Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is well-known to have one of the best fundraising lists in the nation. Bachmann has worked hard to build it up with near daily hysterical appeals. Any time the media report a gaffe, she sends out an appeal that the liberal media is attacking her. When anyone fact checks her, a fundraising appeal goes out because she's been attacked.
Her infamous October 2008 appearance on MSNBC when she told Chris Mathews that many members of Congress are "anti-America" may have raised $1.8 million for her DFL opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg, but her counter appeal that she was under attack netted her nearly a million as well.
But how expensive is her victimhood fundraising machine to run?
You've probably all heard about the OCE investigating Bachmann. More details at my blog.
BUT CONSIDER THIS ...
Consider the allegations disgruntled former staffer Peter Waldron is making that Bachmann used MichelePAC to pay her Iowa campaign manager and campaign chair. Why would someone with as much filthy lucre lying around (remember Ron Carey alleging that Bachmann left campaign checks uncashed?) as Bachmann resort to such underhanded means?
Money was also a persistent problem for the Bachmann campaign. Despite her storied ability to raise millions online by playing the victim, very little of it actually went into the campaign coffers, according to Heckman—a sign of unusually high fundraising overhead. “It did seem to me that we had a remarkably low net cash available,” [Bob Heckman] says. “By the end, we couldn’t do TV, radio, or even phones with the big guys.”
(The Daily Beast)
Why would Bachmann steal the Iowa evangelicals email list? One possibility is they wouldn't rent it to her. The other is she didn't have the cash.
Why wouldn't the campaign manager get a little creative when the money wasn't there to pay himself. He runs MichelePAC after all.
Short helped start and direct MichelePAC, while its treasurer, Barry Arrington, also filed the incorporation papers for Short’s company C&M Strategies with the Colorado secretary of State. These connections appear to have put Short in a position to pay himself, even as other presidential campaign staffers were told that there was no money for their salaries.
Her inability to do much after winning the Iowa Straw Poll is easily explained if you consider that her fundraising machine is very expensive and inefficient. Just apply the concept of Occam's Razor.