David Weigel at Slate wrote a
somewhat dizzyingly detailed piece today that asks the
subtitular question: “Could the shadowy network of Rand
Paul’s old fundraising machine sink his presidential
ambitions?”
Answer: probably not. If you wanted to know a whole lot
about the various different companies and campaigns that Paul
family fundraiser Mike Rothfeld and his company Saber
Communications do work for–all of them within the general
unsurprising bailiwick of right-wing politics–this will give you
some names and facts.
If you want to be reminded that Ron Paul campaign worker
Dimitri Kesari likely paid off an Iowa state senator to abandon a
Michele Bachmann endorsement and give a RonPaul endorsement (see my
blogging
about that back last August), this will remind you. Neither the
bribed senator nor the Paul campaign worker Dennis Fusaro who taped
the phone conversations that led to the public revelation of the
scandal think that Ron Paul himself knew about it.
Weigel talks a lot about how various workers in the Paul
fundraising and campaign machine used to work for right-wing mail,
fundraising, and lobbying house National Right to Work Committee
(NRTW). Weigel sees some of NRTW’s activities in the 2010 Iowa
Senate race as potentially campaign finance law
violations.
Interesting from a more ideological standpoint (but not
discussed much in Weigel’s article, which has other fish to fry,
though Weigel does mention the Rothfeld crowd “are mistrusted by
some in the ‘liberty movement'”) is how the more hardcore
libertarian anti-interventionist types in the larger Paul fan
movement back in 2011-12 always mistrusted and even hated the NRTW
elements in the campaign, especially Rothfeld.
Rothfeld’s comedic-serious personal aggressiveness and
desire to keep the campaign and the movement firmly ensconsed in
the world of right-wing ideas and practices he knew he could raise
money on made him a personal devil to many who went through his
political activist training boot camps. Rothfeld is the sort of
fellow who clearly accepted every ounce of hate and drank it like
the delicious tears of his enemies. (I once had the pleasure of
being kicked out of a meeting I had driven an hour or more to cover
when Rothfeld learned that I was present and a
reporter.)
Complaints about how this or that faction was messing up
or ruining the Paul campaign could be heard from all sides
constantly. It’s always at best an arguable point rather than
something the complainer could prove. But certainly Kesari, when I
interviewed him back in September 2012, was
very happy to distance Paul from any connotations of being some
kind of anti-Empire peacenik.
Kesari averred that “some people think [Ron Paul’s] just a
peacknik and hates Israel and wants to let people do whatever they
want and have bombs and that’s not really the case. If Ron were
president and someone did something against us, Ron would be the
first one to push the button, not the last one.” While admitting
the paid ad messaging for the Paul campaign didn’t talk foreign
policy much, Kesari denied the NRTW pros were trying to quash that
message. Regardless, from having seen Paul do his stump speech
many, many times in that 2011-12 campaign, there is no way to quash
his foreign policy message; he never failed to make it central in
his speeches and at least once in my presence told a group of
donors that it was his key reason for running.
If Rand Paul does end up squeezing out the Rothfeld
fundraising machine because of associations with political sleaze
(even of an abstruse type that will likely not have much national
media play), that may please some of those types. Then again, Rand
Paul might have his own reasons for not coming across as a full-on
Ron Paul anti-imperial warrior. But no one is apt to score serious
political points against a surging Paul for President ’16
campaign–if we come to that point–over Mike Rothfeld. Although
the article did a great job of casting shadows–I got an email from
a relative who’d read it asking “is this true?” though he wasn’t
exactly sure what dark thing in it we should be concerned with
being true.
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