Until now, Santorum has made do with a relatively shallow pool of small donors. Secretive group backs Santorum

Rick Santorum can’t keep up the fight against Mitt Romney with momentum alone: He needs cash and organization.

Santorum may have found his best shot at both in a secretive club of some of the right’s richest and most powerful players. Its members have been credited with solidifying the rise of George W. Bush’s Republican presidential campaign in 2000 and working to undercut the 2008 bids of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.


And, last weekend, when conservative bigwigs gathered in Houston for a meeting of the Council for National Policy, they helped raise $1.8 million in pledged donations for Santorum’s cash-strapped campaign and the super PAC supporting it. They also talked about how to mobilize their networks to help the former Pennsylvania senator’s surging campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

But the support is coming late in the game, raising the question of whether the potential infusion of money and grass-roots resources is enough to carry him through contests on the horizon in big states like California and New Jersey.

“Hopefully, this will just be the first of a number of these types of events where the conservative movement leaders are coming together and saying ‘this is our man,’” said Richard Viguerie, a founding member of the Council for National Policy and an organizer of the main fundraiser for Santorum, on the sidelines of the Houston meeting.

Viguerie credited conservative movement leaders like those represented in Houston with Santorum’s Tuesday primary wins in Alabama and Mississippi. Santorum “needs money, and he needs the conservative movement to come off the sidelines and get fully engaged on behalf of his candidacy. If those two things happen, I am convinced that he will be the Republican nominee,” Viguerie said.

Until now, Santorum has made do with a relatively shallow pool of small donors to his campaign, plus a supportive super PAC that has been fueled mostly by a pair of million-dollar donors, including Foster Friess, a past president of the Council for National Policy.

Santorum and his allies concede that in order to capitalize on his momentum, he’ll need to build a bigger donor base and more on-the-ground organization to narrow Romney’s significant advantages in those areas.

The Council for National Policy, which was created in 1981 to counter what conservatives perceived as a liberal slant at the Council on Foreign Relations, brings together some of the right’s biggest donors, such as Friess and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, with leaders of influential conservative groups focusing primarily on social issues and foreign policy.

“These people have large networks out there,” said Viguerie. “They have members, they have donors, they have supporters, subscribers, listeners, readers, and if they get engaged,” he said, it will mean “many, many, many seven figures” worth of contributions to Santorum and the super PAC devoted to him.

The council meets in secret three times a year under tight security. And while it bills itself as “a nonpartisan, educational foundation” that does not “lobby Congress, support candidates, or issue public policy statements on controversial issues,” gatherings of its members have played key roles in presidential politics.

A 1999 speech to the council by then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, for instance, was credited with helping him unite the conservative base behind his successful presidential campaign the next year. And, during gatherings in the run-up to the 2008 GOP primary, council members helped rally the conservative base against former New York City Mayor Giuliani, grilled Romney about his stance on same-sex marriage when he attended a 2007 meeting, and talked about recruiting an alternative candidate, such as then-South Carolina Gov. Sanford — or even Friess.

Romney and rivals Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul skipped last weekend’s session in Houston, despite being invited “repeatedly,” said Bob Reccord, the council’s executive director.

Santorum accepted the group’s invitation and delivered a speech Saturday afternoon after holding two private meetings with council members, according to a story in WorldNetDaily, which is run by Joseph Farah, who has been a council member.

Reccord stressed that the fundraising events held for Santorum over the course of the weekend were “privately sponsored by individuals” and weren’t part of the official council program, which he said “simply addresses issues of policy and impact from an informational basis.”

But Santorum supporters — including Viguerie, council members Tim LeFever and Rebecca Hagelin, and former council board member Bob Fischer — used the CNP meeting as an opportunity to organize at least two fundraising events on its sidelines because, as LeFever put it, “That’s when we have the greatest group of these activists in one place.”

And, Viguerie said, “Rick Santorum has a lot of friends there at CNP.”

Santorum spoke at a Friday evening fundraiser at the Omni Houston Hotel that attracted about 175 people, including 40 co-sponsors who contributed the maximum $2,500 to the campaign, according to Viguerie. The event was paid for by the campaign, and Viguerie said attendees were also offered guidance on how to donate to the super PAC, which is called the Red White and Blue Fund.

Santorum’s campaign — which did not respond to questions about his speech at the CNP event or the fundraisers on the sidelines — has boasted of its small donors, but their contributions haven’t come close to matching Romney’s big-donor funded operation.

According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by the Campaign Finance Institute, Santorum through January had received 48 percent of his total haul from donors who gave less than $200 — a higher percentage than his GOP rivals and even slightly higher than President Barack Obama’s vaunted small donor-based operation. Yet Santorum trailed the field badly in total fundraising through January (the period covered by the most recent FEC reports).

He did have his best fundraising month in February — reportedly pulling in $9 million to Romney’s $11.5 million — partly on the strength of a three-day stretch after his sweep of contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, during which he raised $3 million. And his campaign boasted this week that it raised $1 million over a 24-hour period through a grass-roots “money bomb” drive.

But the $1.8 million pledged in Houston last weekend shows how a relatively small group of wealthy supporters can do as much — or more — for a campaign as an army of small donors.

And some GOP finance operatives were skeptical that Santorum backers would follow through on the big pledges made at the Houston event

And, while Santorum had his best fundraising month in February some GOP finance operatives were skeptical that Santorum backers would follow through on the big pledges made at the Houston event.

But Viguerie, a pioneer of modern political fundraising, predicted an uptick in Santorum’s cash flow, adding that he’s advising Santorum “on a pro-bono basis” on “direct mail, the Internet, telemarketing — all of it — and we have a very good rapport in that area. I’m giving him whatever advice I can.”

Fischer, a South Dakota businessman, said that, at the Friday night fundraiser, “the room was packed and we had significant donors who couldn’t even get in the door.” He said Santorum “was very well received and he’s got the heart of the conservative movement right now.”

Many council members or former members — including Viguerie, LeFever, Fischer, retired Texas appeals court judge Paul Pressler, and Christian conservative leaders Tony Perkins, James Dobson and Donald Wildmon — were to have attended a January meeting at which social conservatives voted to coalesce behind Santorum.

Held at Pressler’s ranch outside Houston, the two-day meeting, which was not an official CNP event, was intended to unite social conservatives behind a single alternative to Romney.

After three rounds of voting among 114 attendees, Santorum emerged as the leading choice on 85 ballots, with Gingrich taking the rest. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who entered the race as a favorite of social conservatives, didn’t make it past the first ballot, and dropped out of the race days later, after disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“That was almost an impossible moment to get conservatives to agree,” said Fischer. “It was really a miracle. You could really sense God’s presence there,” he said, asserting that the Houston fundraising haul showed that “conservatives are starting to wake up and realize that the time to step up is now and to give and to support him, and to see him through on this thing.”

Friess, a retired mutual fund manager, told POLITICO he intended to raise money for the pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue Fund super PAC from other groups of wealthy conservatives, including those who attended the Koch brothers’ donor summit in late January. But Friess, who has been traveling out of the country and could not be reached for comment, didn’t attend the Houston meeting last weekend.

Yet, in an editorial warning of the potential undue influence of super PAC donors on candidates, The New York Times pointed out that Friess had been president of CNP, which the paper wrote “opposes unions, same-sex marriage and government regulation.”

The group charges members dues of several thousand dollars annually, and its tax filings show that it had a 2010 budget of $2 million, two-thirds of which went toward conferences and seminars. It’s registered under a section of the tax code — 501(c)3 — that bars it from endorsing or raising money for candidates, though it also has a smaller offshoot called CNP Action that’s registered under a different section of the code — 501(c)4 — that allows more overt political activity.

Neither group discloses its donors, and the group has guarded its membership list carefully.

Reccord didn’t answer when asked how many members the group has, and he wouldn’t reveal the venue of the Houston meeting, telling POLITICO “CNP does not publicize its meeting locations.”

The group’s rules forbid members from discussing it, and the media is barred from covering its meetings, even when top government officials speak, such as then-Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who appeared before the group soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was the headliner at a 2008 conference.

Farah declined to say whether he or anyone from his publication was at the Houston event, telling POLITICO “I don’t know anything about it,” while Fischer said, “I’m not supposed to know who’s a member, and report that.”

The secrecy has led to scrutiny and conspiracy theories from the left, with liberals demanding that Bush release audio of his 1999 address (he didn’t), and the lefty website DailyKos dubbing the group the “ Sith Lords of the Ultra-Right.”

Blogger Hart Williams, who has tracked Friess and the CNP, has suggested that the group might have engineered Santorum’s surge. The ties between Santorum’s supporters and the group may send “chills … running up and down your spine,” he wrote, asserting that the media’s failure to reveal links between Santorum and the CNP constitutes “journalistic malpractice.”

But the influence of the CNP has been exaggerated, asserted one conservative operative with knowledge of the group. “They’re always behind, always late to the game and not relevant,” said the operative. “It’s one of these self-validating echo chambers where they sit around four times a year and tell each other how great and important they are, and believe their own press.”