This little snippet from last night's Iowa caucus coverage is just a taste of what Fox News served last night. Ed Rollins summed up their praise for SuperPACs quite well here. I only have one remaining question: Why is Karl Rove still employed by Fox?
Key point by Rollins:
BAIER: We were talking tonight about SuperPACS and how much they're going to play. If there is a lot of support that coalesces around Santorum as the conservative alternative, SuperPACs could play in places like New Hampshire or South Carolina.
ROLLINS: SuperPACs can play anywhere at this point in time and the master, obviously, is my friend Mr. Rove, who has basically put together a better campaign of SuperPACs than anybody's ever done in history for a Presidential campaign.
Rove, of course, spent his evening working very, very hard to convince Fox viewers that Romney should and ultimately would win by hook or by crook.
No one is more upset about SuperPACs right now than Newt Gingrich, given the Romney campaigns judicious use of them in Iowa to pull Gingrich down to the second tier with a barrage of negative ads. Content and justification for it notwithstanding, there is no question that Romney has the support of the party faithful and original architects of the SuperPAC structure, born out of the Citizens United ruling in January, 2010.
PRWatch has a post today with the details, many of which I've written about here and elsewhere. The original FEC requests for SuperPACs (or what I call "Swiftboat Networks") Even though Baier was asking about Santorum's possibilities, Rollins made it clear where the party power structure was: Lined up right behind Mitt Romney, which is what PRWatch confirms.
There's a $500,000 donation from J.W. Marriott, Jr., the chairman of Marriott International, and another half million from Richard Marriott, the chairman of Host Hotels and Resorts.
There's a million dollars from Edward Conard (which was originally disclosed as coming from "W. Spann, LLC," a company that appeared to exist only to donate that million dollars, until calls for an investigation led to a "correction"). Conard is a former executive with Romney's old firm Bain Capital, the firm that specialized in "leveraged buyouts" where companies were purchased based on debt against the companies' assets and executives got sweet equity deals for selling the corporate assets (and which often resulted in lost jobs and benefits for other employees).
Plus, there was a million dollar donation from billionaire John Paulson, who reportedly got richer betting that the U.S housing market would collapse. And, there were numerous $100,000 donations from an array of other millionaires.
The Super PAC also raised major money from for-profit corporations, such as Eli Publishing ($1 million), F8, LLC ($1 million), The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc., in Florida ($250,000), 2GIG Technologies ($100,000), the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies ($100,000), Unit 8N ($40,000), and B/E Aerospace Inc. ($50,000).
The total raised by the pro-Romney PAC in the first half of 2011 was over $12 million. Do you think any of these donors wants anything in return? The Supreme Court claims there is no risk of corruption warranting regulation of such spending. Americans across the country know the Court is completely out of touch with reality on this or simply has its own agenda, like Bush v. Gore on steroids.
Well, clearly they wanted Gingrich "newt-ralized". And of course, I'm sure they want Mitt to continue his mantra that corporations are people, too. Above all, they want Mitt Romney to be the last man standing at the end of the Republican primary process, and are willing to spare no expense to make that happen.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove continues to be a Fox News contributor/analyst, despite his very intimate involvement with the structure and funding of the Romney SuperPAC in the overall blend. This continues with Rupert Murdoch's full blessing and approval. Karl Rove gets to tell Fox viewers what to think while coordinating funding to tell voters what to think.
I'm certainly glad corporations aren't corrupting forces in politics, aren't you?
