Was wondering if the Tea Party-ers picked up on this latest corruption?.
“When people donate to Tea Party Express, they think that they are donating to a tea party, because they don’t read the fine print at the bottom of their e-mails that says it is a PAC,”. “And that hurts the local grass-roots tea party organizers, since a lot of that is actually taking some money away from them.”
Adds Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a nonprofit group that trains local tea party organizers: “I’m concerned that they’re using (Tea Party Express) as a marketing gimmick to line the pockets of consultants instead of actually helping the tea party movement. People are already pretty fired up, so enough protesting and rallying — they need to be empowered to go back and organize their communities.”
In a draft of his proposal last April, Wierzbicki seemed to anticipate some of the criticism, broaching the idea of recruiting Eric Odom and Michael Patrick Leahy, among the organizers of the April 15, 2009, rallies, or FreedomWorks, the Washington-based nonprofit that has helped organize local tea party groups and events across the country.
“We can probably pull off a phenomenally successful tour without these big-ego establishment types,” Wierzbicki wrote in his proposal, cautioning his colleagues that in any effort to woo them “We have to be very, very careful about discussing amongst ourselves anyone we include ‘outside of the family’ because quite frankly, we are not only not part of the political establishment or conservative establishment, but we are also sadly not currently a part of the ‘tea party’ establishment.”
Wierzbicki posited that his PAC’s lack of establishment tea party backing could be offset by winning over “local tea party leaders and grass-roots conservatives” and also by generating buzz including “mentions and possibly even promotion from conservative/pro-tea party bloggers, talk radio hosts, Fox News commentators, etc…”
Aided by campaign-style advance work and event planning, slick ads cut by Russo Marsh, impressive crowds and a savvy media operation, the political action committee run by Wierzbicki, Russo Marsh founder Sal Russo and a handful of other Republican operatives has also emerged as among the prolific fundraising vehicles under the tea party banner. Known as Our Country Deserves Better when it was founded during the 2008 election as a vehicle to oppose Barack Obama’s campaign for president, the PAC saw its fundraising more than quadruple after it took the Tea Party Express public in July, raising nearly $2.7 million in roughly the following six months, compared with less than $600,000 in the preceding six months, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Its fundraising success has made the PAC — which formally filed with the FEC in October to change its name to “Our Country Deserves Better PAC–TeaPartyExpress.org” — a power player in the tea party and beyond, airing hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads supporting Republican campaigns such as Scott Brown’s successful special election for Senate in Massachusetts and blasting Democratic ones, such as Senate Majority Leader Reid’s reelection bid in Nevada.
And that fundraising success has also meant a brisk business for Russo March, which essentially runs the PAC. In that capacity, Russo Marsh and a sister firm called King Media Group have received $1.9 million of the $4.1 million in payments made by the committee — a financial relationship that is not uncommon between political action committees run by consultants and their consulting firms.
But the Tea Party Express’s high profile has angered tea party leaders who are suspicious of its big payments to Russo Marsh, view the bus tours as distractions from meaningful grass-roots organizing headed into the 2010 midterm elections and say the Republican ties of both the firm and PAC are wrong for a movement that has prided itself on independence from the political establishment and has fiercely rejected what it sees as GOP efforts to co-opt it.
So basically Russo March makes out when people who donate to the tea Party express , thinking they are donating to the tea party movement. When in reality they are donating to a PAC for the GOP. Just a big scam to rake in more of your hard earned money.
