Our political Quote of the Day comes from The Daily Beast’s John Avlon (who is increasingly doing more solid, investigative reporting) who comes up numbers to indicate that anti-consultant Sarah Palin is a virtual Santa Claus to consultants, who get big bucks from here (so I guess consultants aren’t that awful after all):
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.
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.
AND:
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,
He finishes with this:
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.”
Indeed, Palin somehow always DOES manage to get the last word.
It may not be an accurate word.
It may not be a completely candid word (read Avlon above).
But she gets the last word.
Which is enough for her supporters.
But not enough for much of the rest of America.
(Read reviews of Avlon’s latest two books HERE and HERE.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.