A StrikeForce about as Effective as the Iraqi Army

conservative_strikeforceIn 2013 former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli lost to Terry McAuliffe by 56,000 votes in a gubernatorial race in which he was outspent by two to one. Would $85,000 more in his campaign war chest have made a difference in the election?

Probably not — the number was a small fraction of the $21 million Cuccinelli spent — but it’s a point worth pondering, given news that the Conservative StrikeForce PAC has agreed to pay $85,000 and hand over fund-raising contact lists to Cuccinelli, according to the Washington Post.

In a lawsuit, Cuccinelli had accused the PAC of raising funds that were never delivered to his campaign. Estimating that the group raised about $435,000 from emails using his name, he alleged that he’d received only $10,000.

Between January 2013 and June 2014, according to Federal Election Commission records, Conservative StrikeForce raised more than $2.8 million overall, of which it paid only $82,000 toward candidates or campaign committees.

“It’s just a thunderous precedent . . . to make it harder and more expensive to be deceitful and misleading with people in the political arena as far as donations go,” Cuccinelli said. “In an already sour environment, people who think they’re supporting something they believe in are defrauded.”

The Washington Post article provides no response from Arlington-based Conservative StrikeForce, its chairman, Dennis Whitfield, or its independent treasurer and outside consultant, Scott MacKenzie. But an outside observer must wonder if this s a case of an opportunist mimicking the police and veteran fund-raising scams in a political context. In a similar case, the Post notes, a committee to recruit conservative physician Ben Carson to run in the 2016 presidential race spent $2.44 million to raise $2.4 million.

Bacon’s bottom line: Maybe this was a case in which Conservative StrikeForce just wasn’t very effective at its job, which it defined on its website as raising small contributions for conservative candidates through mail, direct mail and telephone solicitations. Or maybe it was a cynical ploy for the organizers to pay themselves handsome salaries and perks. We don’t know. But, sad to say, in the wild, wild world of political financing, we’ll probably be reading about a lot more cases like this one.

— JAB