Why would anyone contribute $5,000 to a campaign that ended two years ago, to a candidate who finished a distant fourth? It makes more sense when the donor is Bill Frist and the candidate is Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
Last December, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) cut a $5,000 check to a Senate campaign that had been essentially dormant for more than two years.
More notable than the timing, however, was the recipient: Tony Perkins, whose failed 2002 Senate campaign in Louisiana became merely a prelude to his current tenure as president of the Family Research Council.
Perkins finished a dismal fourth in the race, garnering just 10 percent of the vote. But by the time he took in the $5,000 from Frist’s Volunteer PAC on Dec. 15, 2004, Perkins had moved on to more important pastures.
More than two years after his failed Senate bid, Perkins had firmly established himself as one of the most important figures in the Christian conservative movement, particularly on the attempt to eliminate Democratic filibusters on judicial nominations — one of Frist’s highest priorities as Majority Leader.
I can appreciate that Frist is desperate to rally religious right support for his Senate agenda (and his 2008 presidential campaign), but donating $5,000 to a campaign that doesn’t exist just to curry favor with a far-right group is bound to look pretty bad.
For that matter, maybe Frist could elaborate a bit on why, exactly, he’d offer such generous financial support to Perkins’ long-finished campaign. After all, this is the same Perkins who paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list and later tried to hide the payment from the Federal Election Commission
It’s also the same Perkins who blamed MTV for the Abu Ghraib scandal, compared Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state to the communists’ Berlin Wall, and argued that federal judges who disagree with him pose “a greater threat to representative government” than “terrorist groups.”
Sounds exactly like the kind of guy who should get $5,000 checks from the Senate Majority Leader, right?