The Daily Beast has reported that Sarah Palin relaunched her political action committee known as SarahPAC with an interesting video slamming “the big consultants, the big money men, and the big bad media” fueling our elections. But as what many see as a show of hypocrisy, and as the Daily Beast’s John Alvon reports, Palin is using SarahPAC to raise political funds ahead of the 2014 elections to spend on conservative political consultants — the very thing she attacks in her video.
Going through SarahPAC’s Federal Election Commission filings, Alvon made some interesting findings:
“Seen through the lens of the invaluable Center for Responsive Politics, Palin’s PAC spent $5.1 million in the last election cycle (more than it raised in that time period, raising some questions about Palin’s claims of fiscal responsibility).
But the real news comes when you look at how donors’ money was actually doled out: just $298,500 to candidates. The bulk of the rest of it, more than $4.8 million, went to — you guessed it — consultants…
Palin’s chief PAC consultant, Tim Crawford, pocketed more than $321,000 this election cycle in direct payments alone, according to the documents. Aries Petra Consulting was taking in between $6,000 and $8,000 a month for speechwriting and “grassroots consulting” — something that sounds like an oxymoron, but ended up costing north of $160,000.”
Alvon went on to say that he had difficulty finding a single, non-administrative budget item that consultants weren’t somehow involved in:
“So when Palin thundered at CPAC that “Now is the time to furlough the consultants, and tune out the pollsters, send the focus groups home and throw out the political scripts, because if we truly know what we believe, we don’t need professionals to tell us” — it was a riff written by speechwriters and informed by all tools she tried to diss.”
Watch the SarahPAC launch video below.
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