This may explain why the highest rollers of the 2012 super PAC sweepstakes thus far have been a relatively brash group of billionaires. For the discretion-minded, there are the 501(c)4 groups: nonprofit organizations, often linked to super PACs, that are allowed to solicit anonymous contributions but have more restrictions on how they can spend the money. The super PAC-ers, by contrast, are happy to endure the glare of media attention in exchange for a freer hand in the election. Some of them — such as Adelson, who recently told Forbes that “I’m proud of what I do and I’m not looking to escape recognition,” and Friess, who was cheerfully returning reporters’ e-mails while on a 50th-anniversary vacation with his wife in Peru this past week — seem to be relishing their newfound prominence.
For the campaigns, this is a potentially tricky situation. “It’s kind of like a celebrity who’s untethered,” says University of California at Irvine law professor Richard Hasen. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” (Surely more than a few of President Obama’s campaign hands shuddered at the gleefully controversial comedian Bill Maher’s announcement on Thursday that he was donating $1 million to a pro-Obama PAC, Priorities USA.) More than half of the respondents in a January Pew poll were aware of the new super PAC rules, and most of them considered their influence to be negative.
A freewheeling billionaire might not be able to sink a candidacy, but he could certainly make things difficult in the way that, say, religious figures such as Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee did for Obama and John McCain, respectively, in 2008. And unlike a rogue preacher, a scandal-prone benefactor who is paying the majority of a super PAC’s bills would be difficult to cut loose.
Two of the biggest super PAC donors, the Dallas corporate raider Harold Simmons and the Houstonhome builder Bob Perry, are products of the Texas political scene, in which campaign contributions have never been limited. It may be that the 2012 primary race ends up resembling a run for the statehouse in Austin, in which many voters don’t mind who’s writing the checks or what they may be expecting in return.
But most of the very wealthy who are playing in the 2012 primary contest seem less intent on transaction than on transformation. When I asked Friess why he was supporting Santorum, he told me via e-mail that “not only is Rick Santorum a relatively fresh face and lesser known” than Romney and Gingrich, “but he is 53 years old and starts each day with 50 pushups.” Friess wrote that he wanted to steer the Republicans away from the “Veteran War Horse strategy [that] has not worked in the past . . . not with [Bob] Dole or McCain,” or with Democrats such as Al Gore and John Kerry. The Democrats, he argued, have “won with candidates from out of nowhere” — or in the case of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama, “from beyond nowhere.”
There’s another precedent, however, that Friess’s ambitions call to mind. In 1968, a liberal philanthropist named Stewart Mott, repelled by Lyndon B. Johnson’s worsening debacle in Vietnam, led a small group of wealthy donors in bankrolling a Democratic primary challenge by Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. McCarthy did manage to help drive Johnson out of the race. But this year’s Republicans might want to go back and look at how the rest of that election shook out.
outlook@washpost.com
Charles Homans is a special correspondent for the New Republic.
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