The Chamber of Traitors--The Last Looting of America?

Shine a light on me. The Chamber wakes this morning a wounded giant. All yesterday they kept firing off various press releases trying to put out the fire on the Think Progress story that foreign money was paying for their attack ads against Democrats this year. The best one I saw was their attack on Think Progress, saying it is owned by George Soros and he doesn't want corporations to have freedom of speech. The New York Times weighed in with an editorial raising the questions about the source of Chambers' funding.

While the major news media for now has ignored it, MSNBC ran stories yesterday and this morning with comments by lawyers, former FEC officials and union leaders. The Democrats didn't miss a beat and ran with this story for their campaign. Nancy Pelosi said the Democrats would tie the GOP to this corporate funding like Doggy Doo-Doo stuck to a shoe. But it's clear that the Chamber of Commerce simply didn't know how to handle these charges that the Chinese, India,Dubai, Bahrain, the Russians are trying to buy our elections.

The flap even engulfed Karl Rove and his Crossroads America group. Rove spent his day trying to assure voters he was not spending foreign money on his attack ads, which have other legal problems as I said yesterday.

Richard Trumpka at the One Nation rally spoke about "economic patriots". He railed like union leaders in the past decade against outsourcing of American jobs. And here the Chamber is living proof that in a globalized economy, other countries have a political stake in continuing the process. This reverses one theme of the elections this year. The GOP has gotten away with the McCarthyite tactics of running against the Democrats as 'socialists"--something the press has failed to comment on. Now, however, the patriotism card is being played adroitly by the Democrats for the first time in a while. You can even imagine Harry Truman railing against Republicans as "fascist" when he ran against the Do-Nothing Congress.

What has been a union talking point since the 1990s, looks like it might emerge as a solid campaign point for Democrats this late in the day. A Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this week showed that over 60% of Americans believe that the outsourcing of jobs is a primary result for the slow recovery. And, deliciously ironic is the fact stopping the outsourcing of American jobs was the second most popular idea on the GOP's own survey conducted to draft their Pledge to America. That was left out as was the number 1 vote-getter "legalize marijuana".

The Chamber ads--they have already run 8,000 (the number is not a typo) against Democrats so far--are cookie cutter ads that simply input the targeted Democrat's name. One of the truly weird part of these ads is that it accuses any Democrat who voted for the healthreform as "cutting Medicare benefits by $500 billion" in a bid to scare the Seniors, who have been receiving small checks recently to fill the donut hole. Why weird? One of these ads was for Rand Paul in Kentucky, who is on record wanting to eliminate Medicare entirely. The other was in the Florida race for Marco Rubio, where neither of his opponents had anything to do with this issue at all. Today, the Chamber started its ad campaign against Blumenthal in Conneticut.

The Chamber of Commerce's attempt to handle the fallout from this exposure of the foreign funding is textbook Fail. The Chamber has taken the authoritarian Republican male approach by asserting they have taken measures to ensure no foreign money will fund the attack ads. Used to being treated as a legitimate institution, they simply are not used to facing an inquisitive or hostile press. Once the Chamber early on decided to fight Barack Obama on everything, large members like Apple, Nike and some utilities have dropped out. I would expect many more with this public relations disaster. As I wrote in an earlier post, corporations and the very wealthy are appalled at such exposure. I say the more exposure the better in this case.

This still doesn't handle the additional flood of money through the various frontgroups. Even Americans for Prosperity felt the burn and tried to send out a defensive e-mail,claiming charges about their funding questions about their integrity hurt their 1 million members. The overseas press is claiming that almost 2/3rds of this money will be spent this mouth aimed at Democrats. This explains some of my puzzlement of the total lack of a viable GOTV effort by the Republican party. They plan a covert air war of attack ads until election day to win the day. In the past this was meant as a way to depress Democratic turnout. And this year it's to counter the possibility that Obama surge voters will turn up. If 15% of the electorate identify with teabaggers and the turnout is in the 30% range, you've got the election in the bag.

Karl Rove plans to focus on the 14 competitive races for the Republicans to win back the Senate. In the last few days, Republicans are coming close to that objective. A real problem is that Reid is tied, Bennett is behind, Paul is ahead and other races are close. That's why Karl was mad at Christine O'Donnell's win in Delaware, it seriously hurt his chances. Looking under the numbers, Karl knows that in fact all Democrats in these races lead by significant margins but with likely voters they trail. Vote suppression tends to be one area Rove is an expert in.

Sharron Angle has begun Willy Horton ads in Nevada claiming that Harry Reid favors menacing illegal immigrants not you. The ad is totally false in content but is effective. The leader of the Hispanic group Democracia, which has an organization in Nevada, appeared on Keith Olbermann dismissing the effect of these ads. I think he was naive. His argument was that citizens of Nevada live side-by-side with Hispanics and know them individually. He thought these ads would backfire. Angle's own Hispanic coordinator herself denounced these ads. But I am sure they have been polled for effectiveness. The question is whether in 2010 this type of stunt backfires. The Nevada election is the one where Karl Rove's billionaire club has spent the lion's share of their first tranche of money. Some even say this race will determine who controls the Senate.

There have been signs of blowback against the ads by these faceless groups. In small states, this flood of ad has triggered negative reactions because citizens there are still used to retail campaigning and want to see their representative. It's also harder to say that the congressman you see at the Senior Center really is going to cut Medicare when you can ask him or her about it. This seems to be the situation in Delaware this year. Forget Christine O'Donnell just being crazy. The out of state ads from the Philadelphia market might trigger a Democratic takeover of Mike Castle's old House seat. We may see this trend throughut the country. People can be touchy about outsiders interferring in their state's affairs. I remember Olympia Snowe leading with the RNC to stop robo-calls against Obama in Maine because people were getting furious about them. He went on to win the whitest state in the union.

While the Chinese, Russians and Saudis try to buy a Republican Congress, the firewall may be, of all people, The NRA. The GOP is furious with the NRA because they are backing 58 Democratic congressmen, over a dozen of which are in districts the Republicans need to take over the House. Conservatives were jubilant when their pressure on the NRA forced the organization not to endorse Harry Reid, who scores high with them. But apparently this didn't work on lower key races.

Republicans sense they can win Byrds's West Virginia seat. Governor Manchin, who is running, looked like a shoe-in since he currently has a 71% approval rate. His competitor is an out-of-state millionaire, who says he is more right thasn the tea party folks. It has gotten very tight and Manchin is behind in the polls. A large reason for this in the state is that Obama has low approval ratings and there are mixed reviews on the Administration's efforts to inspect the coal mines. The Republicans are now recruiting actors, who look like blue-collar people and miners, to act in the upcoming attack ads against Manchin. That's why you saw Manchin sue the Administration on its mining policy and his populist rhetoric that Obama threatens our way of life. Whether this populist blast will be enough, we have to wait and see how the actors make out.

Since we have no sense of history, we forget the full-court press by American business against FDR and the so-called grass-roots campaign created by the Koch family even then to portray the President as a socialist. As nefarious as that was then, this current effort by multinational corpporations and the current generation of the Koch family is potentially more lethal. We are now dealing with a global economy where corporate interests are simply no longer national. Even old stand-by companies like Halliburton, Transocean,and even Fox News are no longer American companies anymore. Their company headquarters are in Dubai. Even the mercenary group Blackwater with their Christian right leader have moved there. While the American voter may act the same as before, making his or her decision on a complex set of variables like personality, political history and ideas, the bankrollers of the election process have other, very distinct interests not linked to our country any more. In fact, America is expendable. It is an issue that will become even more dramatic in the years ahead. The issue really is one of national security.

I wrote about the prospect of a massive espionage scandal unfolding among the right in the next two years. I think part of it will be traceable to this period in our politics. Remember Kim Philby in Britain acted the part of the archetypal Tory. The money being thrown around today is just too tempting for people and we can see how fast and loose certain conservatives play with the law. Don't be surprised when more of this blows up in their face.

I was going to commend Queen Meg Whitman for at least spending $140 million of her own money,. But the Los Angeles Times revealed yesterday that she has been attracting big mutinational donors also. Shame on you, Meg. meanwhile Governor Moonbeam is chugging to the finish line with $9 million. Jerry Brown is also a prime target of the Chamber and Karl Rove's covert billionaires--who are the same guys who funded the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry.

Maybe this fear of foreign funding of our elections may spur a less kitsch approach to patriotism. It's bad enough that the GOP has tried to counter the patriot market with their flag-waving, but I really couldn't stand all the bad music. The Democrats shouldn't let this go, even after the election. They stand to pivot the patriotism issue around this time for their benefit. When Sharron Angle's ad asked "What does Harry Reid have against You?", I was reminded of my idea early in the campaign this year that suggested Democrats should run an ad,"What Do Republicans have Against America?" The Democrats never linked GOP obstructionism to the patriotism issues, which I think was a lost opportunity. They are still cowed by a generation of battering by GOP negative ads. They still seem to suffer from PTSD. They should get over it.