The Real RNC Powerpoint Story
Much of the reporting on yesterday’s RNC finance leak focused on how the Republican Party is planning to exploit a fear of socialism to drive up donor dollars.
This is, in fact, disingenuous. The leak did not involve a strategic document, but rather an informal presentation, and a rather innocuous (if imprudent) one at that.
Instead, it suggests what we all know: that some GOP donors are driven by a fear of the President’s agenda. Another slide shows a comical cartoon of a man being held down by the globe, and jokes about Obama’s socialist agenda.
A third slide involves Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi being compared to Scooby Doo and the villainess in One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
To underscore the point that The Daily Show is meant primarily for comedic value, Jon Stewart once told Tucker Carlson: “look, the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” So it would be appropriate to note that right after the controversial cartoon slide is a snore-inducing presentation about how RNC members can log into their webmail.
The big story missed in the PowerPoint is how successful the GOP has been under the chairmanship of Michael Steele.
Without control of the White House, the House of Representatives or the Senate, the GOP has raised an off-year record $81 million dollars.
Another off-year record: 1.2 million active donors; among them 370,000 first time donors, estimated to mean $100 million over ten years.
Democrats, who control the White House, the House and the Senate, are nearly five million in the red, while the RNC remains without debt.
Chairman Michael Steele is no doubt irked by this ‘leak’, but undoubtedly is more irked by the lack of attention to the RNC’s fundraising successes.
At the RNC winter meeting in January, an obviously frustrated Steele responded to a reporter’s question about fundraising by saying:
I don't know if you've noticed what happened this past year... we won two governorships, we won 26 out of 37 special elections. We bested the Democrats in six out of [the last] six months in fundraising.
And all of this occurred without any fundraising strategy that involves playing on fear. In fact, Steele’s best fundraising month so far – January 2010 – was generated by the genuine excitement of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts campaign.
There has emerged zero evidence that the RNC has an actual strategy that involves playing on fears. The real story here lies in a joke taken too seriously, and the untold successes of the RNC’s fundraising arm.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWNsAdVhykY
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