Rubio actually writes his own tweets, by the way.

No matter. The business community is upset with the Democrats for what it perceives as a heavy-handed approach to new regulation. And, behind the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it intends to go after the party in November’s elections. The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen reports:

Modeled in part on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign juggernaut, the [Chamber] has built a grass-roots operation known as Friends of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It has a member list of 6 million names, aimed at lobbying on legislation and swaying voters to back preferred candidates, primarily Republicans, in battleground areas, officials said.

The group will target vulnerable Democrats in up to two dozen states with ads, get-out-the-vote operations and other grass-roots efforts. The chamber plans to spend at least $50 million on political races and related activities this year, a 40 percent increase from 2008.

And this is the pickle for reform-minded lawmakers since the dawn of time. How do you protect citizens from the banks that wrecked the global economy, or the food conglomerates that have poisoned their customers with impunity, or the phone companies that tapped lines without a judge’s OK, or the coal companies that ruin entire mountain communities, when your re-election hinges on campaign cash from those same groups?

The answer — you don’t — makes a strong case for campaign finance reform.

The memo, authored by DLCC Executive Director Michael Sargeant, highlights the group’s concerns over maintaining power in state legislative chambers, many of which are tasked with redrawing congressional as well as state legislative districts following the 2010 census.

The DLCC is determined to run the largest Democratic redistricting mobilization in history this year to ensure that our state legislative candidates have the resources needed to win against well-­‐heeled Republican special interests.

Republicans and Democrats alike have been accused of gerrymandering. Each party hopes to hold legislative control following the 2010 elections in order to limit the opposition’s power to reshape districts.

The DLCC identified ten Democratic-controlled chambers at risk for GOP takeover this year:

• Alabama Senate (21D, 14R)

• Colorado Senate (21D, 14R)

• Indiana House (52D, 48R)

• Nevada Senate (12D, 9R)

• New Hampshire Senate (14D, 10R)

• New York Senate (31D, 30R, 1 vacancy)

• Ohio House (53D, 46R)

• Pennsylvania House (103D, 97R, 3 vacancies)

• Wisconsin Assembly (52D, 46R, 1I)

• Wisconsin Senate (18D, 15R)

Additionally, Sargeant wrote that they are closely watching Alabama House, Michigan House and North Carolina Senate and House for a risk of takeover.

The DLCC also hopes to gain majorities this year in the following chambers:

• Michigan Senate (16D, 22R)

• Missouri House (74D, 88R, 1 vacancy)

• Oklahoma Senate (22D, 26R)

• Tennessee House (48D, 51R)

• Texas House (73D, 77R)

“[Rep.] Bart Stupak [D-Mich]” says he has twelve ‘no’ votes,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who spoke at a 10 a.m. rally organized by multiple Tea Party groups. “I can count one — Bart Stupak. I can’t name number two. There’s eleven anonymous people and you can’t count anonymous votes. If you can’t count them, they’re not no votes. I think that’s something that should have been pressed much, much harder.”

At the rally, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) informed Tea Partiers they had “won every inning” of the health care fight and were in the “bottom of the ninth.” After her speech, she made it clear to reporters: “I think it’s a flip of a coin right now whether it will pass or not.”

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) acknowledged — based on the history of such tough votes — that more Democrats might vote “aye” than were being counted in public “whip counts.” He was hopeful that pro-life Democratic holdouts would be convinced by the argument that “this will be the biggest expansion of abortion since Roe. v. Wade.” But he was also looking past the vote to his home state, where Republicans are looking at legislation to opt out of a health care mandate.

The most confidence I heard came from Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who said that he’d “heard of” Democrats being fed false information about what could be fixed in reconciliation.

“I know they don’t have the votes right now,” said Broun. “As soon as Nancy Pelosi has 216 votes, we’ll have the vote, even if it’s in the middle of the night.”

King, however, expressed more nervousness.

“I’d rather serve in the minority,” said King, “however long they send me back here to do that, that I would live under this socialism that they’re trying to impose upon us. I can’t sleep at night.”

See a slideshow of the rally here.

That they’re not doing anything to change the way that elections are funded says a great deal about the influence of money and lobbying in Washington (and it’s worth mentioning that they were all elected under the current financing system, meaning that it worked for them even as they claim to despise it).

Still, some lawmakers have made campaign finance reform a priority, pushing a bill — the Fair Elections Now Act — that would allow congressional candidates to access public funds in exchange for disavowing large contributions from individuals and all contributions from lobbyists. And today they got a boost.

Thirty former lawmakers, from both sides of the aisle, are urging Congress to enact campaign finance reforms ASAP, arguing that the current system “impairs” the ability of lawmakers to tackle the grave and numerous problems facing the country.

“From our collective experience, fundraising is one of the worst parts of serving in public office, and it has only gotten worse since we served,” the lawmakers wrote in an open letter appearing in Roll Call.

The current campaign finance system serves no one well, and serves us all as a nation poorly. The hours spent raising money from narrow interests would be better applied to connecting with voters, building relationships across the aisle, seeking ideas from issue experts, and addressing the needs of the nation.

As it stands, many members are forced into a permanent “campaign” mindset. The currency of America’s capital city has become money, not ideas, and that hurts democracy in a fundamental way.

Among the signers were former Reps. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) and Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.).

Sponsored by Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in the Senate, and by Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and John Larson (D-Ct.) in the House, the Fair Elections Now Act aims to attract candidates who otherwise might not have the financial resources to launch a serious campaign for federal office.

Under the bill, candidates wishing to tap public funds would first have to prove viability by raising a minimum amount of cash from in-state donors, who could give no more than $100 each. Candidates meeting that state-specific threshold would then receive a lump sum for the primary election, and could raise additional funds from individual donors, again not to exceed $100. For every $1 raised in-state, the government would chip in $4.

Primary winners would receive another grant for the general election, again with the stipulation that additional donations couldn’t top $100, and again with the enticement of a four-to-one federal match for in-state contributions. The matching funds would stop flowing at a certain point, but candidates could continue to raise unlimited small donations from individuals.

The bill would also prohibit participating candidates from accepting any donations from political action committees, the groups organized by businesses and ideological groups to influence elections.

Still, supporters might not want to hold their breath for passage. Not only does the current political environment require 60 votes for anything at all to move through the Senate, but the recent Supreme Court ruling empowering corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to influence elections puts even more pressure on incumbents to raise campaign cash. After all, it is an election year.

Law enforcement officials say Bedell, a man with a history of severe psychiatric problems, had been sent a letter by California authorities Jan. 10 telling him he was prohibited from buying a gun because of his mental history.

Less than three weeks later, Bedell bought a 9 mm Ruger at a Las Vegas gun show by exploiting one of the largest loopholes in the nation’s gun control laws: While federal law requires licensed gun dealers to perform background checks on all prospective gun buyers, unlicensed sellers — like those who often set up shop at roaming gun shows — are exempt. The background checks are designed to prevent sales to those legally ineligible to own guns, including felons, illegal immigrants and, like Bedell, the severely mentally ill.

Several bills floating around Congress would subject unlicensed vendors to the same background check rules as licensed sellers. Considering the political environment on Capitol Hill in recent years, however, even sponsors of those proposals concede that they’ve got no chance of passing anytime soon.

The Base Connect office in Washington, D.C. (Photo by David Weigel)

Bill Russell couldn’t catch a break. He’d made his first run for Congress in 2008, as a Republican trying to take down Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), and winning broad support with grassroots conservatives. He’d lost that race by 16 points and kept on campaigning, eyes on the prize — until, on Feb. 8, 2010, Murtha died from complications related to gall bladder surgery. That forced a special election for May 19, and gave the power to choose a GOP nominee to a conference of local Republicans. On March 11 they met and handed the nomination to Tim Burns, a businessman making his first bid for office.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

A few weeks before the candidate selection vote, in an interview with TWI, Gleason pointed to Russell’s high “burn rate” as a reason to be skeptical of his chances. A week later, influential political strategist and blogger Bill Pascoe accused Base Connect of “subprime fundraising” and “highway robbery.” The next day, Erick Erickson of RedState tweeted that hiring Base Connect could cost candidates support from his website; hours later, the influential blog endorsed Burns. If it wasn’t the key factor in denying Russell the nomination, it still struck the candidate as playing dirty pool.

“There were certain people who were posing as journalists, like these guys from RedState, who were making a bid deal out of how I use Base Connect,” Russell told TWI. “Well, in the last ten days I netted $112,000. That’s after expenses. What they were attacking me on, and attacking Base Connect, on was baseless.”

The episode has brought the spotlight back to Base Connect, a direct mail firm with millions of dollars in business and a persistent chorus of critics on the right and left.

Inside of Base Connect, Russell’s setback was no surprise. The special election nomination might have been a poison pill anyway, as one internal poll showed any of the likely Democratic candidates trouncing Burns or Russell. But the fact that it had become an issue was upsetting. The same week that Russell lost, TPM Muckraker ran a story accusing Base Connect of “fleecing longshot candidates,” basing the charge on ugly 2008 stories about defeated Base Connect candidates and the current coverage of Russell. The panicked campaign of Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.) scrambled, telling local reporters that it was cutting off business with Base Connect. According to Base Connect Chief Operating Officer Michael Centanni, the Cao campaign spoke too soon — Base Connect had just dropped another Cao mailer to more than 10,000 people, and at the beginning of April it would assess whether Cao was still able to benefit from its services.

“What happened with Cao,” said Centanni, “is that our first piece of mail was a huge success. Then he voted for the health care bill, and the drop-off in donations was just massive.”

In a conversation with TWI, Centanni had responses for all of the charges that have bedeviled the firm for three years, before and after the name change. (The change to “Base Connect” happened in 2009 — one staffer acknowledged that the bad press was one reason for the change, but Centanni said it was wholly the result of a “cease and desist” letter from the car company BMW.) Critics, said Centanni, simply don’t understand how direct mail works.

“Some of these folks say, oh, they raised a million dollars and only got $250,000,” says Centanni. “Well, these candidates probably don’t have a way to replace that $250,000. Let’s look at Bill Russell. Twenty-year army veteran. Not a rich guy. He decides he’s going to run this race out of principle. We look at that race, and we’re of the opinion that it’s a bad thing to let incumbents go unchallenged.”

The huge initial hauls help the candidates generate headlines about — to use Russell’s 2008 run as an example — how they raised $700,000 in a single quarter. That, says Centanni, lets them build more buzz.

“Russell raises $700,000 and what happens? Michelle Malkin sees it and publishes an article: ‘This might be the guy to beat John Murtha.’ In the next 24-48 hours, $150,000 comes in online — which has a much lower cost. How is that possible without direct mail?”

But the stories of the last month have emphasized the second act of those fundraising stories. When news outlets decide to dig into FEC records, and when they find out how much Base Connect and its components are being paid, the negative coverage starts to churn. That’s not fair, argues Centanni. First, if the cost-to-fundraising ratio of early mailings are high, the system is working. One Base Connect staffer argued that if you looked at the numbers in April, you would think the candidates were being fleeced; look again in October, and the money has rolled in for a serious ad campaign. Second, Base Connect doesn’t conceal the fact that its clients are billed for the services of several different components of the firm, based in the same suite of the same office building. The placard at Base Connect’s 15th Street headquarters informs visitors that they’ve arrived at Base Connect Inc, Century Data Systems Corp, and Legacy List Marketing Inc.

“Every direct mail operation is the same,” says Centanni. “There is a creative agency — do you remember the show ‘Bewitched?’ Darren worked at a creative agency. That’s what Base Connect is. We’re the creative agency. The next piece of it is Legacy List — we get a book here, about the size of the Manhattan telephone book, with nothing but lists in it. We have lists that we market and lists that we mail.”

The defeats of candidates like Russell, Centanni argues, doesn’t prove that the strategy isn’t working. They choose long-shots because they want everyone to be challenged. “Every other time he ran,” says Centanni, “Murtha was able to dip into his war chest and give that money to other candidates. He couldn’t do that in 2008.” Their high-profile candidates lost in years when, as he puts it, “everybody lost.”

There’s a certain type of long-shot that Base Connect seeks out. To succeed in direct mail, the candidate needs either a hated opponent or a compelling narrative. That’s where the African-American candidates come in — and where some of Base Connect’s image problem also comes in. Two of Base Connect’s eight current clients — Florida’s Allen West and Alabama’s Les Phillip — are African-American. Appeals for previous African-American Base Connect clients like Ada Fisher and Deborah Honeycutt stressed the threat they posed to the African-American political establishment. But up to now, these candidates have been among Base Connect’s least successful. One strategist credited some of Honeycutt’s problems to a “blinged out” campaign that spent money unwisely. That doesn’t explain the low hit ratio of the Black Republican PAC, a Base Connect project that has crystallized this narrative to, so far, little impact. In 2008, the Black Republican PAC raised $1.3 million. By the end of the cycle, only $5000 had been given to black candidates. If that looks fishy, says Centanni, it’s another misunderstanding.

“Black Republican PAC was a new organization for the 2008 cycle,” says Centanni. “And you know what? It might take two or three cycles for it to become a political PAC that becomes really effective. So what you need to look at is whether it’s becoming more effective each time.”

Allen West — also a recipient of $1,000 from Black Republican PAC in 2008 — stands by his partnership with Base Connect. “It’s kind of like investing,” he told TWI, analyzing the high cost, eventual high return strategy. “If you’re a nervous nellie and you screw around with your investments early on, just because they’re not immediately gaining a lot, you can screw with your portfolio.”

West also nailed down a reason why, despite some off-the-record attacks of the kind that helped Tim Burns, Base Connect endures its bad press. It’s got connections. West got a prime speaking slot at CPAC, right before Glenn Beck, through Base Connect’s President Kimberly Bellissimo. “They open the doors to influencers,” said West.

Base Connect’s strategies also drew some support from Richard Viguerie, a pioneering Republican direct mail strategist who, at every point in his career, has faced the same criticism over the high cost of his work. (He doesn’t exactly conceal the mostly meaningless “gross” numbers, claiming on his web site to have raised “more than $7 billion” in the mail.)

“I was roundly attacked in the 1960s and 1970s for what I was doing,” Viguerie told TWI. “All of the criticism stopped in a few hours on election night 1980. That’s when they stopped and said, a-hah! That’s what Viguerie’s been up to! Building these lists!”

Centanni looks to similar vindication from what looks to be the first strong election cycle for Republicans since 2004.

“People are going to take another look when Allen West wins,” he says. “Hopefully Allen will give us a little bit of credit.”

Rachel Rose Hartman contributed research to this story.

Update: Looks like Massa’s resignation might have been a shrewd move. From the Post:

The committee concluded that Massa’s resignation put him outside the reach of any punishment the committee could dole out, and would render any findings of wrongdoing irrelevant. But the move appears likely to set up a political battle with House Republicans, who are already complaining in campaign ads that Congressional Democrats are unwilling to look too deeply into or punish the ethical transgressions of their own.

Republicans signaled Wednesday morning, just before the House ethics committee was set to hold a meeting, that they wanted the probe to continue. Republicans sources said that the public deserved to know who in the House Democratic leadership knew about the swirling allegations and what they did upon learning that congressional staffers might be victims of harassment.

Karl Rove (J.D. Pooley/ZUMA Press)

Washington memoirs are all about settling scores. Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” takes that tradition to new and self-parodying heights. To read Rove’s recollections of George W. Bush’s White House is to believe that, for eight years, men of “courage and moral clarity” governed the United States and were beset by critics who refused to give them any credit. On page after page, Rove names the naysayers and picks apart their claims. He’s most at ease — his delight jumps right off of the page — when he’s able to recount times he shoved the criticisms back in their faces.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“I certainly don’t believe and have never said, ‘We are a Christian nation,’” writes Rove. “I put the offending page in my pocket and went about my business.” Later that day, he encountered Obama and fell victim to “feistiness,” challenging the senator for using “my name and the word ’said’ and quote marks.” Obama, Rove reports, blanched when the torn-out page was shown to him and tried to wriggle out of the conversation: “It seemed to me he didn’t much care that he had attributed to me something I had never said and found offensive.”

Four years later, Rove offers up the encounter as proof that Obama’s image as “the truest, purest proponent of a fresh new style of politics” is a ruse, and snarls that “the last time I checked, I hadn’t bombed any government building (like, say, Obama’s great friend William Ayers); or asked that God ‘damn’ America (like, say, Obama’s former pastor and close friend Jeremiah Wright); or declared that I was proud of my country for the first time in my life only when I was in my forties (like, say, Obama’s wife, Michelle).”

It’s a revealing passage — it takes up three whole pages — that demonstrates just how Rove thinks. Accused of being a steamrolling, divisive political operative, he locates a loophole in the argument, and closes by insulting the wife of the person who criticized him. Apart from some gripping narrative sections about how the inner sanctum of the White House reacted to the September 11 attacks, “Courage and Consequence” reads less like the story of one of history’s most powerful presidential advisers and more like a quickie fightback book from some apparatchik ensnared in a petty scandal.

Rove’s quest to debunk and overpower his enemies in politics and the press begins with his account of the “broken family” that raised him. Nineteen pages in, he starts swinging at journalists — James Moore, Paul Alexander, Wayne Slater — who’ve looked into the suicide of his mother and the rumored homosexuality of his father for clues about his psychology. “The writers who are fascinated with whether my father was gay,” Rove snarls, “are really more interested in implying that all people who have gay relatives or friends must support same-sex marriage; otherwise they are bigots and hypocrites. And if one of these people happens to be Karl Rove, so much the better.”

In other, less personal sections of the book, Rove takes the same care in dissembling what his enemies have been saying. Throughout, he settles scores with political opponents while seeing past the fault in his own. Recapping one of the coups of his early career, he admits that he “destroyed the career” of former Texas Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerroro by leaking the proof that she had embellished her academic record. “Did I pass on to a reporter the information that pointed to our opponent’s lie?” Rove writes. “Absolutely, you bet, and I have no regrets about it whatsoever. Why should I? The information, after all, was true. That should have some bearing on this issue.”

Rove doesn’t have the same attitude about information that damaged his own client, George W. Bush. Rove devotes a chapter title — “Derailed by a DUI” — and five pages to how Democrats killed the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign’s momentum with a leak about Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest in Maine. Mournfully, Rove recounts the reaction of his campaign — “Bush called it ‘dirty politics’ and said, ‘I don’t know if my opponent’s campaign was involved, but I do know that the person who admitted doing it at the last minute was a Democratic and partisan in Maine.” Rove’s regret was that he didn’t outsmart the Democrats by leaking the information before they did: “Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”

Rove’s pride and tunnel vision about his campaign tactics aren’t anything new in the Washington memoir genre. Much of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” featured the same sort of finger-pointing about her brief bid for the vice presidency. If anything, Rove takes more obvious relish in attacking the people who made his campaigns difficult — it’s mostly “the kooky left-wing blogosphere” that thinks he ran a dirty campaign against John McCain in 2000, or that only an “imbecile” could have believed the 2004 exit polls that showed a Kerry-Edwards win, and so on.

But unlike Palin — unlike most people with his portfolio — Rove was in the cockpit for much of a consequential presidency that launched two wars and dramatically expanded the size of the federal government. He writes about this the same way he writes about minor tiffs and campaign tricks. He spends a page trying to debunk the idea that Bush ever told Americans to “go shopping” after the September 11 attacks. Technically, he’s right. The closest Bush ever came to using those two precise words — the moment that most people remember as the “go shopping” moment — were his September 27, 2001 remarks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he urged Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” But Rove insists that the “closest he ever came” was a different speech in which Bush praised Americans for “going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball.” Even there, Rove skips past the argument made by critics — that Bush, in a unique position to demand more of Americans, gave an “all-clear” sign and moved on. In writing about Hurricane Katrina, one of his only regrets is “flying over the region in Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than landing.” In one of Rove’s few admissions, he admits that he’s “one of the people responsible for this mistake.”

“Courage and Consequence” is filled with such arguments. Pre-release excepts about Rove’s take on the Iraq War — that his biggest regret was that he should have worked harder to spin the fallout over the lack of WMD in Iraq — foreshadowed the way Rove would tackle most of the controversies of his tenure. At several points, he simply misstates facts. He impugns the character of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his position in New Mexico after not pursuing politicized prosecutions, by claiming that Iglesias was incompetent and gunning for electoral office. Paragraphs later, he claims that the only qualm that Democrats have with former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin — who resigned after negative attention on his own politicized appointment — is that they feared it would help Griffin’s career. Left unmentioned is the real Democratic argument, that Griffin helped the Bush-Cheney campaign challenge the voter registrations of voters in largely African-American, Democratic-leaning areas. But to Rove, the most important Republican political strategist of his generation, Democratic worries about election integrity are basically one big joke. In an unsurprising chapter about the 2000 presidential election recount — revelations are limited to the angry looks and sighs that various players gave to Rove — he refers to the Bush team in Florida as “freedom fighters whose homeland had been occupied as they grappled with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits filed by Gore’s attorneys and street protests led by Jesse Jackson.”

Very little of this should surprise observers of Rove in power or out of power, as a quotable White House aide and then as a Fox News pundit who has reliably attacked the Democrats. Rove’s disinterest in policy or consequences of policy isn’t surprising, either. (”I didn’t pretend to be Carl von Clausewitz or Henry Kissinger, but I knew the Iraq War wasn’t going well,” Rove writes of his thinking in December 2006.) The historical value of the book itself is minimal. It functions, instead, as a test of whether Rove’s combination of pique and pride will be helpful as Bush administration veterans argue that they spent eight years changing America for the better, over the cries of critics, only to watch their work be ruined by Barack Obama and his pack of elitist liberals.