Wasn’t he a Tea Party guy?
Not sure. You may need to google to find out. Many are not supported by the national tea party groups but are products of local grassroot community — which is truly what tea party is after all !
“Wasn’t he a Tea Party guy?”
We have no evidence that Clawson actually is a conservative, and some circumstantial evidence that he isn’t. This is what I wrote right after Clawson’s victory in the primary over a tested and proven conservative Republican state legislator:
“Curt Clawson definitely donated to the ultraliberal Democrat Senator Stabenow’s 2012 reelection campaign (see below, from OpenSecrets.org’s donor lookup; it’s definitely the same Curtis Clawson, since he was CEO of Hayes Lemmerz International at the time of such donations).
And even worse in the eyes of the “Tea Party” purists who eschew anyone who has an actual record in politics, the only $200+ federal political contributions that Clawson has made since the late 1990s apart from his recent donation to the “Dangerously Incompetent” Stabenow were to ... wait for it ... Mitch McConnell and to the McConnell-controlled Republican Party of Kentucky! If those self-proclaimed “Tea Party leaders” are to be consistent, they should demand that Clawson drop out of the race and permit the GOP to nominate a candidate who is not “a stooge for the GOPe” like Clawson obviously must be—I mean, what is more “establishment” than donating to Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign? At least Clawson donaled to ultraliberal Democrat Stabenow, so I guess that proves he’s no Republican. Whew! Close one for the Tea Party Express—they almost endorsed a conservative Republican by mistake, but Clawson’s Stabenow donation will save its reputation.
Here are Clawson’s federal political donations. Read ‘em and weep:
CLAWSON, CURTIS
NORTHVILLE,MI 48167 HAYES LEMMERZ INTERNATIONAL 12/31/13 $4,800 Republican Party of Kentucky (R)
CLAWSON, CURTIS
NORTHVILLE,MI 48167 HAYES LEMMERZ INTERNATIONAL 12/31/13 $2,600 McConnell, Mitch (R)
CLAWSON, CURTIS
NORTHVILLE,MI 48167 HAYES LEMMERZ INTERNATIONAL 12/31/13 $2,600 McConnell, Mitch (R)
CLAWSON, CURTIS J
NORTHVILLE,MI 48167 HAYES LEMMERZ INTERNATIONAL 5/20/09 $1,000 Stabenow, Debbie (D)”
By the way, while CEOs sometimes contribute to both parties for business reasons, Clawson didn’t make the types of donations that one would expect a CEO to make; he gave nothing (at least at the federal level) prior to 2009, then gave $1,000 to Stabenow (3 years before her reelection—it was one of her early fundraisers to pad her cash-on-hand and scare off potential Republican challengers), then $10,000 to Mitch McConnell at the end of 2013 (the max donations for the primary and the general, with the remainder going to the state party). This isn’t the case of a CEO who gives to both the committee chairman and the ranking minority member of the committees that regulate his company’s industry; his donations are more akin to someone without a set political ideology who wanted to do some networking with politically connected folks in the state where his company was located so he went to a Stabenow fundraiser, and then, after he decided that he was a conservative Republican who wanted to move somewhere and run for Congress, he gave $10,000 to arguably the highest-ranking Republican in the nation.
I hope that Clawson is as conservative as he claims, but this guy has been subject to no vetting, and has absolutely no record to prove his conservative bona fides. Huge gamble for Florida Republicans to have chosen Clawson over two candidates with long, proven conservative records.
We know nothing about Clawson’s political views prior to 2013 or 2014.