The amount of money spent by Romney/RNC and Obama/DNC was astounding — over $1 billion each.
As Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com (and others) have been exploring, the Republican money was concentrated on a small number of connected consulting firms:
Which brings me back to the concern I expressed soon after the election about the fate of small conservative bloggers, Whither small conservative blogs?
When I first started blogging in 2008, there was a vibrant group of small independent conservative blogs, many if not most composed of newbies like me. There was cohesiveness of opposition to Obamacare and the Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis. No one made any money, it was a cause….And why should anyone spread the wealth? Why shouldn’t small conservative blogs have to prove their worth to readership? “Cry me a river that no one links,” probably is a justified respose.Yet these small conservative blogs play an important role. I’ve highlighted the role of Not One More Red Cent in the rise of Marco Rubio against establishment hack Charlie Crist. There are numerous other examples. I’d like to think that we made a difference every now and then.
Which also got me thinking back to some posts Robert Stacy McCain did back in 2010 and earlier about the establishment support for Crist, Death by Consultantitis:
In general, there has been a misallocation of resources by the people who write the checks and hold the purse-strings in Republican politics. Nothing illustrates the disconnect between money and brains in the GOP than a fact highlighted by Jimmie Bise: Charlie Crist raised $4.3 million in a single three-month period of 2009. The more I think about that, the angrier I get. Who were these more-money-than-brains people who wrote those checks for Crist? Did they just take the word of John Cornyn and Jim Greer that Crist was the man to beat in the Florida GOP Senate primary?A fool and his money are soon parted, and there are times when the Republican Party resembles nothing so much as a scam for separating rich fools from their money.For $4.3 million, you could have paid 86 bloggers $50,000 a year.To date, during the 2009-10 election cycle, GOP national committees (RNC, NRSC and NRCC) have raised a combined total of $440.5 million.Do the math, and you see that a mere 1% of that total would go a hell of a long way toward permitting the conservative blogosphere to do more actual political news reporting of the sort that would help balance what the MSM are doing.I’m not saying that I want to be on the GOP payroll. What I am saying is that giving money to the GOP is not going to fix this problem, because the people who run the GOP don’t even understand the problem.
Clearly, going on the RNC payroll or receiving funding tied to opinion is not the answer.
But there has to be a better way to create and sustain the Army of Davids who are even more crucial now that the consultant model has failed us once again.
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