Palin’s SarahPAC Embarrassment: Consultants Are Cashing In
The ex-governor and VP pick railed against political consultants at CPAC. But her latest FEC filings show they took millions of dollars from her in the last election cycle.
She’s baaaack.
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.
(Sarah Palin's "Loaded For Bear" video can be viewed at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/29/palin-s-sarahpac-embarrassment-consultants-are-cashing-in.html)
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 PACspent $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.
In total, Palin’s PAC spent $980,000 on
campaign expenses, $1.3 million on administrative costs (including almost a
million dollars on postage), and three-quarters of a million on
fundraising. Hidden in all of this—amid the direct mail and the media
buys—is consultants’ cut of every dollar spent.
She desperately needs to reload her donor
dollars and so the Sarah Palin show is back online, trying to reassert her
relevance. But don’t kid yourself—it’s all about the Benjamins.
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.
Follow the money in politics and you get
a glimpse of the truth. Sarah Palin wants to be a defender of the middle
class while chartering $27,000 private plane flights and burning through enough
cash on consultants to feed a small village for a year or two. As much as
advancing a political cause, SarahPAC seems to be a lifestyle play, propping up
an expensive ideological entourage.
Also buried in the report are signs of
Palin’s decreasing popularity, which may explain the anxiety to raise a new
round of cash now. Because the vast majority of the money she raised for
SarahPAC this cycle came in 2011, when there was still feverish expectation
that Palin would run for president. When she retreated, the citizen spigot
dried up. After raising nearly $6 million in the 2010 Tea Party cycle, Palin’s
PAC is down to “just” over $1 million cash on hand. While that’s
impressive for a former governor and VP nominee, it’s not the kind of cash flow
that a real party leader shows. Now she desperately needs to reload her
donor dollars and so the Sarah Palin show is back online, trying to reassert
her relevance. But don’t kid yourself—it’s all about the Benjamins.
I feel bad for all the Palin true
believers who forked over their hard-won cash only to now find that the vast
majority of it went into consultants’ coffers. It’s a reminder of Eric
Hoffer’s immortal line that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a
business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
But it’s really only fair to let Sarah
Palin have the last word, aiming unintentionally at herself: “If these
experts keep losing elections, keep raking in millions, if they feel that
strongly about who should run in this party, they should buck up and run or
stay in the truck.”
John Avlon is senior columnist for
Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and the anchor of Beast TV. A CNN contributor, he
won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ award for best online column
in 2012.
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