Charles Townsend's Children: Blogswarming the Patricians

In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies' protests against the Stamp Act, said:

"And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?"

In 2006, a group of Minnesota patricians took out a full page ad in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune declaring that the citizens of Minnesota, nourished by their indulgences, planted by their care, shouldn't grudge to pony up for the "better Minnesota" they envisioned.

They envisioned, mind you; a group of a dozen "experts" who we, the plebeians, are supposed to trust implicitly to take our money (a concept they seem only dimly to recognize) to enact their vision for this state.

Charles Townsend? Meet the patricians.

A longtime Shot in the Dark reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, ran through the entire list of the 203 signatories to the ad:

I have completed the review of FEC and State Campaign Finance records
for the 203 Fat-cats who think we should jack taxes by a couple billion
"for the children".

Attached is the report [which I link here in PDF format. Note: I know the PDF is not a very friendly file; it's huge. I'll try to fix it later today]. I did not include any contributions for people
with rather generic or common names, as I found multiple matches to
different home cities. I also classified PACs according to their known
political affiliations, such as America Coming Together and Moveon.org to
the Democrats and NRA and Pro-Life Minnesota to Republicans.

The contributor did a very thorough job:

The spreadsheet has 3 sheets. One is the raw contribution data, aggregated to each candidate that received a contribution. The summary sheet provides a breakdown of each organization or candidate's contributions
received from this group of 203 people. Contributor Analysis breaks down total contributions by each name on the list and provides a comparision against their specific GOP contributions.

I made some interesting observations. First, 95% of the money these
203 fat-cats made were to DFL candidates and causes. Its not like they
spread their money around...they gave VERY heavily to one side.

Indeed.

These 203 signatories, according to the commenter's research, gave a total of $4,782,724 to DFL and national Democrat campaigns - 95.63% of the total. The GOP netted $188,580, for 3.77% of the total. Other parties/campaigns - mostly Greens, if you look at the spreadsheet - snagged $29,800, less than a percent of the total.

On another blog, a commenter - noting that there were some GOP contributions among the signatories - asked (paraphrasing here) "isn't this bipartisan enough?", noting that Republicans claim bipartisan support for things like, say, Iraq, on issues when Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are the only visible Democrat supporters.

The comparison is specious, of course. The left has turned Iraq into a wedge issue; "a better Minnesota" is not - or shoudn't be.

"Growth and Justice" claims to proffer...:

We believe that at a time of enormous deficits, struggling families and a bitter partisan divide over the size and role of government, we desperately need new ideas that can generate broad support.

Broad is good. Partisan is bad. Which must be why they refer to themselves as a "progressive" think tank; outside the world of wonks (and largely left-wing ones at that), "progressive" still means "favoring progress" rather than "reflexively statist".

The "Growth and Justice" site also notes:

Growth & Justice has a board of directors of 24 distinguished Minnesotans, including Democrats, Independents and Republicans...

Er, yeah. "Independents and Republicans", 95% of whose political contributions are to the Democrats and the DFL.

Back to the correspondent:

One other observation was VERY obvious...and confirms that these people are nothing but DFL partisons trying to mask their intentions. Not ONE penny of the $5 million in contributions went to either Rod Grams or Mark Kennedy. But as you see, Amy Klobuchar is #6 on the summary list...and not one GOP candidate or organization appears in the Top 25 of the list (Jim Rammer Ramstad comes in at #26).

In fact, Amy Klobuchar alone made more in contributions from the Patricians ($206,050) than the entire total of GOP donations for the entire group ($188,580).

Joel Kramer - one of the group's leaders - doesn't actually say that "Growth and Justice" is "non-partisan". But to pretend that it's anything but a DFL front group, with some GOP contributions (many of which are RINO contributions, at that) is as disingenuous as...

..., as the group's claims themselves.

Posted by Mitch at July 10, 2006 06:22 AM | TrackBack