Freedom’s Watch May Spend up to $250 Million in 2008 Election
Group founded to support Bush’s surge in Iraq and encourage military action against Iran gearing up for November
by Bill Berkowitz / February 13th, 2008
In early December, Freedom’s Watch, the well-funded conservative lobbying group founded by former White House staffers and extremely wealthy longtime Republican donors, fired its first shot in Election 2008. Founded last year, and making its public debut with a $15 million dollar advertising campaign in support of Bush’s “surge” in mid-August, the group recently funded a series of ads in a northern Ohio special congressional election.
The advertisements, called “aggressively negative” by the Washington Post, branded the Democratic Party candidate as being soft on illegal immigration. According to the Washington Post, “Behind a blood-red foreground, the group’s ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and ‘liberals in Congress’ of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants.”
Republican Robert Latta won the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green, Ohio.
Freedom’s Watch was founded by Bradley Blakeman, the organization’s president and a former assistant to President George W. Bush and Presidential Appointee to the US Holocaust Museum, Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush ambassador to Italy, and Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary. Much of its financial support so far has come from Sembler and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who is one of the richest people in the world. [more]