Politico's Alex Isenstadt has an important article up that details the money troubles developing for Rand:
In a presidential campaign defined by billionaire sugar daddy donors, Rand Paul has a problem: He doesn’t seem to have one.
While his rivals cultivate wealthy backers who will pump millions of dollars into their candidacies, Paul has struggled to find a similar lifeline. It’s led to considerable frustration in his campaign, which, amid rising concerns that it will not be able to compete financially.Isenstadt goes down the list:Peter Thiel, Sean Parker and Larry Ellison. They were all once top money donor prospects, but the duo of Rand and Benton has not been able to squeeze a dime out of these guys, despite the fact that they have so much money they are looking for excuses to spend some. TRANSLATION: Rand and Benton, whether they realize or not, are proactively turning these guys off.
As Isenstadt notes, that leaves Rand nothing but a grassroots money raising campaign. But the Ron Paul lists that are at the core of any Rand campaign have been so abused by Rand and his operatives that, on any given day, chances are that you will be asked for handouts fewer times if you were to walk through San Francisco's Tenderloin,.
I wrote to a friend in an email yesterday about Rand:
I don't think he is raising anywhere near the money he expected to raise and I think he has a very high burn rate with all the expensive consultants he has brought on board. Watch for defections of consultants to other camps, that will be the end.Certainly, nothing has changed my view today in light of the Isenstadt analysis. Rand will have enough money to fly coach around the country and run a pretend campaign, but he will never be able to match what his father did on the campaign, even when it comes just to travel.
-RW
Why would the grassroots give the man a dime when he sold out all our ideas to get an audience with conservatives and the press? Why would billionaires back him when they know he won't really represent them like a Rubio or a Bush? I called this 3 years ago during the Romney endorsement. Rand sacrificed the engine of the movement, the ideas, and thus destroyed the base of support he would have naturally inherited. One cannot help but wonder if that was not the plan all along via "advice" from men like Olson. I think Rand was ripe for manipulation from an establishment regime changer like Olson and now he's too prideful to admit his mistakes, shift gears, and go full principled the way Ron did. Heaven forbid he do that, it actually worked. We cannot have that now can we?
ReplyDeletehttp://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/02/02/can-ron-paul-be-tamed/
Hillary Clinton is a female of version of Doctor Stranglelove, as played by Peter Sellers, but at least she is shrewd enough to surround her despotic campaign with advisors who's IQ is above room temperature. At this rate Rand may end up being a trivia question politician in the vain of Harold Stassen.
ReplyDelete"he will never be able to match what his father did on the campaign, even when it comes just to travel."
ReplyDeleteGood. I hope you're right, Robert. Rand can't fall out of politics too soon to suit me.