With a combined total of $35 million in campaign funds, Republican presidential candidates are still falling behind President Obama’s whopping $86 million fundraising haul, a deficit that no doubt has some campaign managers stressed about their financial futures.
Michele Bachmann, however, need not worry, because the Minnesota Representative is the only declared presidential candidate to have received a fiduciary blessing from the GOP’s current financial kingmakers, Charles and David Koch.
According to Koch Industries’ FEC files, the company’s political action committee has already donated $5,000 to Bachmann’s presidential primary bid, suggesting that pundits, including myself, may be wrong about the Republican’s odds of wooing elite insiders who are jittery over such a radically fundamentalist candidate.
While Bachmann’s social conservative peer Rick Santorum has received $15,000 from the Koch brothers in the past, he has not yet received a donation for the 2012 race.
Looking over Koch Industries’ FEC documents, it becomes clear the Koch brothers have always had Bachmann’s back: the company’s PAC has given her $30,000 in campaign cash since 2006, the year of her first Congressional election. (Note: Bachmann has yet to release her primary fundraising numbers.)
In other Koch giving news, the company recently gave the Blue Dog Political Action Committee, a group devoted to electing moderate Democrats, $5,000, bringing their total donations to that organization to $56,000 since 1999, according to the FEC.
Perhaps Philip Ellender, head of Koch Industries’ governmental and public affairs office, forgot that little tidbit when he tore into Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Sen. Patty Murray after she asked for a donation.
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