As a "Mark Kennedy Supporter", I receive his usually lousy periodic e-mails. Today I saw something that I just had to blog about, and it brought me out of hibernation (I started a new job out in DC and I have very little free time).



Mark Kennedy claims that 60 percent of his first quarter contributions were under $25. Well, let me quote it exactly: "Did you know that nearly 60% of contributions in the 1st Quarter were under $25?" This I did not know! What I did know about Kennedy was that he raised $1,478,433 in the first quarter of 2006. Now, 60% of that would be $887,059.80, meaning that that he raised a maximum of $25 from at least 35,482 people! That's a lot of people; Mark must be a pretty popular guy! But then I started thinking, he raised $304,256 in PAC money in the quarter, meaning he had literally thousands of PACs and contributors writing him tiny checks! Or so we would think…

Now I'm not stupid nor do I think that Mark Kennedy is the world's worst CPA; he's just using misleading statements, like that 60% of his contributions were under $25. What he really means is that he could have potentially taken the maximum contribution from 195 people (@ $4,200 a pop) and 290 people gave under $25 (this is an extreme example, I'm sure he had at least 300 contributions under $25...).

I don't think Kennedy will ever be mistaken for being a populist, so why try to stretch the truth to convince them otherwise?

Now I go back into my hole.