KRUGMAN: "Rove the businessman has just had an amazing, banner year..."

[kpete]

... Remember how Rove and others were supposed to raise vast sums from billionaires and corporations, then totally saturate the country with GOP messaging, drowning out Obama’s message? Well, they certainly raised a lot of money, and ran a lot of ads. But in terms of actual number of ads the battle has been, if anything, an Obama advantage. And while we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday, state-level polls suggest both that Obama is a strong favorite and, much more surprising, that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to hold the Senate in a year when the number of seats at risk was supposed to spell doom.

Some of this reflects the simple fact that money can’t help all that much when you have a lousy message. But it also looks as if the money was surprisingly badly spent. What happened?

Well, what if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing.

And while Rove the crusader is looking — provisionally, of course, until the votes are in — like a failure, Rove the businessman has just had an amazing, banner year...


the rest:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/karl-roves-mission-accomplished/?

[tanyev]

1. I'm reminded of the reporting Talking Points Memo did on Base Connect.

BMW Direct, the GOP fundraising firm known for taking long-shot candidates for a ride while raking in big bucks off their campaigns, has re-emerged under a new name — but with a similar modus operandi. And this time around, even some Republicans are crying foul, with one consultant accusing the firm of engaging in “sub-prime fundraising.”

One 2010 client of BMW Direct — now rechristened as Base Connect — is William Russell, the retired lieutenant colonel who is running for the Pennsylvania Congressional seat of the late John Murtha. Russell’s campaign raised over $895,000 in the fourth quarter of last year, according to federal disclosure records. But it paid over $719,000 of that amount — about 80 percent — to Base Connect, and other companies associated with it, which ran the company’s direct-mail fundraising program. For the year as a whole, Russell’s campaign raised over $2.8 million, but spent over $2.6 million — much of it again going to Base Connect — leaving it with cash on hand of just $211,000.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/shady_gop_firm_still_raking_in_the_bucks_while_its.php