A Super PAC’s War on the ‘Tea Party Ten’

My Front Page Magazine article from August 9, 2012:


A Super PAC’s War on the ‘Tea Party Ten’

By Matthew Vadum

A well-funded leftist group is targeting 10 Tea Party-backed congressmen because they believe in the Constitution, limited government, and fiscal responsibility and oppose President Obama’s socialist juggernaut.

But Becky Bond, president of Credo Super PAC, puts it another way.

“They are anti-woman. They are anti-science. They are hypocritical, bigoted, and have said and done things that are downright crazy,” says Bond, a Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer.

What exactly have these Republican lawmakers done to stir up this kind of hatred among leftists? Answer: they’ve acted like conservatives.



Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is being targeted because he’s unapologetically pro-Israel and pro-life, positions that got him labeled “racist” and “sexist” by Bond’s group. Because West backed Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) very modest budget-balancing proposal Credo has falsely accused him of voting “to abolish Medicare.”

An Iraq war veteran, West calls Islam “a totalitarian theocratic political ideology.”

Pretty crazy, huh?

Credo is especially afraid of West because he’s “a national rising star in the Tea Party,” who “is going to start to define” what the Republican Party stands for.

“And he’s a freshman,” Bond said June 18 at the Campaign for America’s Future’s Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C. “If we don’t take him down now, he’s raising millions of dollars, and he’s going to set what the new normal is for the Republican Party.”

Credo Super PAC was created by Credo Mobile, the wireless reseller that donates part of its profits to left-wing groups such as the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America, ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, Color of Change, and the Sierra Club Foundation.

Credo Mobile president Michael Kieschnick, a member of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, boasts that his company’s activist network has given upwards of $70 million to left-wing groups since 1985. Credo Super PAC has raked in nearly $2 million so far, according to the Federal Election Commission database. Patricia Richardson of TV’s “Home Improvement” and movie actress Stockard Channing have given the PAC $1,000 and $750, respectively.

West is one target of Credo Super PAC’s “Take Down the Tea Party Ten” campaign. Eight enemies have been selected so far. The other Tea Party-friendly Republican congressmen with bullseyes painted on them are Steve King (IA), Dan Lungren (CA), Mike Fitzpatrick (PA), Joe Walsh(IL), Frank Guinta (NH), Sean Duffy (WI), and Chip Cravaack (MN). It is not clear when the final two members of the Tea Party Ten will be named.

Mike Fitzpatrick is loathed by Credo because he wants America to produce more of its own energy. He supports lifting the ban on new offshore drilling and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry energy from Alberta to multiple points in the U.S.

Dan Lungren is being targeted because he “was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party,” said Bond. “He’s California’s Rick Santorum. He led Youth for Nixon in California back in the day and he’s still in Congress and he’s vulnerable.”

Credo is incensed that when the Obama administration shirked its duties by refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act that Bill Clinton signed into law, Lungren voted to spend a whole $1.5 million in tax dollars to defend the law, which Credo labels “discriminatory.” Credo doesn’t have a problem, however, with the trillions and trillions of dollars the Obama administration has blown on expanded welfare programs, union payoffs, and regulations aimed at strangling American businesses.

Credo is going after Chip Cravaack because he wants the federal government to balance its budget and thinks manmade global warming is a hoax. Cravaack’s opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion provider Planned Parenthood infuriates Bond. “This is a guy who’s voted against women,” she said.

Guinta is under fire by Credo because he has said that Obama is trying “to take socialism and the European style of government and bring it to our country.”

In Bond’s view all of these targeted Tea Party Republicans can be beaten.

“We can get them out of Congress but they’re going to be supported by a wave of big money donations from Citizens United-enabled super PACs, from the Koch brothers, from [GOP donor] Sheldon Adelson, from all of this big conservative money, and so we have to figure out how we’re going to counter that money and we believe that’s going to be with people.”

“They have big money and they’re going to spend it on negative television advertising and we know volunteer neighbor to neighbor contacts are much more valuable than negative television advertisements,” said Bond.

“We’re going to have a thousand volunteers in every district. This isn’t a plan. This is happening right now.”

You’ve been warned.