Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Tommy's Benefactors Taking Hands-On Approach?

Tommy Thompson's special interest benefactors from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are apparently going to take a hands-on approach at this point in the campaign.  They have already bankrolled over $2 million in deceptive television attacks ads against Tammy Baldwin. A total of $1,333,161.00 (including $490,851 in unregulated spending not filed with FEC) in attack ads during the primary and $714,702.00 during the general. Now their national political director is tweeting that he will be joining Tommy Thompson for an "important announcement".

What is the announcement? Tommy Thompson has already outsourced his campaign to this exact kind of D.C. special interest.  Are they going to literally control his campaign message and its day to day operations now? Perhaps the U.S. Chamber of Commerce official is going to coach Tommy about using some of the same talking points that the Chamber President Tom Donohue has offered in the past.

In 2004, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said, "there are legitimate values in outsourcing ‐‐ not only jobs, but work ‐‐ to gain technical experience and benefit we don't have here, to lower the price of products, which means more and more of them are brought into the United States, used, for example, I.T., much broader use than it was 10 years ago, create more and more jobs. But the bottom line is that we outsource very few jobs in relation to the size of our economy."

In July 2004, the Associated Press reported “Donohue acknowledged the pain for people who have lost jobs to offshoring ‐ an estimated 250,000 a year, according to government estimates. But pockets of unemployment shouldn't lead to ‘anecdotal politics and policies,’ he said, and people affected by offshoring should ‘stop whining.’” [Associated Press, 7/5/2004]

Whatever the reason for this special interest liaison with Tommy, we know at least one result that will come from it.  He will owe them big and he will be no one's senator but THEIRS.

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