That’s the implication, at least: Ms. Shea-Porter is going around telling people that the reason that she lost was because of all that dirty, dirty (and apparently foreign) special interest money. The quote: “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.*”
Let us leave aside for the moment the minor detail of why the PRC would want to topple a fellow-leftist: has the woman no understanding of campaign disclosure rules? It’s not as if the money’s being delivered in paper sacks: we are actually able to know who contributed to various campaigns. For example – and to use her own election race as an example – incoming Congressman Frank Guinta raised a total of 1.53 million this cycle, 21% of which was via PACs (and none of it from, say, the US Chamber of Commerce’s PAC). Ms. Shea-Porter? 1.64 million, 30% via PAC money. Business/ideological in Guinta’s case, labor/ideological in Shea-Porter’s: all perfectly obvious, and all reasonably transparent.
What’s actually bugging Shea-Porter, of course, is that the aforementioned US Chamber of Commerce happened to allocate 149K worth of negative campaign ads against her in the last two weeks of the race; probably not all that necessary (her polling was terrible), but it certainly didn’t help the incumbent much. It nonetheless does give a crumb of rationalization to any progressives out there not yet ready to face objective reality; which is why the soon-to-be-former Representative is implying as overtly as she dares that her election losses were all the fault of the Godless Chinese Hordes. It’s a more appealing narrative to the left than the truth, which is that being an open progressive in the wild is an excellent way to lose one’s election by double digits. Continue reading Carole Shea-Porter… BROUGHT DOWN BY THE PRC?