Schauer being targeted by conservative interest group

In the very important 7th District congressional race, incumbent Democrat Mark Schauer has a sizable fundraising lead over his challenger, Republican Tim Walberg. But Walberg’s numbers do not include more than a half million dollars already spent on his behalf by a shadowy right-wing interest group called the American Future Fund.

With just two weeks to go in the campaign, Schauer has raised almost $2.8 million and has just over $1.3 million on hand; Walberg has raised just over $1.2 million and has $820,000 cash on hand. But the Des Moines, Iowa-based American Future Fund, founded in 2008 by a group of GOP consultants from the Romney and Bush/Cheney campaigns, has spent $506,761 on “issues ads” on behalf of Walberg.

Issues ads are the most common form of electoral advertising. These are ads that clearly do support a candidate or spread negative information about his/her opponent, but avoid explicitly endorsing a candidate — and therefore are exempt from election laws that require disclosure of those who financed the ad.

The AFF is one of the most active interest groups paying for such ads, announcing in August that it intends to spend $20 to $25 million on such ads during the current election cycle, focused mostly on specifically targeted House incumbents like Schauer.

In some ways, the AFF barely exists. Its offices are nothing more than a P.O. Box in a UPS store in Iowa. But their profligate spending on issues ads on behalf of Republican candidates around the country has caught the attention of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Even less is known about where that $25 million comes from because the group is incorporated under a specific set of tax regulations that exempts it from the requirement to report who contributes the vast sums of money used to pay for those commercials.

“Who is American Future Fund?,” asks Zack Pohl, spokesman for the Schauer campaign. “The answer is nobody really knows, because this shadowy group has no presence in Michigan and refuses to disclose the source of its funding. It’s clear Tim Walberg’s special interest buddies will say whatever it takes to cover his support for a risky budget plan that would eliminate Medicare and cut Social Security benefits for Michigan seniors.”

But a 2008 investigation by the Messenger’s sister site the Iowa Independent found that the organization was led by a prominent group of Republican consultants, many of them from the 2008 Romney presidential campaign. That leadership also includes veteran consultants to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush/Cheney campaigns.

The Times confirms what the Iowa Independent reported two years ago, that the organization was started with seed money from Bruce Rastetter, founder of Hawkeye Renewables, the fourth largest ethanol producer in the nation. That may explain why so much of the AFF’s focus seems to be on supporting pro-ethanol politicians and opposing anyone who opposes the best interests of Rastetter’s business holdings.

The Times reports that nearly every incumbent targeted by the AFF sits on a committee with influence or control of federal ethanol policy. That includes Schauer, who sits on the House Committee on Agriculture and specifically on the Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research, which oversees bio-based energy.

Schauer is not opposed to the use of ethanol or to federal subsidies for the production of ethanol, but in 2009 he did propose legislation that he said was designed to fix a 2004 law that had “artificially inflated commercial ethanol market prices.”

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, says that the laws must be changed to require groups like AFF to disclose where the money they are using to influence elections is coming from.

“Campaign spending without accountability is guaranteed to produce corruption on a massive scale,” Robinson says. “Now that every black box gets to spend all it wants in politics, we need to know who is stuffing the money into the black boxes.”