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What does this amount of money buy?The Blue America PAC vs Retroactive Immunity fund is now at >$290000. It looks set to break $300000.
It buys a lot of things -- and I expect that number will continue to go up, probably significantly, as (a) the Senate likely disgraces itself this week even worse than the House, (b) Obama votes for final passage, and (c) the Money Bomb which the Ron Paul people are planning for us to fuel the start of the new PAC to do campaigns like this comes to fruition -- and so the real challenge now is to figure out the way to spend it that creates the largest impact.
As the number goes up, the feeling of responsibility to make shrewd decisions about how to use that increases, too. I can't tell you how many people I've heard from -- both in comments here and especially via email -- say that they never donated to a political cause in their entire lives until the donation they made to this, or who say that they stretched themselves beyond their financial limits to donate. I want to make sure to maximize the impact of their actions.
In one sense, $300,000 is a lot of money. But when set against the broad context of how much money swims around DC, it's anything but big. So we need to recognize our limits. Things aren't going to be achieved in one fell swoop. We can't do a full-frontal assault on the whole Beltway establishment. We can't remove from office every bad person who deserves it. We can't do a massive nationwide TV advertising campaign to change people's minds en masse about these issues. At least we can't do any of that yet.
But what $300,000 does is let you speak very loudly -- have your actions reverberate strongly -- in smaller, more limited ponds. We can shift the dynamics of individual races in specific districts, or even influence Senate races in small states where media buys are inexpensive, or start to change the way constituents see their long-term powerful incumbent to start weakening them to remove them from office over the slightly longer-term (i.e. Steny Hoyer).
The key, as I see it, is to spend this money the right and smart way to achieve real results -- to make the people who otherwise ignore us unable to do so any longer -- and once we can show that we're doing that, then we can maintain and expand support for what we're doing -- have people who want a way to defend these issues and change the way things work believe that we are creating a real template for doing that.
The immediate priorities are the Barrow/Thomas primary on July 15, Chris Carney's November race, and Steny Hoyer's reputation among the African-American voters in his district whose interests he ignores but whose indispensable support he exploits to return to Washington over and over, all in order to serve other interests that conflict with theirs. I'm reluctant to in advance specifically what we're planning for Barrow and Carney, because I don't want them to be able to anticipate it and counter it, but I think we're forming some smart strategies that can really hurt both of them.
None of these is perfect. There are reasons why each could be better in terms of our target. But there are no perfect approaches to any of this. The key premise is that Democrats are going to control the Congress into the foreseeable future -- that is clear -- and so it's irrelevant whether they lose a seat here or there. What matters is whether they are responsive, to whom they listen. And the key is to force them to listen to us, rather than AT&T, the "intelligence community," and their slimy lobbyists. The only way that will happen, in turn, is if the cost of not listening to us is ratcheted way up.
