Interestingly there is a Forbes piece being discussed in the political world today where Sheldon Adelson who has donated $11 million into Winning Our Future SuperPac, which is pro-Gingrich, says he may donate $10 million or $100 million and some critics accuse Adelson of trying to buy the presidential election.
The Washington Post has a piece with a chart which will be shown below that references how much more negative and viscous this primary season has been in comparison to primaries past but the chart also shows something else..... It would take far more than the $11 million or even the rumored additional $10 million that Adelson is expected to hand over to Winning Our Future, to even begin to level the playing field.
The chart shows that not even counting the positive ads produced by Mitt Romney or the pro-Romney SuperPac, Restore Our Future, just the negative ads alone, total more spent that all the other candidates positive and negative ads combined.
Green is the positive ads and how much each campaign spent on them through February 12, 2012, and the gold is the negative ads.
Combined, Gingrich, Santorum and Pauls, positive and negative, totals 10 and Romney's and/or Romney's SuperPAC totals 14.7 just in negative ads.
This brings up another point. After Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney attempted to justify his pure negative campaigns in Florida, where 99 percent of pro-Romney ads were negative, by saying "In South Carolina we were vastly outspent with negative ads attacking me and we stood back and spoke about President Obama and suffered the consequence of that. If you’re attacked, I’m not going to just sit back, I’m going to fight back and fight back hard."
ABC News at the time shows that claim to be demonstratively false.
As it turns out it was Romney who vastly outspent his opponents.
According to sources tracking media buys during the South Carolina primary, Romney and his allies, which include two super PACs, purchased more than $4.6 million of television airtime during the run-up to the state’s Jan. 21 primary. The two pro-Romney super PACs, Restore Our Future and Citizens for a Working America, chipped in millions.
By comparison, the Gingrich campaign and a pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, spent more than of $2.2 million in the state.
Every time Mr. Adelson donates to the pro-Gingrich SuperPAC, it is major news, and Romney and Romney surrogates attempt to convince Adelson to stop donating to Winning our Future, which begs a few questions.
Why is Romney and his surrogates so scared of Adelson attempting to level the playing field?
Why are the major news outlets and the Republican establishment not accusing the Romney billionaire donors of trying to buy the election?"
Why is Romney spending more than he is taking in , by three times the amount, and still not able to close the deal with conservative voters?
Sheldon Adelson's estimated net worth is $25 billion, he is a 78 year old self-made billionaire and casino owner and his friendship with Gingrich aside, self-made billionaires do not make a habit of throwing their money away or making bad bets.
"What scares me is the continuation of the socialist-style economy we’ve been experiencing for almost four years. That scares me because the redistribution of wealth is the path to more socialism, and to more of the government controlling people’s lives. What scares me is the lack of accountability that people would prefer to experience, just let the government take care of everything and I’ll go fish or I won’t work, etc."
"U.S. domestic politics is very important to me because I see that the things that made this country great are now being relegated into duplicating that which is making other countries less great. … I’m afraid of the trend where more and more people have the tendency to want to be given instead of wanting to give. People are less willing to share. There are fewer philanthropists being grown and there are greater expectations of the government. I believe that people will come to their senses and not extend the current Administration’s quest to socialize this country. It won’t be a socialist democracy because it won’t be a democracy."--- Sheldon Adelson, Forbes
So, the most important question of all, shouldn't be whether Adelson is trying to buy an election, but what he sees in Gingrich that he does not see in the rest of the candidates, given his reasoning for why he is throwing himself into the game and his worries about the Obama administrations push towards socialism.
Why does Adelson think Gingrich is the best person to undo the damage Barack Obama has wrought and put America back on the path to fiscal health?
That should be what every Republican and conservative supporter is asking.
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