The Post is starting us off right this week with a story about PACs that do little but raise money to raise more money and keep the staff employed — which leads to an analysis the Posties did of ex-everything-and-nothing Linda Chavez’s network of political action committees with names like “Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee.”
Here’s the key passage …
Of the $24.5 million raised by the PACs from January 2003 to December 2006, $242,000 — or 1 percent — was passed on to politicians, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal election reports. The PACs spent even less — $151,236 — on independent political activity, such as mailing pamphlets.
Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.
The Post notes that this is not illegal: a political has-been may under current election law run a network of political rip-off operations to squeeze money from witless ideological compatriots. You can look it up.
But this left me wondering: how did they manage to burn through that money? With simple arithmetic even I can manage we can see that well under half a million dollars went to anything that can be considered “political action”, as in political action committee. And that leaves over $24 million raised over 4 years. So $6 million a year on operating expenses and salaries for Chavez, her husband and sundry offspring.
The answer? Oddly enough not all that much of that money seems to have gone to Chavez and her husband and sons. Evidence turned up by the FEC suggests that the telemarketing solicitation firm they contracted with kept as much as 95% of the money raised on the PACs’ behalf.
In other words, the PACs, rather than being cash cows for the Chavez clan, seem mainly to have been in the business of making money for the telemarketing firm. So where’d they get their money? For their own salaries, the Chavez family relied mainly on their nonprofits like One Nation Indivisible and Stop Union Political Abuse.
Along the way there were apparently many sojourns into unwitting parody — as when one mailing from a Chavez anti-union PAC concluded: “If we stop now, the terrorists win.”
As a special bonus, the article includes a thumbnail sketch of the the ups and downs of life in the capital for Chavez and husband Christopher Gersten.
It seems that as the Reagan-Bush years were winding down and the air whizzed out of the Chavez publicity balloon, the family fell on somewhat hard times. After Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Chavez and Gersten were running a Mexican restaurant in the DC suburbs “with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night.” The restaurant went broke. But as luck would have it, as Gersten recalls, that was around the time the “partial birth abortion” crusade picked up steam.
So as the eatery was tanking, Chavez and Gersten rode the partial-birth wave into financial security in the phony PAC and nonprofit racket. First there was the Institute for Religious Values, then the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. By the time the Bush years rolled around, they were operating a one family Keiretsu of public policy bamboozlement.
Give this article a read. It’s the kind of thing that should make these two embarrassed to ever show their face in Washington again. But that’s not how it works down there.
