Conservative advocacy group Freedom’s Watch, funded by billionaires such as Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a famously fierce critic of labor unions (see core issue area three here, “Standing up to Big Labor’s radical agenda”), revels in its newly discovered economic populist streak.
Yesterday, it launched an ad attacking House Democrats and speaker Nancy Pelosi for “doing nothing” to reduce high gas prices.
Today, it sends out emails attacking Congressional Democrats for being responsible for the housing crisis, the bad economy, and more high gas prices. And it’s rebranded itself as “mainstream,” too: “‘It is truly astonishing that two years after assuring the American people they possessed a ‘commonsense plan’ to combat high gas prices, Congressional Leaders are still struggling to put one together,’ said Ed Patru, spokesman for Freedom’s Watch, a mainstream conservative issues advocacy organization,” the group emails.
What’s next? After all, with Adelson’s fortune valued at $28 billion by Forbes this year, an expressed commitment by the former Boston cabbie to donate $200 million a year to charitable causes he favors, and given the fact that that, according to a recent column by George Will, Adelson’s casino empire is now the single largest foreign investor in China, Adelson alone would be in a position to make a meaningful contribution to those Americans losing their homes in foreclosures and consumers hurting at the gas pump. Stay tuned, as they say.
