He's a conservative "PR" guy--expert in direct marketing. IOW, a right-wing SHILL. He is closely tied to Rove and to Falwell. The right isn't doing anything right. They CHEATED AND STOLE THIS ELECTION.
Here's some of the low-down on RV:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=kaplan article | Posted October 14, 2004
Follow the Money
by Esther Kaplan
This article is adapted from Esther Kaplan's With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House (New Press).
Five years ago the Christian right was in a tenuous position. Its standard-bearer, the Christian Coalition, was under investigation by the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, and many of its state chapters were nearing collapse. Its lead organizers were fleeing so fast that one former field director called the organization "defunct." Groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, undergoing their own leadership transitions, had not yet risen to take the coalition's place. The movement had staked nearly everything on the drive to impeach Bill Clinton, and after that effort collapsed, its leaders projected a palpable sense of gloom. Paul Weyrich, the master coalition builder who had inspired Jerry Falwell to build a "moral majority" in America, wrote a Dear Friend letter that resounded with defeat. "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," he wrote in February 1999. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values." He declared that the right had lost the culture war and that America was becoming "an ever-widening sewer." He encouraged activists to give up, to quarantine themselves from this infectious immorality, "to drop out of this culture, and find places...where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives." Weyrich's letter sparked enormous controversy on the Christian right, but many saw it as the harbinger of a new evangelical separatism, marked by a retreat from political life.
Now, five years later, thanks to George W. Bush, the Christian right is on top of the world. Bush has not only bucked up the movement by ceding huge swaths of his domestic and international policy to this lobby, from his efforts to block abortions and gay marriage to his expenditure of significant political capital to support abstinence education, church-based social services and socially conservative judges. He has also revived the movement by injecting tens of millions of federal dollars directly into the coffers of the Christian right's grassroots organizations, while at the same time starving their most vigorous political opponents of funds--singling out family planning and AIDS organizations for special punishment. While these groups receive a steady diet of financial audits, investigations and outright defunding, the President has turned his faith-based initiative into what the Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston calls "a financial watering hole for the right-wing evangelicals."As Weyrich told the conservative Christian magazine World shortly after Bush took office, "The Bush administration came along just in time to save many of these pro-family organizations. Four more years of a Gore administration--of being on the outside--and I think a lot of them wouldn't have made it."
It was Weyrich's old running buddy, Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail guru who helped forge the religious right as a political force, and Howard Phillips, a former Nixon official who went on to head the Conservative Caucus, who first launched a campaign to "defund the left" in 1981. Viguerie and Phillips and their coalition of some eighty right-wing organizations went after groups concerned with core liberal issues--from women's rights to civil rights and the environment--that were also important elements of the Democratic base. Their targets included the Audubon Society, the Urban League, Planned Parenthood and other organizations suspected of using federal funds to "subsidize liberal antifamily values." "Our opposition receives almost 70 percent of its funds from the government," said Viguerie in 1982. "We want to stop that." Viguerie and Phillips battled for a series of rule changes to accomplish their aims throughout the Reagan years, many of which were rebuffed, but some of which, such as the Mexico City Policy (now commonly called the global abortion "gag rule"), became government policy. This drive to defund liberal institutions was revived in the mid-1990s by the conservative true believers of the Gingrich revolution, in conjunction with think thanks such as the Heritage Foundation, though their flood of bills went nowhere.
The Bush White House has picked up where Viguerie and Gingrich left off--though with far greater success.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&s=corn Did Larry Klayman, the conservative lawyer/provocateur who spent much of the 1990s suing Clinton-related targets via his Judicial Watch and accusing the Bill-and-Hillary crowd of vast corruptions, recently try to skirt campaign-finance law to obtain an illegal million-dollar boost for his back-of-the-pack US Senate campaign in Florida? Klayman is litigious. Newsweek reported in 1998 that he had even sued his mother during a family spat. So let's just lay out the facts, and readers can reach their own conclusions.
Some background: Klayman started Judicial Watch in 1994 and became famous--in a cable TV sort of way--by filing what seemed like thousands of lawsuits against Clintonites. His work (some might call it shenanigans) was partly underwritten by Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing millionaire. And Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail titan of the right, raised money for Judicial Watch. Klayman also represented the Miami relatives of Elián González in a lawsuit against the Justice Department, and he involved himself in the Florida recount mess. In recent years he expanded his hit list. Judicial Watch joined the Sierra Club in suing Vice President Cheney for records of Cheney's energy task force, and it launched a lawsuit against Cheney and Halliburton for alleged accounting fraud (a federal court dismissed the case). But Klayman also stuck to his bread and butter, representing Gennifer Flowers, who filed a suit claiming Hillary Clinton had tried to destroy her, and supporting a businessman charged with stock and bank fraud who claimed he secretly made illegal campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton.
On September 23, Klayman left Judicial Watch, which issued a terse three-sentence statement that could be read as a sign that the parting had not been amicable. That day, Klayman announced he was running for the US Senate from Florida and that he intended to be Hillary Clinton's "worst nightmare." He joined a large field of Republicans seeking this seat, a group that now includes former Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, former US Representative Bill McCollum, Florida House speaker Johnnie Byrd, former US Senator Bob Smith, State Senator Daniel Webster and businessman Doug Gallagher. In a recent poll, Klayman was at 4 percent.
In the first three months of Klayman's campaign, he raised $610,555, mostly through direct-mail fundraising conducted by Viguerie's American Target Advertising, according to Federal Election Commission records. In this period Klayman paid ATA $577,358. That is, the revenue barely covered the direct-mail cost--not good news for any campaign. And a report prepared in late January by ATA noted that the Klayman campaign had sent out slightly more than 1 million pieces at a cost of $730,315 and brought in $703,155.
Viguerie was using an assortment of conservative mailing lists, yet Klayman was scoring reasonably well mainly with those from Judicial Watch, according to ATA records. These Judicial Watch lists, though, were several years old, and mailing lists tend to deteriorate quickly. Klayman's direct-mail program could not rely on the older lists. One obvious answer was to rent Judicial Watch's up-to-date lists.
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