Thread: Billionaire mogul Sheldon Adelson looks for mainstream Republican who can win in 2016

Billionaire mogul Sheldon Adelson looks for mainstream Republican who can win in 2016

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg -

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp.

By Matea Gold and Philip Rucker, Tuesday, March 25, 4:09 AM E-mail the writers

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife plowed more than $92 million into efforts to help mostly losing candidates in the 2012 elections, is undertaking a new strategy for 2016 — to tap his fortune on behalf of a more mainstream Republican with a clear shot to win the White House, according to people familiar with his thinking.
In 2012, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent so much of their money on long-shot candidate Newt Gingrich that they helped extend an ugly intraparty fight that left the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, severely bruised by the time he faced President Obama in the general election.

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This time, the Adelsons are plotting their investments based not on personal loyalty, but on a much more strategic aim: to help select a Republican nominee they believe will have broad appeal to an increasingly diverse national electorate.

The change in attitude comes amid early jockeying by a lengthy list of aspiring Republican presidential contenders to win the affections of the billionaire, who is in the beginning stages of assessing the field.

“The bar for support is going to be much higher,” said Andy Abboud, Adelson’s top political adviser and an executive at the Adelson-run Las Vegas Sands Corp. He added, “There’s going to be a lot more scrutiny.”

This strategy would favor more established 2016 hopefuls such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. All four will descend this week on Adelson’s luxury hotel in Las Vegas, the Venetian, for an important step in what some are calling the “Sheldon Primary.”

Officially, the potential 2016 candidates will be at the Venetian for the spring meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which begins Thursday with a golf outing followed by a VIP dinner featuring Bush and hosted by the Adelsons in the private airplane hangar where Adelson keeps his fleet.

But some of the most important events will occur between the poker tournament, Scotch tasting and strategy workshops. That’s when Adelson is scheduled to hold casual one-on-one chats — over coffee, at dinner or in his private office — with the prospective candidates.
Victor Chaltiel, a GOP donor and an Adelson friend who sits on the board of Las Vegas Sands, said at this early stage in the 2016 sweepstakes, Adelson is “neutral” and has his eye on a number of potential candidates, including Bush and Christie.

“He doesn’t want a crazy extremist to be the nominee,” Chaltiel said.

“He wants someone who has the chance to win the election, who is reasonable in his positions, who has convictions but is not totally crazy.”

Chaltiel said Adelson is concerned about the impact the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal in New Jersey has had on Christie’s political image. He also said Adelson admires Bush and believes he has the unique potential to do what Romney could not: win over a large number of non-white voters. Bush, whose wife is Mexican American, speaks fluent Spanish.

“Jeb Bush, because he’s bilingual, because of his wife, he has a better chance to reach out and get more access to the minorities,” Chaltiel said.

Shawl Steel, a Republican National Committee member and prominent California-based fundraiser, called Adelson “a very rational guy” who has learned his lesson from 2012.

“He wants to have the guy or the gal who’s most likely to put a coalition together to win in November,” Steel said. “The candidate will have to have a strong résumé — no sudden lightning-new guy — will have to build a formidable fundraising apparatus and really be emotionally tethered to bringing in middle-class Latinos, Asian Pacifics, Jews and blacks like never before.”

Adelson’s approach in evaluating the next batch of candidates has significant implications not just for those vying for his support, but also for the Republican Party as a whole.

In 2012, the Adelsons emerged — perhaps more than any other donors — as potent symbols of the remade campaign-finance landscape, in which a small handful of the ultra-wealthy could alter the trajectory of a race.

While other conservative donors, such as the industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, can inject substantial financial firepower into campaigns, Adelson is perhaps the most highly sought-after because of his willingness to dip into his personal fortune to back candidate-specific super PACs.

The $15 million the Adelsons gave to Winning Our Future, the pro-Gingrich super PAC, financed a brutal television ad campaign against Romney that prevented the establishment front-runner from locking up the nomination in the early round of primaries.

Once Gingrich dropped out of the race, the Adelsons embraced Romney and poured $30 million into the leading pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future. In all, the couple reported giving $92.8 million to super PACs in 2012, making them by far the biggest individual donors of the cycle, based on money that gets reported to the Federal Election Commission,according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The Adelsons also reportedly donated tens of millions of dollars to politically active nonprofit organizations, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, as well as to groups affiliated with the Koch-backed political network, which do not disclose their donors.

Despite the poor showing in 2012, Adelson told the Wall Street Journalafter the election that he was not turned off of political spending — and in fact would devote even more resources in the upcoming cycles. “I don’t cry when I lose,” he said. “There’s always a new hand coming up.”

This week’s meetings in Las Vegas will not be Adelson’s first encounter with the crop of 2016 hopefuls. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for instance, was the featured speaker at an RJC meeting last spring.


“Certainly the ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush who serves with Adelson on the RJC’s board. “It goes without saying that anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.”

Most of the prospective candidates have made a point of reaching out to Adelson with phone calls and personal visits when they come through town. The conversations are not overt pitches for financial backing yet, but rather solicitations of Adelson’s thoughts on the economy and Israel as well as strategy for the 2014 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Adelson, who is worth an estimated $37.9 billion, according to Bloomberg, is a staunch supporter of Israel. Adelson has expressed little interest in some of the social issues that motivate the GOP base.

But he is driven by what he has said he sees as Obama’s socialist agenda. He is a fierce opponent of organized labor and is currently embroiled in a fight to ban online gambling.

Adelson also is lending his weight to a bid by Las Vegas to host the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Adelson has a personal friendship with one possible candidate: former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. In late November, Adelson introduced Huckabee at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner in New York City, where Huckabee received the Adelson Defender of Israel Award. There, the casino magnate called him “a great person, a great American and a great Zionist.” But it remains to be seen whether their friendship would translate into financial support should Huckabee run.

A senior strategist who has advised past GOP nominees said the 2016 hopefuls “are just falling at his feet.”

“It’s a bunch of people out scrounging for the same dollars, and Sheldon represents the largest or second-largest box of money,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Adelson will not be the only major bundler for prospective candidates to visit with in Las Vegas. The RJC board also includes private-equity executive Lewis Eisenberg; hedge fund founder Paul Singer; Washington insider and lobbyist Wayne Berman; former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman; and former ambassadors Sam Fox and Mel Sembler.

“Running for president requires a broad, wide base of voters and people who are willing to donate money,” said Jack Oliver, a former Bush campaign adviser and finance director. “Anyone running for president on the Republican side would love to have Sheldon as a part of their team, and he’s incredibly important.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...y.html?hpid=z5

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The ABCs of Buying Elections

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Wash Post story on Adelson as Republican kingmaker leaves out his nuke-Iran agenda

Philip Weiss on March 26, 2014

The Washington Post has a long story today about “the Adelson primary:” the fact that Republicans who are considering a run for president are courting Sheldon Adelson as a preliminary to everything else they must do to prove their worthiness, like kissing babies in Iowa or formulating a position on jobs.

Shockingly, the story mentions Israel only three times, and not till the 24th paragraph (of about 30). It does not include Adelson’s October 2013 recommendation to Obama, that he nuke Iran. It does not even mention Iran, which was one of Adelson’s big issues in the last presidential race.

Here’s the Post’s setup:

former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich… will descend this week on Adelson’s luxury hotel in Las Vegas, the Venetian, for an important step in what some are calling the “Sheldon Primary.”

Officially, the potential 2016 candidates will be at the Venetian for the spring meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which begins Thursday with a golf outing, followed by a VIP dinner featuring Bush and hosted by the Adelsons in the private airplane hangar where Adelson keeps his fleet.

Now here are the first two references to Israel, way down in the story, as an afterthought:

Most of the prospective candidates have made a point of reaching out to Adelson with phone calls and personal visits when they come through town. The conversations are not overt pitches for financial backing yet, but rather solicitations of Adelson’s thoughts on the economy and Israel as well as strategy for the 2014 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Adelson, who is worth an estimated $37.9 billion, according to Bloomberg, is a staunch supporter of Israel. He has expressed little interest in some of the social issues that motivate the GOP base. But he is driven by what he has said he sees as Obama’s socialist agenda. He is a fierce opponent of organized labor and is currently embroiled in a fight to ban online gambling.

I’m gobsmacked in Gotham. Adelson has one overriding issue, Israel, and preventing the creation of a Palestinian state and the division of Jerusalem. In his uncensored remarks last fall, he didn’t talk about organized labor, no, he came off as a lunatic. He talked about Muslims wanting “to kill 100 percent of the Jews,” about the Palestinian state as a precursor to another Holocaust, about there not being any such thing as Palestinians.

“There’s no such thing as a Palestinian people. They have fooled the world very successfully.”

Here was his advice to Obama about Iran:

What are we going to negotiate about? I would say ‘Listen, you see that desert out there, I want to show you something.’ …You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say, ‘OK let it go.’ And so there’s an atomic weapon, goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever.

Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development.

You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes.’

The Post deprives us of any such intelligence. No wonder the American people are so ignorant. No wonder that the grassroots are on fire. This is a hugely unstable situation, discursively.

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/adelso...kingmaker.html

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Frankly Curious » Sheldon Adelson Social Liberal

by Frank Moraes - in 20 Google+ circles
Sheldon Adelson is a social liberal, just one that doesn't give a shit about social issues.

Sheldon Adelson: 'I'm Basically a Social Liberal' - Washington Wire ...

blogs.wsj.com/.../sheldon-adelson-im-basically-a-...‎

The Wall Street Journal
Dec 5, 2012 - [/COLOR]Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, in an interview, shared political beliefs that may leave some surprised.


Sheldon Adelson, "Social Liberal" - Daily Kos

[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498039)]www.dailykos.com/story/.../-Sheldon-Adelson-Social-Liberal‎

Daily Kos
Dec 6, 2012 - [/COLOR]That Sheldon Adelson. The guy who can burn $150million and be fine. A self-described "social liberal." Over the orange croissant for the ...[/COLOR]


Sheldon Adelson: 'I'm basically a social liberal' - Washington Post

[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498039)]www.washingtonpost.com/.../sheldon-adelson-im-b...‎

The Washington Post
Dec 5, 2012 - [/COLOR]Sheldon Adelson isn't giving up on the GOP. (Jerome Favre/Bloomberg News). Billionaire casino mogulSheldon Adelson tells the Wall Street ...[/COLOR]

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GOP Hawks Prepare for War—Against Rand Paul

Matthew Feeney|March 31, 2014

Credit: Gage Skidmore/wikimediaAccording to several donors at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference held in Las Vegas last weekend, the billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is prepared to fund a campaign against Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) if he picks up increased support during his widely anticipated presidential run in 2016.

Several prominent GOP donors at the conference suggested that Adelson, who spent more than $100 million backing Newt Gingrich and Romney in 2012, is likely to spend vast sums against Paul if he appears to be well positioned in the Republican primaries. Adelson’s spending is largely motivated by his strong concern for Israel, and Paul’s positions may well put a target on his back.

According to TIME, one unnamed former Mitt Romney bundler said it was "scary" that Paul could win the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.
More from TIME:

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is hard at work laying the groundwork for an almost certain presidential campaign in 2016, but as he broadens his support among libertarian and younger voters, there’s a budding counter-campaign to take him down if he becomes a threat to actually win the nomination.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) meeting in Las Vegas this weekend, Paul was nowhere to be found, but his presence was felt in the form of a straw man — and frequent worry. Speaker after speaker, from former Florida governor Jeb Bush to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, laid into Paul’s more isolationist views on foreign policy. They never mentioned the lawmaker by name, but the message came across loud and clear.
The conference brings together some of the biggest names — and wallets — in Republican politics, most notably billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. At a private dinner for VIP donors in an Adelson-owned aircraft hangar holding one of his pair of Boeing 747s, Bush was asked about the growing isolationist wing of the Republican Party and replied there was no such thing — effectively casting Paul out of the fold, according to attendees.

Background on Paul’s Foreign Policy
Like his father, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, advocates for a less involved American foreign policy. However, Rand Paul’s brand of non-intervention is not a rigid as his father’s.
In February last year, Paul went to the conservative Heritage Foundation and gave a speech in which he argued for a foreign policy that is neither isolationist nor neoconservative and is open to using containment as a way to address the threat of Islamic terrorism. Watch the speech below:




During his time in the Senate Paul has come out against American intervention abroad, perhaps most notably relating to the conflict in Syria and urging the U.S. not to rub Russian President Vladimir Putin the wrong way amid the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
Analysis and Commentary
Unsurprisingly, some conservatives aren’t happy about Paul’s foreign policy proposals.
The neoconservative columnist Jennifer Rubin has mentioned Paul 143 times between March 1 and March 21 in her blog at The Washington Post. Some of the recent headlines of Rubin’s posts include "Rand Paul’s fake foreign policy" and "Rand Paul is the odd man out of the GOP on foreign policy." Yesterday one of Rubin’s posts was headlined "Rand Paul trashed military option for Iran and blamed the U.S. for WWII."
Writing about Paul’s speech at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, Rubin outlined in characteristically blunt language her feelings about Paul’s opinions on foreign policy:

...Paul’s spiel is certainly indifferent to if not at odds with what is going on in the world. Should we be alarmed that Iran is getting the bomb, Russia is invading a neighbor and there is a war of genocidal proportions in Syria? No, the greatest danger is the government’s (nonexistent) eavesdropping on your phone calls. Not only is his shtick divorced from world events, but it also is entirely alien to the experience and concerns of most Americans who are worried about health care, the economy, the middle-class squeeze, etc. Other than people exactly like those in the ballroom, who is going to find this the most compelling message out of all the Republican contenders’ agendas? He keeps saying he will reach out to African Americans and Hispanics, but the crowd that love him was overwhelmingly white and male. And if he is serious about immigration reform (he told Silicon Valley he was), he kept it to himself.

Rubin continued:

He is after all a libertarian, not a mainstream conservative, and his disinclination to speak about anything but his paranoid vision of the government leaves little room for reform or problem-solving. This one-note fear of government has limited selling power in the Republican Party, most especially during times of rising international threats.

Writing in Forbes, David Adesnik, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized Paul for flip-flopping on the Ukraine crisis:

My best guess is that Paul is desperately searching for some framework or ideology that can justify the dovish, perhaps even isolationist instincts he inherited from his father. Yet he doesn’t know enough about foreign policy to think even one or two steps ahead, so he jumps into the breach with a loudly unorthodox position, only to find himself embarrassed when events demonstrate his ignorance. Then he starts firing in every direction, not knowing what to make of a world that doesn’t conform to his preferences. I don’t get the sense Paul is learning from his mistakes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the same pattern play out again before long.

In an oped for Breitbart News, Paul implicitly criticized fellow potential 2016 contender Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for trying to claim Reagan’s mantle after making a distinction between Paul’s foreign policy and Reagan’s. The Daily Caller senior editor Jamie Weinstein wrote that Paul and Reagan have little in common when it comes to foreign policy:

Paul may be right when he says that none of the Republicans considering a White House run in 2016 have a foreign policy outlook exactly like Reagan’s. But what’s undeniable is that Paul’s foreign policy is far and away the least Reaganeque of any of the possible 2016 Republican presidential contenders.
What Paul is trying to do is muddy the waters on Reagan’s foreign policy legacy in order to hide the reality that his foreign policy outlook bears no resemblance to that of the Gipper’s — and, more broadly, is wildly out of touch with the Republican mainstream. Sure, Reagan engaged in diplomacy, even occasionally when some in his own party believed it inadvisable. But that hardly makes Reagan a Rand Paul-style non-interventionist. Far from it.
Paul says he, like Reagan, supports “peace through strength.” Except Reagan’s notion of “peace through strength” focused on increasing military spending. Paul has not yet discovered a military cut he didn’t like.

Paul’s foreign policy has been criticized by liberals as well as conservatives. Writing in Politico earlier this month, Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, argued that Paul’s thoughts on foreign policy put him in a politically awkward situation:

Politically speaking, Paul faces an intractable dilemma: If he embraces his inner libertarian, he’ll stir excitement among liberty-loving younger Republicans—GOP strategist Bill Kristol cuttingly calls them “Snowden Republicans”—as well as many on the left who take a dim view of U.S. power and motives. But he will alienate many social conservatives and Tea Party “patriots” who still believe in American exceptionalism, as well as mainstream Republicans who see military strength as a more reliable basis for U.S. security than withdrawing from a fractious world.
So maybe Paul has no choice but to keep trying to reconcile incompatible conceptions of America’s role in the world. So far, he’s produced only a muddle.

Like Adesnik, Marshall also argued that Paul’s comments on Ukraine are confused:

Consider Paul’s ideas for punishing Russia, which are so inconsistent they sometimes cancel each other out: Paul the geopolitical hardliner calls for restarting work on American missile defense systems in Eastern Europe that were suspended as part of Obama’s unsuccessful “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations. But Paul the skinflint insists that “the Europeans pay for it”—which means the missile shields probably won’t go up. In one breath, Paul calls for more vigorous U.S. action to punish Russia for its rogue behavior; in the next he bemoans the fact that America is “broke” and can’t be the world’s ATM or policeman. This puzzling logic sometimes sound like a Zen koan: “Like Dwight Eisenhower, I believe the U.S. can actually be stronger by doing less,” he wrote in Time.
While insisting that he stands with Ukraine against Moscow’s attempts to dismember the country, Paul also ruled out U.S. economic aid to Ukraine because it might go to Russia to pay Kyiv’s enormous gas bills. In Paul’s view, energy isn’t just a cudgel Putin uses to intimidate neighboring countries—it’s also the main weapon America has to wean Europeans from dependence on Russian gas and oil. In contrast to Obama’s supposed dithering on energy, Paul calls for aggressively exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe and demands, weirdly, “immediate construction of the Keystone Pipeline.”

Reason on Rand Paul
Reason has extensive coverage of Rand Paul and his foreign policy, which can be read here. Some highlights:
Matt Welch wrote on the fight between Paul and Cruz over the Gipper’s mantle.
I wrote about how despite what neoconservatives might say, Paul is not an isolationist. I also considered whether the American public will pay attention to Paul’s foreign policy.
Brian Doherty wrote about the "rhetorical judo" Paul has used on those who criticize his positions on foreign policy.

http://reason.com/24-7/2014/03/31/go...inst-rand-paul