Where are contributions to conservatism?

The NY Times reports on the conservative group that started with a bang last summer and since has been missing in action.

The conservative group Freedom’s Watch, headlined by two former senior White House officials, had been expected to be a deep-pocketed juggernaut in this year’s presidential election, heralded by supporters on the right as an aggressive counterweight to MoveOn.org, George Soros and the like.

But after a splashy debut last summer, in which it spent $15 million in a nationwide advertising blitz supporting President Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq, the group has been mostly quiet, beset by internal problems that have paralyzed it and raised questions about what kind of role, if any, it will actually play this fall.

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Although the organization was founded by a coterie of prominent conservative donors last year, the roughly $30 million the group has spent so far has come almost entirely from the casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Sands Corporation, who was recently listed as the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine.

Mr. Adelson has insisted on parceling out his money project by project, as opposed to setting an overall budget, limiting the group’s ability to plan and be nimble, the Republican operatives said. Mr. Adelson, who has a reputation for being combative, has rejected almost all of the staff’s proposals that have been brought to him, leaving the organization moribund for long stretches, the operatives said.

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Where are the other wealthy conservatives? Where is the support for conservative ideas? Politics and framing the issues has moved beyond think tanks which still have their importance, but conservative supporters have not developed an adequate response to the left's activities on the web. It does not all have to be TV ads. YouTube has come into its own this campaign season and only Fred Thompson has shown any knack for using the medium. Conservative organizations could also spread their message through advertising and supporting blogs. If the big bucks guys are not going to kick in we are going to have to boot strap our way back into a conservative majority to fight the evils of liberalism.