Sarah Palin attempted to relaunch her political career and her political action committee, SarahPAC, on Thursday with a Web video called “Loaded for Bear,” which presented the former Alaska governor as the new kingmaker for conservative populists in the GOP.
The video riffed off her speech at CPAC, in which Palin railed against “the big consultants, the big money men, and the big bad media.” But there’s an irony alert ahead: the current stated purpose of SarahPAC is to raise money ahead of the 2014 election—most of which will be spent on conservative consultants.
Don't believe me? Well, this is a perfect time to page through SarahPAC’s Federal Election Commission filings, which—helpfully enough—were just released yesterday.
Seen through the lens of the invaluable Center for Responsive Politics, Palin’s PAC spent $5.1 million in the last election cycle (more than it raised in that time period, raising some questions about Palin’s claims of fiscal responsibility).
But the real news comes when you look at how donors’ money was actually doled out: just $298,500 to candidates. The bulk of the rest of it, more than $4.8 million, went to—you guessed it—consultants.
That’s some seriously hypocritical overhead.
These are the top-line costs of life in PAC era. But the devilish details in expense reports are what makes it really come alive. Palin’s chief PAC consultant, Tim Crawford, pocketed more than $321,000 this election cycle in direct payments alone, according to the documents. Aries Petra Consulting was taking in between $6,000 and $8,000 a month for speechwriting and “grassroots consulting”—something that sounds like an oxymoron, but ended up costing north of $160,000. C&M Transcontinental racked up $10,000 a month in management consulting, which is hard to imagine for a PAC whose job is simply to raise money and spend it on candidates. Inside SarahPAC, there were consultants for research and consultants for logistics and consultants for issues and on and on and on. It's hard to find any area where consultants weren’t employed. So when Palin thundered at CPAC that “Now is the time to furlough the consultants, and tune out the pollsters, send the focus groups home and throw out the political scripts, because if we truly know what we believe, we don’t need professionals to tell us”—it was a riff written by speechwriters and informed by all tools she tried to diss.
Just like Sarah Palin to attack the very people that she uses herself, to help her attack them. Kind of like reading a quip about the President relying on a teleprompter off of a teleprompter.
The woman has no self awareness whatsoever.
As I am sure most of you surmised the majority of the money spent by Palin's personal piggybank was for the ever hard to define "postage," which this time came to an incredible $957,385. (That is a lot of forever stamps my friends!) I don't think anything helps to illustrate that this is a tool for money laundering quite like the amount spent on this so-called "postage."
Personally I am thrilled that SarahPAC came out with this ad because it has invited the kind of media scrutiny that we all know Palin cannot withstand.
The hypocrisy of the attack on consultants was not the ONLY red flag identified by the media, there was also the contention that her endorsements were crucial to the election of some of the current conservative headliners.
This from the Tampa Bay Times:
Sarah Palin, enjoying a mini resurgence after her CPAC speech, is trying to feed her PAC and promoting herself as a kingmaker. In a new video, her PAC takes credit for picking winners from Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio.
But anyone who follows Florida politics knows Rubio kept a distance from Palin and she only showed interest after he was surging.
From a Nov. 8, 2010, Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald story: Rubio had an opportunity to cozy up to tea party darling and former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, but his campaign never emphasized her support. "Marco, keep up the good work. Call me. Can I help ya?" Palin told a conservative blogger who asked about Rubio at a conservative gathering in New Orleans in April. He never did. In the final stretch of the campaign, when it was clear he would win, Rubio showed up to a big rally in Orlando featuring Palin. But he left before she came on stage, denying opponents a photograph that could be used against him in the future.
Yeah Rubio may be young but even he recognized the smell of a rotted political corpse when he got a whiff of one.
Well clearly Sarah Palin was desperate for attention, and hoped this new ad would attract it. I wonder if she is happy with the result?
And does ANYBODY really think this web- ad will bring any significant money into the SarahPAC coffers?
Cause I don't. So I guess Palin will have to find some other way to keep paying off that
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