Largesse

Julie Bykowicz of AP writes about a conference that has been taking place this week in Dana Point, California. It is put on by Charles Koch of Koch brothers fame. Attendees were

450 business leaders — many among them top political contributors — and the elected officials who receive that largesse. They've been strategizing with officials at the education, policy and activist groups that Koch and his brother David have spent years building up and funding.

That network has a budget of $889 million through the end of 2016 — and much of it will be directed at electing a Republican to the White House.

As such, five GOP contenders spoke to the donor group, answering questions.

...The Koch donor conferences, held twice a year, are insular affairs.

Only those who have donated $100,000 or more to Koch-backed groups are invited. Yet even those deep-pocketed donors must check their mobile phones at the doors of some strategy sessions.

For the first time, a small number of reporters were invited to hear the 2016 candidates and attend some other forums. As a condition of attending, reporters were not permitted to identify any of the donors in attendance.

Most of the Koch-backed entities are nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. The two most politically active groups are American for Prosperity, which deploys activists to knock on doors and discuss issues important to the Kochs, and Freedom Partners, which has a super PAC that can spend directly on elections.

Although leaders for those two groups say they aren't endorsing anyone in the GOP primary, donors at the retreat have the ability to write million-dollar checks to boost a candidate's chances.

Read more here.

Glenn Reynolds has an idea for big GOP donors

Two and one-half years ago Glenn Reynolds offerred GOP donors some valuable and free advice in a column he wrote in the New York Post.

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites.

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

...For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.

For the pro-Republican stuff, well, just visit the “Real Mitt Romney” page at snopes.com, or look up the time Mitt Romney rescued a 14-year-old kidnap victim, to see the kind of feel-good stories that could have been running. For the others, well, it would run articles on whether Bill Clinton should get a pass on his affairs, whether it’s right that the Obama White House pays women less than men, and reports on how the tax system punishes women.

This stuff writes itself, probably more easily than the Spin Sisters’ pabulum. And opening up a major beachhead in this section of the media is probably a lot cheaper than challenging major newspapers and TV networks head on.

The only losers will be the political consultants who ate up so much of the GOP’s cash this time around.

Read more here.