09-27-2010, 10:13 AM
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Karl Rove is building a "shadow Republican Party" to beat the Dems -- and the Tea Party?
The New York Times reports:
Quote:
Already a prominent presence as an analyst on Fox News Channel and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove is also playing a leading role in building what amounts to a shadow Republican Party, a network of donors and operatives that is among the most aggressive in the Republican effort to capture control of the House and the Senate.
He has had a major hand in helping to summon the old coalition of millionaires and billionaires who supported Mr. Bush and have huge financial stakes in regulatory and tax policy, like Harold C. Simmons, a Texas billionaire whose holdings include a major waste management company that handles some radioactive materials; Carl H. Lindner Jr., a Cincinnati businessman whose American Financial Group includes several property and casualty insurance concerns; and Robert B. Rowling, whose TRT Holdings owns Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym.
Their personal and corporate money — as well as that of other donors who have not been identified — has gone to a collection of outside groups Mr. Rove helped form with Mr. Gillespie, including American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which in turn are loosely affiliated with similar groups staffed or backed by other operatives and donors with ties to Mr. Rove. With $32 million and counting, they are now filling the void created by the diminished condition of the Republican National Committee, which has faced fund-raising difficulties under its embattled chairman, Michael Steele.
“A lot of what we’re doing would normally be done with the R.N.C.,” said Ms. Cheney, who is part of a group, the Alliance for America’s Future, that is working with the organizations Mr. Rove helped start on encouraging early voting in House races this fall. “There’s no money there.”
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Vanity Fair adds:
Quote:
While the Shadow Party has supported Tea Party–favored candidates such as Kentucky senatorial hopeful Rand Paul and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s challenger Sharron Angle, Rove’s support of incumbent Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican senate positioned him as a threat, and possibly a corrective, to the Tea Party’s influence. This animosity may have reached its apex with the win of Castle-stormer Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party–backed national oddity who, in a recent interview, accused Rove of “political cannibalism”—that is, eating of one’s own kind—and also predicted that “he’s eating some humble pie and he’s just trying to restore his reputation”—the humble pie presumably having Republican filling.
Democrats too are anxious about the influence of Rove and Co.’s interference. “They’re running a very proficient party operation funded by millions of dollars of undisclosed special-interest dollars,” said Obama aide David Axelrod. “These guys are great political operatives, and they will have an impact in this election.” An operative at Rove’s organizations American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS also told the Times that the group already has its sights on 2012. It may be Karl Rove—not Jon Stewart, not Stephen Colbert, and certainly not the Democratic party leadership—who will be the one to restore sanity to America. And if he succeeds, Democrats, barely unable to combat insanity, may find themselves nostalgic for nonsense.
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Interesting times.
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