| So Rep. Cao finally fired his odious direct mail fundraising firm, BMW Direct now d/b/a Base Connect because they were overcharging for their services:
The AP reported last month that the campaign of another Base Connect client, Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA), had a similar financial profile to Russell's, spending around 75 percent of the money it raised on fundraising, leaving it with just $315,00 cash on hand. Cao, a freshman who represents a heavily Democratic district, is considered highly vulnerable this year, and his financial situation only makes things seem bleaker.
But the stellar reporting done by the folks at Talking Points Memo overlooked a thread of the story that is racially divisive, and was mentioned by Jeremy Alford in The Gambit:
Of the $283,000 Cao spent during the last quarter, a great deal went to direct mail. Nearly $39,000 went to Base Connect of Washington, D.C., a firm with connections to various outreach organizations and so-called 527 groups, which have relaxed reporting requirements, like the National Black Republican Association. According to The Washington Post, the NBRA once bankrolled radio ads to "identify Martin Luther King Jr. as a Republican and pin the founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Democrats."
While that is despicable racial politics, and for New Orleanians, it's something to remember, what I'm curious about is if BaseConnect is reprising their role as Vitter's fundraising mail firm this year, which they took care of back in 2004:
Now y'all might be wondering why that's an important thread to this story. It's important because Base Connect takes an unknown candidate that's running against some "infamous" Democrat, (in this case, Cao, who was an unknown candidate running against Dollar Bill back in '08), and mail off letters to easily pissed off small dollar conservative donors all over the country. They, along with the firms they contract with to help them get this program off the ground, then take nearly 75% of the fundraising take from the unknown candidate. The folks that send money to those running against "infamous" Democrats then get letters from real candidates like Vitter. What's really sketchy about this is that real candidates like Vitter only get charged for the cost of drafting, printing and mailing the fund-raising letter to their list of small-dollar conservative donors.
In short, Cao got robbed, and Vitter's benefiting from the robbery if he is still using Base Connect for his fundraising letter campaign.
So, the question remains ... is Base Connect (or one of their subcontractors) working for the Spinning Sinning Senator David Vitter this cycle? |
