Axe: The heartening news is that you can’t buy the White House

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from Greg Sargent: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/axelrod-rubs-roves-face-in-it/2012/11/08/9717c1c4-29db-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_blog.html


On a conference call with reporters just now, David Axelrod took a moment to gloat over the disastrous 2012 performance of Karl Rove's attack ad operation, joking that if he were one of the billionaires who had handed big checks to Rove, “I’d be asking for a refund.”

“The heartening news is that you can’t buy the White House; you can’t overwhelm the Congress with these Super PAC dollars,” Axelrod (said). “I would think there will be reluctance in the future, when Mr. Rove and others come knocking on the door, because of what happened on Tuesday.”

In an intriguing coincidence, Axelrod’s comments about Rove came at roughly the same moment as the GOP operative appeared on TV to claim that the Obama campaign won by “suppressing the vote” with negative ads that “turned off” voters. That’s an odd statement coming from the co-founder of the Crossroads operation, which spent an estimated $100 million in this election, much of it on negative ads. That aside, it’s clear Rove needs to be able to tell all those wealthy donors something in order to explain why all those checks produced zero returns.

This isn’t just true of the presidential race, by the way. These groups pumped an enormous amount of money into key Senate races, to no avail. For instance, two of the top targets of all this money — Sherrod Brown and Claire McCaskill — won decisively. All that cash wasn’t enough to change the fact that the Republican candidates sucked . . .


read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/axelrod-rubs-roves-face-in-it/2012/11/08/9717c1c4-29db-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_blog.html

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1. What is interesting to me ...

is how these guys can drop $100 million on these races, a complete waste of their money, while squealing like little pigs if they are asked to contribute just a tiny bit more on their federal income taxes. And don't tell me $100 million is just a drop in the bucket to them. It may be so, but so is the amount they'd have to pay on their incomes as well (especially considering how good they are at hiding it).