s why it’s all coming from Obama-revering circles. It has nothing to do with the issues raised and everything to do with the standard political cult behavior of trying to smear those who oppose the Leader.

In this case, it backfired. What you said was blatantly false. You were so reckless in what you said that you had to retract it. Every actual fact that you cited was disclosed long ago by Accountability Now as clearly and publicly as possible.

Being able to accomplish what we accomplished with AN, with a tiny budget of small donors who were never asked again to donate, is one of the things about which I’m most proud in terms of the work I’ve done in the past 18 months. What is missing more than anything from Washington is a credible infrastructure to recruit and support primary challengers against unaccountable incumbents, and from scratch, we created that. Every last aspect of the group’s activities and finances were publicly disclosed way beyond what the law requires. The ones who have been exposed and whose credibility has been damaged are people (like you) willing to spout false and baseless accusations without bothering to do the slightest work to first find out if what you’re saying is true, all because the people you’re smearing don’t sufficiently revere your Leader.