October 26, 2010

Crashing the Covert Campaign Spending Spree [VIDEO]

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jtyerse/3954240271/">jtyerse</a>

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You’ve heard about them in the news, watched their slick ads flash across the TV, maybe even given them some money. Each election season, a raft of outside groups crops up, bankrolling political ads across the country. But this year, the rules have changed—as has the amount of money pouring into independent expenditure campaigns, which is unprecedented. Thanks to Citizens United and other court rulings, we don’t know who’s funding many of these increasingly powerful players—groups like the Alliance for America’s Future, Americans for Job Security, the American Future Fund, and Crossroads GPS—and in turn shaping the results of elections from Maine to California.

So we set out to track down some of these shadowy organizations and try to get some answers. Here are the three organizations we visited, as well as details on their leadership and their total spending in this election (via the Center for Responsive Politics):

  • 60-Plus Association: Often billed as the conservative alternative to the AARP, this group has so far spent $6.4 million on the 2010 midterms. The group’s chairman is James L. Martin, a former chief of staff to the late Rep. Edward Gurney (R-Fla.) and an organizer behind the National Conservative Political Action Committee, among other conservative organizations. 60-Plus has funded ads opposing more than 40 Democrats in Congress, including Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), and Nick Rahall (D-W.V.).
  • Americans for Job Security: Headed by Stephen DeMaura, a former executive director of the New Hampshire GOP, AJS stirred up plenty of controversy with a vicious attack on Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter, Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. The ad accused Halter, a former tech executive, of shipping American jobs to India, and even featured an Indian actor “thanking” Halter for his supposed outsourcing. All told, AJS has spent $8 million attacking Democrats including Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) in the midterms.
  • Alliance for America’s Future: GOP consultant Barry Bennett runs AAF, whose leadership includes Dick Cheney’s daughter, Mary. So far the organization has spent $632,541 target Democrats. including Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.).

Here’s what happened when we paid these groups a visit.

A version of this story appears in the January/February 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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