Still looking at campaign disclosures, I now move to John Oxendine. Ox fared much poorer than expected this time, only generating $416,580 in new contributions – and spending $280,057 in the process.
Now, to be fair, $120,000 of those expenditures were refunding potentially illegal contributions he accepted last fall – which he said he was going to do once the Campaign Contribution Scandal story broke and he realized he had no other choice if he wanted to stand any chance at all in this election.
That said, of the $416,580, only $6,847 of that was in unitemized ‘working man’ contributions. Of the remaining $409,733.50, there was $38,797 for any runoff that may result from the Primary next year, as well as another $34,200 for next year’s General Election – and $1,000 for the ’2009 Primary’.
The other numbers included this number, but there was a total of $95,636.50 from out of state, with the highest concentration of that money coming from the New York City area. This amounts to roughly 23% of his total itemized contributions in the race for Governor of Georgia coming from entities outside the State.
But the biggest single group of contributors? Those tied to the insurance industry. Indeed, those obviously tied to insurance, financials, loans, and doctors totaled $134,323.50 of the Ox’s $409,733.50 in itemized contributions. Indeed, outside of the out of state contributions or the contributions for races other than the Primary, this was the ONLY readily apparent grouping of contributions – and it amounts to almost 33% of his itemized contributions. In other words, if you selected three random contributions from his itemized list, at least one of them, on average, will be from this group.
But hey, I have absolutely no idea why this particular group would want the longtime Insurance Commissioner to have the power of the Governor.
The question is, with this amount of money coming from this particular group, will he be the Governor ‘of the people’ he claims he will be – or will he use that power for the benefit of his friends and donors?
Honestly, no one knows but John Oxendine which way he will govern, if given the chance. The question I leave you with is simple:
Are you willing to take that chance?
Mr. Anderson:
I agree that we should question all contributions made to our candidates for public office. Have you given candidates other than Ox the same scrutiny? I’m just curious because your motive for writing this opinion seems to be nefarious.
Sincerely, Russell Carlisle.
For what it’s worth, there isn’t a “Mr. Anderson” here, but I can assure that Jeff is looking as closely at every single candidate as he is for Oxendine.
Russell:
Seriously, dude? Have you looked at nothing else on this site other than the Ox stuff? At this point, I’ve actually went in and examined EVERY GOP candidate for Governor already, and I am beginning looking at the Democrats today – I’ll even be posting one on the Libertarian, John Monds. I’ve also already looked at Brian Kemp in the Secretary of State race, and I’ll be looking at both Doug MacGinnitie and Gary Horlacher there as well. I further plan to look at EVERY state wide race in this detail, with one final post where I combine all donor lists, color coded to the candidates, and try to determine any common donors and what they gave in each race to each candidate.
In other words, yes, I’ll be looking just as intently at EVERYONE as I am looking at the Ox.
Don’t blame me if Ox is an idiot and makes HIMSELF look bad when actual facts come out rather than his propaganda.