Jumat, 23 Oktober 2015

Is it bad that "Conservative PACs Attack Republicans, and It Pays"?

Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer write in the NYT about petitions like "Boot Boehner,” “Dump McConnell,” “Drop a Truth-Bomb on Kevin McCarthy,” and “Fire Paul Ryan” that come from "conservative websites and bloggers who have helped stoke a grass-roots rebellion to make Congress more conservative" and who use the petitions to raise money for their own on-going effort.
“This is clearly an organized effort and an attempt by these groups to raise money for themselves,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who added that she was the target of a similar attack during the 2013 Senate debate over gun safety legislation. “They hurt our party, they hurt our Congress and they hurt our country.”...

Campaign finance documents examined by The New York Times show that the PACs and other groups running many of these petition drives have a history of spending most of the money they raise on consulting firms, as opposed to using it to support political candidates, a stark contrast to how most PACs function.

The efforts employ similar tactics. Conservative outlets like Breitbart or The Washington Examiner are given “exclusive” advance notice of a new effort, like the “Remove John Boehner” campaign started early last year by the Tea Party Leadership Fund....
I'm puzzling over what's supposed to be bad here. What's wrong with political activity in support of an ideology and what's wrong with trying to take down politicians you oppose instead of looking for politicians to boost? Is it that the political group is able to raise funds for itself and keep its operation going rather than to use the money to get people elected? Isn't this kind of ideological activity done on both the left and the right? The only problem I can detect — and this isn't in the article — is that it works best at the political extremes: moderates and realists can't use it.

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