The lives of donors like Ricketts, Friess and VanderSloot have become news fodder. | AP Photos Mega-donors: Quit picking on us

All they wanted was to get involved.

But to hear some of the biggest donors of 2012 tell it, their six- and seven-figure contributions have instead bought them nothing but grief.


Their personal lives are fodder for news stories. President Barack Obama and his allies have singled out conservative mega-donors as greedy tax cheats, or worse. And a conservative website has launched a counteroffensive targeting big-money liberals.

This is definitely not what they had in mind. In their view, cutting a million-dollar check to try to sway the presidential race should be just another way to do their part for democracy, not a fast-track to the front page.

And now some are pushing back hard against the attention, asking: Why us?

“This idea of giving public beatings has been around for a long time,” said Frank VanderSloot, a wealthy Idaho businessman who donated $1 million in corporate cash to the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney and says he’s raised between $2 million and $5 million for the Romney campaign.

VanderSloot, who is also a national finance co-chairman for Romney, was among eight major Romney donors singled out on an Obama campaign website last month as having “less-than-reputable records,” and he thinks the purpose is clear – intimidation.

“You go back to the Dark Ages when they put these people in the stocks or whatever they did, or publicly humiliated them as a deterrent to everybody else – watch this – watch what we do to the guy who did this.”

( Also on POLITICO: GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz)

VanderSloot is one of the loudest of the aggrieved mega-donors, announcing that his family’s privacy has been invaded and his health and home products company, Melaleuca, had lost hundreds of customers, and asserting the Obama campaign list and liberal websites have misrepresented his company and political activism.

He’s waged an aggressive response, making a series of appearances on the Fox News Channel in which he called for donations to Romney in protest of the list. He also spoke at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington this week. And he told POLITICO he intended to make additional donations to the pro-Romney super PAC each time something untruthful was published about him – a plan he said his wife predicted could yield “several hundred thousand dollars” more in contributions.

The top lawyer for VanderSloot’s company has demanded corrections from media outlets writing about VanderSloot’s political activity. When one blogger emailed back, “I do not appreciate thinly veiled threats,” the lawyer responded, “We have been neither thin nor veiled. … Melaleuca is more than capable and willing to protect its reputation from false and defamatory statements as it sees fit.”

Plus, VanderSloot launched a website where he defends himself against what he calls attacks from “extreme, far left blog sites.”

Other mega-donors seem to have been caught off-guard by media attention and partisan attacks.

Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, was said to be “extremely upset” by the controversy that swirled around him after the New York Times reported he was considering spending $10 million on ads attacking Obama over his controversial former pastor.

“It’s just deeply hurtful and unfair to the Ricketts family to have anybody suggest they want to do or pursue or support anything like this,” a Ricketts spokesman said this month on MNSBC’s Morning Joe.

Comedian Bill Maher protested that conservatives were merely looking to divert attention from their own controversies when they made an issue of his sexist slurring of Sarah Palin after he donated $1 million to the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action super PAC in February.

Foster Friess, the mutual fund guru who kept Rick Santorum’s campaign afloat with $1.7 million in super PAC donations, recently professed himself still puzzled over the frenzy sparked by his recollection during a live television interview that women used aspirin as contraception “back in my days.”

Santorum “never bought into what I was saying” about a hard-line opposition to contraception, Friess told POLITICO this month. “So here’s a classic example of how the left is very skillful about trying to – and they can achieve this. Whereas the Republicans, they don’t quite get how the game is played, I guess.”

But it’s the Obama campaign’s list of Romney donors that has ignited the debate over whether donors should be fair game. The list has drawn howls from conservatives, who have compared it to Richard Nixon’s “ enemies list,” argued it shows the downside of campaign contribution disclosure, and asserted it’s an attempt “ to delegitimize Mr. Romney” and discourage his supporters from donating.

One of the donors listed, Tom O’Malley, an energy executive, said the Obama campaign misrepresented the effect of an oil spill at one his company’s refineries.

“I think somebody screwed up,” said O’Malley. He’s raised money for Democrats and said he voted for Obama in 2008, but this year donated $100,000 to the Romney super PAC and $2,500 to the Romney campaign.

“Being on the enemies list was somewhat shocking to me,” he added.

Another Romney donor on Obama’s list, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, called the list “a stupid thing done by the campaign,” but predicted “they will apologize or Obama will disavow countenancing this enemies list and it will be deleted.”

That’s not going to happen, said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. The purpose of the list is not to intimidate, he said, but rather to educate voters on the “special interest policy goals and motivations” of the big money behind Romney. Not only does the campaign have no plans to remove the list, LaBolt said “we might” add more donors.

Conservatives are fighting back. Michael Goldfarb, chairman of the conservative Center for American Freedom, said Team Obama can count on reaping what it sows.

“They started this war on donors, but we’re going to try to level the playing field,” said Goldfarb

His group, a conservative analog to the White House-allied Center for American Progress, launched this year with a website called the Washington Free Beacon that, like CAP’s, has dinged the other side by relentlessly spotlighting – or trying to create – controversies surrounding their rivals’ donors. Recent Free Beacon reports have dogged Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

Goldfarb even took a page out of the playbook of CAP’s ThinkProgress blog this month, sending a reporter to crash a private Miami meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a club of major Democratic donors in which billionaire financier George Soros is an anchor member.

Under a headline about “ George Soros’s liberal conspiracy,” and a photo of the octogenarian lounging shirtless on a beach, a story identified several attendees and detailed some innocuous overheard conversation. The site also reported that a club official urged the Free Beacon to be more respectful of club members’ privacy.

One attendee identified by the conservative website, a foundation manager named Cynthia Ryan who has raised at least $200,000 for the Obama campaign, said she was not bothered by the story or donor scrutiny, generally.

“I was there, so I have no problem with it, whatsoever,” she said. “I believe in transparency, and I am absolutely fine with people knowing what I give to, and what donor affiliations I belong to.”

Michael Vachon, a Soros spokesman, declined to comment on the story or on ongoing conservative attacks of Soros.

“Rather than criticize the critics, our response has been to tell the public why we’re doing what we’re doing, and to be transparent about it,” he said of Soros’s giving.

The modern era of donor-targeting may have started with the sustained conservative attacks on Soros starting in 2004, when he donated more than $20 million to Democratic groups that tried unsuccessfully to defeat then-President George W. Bush.

While Soros has said relatively little about the attacks, his foundation did donate $1.1 million in 2010 to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, which he said was intended to hold Fox News – one of his leading critics on the right – “accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast.”

And Soros engaged in a rare bit of public pushback in 2011, asserting Fox “has imported the methods of George Orwell,” after then-Fox News host Glenn Beck’s show featured a multi-part series that cast Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew who escaped capture during the Holocaust, as a Nazi collaborator and as the “puppetmaster" controlling Obama.

Other big donors increasingly have found themselves targeted for their political giving since a pair of 2010 federal court decisions spurred more mega-checks from wealthy activists.

Charles and David Koch have emerged as the leading mega-donor bogeyman for Obama and other Democrats, in recent years. Democrats have invoked the brothers in fundraising pitches and television ads and ascribed to them all manner of devious plots.

A representative of their privately held company this month complained that “irresponsible” coverage of the brothers on MSNBC and in “the far left media” had “led to death threats against our owners.”

But the Kochs also have hit back hard. They’ve waged open war with the White House, released sharp-edged research on their liberal critics and journalists alike, and increased their political involvement, culminating with a plan to steer more than $200 million ahead of Election Day to conservative groups that have already aired millions of dollars worth of tough ads hitting Obama.

It’s not enough for the right to simply push back against liberal criticism of conservative donors, asserted Goldfarb, who previously worked for the Kochs.

“They’ve decided that this is fair game and we have to play by the same rules as they are,” he said. “So our message is: We’re coming after their donors. We’re going to be going through their trash, and we’re going to be showing up on their front yards and investigating all the pay-to-play and cronyism on their side.”