Virtually every news org under the sun has now weighed in with an aggressive fact check of White House/Dem foreign money allegations against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And that's as it should be.
But when are folks going to start getting equally aggressive about fact-checking the false and misleading claims in this dispute that are coming from the right?
Karl Rove, who co-founded two big spending groups, and others behind the huge conservative ad buys, have repeatedly claimed in recent days that their spending is comparable to anonymous spending from the left. These clams are serious distortions at best and demonstrable falsehoods at worst. But no one seems to care. While it's understandable that White House claims would draw more scrutiny, Rove is a hugely influential figure this year, helping raise and spend tens of millions to swing the elections.
Yesterday Rove
falsely claimed that MoveOn doesn't disclose its donors, even though it complies with the same disclosure requirements that candiate and party committees do. And today, Rove
amplified this line on Good Morning America, responding to the President's broadsides as follows:
President Obama based his attack on a blog posting by Think Progress, which is associated with the Center for American Progress, a group headed by John Podesta, who was the chairman of the president's transition. It is a political group and does not reveal its donors. The president didn't say anything about the League of Conservation Voters, which does not reveal its donors, and makes political ads.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which runs ads through its action fund, does not reveal its donors. The president's own campaign refused to reveal the names of donors who contributed literally tens of millions of dollars to his efforts.
Rove's claims passed largely unchallenged, but let's take them one by one. The comparison to the Center for American Progress is absurd, because it does not and has never run campaign ads. The League of Conservation Voters has only spent a paltry $1.3 million this cycle -- an infinitesimal fraction of the right's spending. It pays for ads out of several committees. Nearly half of LCV's spending came from a committee that
does, in fact, disclose some of its donors.
LCV does also spend for ads out of a 501 c4, which doesn't disclose donors, but there's substantial donor overlap between the two committee, so we already have a very good idea of who they are. The Natural Resources Defense Council is also a 501 c4, and doesn't disclose.
But even so, Rove's assertions about these groups are still absurd, because we
already know what their issue positions and agendas are. What's more, Obama and Dems tried to pass the DISCLOSE Act this summer -- which would have
forced such organizations to disclose their donors.
As for Rove's claim that literally tens of millions of Obama's contributions remained secret, the reality is that
90.2 percent of the hundreds of millions Obama raised were disclosed. And the comparison of conservative spending to labor, echoed by many on the right, has
already been debunked by one lone blogger, Ben Smith.
By all means, let's fact-check the living heck out of the White House/Dem attacks on Chamber foreign money. But the steady stream of falsehoods and distortions coming from major players on the right deserves a look, too.
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