For the last time, Abramoff is not a bi-partisan scandal

January 28, 2006

The Republican defense for the Jack Abramoff scandal is basically one phrase: Dems took Abramoff money too. Those five words have been repeated by every GOP activist and lawmaker, and regurgitated by reporters striving for some kind of fact-free “balance,” but the truth remains that Abramoff was a Republican operative, who donated to Republican candidates and office-holders, which makes this a Republican scandal.

But wait, the GOP says, some Abramoff clients contributed to Dems. True? Yes, but the context makes all the difference. Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, worked with The American Prospect and a research firm that specializes in campaign finance to make definitively clear what most of us have realized for some time.

A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.

The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets. […]

[T]he Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes’s giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.

The report is well worth reading. The results are unambiguous.

* In total, the donations of Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him, while their donations to Republicans more than doubled, increasing by 135 percent after they signed him up;

* Five out of seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients vastly favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones;

* Four of the seven began giving substantially more to Republicans than Democrats after he took them on;

* Abramoff’s clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP — exactly the reverse pattern.

This isn’t spin or playing a semantics game about the meaning of the word “donation.” As Josh Marshall put it, “The truth is that only idiots and liars (actually, I guess the liars ‘say’ but don’t ‘believe’) think the Abramoff operation was really bipartisan in any meaningful sense.”

“Laundering”, “Payola”, “Money for ‘Favors'” – those are our arguments. “Taking Money” is theirs.

  • It doesn’t matter what the real facts are – only
    what you can pack into a 10 second sound
    bite counts – remember, Dean had only 30
    seconds to describe what the Democrats
    stand for.

    It’s bipartisan from the standpoint of the media,
    and that’s the way the public will see it. If you
    can cram all that info into 10 seconds, it still
    won’t do, because it has to be idiot simple,
    as well.

  • Just curious, why is all the focus on the tribal clients? It seems like we’re just following the Republican frame that focuses solely on traditional Democratic donors like the tribes. What about donations from Abramoff’s other clients like defense contractors? How did they direct their donations?

  • Sure, there are some Dems in the cross-hairs, but the evidence against them doesn’t amount to much upon close inspection. Once this investigation really heats up, even the 60% of the electorate that is completely brain dead will pick up on the fact that lots of Repubs are facing indictment but not a single Dem. Some of them might even understand that this is not just about a few bad apples but systemic corruption in the Republican Party establishment.

  • Don’t worry, the newspapers will all print corrections on p. E-20 next year when no one is paying attention anymore.

  • What’s weird about the “Abramoff clients gave twice as much to Repubs” line is that that’s exactly what the WaPo said…except they didn’t say it like that. They said it as Repubs got 2/3 of the money and Dems got 1/3. And that’s the same thing, except they decided to say it in one way, and not the other. And the way they say it makes it sound far less damning than “gave twice as much”.

    Plus, they failed to give any context to this, probably because they had done absolutely zero research on this, and were simply accepting some GOP spin. But the context is obvious, and shouldn’t have been hard for them to give. And while Howell seems to have changed her tune (I hope), many other media types continue to see this as a semantics debate, and that Howell’s original claim was essentially correct. They still don’t understand what they’re looking at. But for tribes that traditionally give more heavily to Dems to suddenly start giving far more to Repubs, the story is obvious.

    And that doesn’t even include the Ralph Reed scam part of this all, where they were abusing both their grass-roots AND the tribes in order to drum up more money for Republicans.

  • even the 60% of the electorate that is completely brain dead

    Beale – I believe the phrase you are looking for is “brain unaware”. Let’s try not to be too condescending, please. They’re trying their best.

    When almost 50% voted for Kerry and Bush is polling in the low 40’s, where does 60% come from? If anything, I’d put it in the low 40’s; though I suspect that at least some of those are fully aware that they’re backing a bad horse. But maybe you had something else in mind.

  • Every reporter in Washington knows what the K Street Project was. Every one. They’re playing stupid so they can spin the facts to fit the GOP narrative. No amount of evidence is going to sway them from that.

  • When almost 50% voted for Kerry and Bush is polling in the low 40’s, where does 60% come from?

    Doc: I pulled it out of my butt, as Al Franken would say. I don’t know what the exact number is, but, though it consists mostly of Bush voters, imho, there are plenty of Kerry voters in the mix as well.

  • We have a totally irresponsible press bought and paid for by the powers in office. What bothers me is the fact they fill the airwaves with anything but the important issues; Alito, Abranoff, Congressional corruption, even the upcoming Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling trials.
    They avoid all these real issues. Instead, it is crap Bush has said with spin, murder trials and other garbage. Freedom of the Press? Bought and paid for press. They ought to be ashamed. They are now little better than the people they protect.

  • Well, regarding the numbers of the brain-unaware, you have to distinguish between whether you’re talking about among likely voters or among those legally qualified to vote (but not necesssarily registered). That distinction maybe makes a lot of difference.

    I’m not sure why this issue is presenting such a problem. Part of it I think it’s just that Republicans are sort of getting the first word in the press all the time nowadays.

    OK, here’s the metaphor, and it’s not “drawn to scale” or anything, so just bear with me: Say, immediately after a big story breaks, there are ten “slots” of speaking about it that follow immediately after- they could be the first ten days after, or the first ten big editorials, the first ten speakers on the topic cable TV news channels- I don’t know what you’d select for a study.

    Even if liberal commentators get the very first couple of chances to speak on the issue, if the the GOP gets the other eight of those prime ten first spots, then those eight outweigh the liberals’ two and the effect is that the public experiences it as the GOP having gotten the “first word” out- which counts for a lot, as all first impressions do. So it’s the balance of those first few crucial chances to comment that matters, and as we all know from Media Matters, our own experience and so forth, the GOP’s got the best spot at the media dinner-table nowadays.

    The GOP knows how to amplify the chance they get– they’re going to use those chances to display a well thought out, coherent and coordinated message. And they’re not going to stand down like a lot of liberals will.

    But this issue shouldn’t be one that’s confusing, and I was boggled by the media reaction CB’s talking about from the very beginning.

    Abramoff’s victims give money to the Dems. How hard is that to understand? How hard is that to communicate? His friends give money to Republicans.

    Abramoff’s real job is that he’s a lobbyist. So, yeah, if he thought that some Dem was the person he should go to to get something done for a person, he might have dealt with a Dem. Are there any lobbyists who will not talk to members of one party or the other at all? I really doubt it. The circumstances in which Abramoff’s clients or Abramoff dealt with Dems pretty overwhelmingly had nothing to do with the scandal.

    I guess big part of it is the depth of the GOP’s deceit. I felt like liberals heard the GOP’s talking point and then just dropped the ball. The thing is that what the GOP is doing is just implicitly contradicting the common-sense points I just referred to above– to a regular person’s mind, there’s no point for the GOP could make on the actual facts. So instead the GOP relies on peoples’ not distrusting them, immediately puts out some crass spin, and then it sounds like there must be something to what they’re saying.

    You have to understand that they’re asshole liars to be able to comprehend how worthless what they’re saying is. If you’re automatically giving them some benefit of the doubt at all- if you’re not ready to be suspicious- then when you hear the talking point, it’ll make you accept it as something that makes a valid point– because otherwise you have to accept that we have blatant, outright deception being megaphoned all over the news.

    It is a pretty cheesy deception. If the GOP is discovered to be involved in corruption, then all their people have to do is get on the news right away and say, “But the defendant gives money to the Democrats.” Even if the point doesn’t, upon examination, undermine the main allegation at all, just the fact that they’re presenting it as if it does creates the impression that it actually does. That’s why the tactic is so hard to fight against. People still have enough faith in the integrity of the GOP to elect a GOP president. They won’t be immediately suspicious of a GOP talking point they hear on TV.

  • I guess a lot of the reason the average voter is at such a disadvantage in the media forum is because they tend not to have any background knowledge about any of these issues until the story breaks and the media starts educating them. Without knowledge, they can’t evalauate what’s being presented to them.

    If an average guy goes out to buy a fridge or a car, the average salesman really can’t go telling them a bunch of BS about the product. The salesman has to look at the guy and figure, “maybe he knows about fridges” or “maybe he knows about cars.” Even if the salesman wants to engage in a little puffery that wouldn’t ruin his rep after the person bought the product and actually used it, the salesman can’t usually, because he doesn’t know whether the customer knows enough so that the puffery wouldn’t sound right, and the customer be turned off.

    But if the GOP can know wholeheartedly that 98% of the people who watch the news don’t know anything at all about inside the beltway– and that those people aren’t disposed to read long newspaper articles, but rather just want to get the gist of what’s going on quick– then the GOP can go a long way by just getting a snappy talking point out & confidently stating it. What happens to Jack Abramoff isn’t immediate enough to most people’s lives for them to care to learn much about it. Sadly, they don’t think that even corruption in congress is close enough to their lives for them to spend some time learning the background to a story about that.

  • Another of my crazy ideas:

    You want a soundbite?!

    Interview the tribes, and ask them what they think of what has happened to their money!

  • Any way to initiate a Take Action Pyramid against certain offensive news media? Very simple plan. Email five to ten friends with boycott information. Ask them to act on the information and also email it to 5 to 10 more people.
    I already have my ten and am working on the information. I have to do something or my head will explode.

  • Does this include the money that went to Americans for Tax Reform, etc. Or are we just talking hard money here?

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