FPI / March 17, 2023

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

It should be a deeply troubling fact: Two of the Top 5 self-funded campaigns of 2022, according to campaign finance monitoring site Open Secrets, were Pennsylvania Senate Republican candidates Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick. Two enormously wealthy men, one from New Jersey and one from Connecticut, swooped into the Keystone State and attempted to purchase a U.S. Senate seat under the GOP label.

McCormick, a hedge fund goliath who made a good chunk of his considerable personal fortune doing business with communist China while serving as CEO at Bridgewater Associates, ran a transparently deceptive campaign as an American First zealot that proved so unpalatable to Pennsylvania Republicans that he couldn’t capture the GOP nomination over a ridiculously awful rival, Oprah Winfrey’s TV doctor.

Oz then proved so thoroughly mediocre a general election candidate that he somehow managed to lose to radical Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a man so debilitated due to a stroke that he couldn’t coherently communicate in public. Any halfway competent opponent should have easily won over him.

Incredibly, Republican establishment bigwigs cast all the blame for this on Donald Trump. And they have the solution to assure victory in 2024: Dave McCormick, Mach Two.

Three Republican senators, GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell's PAC, The Wall Street Journal, a leading D.C. think tank... the entire band is getting in on the act of elevating this guy that the people do not want.

Dominant media organ the Associated Press reported Feb. 27:
 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee... intends to wade into party primaries in key states, providing resources to its preferred candidates in a bid to produce nominees who are more palatable to general election voters....

The new approach was on display this month during an NRSC retreat at the Breakers, a luxury resort in Palm Beach, Florida, which drew senators and potential candidates, including Dave McCormick....

McCormick, who is considering another run in 2024, spoke at the multiday event, according to two senior Republican strategists, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the details of the private gathering.

There was apparently a lot of love at the NRSC gala for the ex-CEO of the company that manages state money for the bloody Chinese communist tyranny. Ruling regime media site Politico on March 7 named three entrenched Republican senators eager to have McCormick join their cozy upper chamber club along with a PAC aligned with the Senate party leader:
 

“The question would be, what’s [2022 Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who is also mulling a 2024 U.S. Senate run] going to do differently this time? It wasn’t a close race,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “I know that McCormick is giving it a hard look. And I think he’d be a great primary and general election candidate.”

[...]

“Dave McCormick would be a good candidate. Didn’t work so well for Mastriano last time,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “I think it all comes down to winnability. Who has the best chance to win?”

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) praised McCormick at the NRSC’s winter meeting, at which McCormick also spoke, according to an attendee. And while [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell declined to comment on Mastriano, the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund said via spokesperson Torunn Sinclair that it is “focused on Dave McCormick as a candidate who can run and win this race.”

Pennsylvania is one of a cluster of U.S. states that make up Ground Zero for serious allegations of massive voter fraud. But while attention is riveted on how the establishment rigs elections in November, what is to stop them from doing the same in GOP primaries in the spring?

What better way to defeat the hated Trumpism than to stop it at the source? Independent reporter Emerald Robinson may have been the only person to publicly discuss the very strange Republican senatorial primary results in Pennsylvania in 2022, in which a clearly fading McCormick somehow amassed 419,048 votes, 87,184 more than populist outsider Kathy Barnette, whose dramatic late surge in the campaign shook the state and national GOP establishment to its core:
 

To summarize: Kathy Barnette and Dr. Oz were in a dead heat, and the GOP establishment choice Dave McCormick was third. That’s how the race looked not just to Trafalgar but to every other pollster as well: McCormick was a distant third.

On the day of the primary, Kathy Barnette supposedly runs a distant third – though four polls showed her tied for the lead with Oz! – while Dave McCormick runs neck and neck with Dr. Oz. Here’s the problem with that scenario: I was unable to locate anyone living in Pennsylvania who was voting for Dave McCormick. All the talk in conservative media, and conservative radio, was Kathy Barnette surging against Dr. Oz.

McCormick has made it abundantly clear that he is biting at the chomp to give the Senate another shot in 2024. He’s even resorted to the timeless political gimmick of writing a book:
 

🚨ONE WEEK🚨 until my book comes out! I’m so excited to share my vision to educate our people, confront China, and secure America.

Buy it here ➡️➡️ https://t.co/72WkMy8OV7 pic.twitter.com/cKzWR7v9g4

— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) March 7, 2023

The author is excited to see that the military industrial complex gives it two thumbs up:
 

Very grateful to have the support of my friend Marillyn Hewson of @lockheedmartin!

My battle plan to renew America comes out next week. Pre-order your copy of Superpower in Peril: https://t.co/72WkMy8OV7 pic.twitter.com/LFJrc64Bqa

— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) March 6, 2023

The title says it all. It’s "Superpower in Peril," not "American Republic in Peril" or "National Sovereignty in Peril.” It’s a telling framing that suggests McCormick may leave behind the puffy-vest America First faux theatrics of 2022 and lean on a new strategy next year. Has McCormick learned his lesson? You don't have to fake being a populist when your establishment cronies rig the system for you. McCormick would dearly love to sow up the GOP nomination without even having to wage a primary battle. Lead Swamp figure McConnell has publicly stated that this is indeed the plan for 2024:
 

“Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in 2022 because of the support of the former president [Donald Trump],” McConnell openly declared on Dec. 13 in an astonishingly blunt public statement. “Hopefully in the next cycle, we’ll have quality candidates everywhere.” By “quality candidates,” McConnell means Republicans who will adhere to the status quo. Anyone aligned with a change agenda automatically fails to meet this standard.

AP reports McConnell’s strong backing for McCormick before the gates are even loaded may serve as a potent intimidation factor to dissuade any other potential entries from throwing their hats in the ring:
 

If he enters the primary, McCormick has also been promised support from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC linked to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that spends millions of dollars on TV advertising, according to two other Republican strategists familiar with the matter.

That serves as a warning to anyone else thinking about the race: If McCormick gets in, he would have the full weight and resources of the Senate Republican campaign operation behind him.

Big-box faux conservative media is on board with another McCormick run as well. The Wall Street Journal was a natural choice to get in on the McCormick fawning. A nauseating interview conducted by “Editorial Page Writer” and defunct neocon Bill Kristol-publication The Weekly Standard alum Barton Swaim published on March 10 to help launch the new book indicates that the weird attempts to make the China-tainted gazillionaire appear as regular down-home folk will continue.

Here’s a snippet that says it all. Apparently, arugula-on-his-pizza Swaim is willing to play the part of urban metrosexual (is that is what is going on here?) in order to boost McCormick’s blue-collar bona fides:
 

Mr. McCormick may need to parry the “Aren’t you an elite hedge-fund globalist?” question a bit more skillfully, but he does project a normal-guy gregariousness that wouldn’t hurt him in a future run for office. He has already lunched by the time I arrive, but he samples a slice of the oversized pizza I order without caring to notice what’s on it (prosciutto and arugula). He seems to know half the people in Pietro’s, although we’re in Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh, where he lives.

“These are my people,” he says.

On April 21, McCormick is slated to chat about his new book at a “Conversation with David H. McCormick” event hosted by “pro-free market” D.C. think tank the American Enterprise Institute. AEI President Robert Doar will preside over the affair. As World Tribune documented in January 2022 when warning about his first attempted corporate raid on a GOP senatorial nomination, McCormick has extensive ties to AEI:
 

McCormick, listed along with his wife Dina Powell McCormick, sits on the cheap-labor-loving D.C. think tank the American Enterprise Institute’s National Council… and he is listed as a member for Connecticut, not Pennsylvania...

Eric Cantor is a Virginia member....

Paul Ryan is an AEI “Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy.”...

By the way, check out who is on AEI’s Board of Trustees:

Daniel A. D’Aniello, Chairman

Cofounder and Chairman

The Carlyle Group

The Honorable Richard B. Cheney

And then there is Bill Gates. In 2019, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave AEI a whopping $900,000 “grant.” Here is AEI lobbing softballs to Bill Gates at a discussion it hosted with him in 2014:
 

Bill Gates points out that capitalism and charity aren't mutually exclusive and that most of the great advances that have provided aid to poor countries – vaccines, agricultural technologies, among others – have been developed through private enterprise.

Gates is literally talking about his plans to push vaccines and control farmland throughout the world. And AEI is saluting him for it in the glorious name of “free market capitalism.” You can’t have Bill Gates without the World Economic Forum, can you? Dave McCormick connects that dot too. In April, WorldTribune reported that:
 

McCormick’s wife Dina Powell McCormick... is a member and co-chair of and active contributor to the WEF’s “Global Action Group.”

Kent Walker, who is now President of Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer at Google, is another co-chair.

Powell McCormick’s work at WEF is being utilized by the organization to lay out its vision for global governing power.

This is what the Republican establishment really means when it spews empty words about “viable general election candidates” who “can win.” The question for grassroots voters is an easy one: Win for who?

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