Fundraising Campaign Quotes

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?

For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called “the real America,” by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack.

the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house.

Extorting money in the form of campaign contributions is not simply about getting reelected. Many politicians aggressively fund-raise even though they face little or no opposition for reelection. Politicians have discovered a creative way to transfer donations into subsidies designed to benefit their lifestyles

The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

Obama has played fast and loose with ethical rules, from promoting crony capitalists to attending near-constant fundraisers among the pay-to-play 0.0001 percent. Again, why should we be surprised, given that he was the first presidential candidate who refused in a general election to accept federal campaign financing, with its accompanying rules curbing mega-fundraising?

But then he switches into campaign mode, shaking hands with spectators as he comes down the aisle. He even tries to shake hands with a prosecutor. She turns her back on him and walks away.

So how do my election law offenses compare to those of leading progressives? Well, let’s see. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took $31,000 in late 2013 from his campaign funds to buy jewelry for his granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid’s wedding. In his campaign year-end report, Reid tried to hide his granddaughter’s relationship to him by simply listing the transaction as a “holiday gift” to one “Ryan Elisabeth.” The impression Reid sought to convey was that he was buying gifts for his supporters. When it came to light that Reid had funneled campaign money to his granddaughter, Reid agreed to repay the money, but waxed indignant at continuing questions from reporters. “As a grandparent,” he fumed, “I say enough is enough.” Although Reid’s case involves obvious corruption, the Obama administration has neither investigated nor prosecuted a case against this stalwart Obama ally.6 Bill Clinton, you may recall, had his own campaign finance controversy. Following the 1996 election, the Democratic National Committee was forced to return $2.8 million in illegal and improper donations, most of it from foreign sources. Most of that money was raised by a shady Clinton fundraiser named John Huang. Huang, who used to work for the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, set up a fundraising scheme for foreign businessmen seeking special favors from the U.S. government to meet with Clinton, in exchange for large sums of money. A South Korean businessman had dinner with President Clinton in return for a $250,000 donation. Yogesh Gandhi, an Indian businessman who claimed to be related to Mahatma Gandhi, arranged to meet Clinton in the White House and be photographed receiving an award in exchange for a $325,000 contribution. Both donations were returned, but again, no official investigation, no prosecutions.7

Hillary mingled with old friends in Sag Harbor under a tent on the night of August 30: Calvin Klein, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi, and Sir Paul McCartney. Buffett and his wife, Jane, were the hosts of this extravaganza, which capped a multiday fund-raising blitz through the Hamptons. For a minimum of $100,000, VIPs were treated to dinner, “premium seating,” and the option to dance the night away with Hillary, Bill, and a few of their A-list pals. Hillary put on a brave face, reveled with her donors, and even joined in singing “Hey Jude.” But, below the surface, she was tense. Her closest aide’s personal life was blowing up in a fashion so spectacular that the campaign was at risk of becoming collateral damage.

Tina Brown, who had edited Talk magazine for Weinstein, began telling the press that she’d warned Clinton team members about Weinstein’s reputation during the 2008 campaign. The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.

A few days after McGowan’s tweets that October, Weinstein was at the St. James Theatre in New York City for a lavish fund-raiser he’d co-produced for Clinton, which put a further $2 million in her campaign’s coffers.

In September, there was more outreach, Ivanka said, from a Schneiderman advisor, who “said that Mr. Schneiderman would ‘greatly appreciate’ if I attended a fundraising event for newly elected California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris as Mr. Schneiderman’s guest. He also asked that we make a substantial contribution to Ms. Harris’s re-election campaign.” Ivanka’s father, Donald Trump, wrote a five-thousand-dollar check to Harris’s campaign, but Ivanka attended the fundraiser, “an intimate gathering of New York

The current political system was never designed to deal with the high complexity and frenetic pace of a knowledge-based economy. Parties and elections may come and go. New methods for fund-raising and campaigning are emerging, but in the United States, where the knowledge economy is most advanced and the Internet allows new political constituencies to form almost instantly, significant change in political structure comes so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. One hardly needs to defend the economic and social importance of political stability. But immobility is another matter. The U.S. political system, two centuries old, changed fundamentally after the Civil War of 1861–1865 and again in the 1930s after the Great Depression, when it adapted itself more fully to the industrial era. Since then the government has certainly grown. But as far as basic, institutional reform is involved, the U.S. political structure will continue crawling along at three miles per hour, with frequent rest stops at the side of the road, until a constitutional crisis strikes.

The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.

Trump was made for these moments, having spent decades mastering camera angles and production quality, distorting his expressions and gestures for maximum dramatic impact. He was having the time of his life. Bush was not. Awkward and reticent, with his six-foot-four frame coiling into itself due to poor posture, the former governor was already sore about having to compete with the Judas known as Rubio. Now he was forced to endure the indignity of sharing top billing with a man who had spent the last year mocking his family. Trump could read the repulsion on his rival’s face. At one commercial break, he turned to Bush. “Jeb, how you doing?” he asked. “I’m fine, Donald.” “So, where are you going after this?” “Headed to New York for some fund-raising events tomorrow.” Trump beamed. “You want a ride? I’ve got my plane here. We’re heading back tonight.” Bush stared blankly. “No. I’m good. We’ve got a ride.” “You sure?” Bush nodded briskly. “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.” Trump, feet still positioned perfectly over his stage mark for the television cameras, turned toward his family in the front row and winked. It was a down payment on the space he would occupy inside Bush’s head for the duration of the campaign.

Months later, Falwell was distributing $25 audio tapes of North’s commencement address, his “Freedom Message.” In a fundraising letter sent to supporters, Falwell framed what was at issue: “In my judgment, petty partisan politics have made Ollie North, his family and the very lives of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters pawns in a liberal campaign to humiliate President Reagan.” Critics accused leaders like Falwell of exploiting North in order to reap a “financial bonanza” in their direct-mail campaigns. Falwell’s spokesperson refused to say how much his campaign had brought in, but he wasn’t the only one cashing in on North. Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America offered a “beautiful full-color picture” of North being sworn in at the Iran-Contra hearings for a mere $20 contribution. Other conservative evangelical organizations also participated in the “Olliemania.” For American evangelicals, Ollie North was the perfect hero at the perfect time.4

Reassurances are multiplying in the United States and Western Europe that “the general population” is safe. But “the general population” may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals. Everyone knows that blacks are getting AIDS in disproportionate numbers, as there is a disproportionate number of blacks in the armed forces and a vastly disproportionate number in prisons. “The AIDS virus is an equal-opportunity destroyer” was the slogan of a recent fund-raising campaign by the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Punning on “equal-opportunity employer,” the phrase subliminally reaffirms what it means to deny: that AIDS is an illness that in this part of the world afflicts minorities, racial and sexual.

Facebook would become our biggest fund-raising tool, bringing in some $250 million in contributions. The base and the supporters would vote with their credit card every day. Ten bucks here, five dollars there. If they liked what they heard or saw, they might give you twenty bucks. For each dollar we spent on ads, we were making around $1.70 back. Most campaigns spend a dollar and make only 70 cents.

It hadn’t been enough to keep the majority of her students from failing to launch after high school, but the few she had helped to realize their potential had never forgotten her. Katie had waged war against a broken system, resigning from teaching to tackle the root of the issues directly in her early thirties. Her singular focus was tearing it up from the inside and becoming a thorn in the side of the bureaucrats. She was present at every meeting, every gala, fête, or fundraiser, campaigning

I’ve been over every inch of what happened. The NRA had nothing to do with it. This happened in a Democrat county with a Democrat sheriff, a Democrat superintendent, and a Democrat school board, implementing Democrat ideas on criminal justice, Democrat ideas on special education, and Democrat ideas on school discipline. And after Democrat voters gave all these Democrats a resounding vote of confidence in the school board election, the Democrat teachers union president, Anna Fusco, wrote in a Facebook group about our campaign for accountability: “Now you can all shut up!” Meanwhile, at the national level, Democrat organizers swooped in and weaponized my daughter’s murder for their Democrat agenda and to fund-raise to elect more Democrats.

Our opposition pulled out all the stops, too. A thinly disguised political NGO called V15, with a staff that included former Obama advisors, fueled an anti-Likud campaign with millions of dollars from abroad, including $300,000 given by the US State Department.4 This was highly questionable legally. The attorney general gave it a pass, however, arguing that V15 was not subject to campaign fundraising laws because it only opposed a particular party instead of supporting a specific one. Such flexibility was never shown to anyone on the right. “They have V15,” I said to my supporters in campaign rallies. “We have you.” Then I would invariably add, “But if you don’t come out to vote on election day, we’ll lose.

In fact, it was a deeper version of the lesson I had been trying to teach to fellow fundraisers in Chicago. Listening to others and sharing mutual hopes and fears as Obama had done with us in Louisville was indeed effective, but it was not a tactic. It was not part of a strategy to multiply in order to win. That would have been the Pyramid mindset. Instead, listening and sharing and being open was the campaign. It was both the means and the end. A listening campaign for a listening government. The “how” was the “what.

broke” Hillary to hit the Wall Street speech circuit, lending her 2008 campaign $13 million of her own money had turned Hillary in 2016 into both a cheapskate and a ravenous fund-raiser.

She let me take what I knew about marketing and human behavior to devise a campaign to garner better results.